008 Training Frequency - what to consider if you want to train every day

And welcome back to another episode of High Perage Feed Pass and Present. Chris, how are you today? I'm doing well, thanks, Cheek, not feeling the absolute best, got a bit of a cold as you can hear, but other than that, I'm doing well. You sound pretty good, I know, you sounded a little bit snuffly before a bit, so if I sound pretty well, so hopefully, hopefully you hold up, okay, today we have, so obviously we normally, well, I normally introduce us to a silver era workout plan, and we did discuss in our first episode kind of these different areas, and I talked about the drawn zero, which was sort of obviously before the silver era, and this was where there was more like, I guess, strong men, and kind of more like circus lifts, and bodybuilding was sort of becoming a thing, but there weren't any sort of really dedicated bodybuilding shows or some of those little bit different, or more, this performance type thing, and it's not, that's not really the era that we focus on that heavily, obviously it was pre-surried, so there's still some interesting things, but, you know, even the aesthetics were a little bit different, we've talked about that, and obviously there was a big performance nature to it. Now today, I do want to go back in time to the drawn zero, and I do want to talk about a particular figure, who is perhaps, I would argue probably the second most well-known figure of that time, a guy named George Hackensmith. Now what I do find interesting about George, if you look up George Hackensmith, the dude was absolutely jacked, massive, massive guy, now he was also, wrestling, he was known as a Russian lion, and a performer, but certainly, you know, for all intents and purposes, a bodybuilder as well, even though we didn't have the classy bodybuilding shows that we have now. Now interesting thing with George Hackensmith is, and obviously this is really early on, we're talking, you know, in 1900, very early 1900s, and he did write, he did write a book, believe it's called The Way to Live, I think, something along those lines, and he does talk about not just exercise, he talks about, you know, eating, he talks about healthy habits, and the interesting thing with George Hackensmith is, is in the way that he trained, it was quite different to what we see in the Sylvia era, and not just in terms of exercises, so exercises were obviously different as well, or the drones area exercises were, you know, that more sort of strong man style, but even the methodology in which he actually trained was quite a lot different to the other plans we've talked about so far, so I thought it would be a good example of something a little bit different, something a little bit outside the box first to talk about, now, as is kind of the case of some of these guys or some of these plans is, hey, there's a little bit of, I guess ambiguity, I've mentioned this in the past where they don't always explicitly say this is exactly what we do, this is exactly how often we do it, this is exactly the repetitions we use and all of that, sometimes they give more detail, sometimes less, and with George Hackensmith's training plan, he gave, I guess, sort of medium amount of detail, so he does tell exactly his progression model, but he does leave a little bit to the imagination, so the interesting thing here is he does talk about training most days, he does talk about doing exercise every day, but it's a little bit unclear whether he's suggesting doing the weight training every day or most days of the week, but it's very obvious that he's certainly insinuating that one should be training with weights at least most majority of the days of the week, so that's interesting in and of itself, we're talking probably five or six days a week, maybe even seven days a week weight training, now in order to do that, he recommends a very specific progression model and he says each exercise should be done, well, he doesn't exactly say one set, that's his assumed, because they were all using one set back then, so it's one set, and what you would do is start with your ten repetition max load, and you would do five repetitions with it, and you would add one repetition each workout, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and you'd go to ten, and once you hit ten, you would add load, you would go back to five, and you'd go again, so fairly nice, I mean, this is nice, this is, we're talking, you know, early 1900s on the head, such a nice progression model back then, and as far as the exercises go, again, there's a, you know, it's a little bit vague in terms of which exercises he would do each time, but he does talk about some of the exercises he liked, and we're talking things like, actually, I should mention like the hack squat, so hack and submit invented the hack squat, now obviously, you know, we're not talking machine hack squat, we're talking barbell hack squat, where it was kind of like a, almost like a combination of a deadlift and a squat where you would have the bar behind your back, so he would do things like hack squats, he would do things like one arm presses, he would do like variations of like a snatch exercise, he would do like a wrestler's bridge type exercise, which was kind of like, almost like a hip thrust, but you would actually go up on your neck instead of just pushing your hips in the air, and whatever, he was also doing several different shoulder type exercises like raise dumbbell raises and curls, so again, the exact exercise selection isn't a little bit vague, but this concept of doing one set, low repetitions, you know, presumably a little bit away from failure, if you're starting with a 10-rm and you're doing a five-riff max and you're increasing one rep a day, so presumably holding you that little bit and reserve, and doing that most days of the week, it's an interesting method, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, the numbers are not lost on me, it's really interesting that historically we've thought about stimulating reps as being probably the last five reps of a set, and so when Hacking Schmidt is saying, well, let's take a 10-riff max and do five reps in the first workout, and then obviously go for six in the second, obviously that first workout is obviously just like a, you know, designed to, you know, familiarise you with the exercise, probably isn't doing anything really other than improving coordination after that, and