027 Are 4 reps optimal?! New study: stimulating reps vs volume load

Welcome back to another episode. Thank you everyone for joining us. I'm joined by my co-host professional full-time processing Chris Beasley. How are you doing this week? I'm doing well, thanks Jake, not quite so many podcasts this week. I actually do that many. It's just I had a thing last week. I had three and one weekend, so it was a bit crazy, but only two this weekend, so normal normal levels of podcasting behavior. So today we have a totally, wholly different approach for you guys. Suddenly I've never talked about on this podcast series before, and we're more than six months in. This is episode 27. So thank you to anyone who's been with us for the journey so far. Now obviously you guys know that I normally start the show with a silver era plan, so a bodybuilding plan from before Annabelle Xeroids were being used in bodybuilding. And today, I'm doing something a little bit differently. Now I am still talking about someone that you will know. So last week we talked about Bill Pearl. Now for you guys who did listen to last week's episode, I mentioned that Bill Pearl is an interesting figure because he was active actually for quite a long time. So he won Missy Universe in the 50s, the 60s, and even in the early 70s. And he transitioned in this period where Annabelle Xeroids were being introduced. So when he first won his first Missy Universe, he was natural and Annabelle X were not widely being used. And then shortly after winning, he started using Annabelle X. And if you do look up his physique transformation, you'll see that obviously he had a very impressive physique when he was natural, but then you fast forward a few years, and he kind of looks completely different. But it's an interesting case study not just to see how his physique has changed or did change over that time, but to see how his training methods changed over that time as well. So last week we covered a plan that he discussed when he was still natural. And this week we are covering a plan from 1967 and he started using Annabelle's most life when he around 1958. So this is about a decade obviously after that. And I'm going to do my best to communicate this plan to you because you'll see or you're here in a moment that there's quite a bit to it. So it's a two way split. And he was doing six days a week. So we've got a Monday, Wednesday, Friday workout and we've got to choose a Thursday, Saturday workout. So I'll start with the workout A, the Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And we have a restart with an alternating twisting sit-up into a incline leg tuck and then into a incline dumbbell sit-up and actually also a dumbbell bend to opposite foot. So we've got this kind of core work there. He's doing a single set of each of these exercises, doing a hundred repetitions. So obviously very high volume there with this sort of core on ab work. Then we go into an incline lateral raise, four sets, into a close grip chin up for four sets, a bent arm lateral raise for another four sets, a medium grip chin up for another four sets, a decline lateral raise for another four sets, a wide grip chin up for another four sets, and then a military press for another four sets. So that's what's that like four eights. What do we got here? Like 12, 16 sets of pull ups I think it is in that sort of little middle series. Then we're not done yet. We're then going to weighted dips four sets of eight, press behind the neck. Actually we've got a little bit more deltabny, another four sets and then incline barbell biceps curls four sets, standing dumbbell lateral raise, a little bit more deltabny, another four sets, and then finally finishing off exercise number 16. We've got decline dumbbell biceps curls and four and other four sets. So that is our workout A. Now if you want to jump in and make a comment on that. I wasn't going to make a comment so much as just ask for clarification of what do we think this, what parts of the body is he targeting with this exercise. Obviously you've described pull ups and butt raises and all kinds of stuff and that but can you summarize for us because I'm just hearing this information. I'm going, you know, how do I pause this? It's so much data that what muscle groups are we training here? It's difficult to fully identify this split because obviously we had a lot of bicep work here, but we will have bicep work again on the following day. Okay. So we had bicep, we had a stack of deltoy work. We had obviously a stack of back work as well and then we had a core work. Now that's predominantly I guess what we see there. So there's not really much peck work in there as such. It's not as such. We feel like if we dip in there and that's about it. So it's I guess triceps shoulders biceps core and back. So then our Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday workout. So here this is where we've got legs, but we've got biceps again. We've still got some delts, but it's more rear delts and then we still got our core work in there as well on carbs as well. So basically all the lower body stuff and then some some upper body stuff. So this workout again, we're starting with core and abs. So we've got a sit up, one set of a hundred reps and alternating leg raise, a dumbbell side bend and then a lying leg crossover. So one set of each of those for a hundred repetitions. And then we go to a standing dumbbell curl for four sets, an incline rear delt raise for four sets incline dumbbell curl for four sets. We've got so much bicep work. A lying rear delt raise for four sets bent over delt cable raise four sets, leg extension four sets. This is four sets of 10. Everything else was four sets of eight. And then standing, this is an interesting standing calf raise. We've got five sets of 15. So we have