then you kind of, you know, you go in and you do your sort of six or seven or eight, and you're doing some stimulating reps, and so obviously by the time you get to your 10, maybe the 10 hopefully has moved up a bit, and it's now maybe you're using an 11 or 12-riff max instead of a 10, so you perhaps spend a lot of time working with a couple of stimulating reps, you're probably not getting, or you obviously not getting anywhere near five at any point, but you're also probably not getting those last couple of reps of the set, the two that would produce post-workout fatigue, and obviously this is something we can come back to and dig into later on when we talk about the physiology side of it, but what it looks to me is that he's actually a very elegant progression model, which is allowing him to work with a couple of stimulating reps per day, per exercise or per muscle group, but he's never really getting to the point where he's training with those last two reps of a, of a moderate load set, which would give you post-workout fatigue, it's, it's a very, very well put together the progression model, and you know, this is, I think people think that I'm maybe overstating things when I say honestly, if you want to really understand, you know, really good strength training practices, go back to these guys, bronze and silver era, before anabolic came in, because they had pretty much all the best ideas, and they didn't have any of the anabolic techniques creating problems for them when they were trying to figure out what worked, because they weren't obviously there at the time, so they got the clarity, everybody was working with the same, you know, from the same sort of starting point, and making the same kind of observations, but I really like this progression model, and I think it does exactly what you would want it to do in the context of a daily training program where you're training the same muscle every single day. It's interesting, because obviously a lot of people talk about, well, I say obviously, some people maybe don't know, but there's a lot of people talking about the moment, is it possible to train every day, trains the same muscle each day? And there's not a lot of data on there, is there like we don't have a lot of studies, or we don't have any studies where they've sort of done that from a high-pertory perspective, have they? So I think there are a couple of rather strange muscle damage type studies from memory that might be one or two people have done, like eccentric contractions every day for, you know, a couple of weeks. And what generally tends to happen in those scenarios is that you get a little bit of adaption over the first kind of week or so, and then it plateaus, and you don't really see any other changes after that. And of course, you know, it's because you're dealing with an incredibly muscle-damaging type of exercise, and so you accumulate fatigue to the point where you're unable to recruit many of the high-professional motifs, and you're unable to produce very much single-fiber force with the fibers that are activated. And of course, that means you're not getting any stimulus for a high-pertory. I mean, ultimately, that's the problem with accumulating fatigue, is that it stops you from triggering the adaptions you're trying to trigger. I think that's a really important point just to emphasise that, you know, people sort of will say, "Oh, you make too much fuss about fatigue," and, you know, you, everybody has to get fatigued. It's the cost of, you know, kind of doing business if you want to, you know, make sort of the adaptions happen. Well, yes and no. You do expect to see a little bit of fatigue in many situations. You don't necessarily need it as a high-conscious programme is showing. I mean, it certainly doesn't contribute positively. It's just as, you know, people correctly say, often, it's just a cost of doing business. But if you start to accumulate that fatigue and you start to reduce the ability to recruit motorists and you start to reduce the amount of single-fiber force by calcium-amulade fatigue mechanisms, you are not going to be able to make that programme continue to produce the adaptions you wanted to do. So, I mean, ultimately, that is the problem with accumulating fatigue. And I think it's a really nice sort of demonstration, this academic programme, of exactly how you might, and there's other solutions as well. But this is one of those examples of how you might go about constructing a progression model that keeps you in a zone where you're getting some stimulating reps every day, but also you're not going into that last two reps of the set of a moderate load, which would cause post-workout fatigue. Yeah. So, when I get this question from people, I, the place I land is I kind of think, well, I don't have any research to fall back on. I can't show you a study that shows you that this works. And I think that that's maybe become the default from a lot of people to say, well, therefore, don't do it. And the answer I give is, well, I don't know, I don't have anything to show you, except I know that George Hackishman was jacked. Like, look at this guy before his story. He's obviously an of one. But a lot of the blinds of your guys were doing stuff every day. You know, sandal is doing stuff every day as well. And these guys had no issue building muscle. So clearly, there's got to be some way of making this work. Oh, absolutely. And I think you raised a really good point there, which is that there's this tendency in the modern sort of science-based lifting community to say that if there's not a study that shows it, it's not, it's not a thing. It's not really. It's not, it doesn't happen. And so, well, no, that's not how science works. Science seeks to test hypotheses about things. But just because, you know, if there's no data about something, it doesn't mean that it's not a thing. It just means that there's no data about it. You know, you can't say, oh, well, there's no, there's no study. Therefore, it's not real. It doesn't happen. It's not a thing. So, well, no, it just means there's no data. And that's why, really, I think it makes so much more sense to start from a physiological perspective and say, what's happening physiologically? Do we think this is possible? I mean, obviously, we're going to go on and talk about this question. But, you know, do we think it's possible, you know, to train a muscle every day and what are the advantages and disadvantages and how might that kind of piece together? But yeah, there's this kind of tendency in the science-based lifting community to kind of say, well, if there's not a study showing that it happens, we can just say it's not happening. Well, no, that's not the right way around. It just means that there isn't any data. So, as you rightly point out, we can go back and look at history instead. And, you know, we can make use of that data. And, honestly, rather do that, then look at the sort of sections of the fitness industry that have been contaminated by the experiences and observations of people who have been using antibiotics for 50 or 60 years. So, that's the goal of this podcast. Let's talk about, you know, understanding that we do some limitation in, I guess, in data, like you said. But, based on a physiological model and understanding how this stuff works, what might it look like if someone wanted to effectively train every day? And, like you said, what might be some of the pros and what might be some of the cons? Well, before I answer that question, let me just give a couple of background blocks of information. So, I'm just going to talk a little bit about the stimulus period and what we know about that, what data exists, and what we can and can't say based on the life or blood proteins synthesis rate or things like that. And then secondly, talk a little bit about what we know about post-workout fatigue, although, to be honest, I've kind of already summarized that. So, when we are thinking about training with a very, very high frequency, like training and muscle every day, we obviously want to know as much as we can about the duration of the stimulus period. Now, the reason we want to know that is because there is a limit on how high you can push muscle protein synthesis rates or my favorite protein synthesis rates before they just kind of cap out. Now, for clarity, when we say muscle protein synthesis, what we're referring to is any muscle protein. So, the study is set up to look at any sort of muscle proteins, which of course is very less precise than looking at myfibular proteins. Of course, myfibular proteins synthesis is looking very specifically at the myfibral kind of fraction. So, generally speaking, we tend to regard myfibular proteins synthesis as being a more specific indicator of hypertrophy. It's not different from muscle damage repair. So, if we look at muscle protein synthesis rates, you'll see that those are elevated after damaging situations, even if they're not related to exercise, and you'll see the same thing with myfibular protein synthesis rate. So, what you can't do is say, "Oh, well, it's myfibular protein synthesis rates, therefore it doesn't include damage." It absolutely does. They both deal with damage as well as with hypertrophy. So, we've got these two kind of measurement sort of measurements that we can take. One is an elevation in the muscle proteins synthesis, one is an elevation in the myfibular proteins synthesis. So, basically, we tend to use these elevations in these rates as an indicator of this two-minute period, and it's not horrible, but it's not perfect either, for reasons we'll get into in a minute. But ultimately, what we're saying is that leaving measurement issues aside, we kind of want the muscle protein synthesis rate to come back down a bit from its very high level before we stimulate it again. Now, this is a really, really important point, and this gets very confusing for people. The reason we're saying this is because if you've say done a workout on a Monday, and then you come back in on a Tuesday at the same time of day, and you do another workout at the same muscle, then after your workout on Monday, you stimulate to the elevation in either myops, myfibular proteins synthesis, or muscle proteins synthesis, whichever one you're measuring, and it will have jumped really high really, really quickly. And until I start coming down again, probably after about sort of eight to twelve hours. And the question then is, if I've still got an elevation present the following day, what does that mean for me in terms of the stimulus that I can generate with the second workout? Well, what it means is that if you're, I mean, in the scenario, for example, that myops or MPS was sort of maintained at a really high level all the way through that 24-hour period, and it was still really high at the start of the second workout. What that would mean is that you would not really be able to push myops any higher from that second workout. So your second workout would essentially not do anything, because you've already got a maximum level of myops or MPS from the previous days working, and now that's not the way the curves are, you know, that's not the shape of the curves. The curves are coming down rapidly after about 12 hours, and they're coming right down to probably about sort of 25%-ish, forget the exact percentages of what your peak was the previous day. Now, just kind of running with that for a moment, that random number I just pulled out my head. If you were to be at 25% of your peak, you know, of the previous day, then essentially you would expect that you'd get about 75% of your previous day's benefit by doing another workout. So you're losing something by not getting myops or MPS back down to that base level following day. And that's the essence of the problem that we're talking about. When we talk about myops and MPS rates still being elevated from the previous day, I think some people, when they ask me questions, they go, why do we need to get MPS or myops back down to baseline before we elevate to them? We don't. You absolutely don't need to get it. What we're saying is that you lose something because your peak that you got the previous day was your maximum amount that you could elevate to. You've got a certain capacity for increasing the rate. You can think of muscle fibres, basically, like having these little manufacturing kind of engines or machines in them that sort of spit out proteins and they're making these and you elevate the speed at which they make them, the rate at which you make these proteins. So when we say we're elevating the rate of myopropyl or muscle protein instances, we're saying that these machines are kind of pumping out proteins at a faster rate and that's then aggregating and accumulating inside the fibre and making the hypertrophy happen or the muscle damage repair happens. We'll talk about them in a minute. But ultimately, if you bring that down to a level which is say 25% of your peak, then you can still move from that 25% to the 100%. You've got the 75% there. So you're not losing completely the benefit of that second work out, but you are reducing a part of the advantage, a part of the benefit that you get from that second work out because you can't bring things all the way back down to baseline. So summarizing what I'm saying is that you don't need to get things 100% back down to baseline. You do kind of need to accept that. You might lose a little bit to the stimulus that you would have got from that second work out. If you start that second work out, why you're still got MPS or maps elevated from the previous day. So this is really important because I do see a lot of people get this confused and there's a, I would say a very dominant narrative online that says you must wait until MPS is back at baseline before you can train again. And it seems to be presented in a way that's different to what you've just said there where the insinuation is you will get no benefit unless MPS or MPS is back at baseline. And what you've said is no, no, it's just not additive. So you can't go in and say, well, you've let's say doubled my ops in one work out. And now it's back down to say 50% above baseline. And you're just saying, well, you can't just add another 100% top of it. You're saying you can just go back to the peak that it was. So the analogy that I guess I would sort of metaphor, I'll come up with there is like imagine you've got 10 employees and you set all 10 employees to work and then five of them knock off. Well, when you stimulate an MPS again, you don't just get 10 new employees, you get those five back again. So you can't just add another 10 on to it and get 15. But you're saying you can still go back to that peak. Yeah, exactly. Basically, you've got a peak that you can reach and you know, that peak is very, very pointy in the first kind of 12 hours. I mean, you can see this from the the MPS day to most clearly. It jumps really high in the first kind of 12 hours or so and then it starts flying back down again. So obviously, by the time we get to the following day, we are not at the peak and therefore is a possibility of creating. And this is really the conclusion that I would come to is that if you just go and look at some of these diagrams of what MPS and maps does post-workout, you will see that it spikes in the first 12 sort of 18 hours and it's coming down by the time you get to the kind of the 24 hour mark. So there is clearly a capacity to then push it back up again. You're not going to get the 100% benefit as you say because you know, you've got that sort of residual effect kicking around. You know, and that residual effect is also going to be doing muscle damage per, you know, and that's and that's and that's a really important point as well because we don't really know. I mean, realistically, we should be imagine that, you know, if you if you're repairing muscle damage, then you probably not able to, you know, use that. I mean, you're not able to use that elevation in MPS or maps for the purposes of, you know, hypertrophy. So it probably does occupy your employees or your machines in the same way that the hypertrophy processes do. I kind of, you know, it's kind of like you've got your 10 employees as you were sort of explaining and you've got maybe sort of five of them occupied from the previous day still processing the miles from the previous day. So you've now only got five that are able to then give you some benefits today from the work that you're doing. But then maybe if two of those are tied up doing HR work, which is kind of muscle damage repair, then you've now only got three. So this is one of those issues where you can say, well, if I, and again coming back to how can you say it's protocol, you know, it's really cool to see that it's explicitly designed to produce actually a relatively small stimulus every day, but also not really produce any damage repair. You don't need damage repair if you don't produce damage. And if you're missing the last two reps off of your set, then you're probably not going to get any damage. So that's a really, really nice kind of sort of connection with what was saying happening physiologically, which is that if you do create muscle damage, then you will produce quite a long, I mean, my ops MPS rate elevations where you've got muscle damage, they really do kind of just sort of tick along at a above baseline level, like that 25, 30 percent level for a long period of time. So if you kind of do three or four sets to failure, you know, and you were trying to make that work in the context of a daily kind of routine, which it wouldn't, but you would find that you would just be constantly stuck with my ops and MPS sitting at like that sort of 30, 40, 50 percent of a baseline all the time just doing damage repair processes. And it wouldn't then allow you to then use any of that my ops or MPS for the purposes of hypertrophy. And presumably that would accumulate in successive workouts. And of course, you'd also get fatigue. I mean, this is a separate concept from fatigue accumulation. I mean fatigue accumulation is stopping you creating stimulus in the first place. This is what I'm saying here is just talking about tying up your machines or your employees in terms of producing this protein that you're trying to add to your muscle files. If you're constantly repairing damage, then you're tying up the resources that you want to use for hypertrophy to do damage repair. Now, I know that when we put this out, there's going to be a lot of people being like, no, you can't train everyday. And I know one of the arguments that's going to come up because I've heard it a lot is that there's a some kind of refractory period where you can't stimulate MPS again. There's nothing to suggest that will happen from training. So there's a couple of really nice rodents studies that show that if you try and stimulate hypertrophy, I think it's eight hours after a previous workout, nothing happens. I mean one of the really interesting things about those studies is that and I use those all the time to make a point which is that you can't use signaling data to make sense of hypertrophy because if you look at the signaling data, the signaling data tells you that you're stimulating hypertrophy in those situations. You know, you do the workout and you get all of the MTOR signaling and everything all the way through to P70, SXK. And everyone's like, oh yeah, you know, that's telling me of experiencing hypertrophy. And I'm like, okay, well, well, why aren't you getting a mouse right at the end of that signaling pathway then? And they kind of make up an excuse and they stop talking to you because ultimately it's because we've got a blocking situation there that's preventing you from converting that signal into hypertrophy stimulus. You know, an elevating mouse. So yeah, I think there is a period of time in which, you know, you can't stimulate another worker. And I, sorry, you can't stimulate another, another sort of elevation in my ups in the same muscle room. And I often refer to that when people are saying, well, can I, you know, do some of my work in the morning and some of my work in the evening for the same muscle? And I'm like, no, you probably can't. That's one of the things you really probably can't do. I would be much happier if you just did it every day than doing it either end of the day because I think that's the kind of scenario where you are going to hit this, this period of time in which you've got this barrier. Now, the nature of that barrier is a separate question. And, you know, there's all kinds of interesting things that you said about that. I don't want to go there today. But I think that's definitely not the case if you go the 424 hours. I think you go the 424 hours. It's just gone by that point. We're back to a reset sort of state. And all we really dealing with then is, what have I got going on in terms of my ups rate elevations or MPS rate elevations? You know, am I back down the baseline? Am I at 25% that you send ish? Or am I all the way up at the top level that I was, you know, at the peak the previous day? Well, you're not going to be at the peak the previous day. You are going to be probably somewhere around the 20, 30, 40% mark. So you're going to find that you've got a less effective stimulus and I'm not denying that. So let's be totally clear. You are going to get a slightly less effective stimulus than if you let my ups come all the way back to baseline. But there's nothing magical about getting all the way back down to baseline. Absolutely not. You can just take the hit and say, well, you know, okay, I don't get 20, 30% that I was trying to get, you know, but I'm training more regularly. So, no, I'm winning them, so I lose some, you know, there's a downside and an upside. So, you know, there's definitely, it's important to say that, you know, there's nothing magical about coming all the way back down to baseline. You are just accepting that you're losing something. I do need to ask some short people listening, I think, you know, okay, you said you can't train eight hours later. So how long, like if you were to do a, there seems to be a resurgence of very, very, very long workouts. And I'm hearing some people now talk about three to four hour workouts, which blows my mind. But I'm sure those people listening to this will be thinking, holy moly, what's happening? Then if it's a four hour gap, if you're saying an eight hour gap won't work, do you know what the, the, the short end of that timeline is? No, not really. I mean, I would say it probably is around that three or four hour mark. I think if we look at, if we look at what's, I mean, essentially, you kind of, you, you do the, you do the workout and then you look to see where various events start to happen. And I mean, ultimately what we're looking for is the inflammation and the upstate distress that's tend to sort of start developing the post workout period. Now, you can look at studies and they'll show some of that starting to kick off around the three hour marks. Some studies show more like six hours. And then you kind of like, well, you know, I've got some human data, I've got some animal data, how different is all of that. And it's like, honestly, I wouldn't want to put a number down. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm completely confident that if you're doing them at the opposite ends of the day, you know, morning and then the evening, I think you're probably well into the territory where you can have a problem there. If you're just doing a really long workout and you, you know, like, and don't have burn used to do, you know, kind of playing golf between, between squats sets of squats. You know, I think those are kind of the interesting sort of, sort of situations where you're like, you kind of probably pushing up against the limit of what you can do. How many people are really doing that? I don't know, but I think if you were to say, you know, three hours, you're probably okay, then I don't think that's going to be wildly wrong. I think if people are going much over three hours, then I think they're probably into dangerous territory. But honestly, if you're doing a three hour workout, you're not training every day. No, that's true. And you're also probably not doing the same muscle at the start and end of that workout that have been odd way of doing exactly, exactly, exactly. So, you know, it's probably a little bit irrelevant for what we're trying to talk about. So if there's not a significant refractory period the following day and you're saying you can still increase MPS even or my ups, even if it was, even, you know, there's still a bit of an elevation. So we're saying, again, the way my head works here, the metaphor I think here is imagine you were, you know, being paid $200, you could be paid $200 a day, but you can't work successive days or you can get paid $150 and work successive days. That feels to me what we're saying. You're not going to get the same impact in terms of stimulus, but you're still getting a decent stimulus. So you're still able to, if you do things right the way George academic did, that seems like it could be a worthwhile payoff or trade off. So, yeah, I wouldn't say that we're comparing apples and apples there. So the reason I say that is because if you were to construct a standard full body three times a week program or every other day program, then you would probably be doing two or three sets. Yeah, so we're comparing doing his single, yeah, okay, true, yeah. So you're, you know, you kind of got to elevate your sort of your $200 little bit there. And it's no longer 200, it's probably more like 300 or so. So that then, that then starts to make it a little bit more probably similar in the sense that if we're doing daily training, we're probably not even getting a full set. I mean, if you look at how can you smear, he's not getting a full set of stimulating reps, he's probably getting three stimulating reps max. So again, you're discounting back. Again, off your one set, it's probably not one set, it's probably more like, you know, sort of half a set or a bit more than half a set, maybe. So I think really, it probably is a little bit closer to the three sets, three times a week or three sets every other day, that we've kind of settled into being the probably default solution for most people most of the time, you know. So I don't think, I mean, because I get people saying, oh, well, you know, if I put one set today in the weekly next to miss model, I get, you know, a superior result from, you know, training three three times a week or three point five times a week. Yeah, you will do. Can you really do that though? You know, and as we point out, the beginning of this podcast, there's no day to tell you whether that's doable or not. And we're just kind of looking at Hackensmith's protocol today and saying, you know, what's he doing? He's not doing a full set, he's not, he's missing off the reps of the last, the last two reps of the set at least if not more, and he's avoiding those because he doesn't want to end up with post workout fatigue accumulating, both for the reasons that we'll, you know, probably talk about shortly, but also for this probably, fact, he doesn't want to have a constant elevation of my ups and, I mean, obviously he's not thinking this, but, you know, he doesn't want, doesn't want elevations in my ups or MPS to be spilled over because if you look at the MPS curve for one set, and if you look at the MPS curve for three sets, you get a very clear increase in the magnitude of the my ups from the three sets compared to the one set, and that increase in the magnitude in the first kind of 24 hours pretty much explains the extra hypertrophy that you get from that three sets of multiple people have observed that myself included. And yet you also get a long tail from the three sets that you don't get from the one set, and people are like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can argue now that three sets allows a longer duration of my ups and therefore a longer stimulus period. Well, you can't because you've already had the benefit of the extra volume, you know, causing hypertrophy in the first 24 hours. That's where the hypertrophy is happening, and, you know, it clearly does account for all of that, you know, your extra sort of my ups and that second day is is damage repair, you know, and there's a whole load of studies that show why that might be the case. So, you know, I think we've got to be really careful about what we can and can't do here, and yes, I agree that if you do just go to the weekly next stimulus model and put in one set every day, you will get a crazy number, but I don't necessarily think that that is doable. I think probably what you're looking at is more like two or three stimulating reps a day. So, the limitation obviously then is going to be what you can recover from, yes. So, it's going to be avoiding the accumulation of POSO T, but it's also, you know, going to be avoiding that muscle damage repair process, chewing into your available myelops and MPS in that second day after the workout. So, we've got two issues going on here, both are caused by muscle damage, but one of them is that we're chewing into our available MPS or myelops, and the other is that we are basically starting to accumulate post-reg up to you and starting to produce a interference with the stimulus that we are trying to generate, yes. So, then we're going to work out, well, what is like how much muscle damage is recoverable in a day, in 24 hours? Yeah, so, I mean, I think this is one of those situations where, you know, you're probably looking at one or one and a half sets if you look at the tables and graphs that, you know, I've tried to create, you're probably looking at about one to one and a half sets of moderate loads, and you could do heavy loads and probably, you know, do more than that. I mean, we've talked recently about heavy loads training and you can do silly numbers of singles if you really want to, and I guess that starts to go back to those circus performers and Eugene Sandow and those period of time when they were doing lots and lots of single lifts, practicing lifts, and doing a bunch of practice lifts, and then coming up on a day. So, you know, maybe they were getting more than two or three stimulating reps in those situations just by using heavy loads. I think the problem that you're going to hit when you go into that territory is the same problem that Olympic weight lifters hit, which is now, yeah, if you've got the, if you've got the sort of genetics and the biomechanics that allow you to do that, you're going to be okay, but a lot of people are going to run into difficulty that, not from a muscular point of view, but just because it creates overuse injuries. And that I think is probably the problem with going down the route of saying, oh, well, you know, I'll just do heavy loads and I'll do a bunch of stimulating reps, I'll probably get five or even ten stimulating reps a day, where you have heavy loads and, you know, kind of do it that way. I think probably the limitation there is separate. The nice thing about hand conch mitts routine is that you're probably not hitting that problem, you know, I think working with a five to ten rep zone with a ten rep max, I don't think you're going to be hitting that kind of biomechanical problem. So it's a really, really nice way of doing it. So yeah, I mean, I think realistically, hand conch mitt probably is on the low side, you know, you probably could get away with one to one and a half sets, but, you know, like we were saying at the beginning, there isn't data of what happens when you start doing this stuff, you know, we don't have training studies where people have trained every day. So really, you know, what's going to happen? And I do think that a lot of the studies that measure post workout fatigue are pretty horribly underpowered. And, you know, like I made the point, we muscle swelling when, you know, people say, oh, you know, here's this, and they love to do this. Though they'll grab a whole bunch of studies that show no significant muscle swelling at like 24 hours or 48 hours after a workout and they'll, you know, kind of run around the internet yelling about these studies going, you know, it's not significant. Therefore, we can ignore it. And I'm like, okay, if I put every single one of these studies on a chart and look at the numbers, you know, if it's not significant because it's not there, it's not, it's not a thing. Well, I should see is everything clustering around zero because that's random. Yeah. So if it genuinely is nothing, I should see everything clustering around zero. And I don't see everything clustering around zero. I see everything clustering around like 405 percent muscle size increase, you know. So I think there's this underpowering problem when we look at it. So even though, you know, we might have a table or a chart that we've created that shows you can probably recover from one, one and a half sets, you know, every day. It's really interesting to see that engagement was way way lower than that. You know, and he was deliberately looking for ways to avoid that postwork happening. So I think the chances are that we probably do underestimate, if anything, how much postwork happening. And so I would probably look to, I could say, I would start that. I wouldn't start with the tables and the charts and go, hey, look, you know, this shows I can do one and a half sets a day. So I'm going to do, you know, maybe two sets with two reps of reserve and, you know, do that every single day. I think you're probably going to have problems if you do that eventually. Presumably within just a few weeks, so following the progression, how can you make it laid out? You're going to probably have fewer reps of reserve, at least in some of those sessions. So there might be maybe some of those days with more, providing more stimulating reps than others. But a lot of people, a lot of people ask me, hey, can I just do one set of five, you know, zero to one reps of reserve? So obviously what you've said there's look, you know, there's potentially a bit of limitation here in some of that, but maybe that might be sort of, you know, hitting up against what might be recoverable and then someone could maybe trial for themselves. Yeah, I mean, I think I genuinely really like this model that I can just make create and I think I really would start there. And as you say, like with that burn routines, you do these for a couple of weeks, a couple of months and you start to feel like you're pushing things a bit harder and, you know, that's inevitable. So I think it's a really, really cool starting point. I've never really been happy with the idea of doing a single set of, you know, moderate or moderately heavy load today and training to failure and making that work. I don't think that will really allow recovery to happen. So I think basically with these two limitations, you probably can do it with heavy loads, you know, not training to failure, just doing maybe a bunch of doubles and triples with five rate maxed. But honestly, if you do that, you are going to find that you get unless you are very lucky and, you know, bi mechanically perfect. I think you're probably going to experience some, some grumbles along the way. Go down the routes of doing moderate loads, you're probably going to find that your Facebook app to accumulate. So yeah, I think either way, you're going to hit a problem and doing it this way where you're just doing, say, two or three stimulating reps a day with moderate loads is a really, really nice solution, really impressed actually. I have experimented with some of those methods, you know, we talked about this a few years ago, I've tried doing singles of doubles with about a four or five rep max. And I can get away with it for a couple of months, but eventually it caught up with me. And maybe different exercises or different muscles might be different, but I tried to know a few different things and it did beat me up a bit. Yeah, and I think really that's that's kind of why I would just sort of draw a circle around it and say, you know, what we're really interested in is a sustainable practice that can be done, you know, and that's why this is probably about as close to a sustainable practice as I've ever seen. And just reiterating, we are literally working off, you know, a historical, you know, account here, we're not working off data that, you know, that exists in the scientific literature. It's just interesting to note how much of the physiology is clearly apparent in a routine like this where, you know, you're getting a couple of stimulating reps, it's going to produce a bump in the MPS or myelps, and it's going to probably come down pretty much to baseline within sort of 24 to 30 hours. And you're going to get, you know, a very nice bump following day when you train again. And you're never really going to accumulate post-workout tea because you're missing those last couple of reps of the set. It's really, really nice the way that you've done this. It's very, very impressive. So, you know, ultimately I think that would be my starting point, I really would. So the two questions I've got for you then would be, is there anything else to consider if someone was planning on giving something like this ago and then be, are there any specific advantages? Because you've kind of talked about, well, if you're doing multi-sets and you're doing it every second day, obviously you're going to get a higher spike of my ops and the hypertrophy potential of that is going to be higher than a single set or even a couple of stimulating reps. So is there actually a specific benefit to doing it this way or would it just be someone preferred at or wanted to experiment with it? I think experimentation is probably the main reason why you would do something like this. I mean, like you were talking about, you know, recently. The sort of thing that I would probably put as the first suggestion for making this kind of thing work would be to rotate exercises. Do not do the same exact exercise every day. So, you know, by all means, play around with training a muscle every day, but I think you could probably have, I mean, this is interesting because, you know, we've talked before about how, you know, you really can't do ABC routines in a full-body situation. You can't do ABC routines in an upper lower situation. You can't even do AB in an upper lower situation. If you're doing them classically as four workouts a week, you can if you're doing six, but you know, that's not really up below. That's full-body split out into upper and lower components. So, you could here. You could do ABC. You could do ABC. And so, you could, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's an interesting idea. So, you could actually gather together your, you know, three favorite full-body workouts, and you could just do those, you know, as you say, six days a week, and that would actually work from a muscle fiber perspective. That's interesting. I mean, one thing I didn't mention about Hackenschmitt is he does talk about these sessions are quite short. I forget exactly how long I think he specified some in the round of 20 to 30 minutes. So, in this scenario, I guess it would be that if you're picking one exercise, per muscle, one set, yeah, it would be a fairly short workout. You're doing, you're basically doing your 20th minute, 30 minute workout six days a week instead of your hour session every other day. Yeah, and I doubt you would need enormous amounts of warm-up for most of the lifts. You know, I mean, it would really only be if you were sort of trying to make this work with, you know, kind of sort of complex multi-joint exercises that require a lot of warm-up. But even then, because you're working with a 10-watt max and you're doing probably five, six, seven reps with it, you probably don't need to be quite so, you know, sort of dedicated to the warm-up as you would be if you were trying to do, you know, a lot heavier loads or you were trying to train to fail you or anything like that. So, you know, I think really it, it's a very interesting, it's a very interesting approach. I still, I still think my default would always be, you know, full-body three times a week or every other day. I think that is probably the easiest and most elegant way of solving the problem. But as you say, for people who really want to train every day, people who want to experiment, people want to see what happens. I think, yeah, doing sort of ABC, ABC across six days, with, you know, sort of training the same muscles, but with different exercises, you know, using Hackensmith's protocol progressive overload. I think that could be a really interesting experiment. I think it would be really interesting to play around with. I don't think it will come out better than training three or three and a half times a week, but for some people it might just work for scheduling reasons or, you know, maybe they've got a home gym and they just run in there for 20, 25 minutes and run out again. I don't know. I mean, that's, that's what I'm thinking too, you know, if you have a, you have some equipment in home or even, you know, if you're PT and you only get half an hour, you know, between a client to do a session, you know, on the gym four or five or six days a week, you know, there might be some scenarios where this just works. It's just more convenient and realistically 90% of people, this is going to be a less convenient option, but there'll be some people out there that might just work really well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, again, very limited data, really just building stuff up from history and physiology, not trying to tell people, this is the next big thing at all, far from it, you know, just kind of talking around a concept and seeing, you know, what, what might work, what could, what could work and why, you know, and hopefully just dispelling this myth that, you know, we need to get my ops back down to baseline before you training again, you don't need to get it all the way back to baseline, you just need to accept that anything above baseline is, you know, lost benefit, really. So yeah, sure, if you're still at 100% above baseline from the previous day, you know, as in 100% of your peak, then, you know, you would not be getting any benefit, but that's not happening, that's absolutely not happening, you know, it does come down a long way from the previous day. And so there is a cost, but it's not an overwhelming cost. Anything else we should mention for people to consider? I guess one thing would be the type of exercises you're selecting, and you've mentioned anyway, obviously, if you're using a cost, that's going to be a limitation. So you'd probably be thinking more, single join exercises, maybe more contracted position exercises, machines, if you had access to them. Yeah, I mean, obviously, if you're doing your ABC, you could sort of focus a bit more on your contract position stuff, and you could just throw in your critical stretch position once every three days, like, you know, to keep your sarcoma regensis. I do think that, you know, squats, bench, deadlifts, squats, bench presses, and deadlifts are probably going to be the most complicated and difficult ones. Deadlifts actually might not be horrible, or a deadlifts variation might not be horrible, like a rack pull, maybe, or an audio, but certainly a kind of classic power lift is probably going to be really difficult to warm up for, and you're just not going to feel like it makes any sense. So that would probably be the biggest downside, but yeah, I mean, you could go down the contract position route, that would certainly give a big benefit in terms of avoiding post-workup T, but that's always the case. It's just that not every muscle would let you do that, you know, so that's a challenge. But yeah, so I think practically, it's all the same stuff we've talked about in other situations, you know, managing post-workup T is always going to be an issue in anybody's programme, even whether they're training every other day or every day. Cool, so if there's someone out there listening who's going to jump in and get this go, we'd love to hear feedback. Is there anything else you want to mention before we sign off? No, hopefully that was, you know, short and sweet and interesting for people, as I say, absolutely not saying that this is the next big thing or anything like that. I'm just hoping to clarify how the physiology works and mesh it with the history, which is really the purpose of this podcast in every podcast that we do. Yeah, and it's a question that's coming up a lot of the moment. People are interested in doing this, and like I said, we're not pushing you to do it, but if you guys want to give it a go, A) give it a go, C) respond, and B) we wanted to talk and provide a little bit of physiology and a little bit of stuff for that to think about that might help you if you do plan of giving it a go. So let us know, give yourself feedback. We'd love to hear how it goes, and until next time, thank you for joining us, and hopefully you'll join us next week for another episode.