moved up a little bit in the repetitions there. A hat squat for four sets, a seated calf raise now for five sets. A hamstring curl for four sets and then finally a calf raise, I guess more like a toe press, a calf raise down in the leg press machine. And that was five sets. And you know what you were talking about chest before and that there was million in the first workout and we've got none in this workout. So we're very much missing apart from I guess what it is getting in the dips and a little bit of upper chest and some of the overhead work. There's not any significant chest work. From memory though, there was in his previous program, I'm just trying to recall what we talked about. Yeah, so that was a that was obviously one that he's written four people to follow. But yeah, I believe there was a there was a wide group bench in that one and an incline and the fly man, he body thin is he put all these chest work 10 years prior. Man, it barely excreted all the 10 years later. Yeah, that's really, really interesting. It's I mean, obviously the first thing that anybody is going to think when they when they kind of hear this, it's just an absolutely incredibly high degree of workout volume. But also, you know, this is happening six days a week. You know, got Monday Wednesday, Friday workouts and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday workouts. It's just a colossal amount of a volume being done, you know, not just single sessions, but you know, constantly. So, obviously, it doesn't fit into the recovery date that we've got for strength training people. So, you know, there's kind of two perspectives that we can we can bring to that. You know, obviously, historically, people have argued that anabolic do accelerate recovery. And they we do know that and whether they do or not is actually really difficult to track. Because essentially, if you imagine you're in the post workout recovery period and you're trying to track whether someone's strength is recovering faster because they're using an anabolic versus when they're not using an anabolic, the problem is that the anabolic is going to cause hypertrophy in that in that recovery period. So, the fibers are going to grow faster due to the anabolic usage and they're going to get stronger in that post workout period, whether or not the fibers that you damage the recovering faster or not. So, it's a really, really difficult sort of thing to track. So, what you have to do is go and look at the non-exercise muscle injury and people hate to when I do this, but it's the easiest way of just seeing whether something happens and go do the data in anabolic suggest that non-exercise muscle injury recovers faster and some data do and some data don't. So, I think, you know, on balance, I mean, I used to say that I don't think it does make a difference. I think it probably does make a little bit of a difference. But, at the end of the day, it is a very, very difficult problem to solve because you can't actually control for the repairing effects of anabolic. So, at the same time, as, you know, you can't exclude the, you know, hyper, the hypertrophic effects of anabolic while you're trying to investigate the repairing effects of anabolic in an exercise situation. So, you actually have to use non-exercise muscle injury to give you informative data. Do I think the anabolic accelerate recovery to the point where you could do a work-up on like this and recover from it? No, I don't. I don't think the bit of the effect is anywhere near that bit. Yeah, I mean, essentially, like just on that first workout, we're looking at just from a dealt perspective. We've got 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, we've got 24 sets of delts and then that's going to be repeated again two days later with even potentially a little bit of trosolar in the following day. So, even with the assistance of anabolic 24 sets in 48 hours, it's just not going to happen, is it? No, not at all. And I think, you know, this is a really good opportunity to repeat what I've said before, which is that one of the central points that we're trying to make in this podcast series is that the high volume approach to strength training only appeared at the point when anabolic became popular. So, the people who argue that high volume works for everybody, you know, whether they're using anabolic or not, are requiring us to believe that simultaneously at the point when people start using anabolic, a group of people who are using anabolic simultaneously, magically discovered the high volumes are with the answer to maximum hypertrophy. They're asking us to to believe that that is a likely possibility. The far more likely possibility is that people started using antibiotics and at that point it didn't really make any difference what kind of strength training you do. As you can agro to the antibiotics, you don't need the strength training now to provide growth because the antibiotic can do that. Just to be clear, what I'm saying here is that antibiotics provide a completely separate parallel stimulus for muscle growth at the same time as the strength training is doing. For people who are taking antibiotics are going to grow no matter what they do. They could sit on the sofa and they'll go, "Oh my god, the study is showing that you can literally sit on the sofa and grow." Ultimately, it's really, really hard to see the effects of the strength training program that you're doing. What's interesting is trying to get to the bottom of why did they decide to start doing higher volumes at the same time as they started introducing other ways? Was it that made them think that that was useful? I can understand responses. Well, I'm not sure there's anything. It's just that they're growing like a weed no matter what they do. They lose the connection between the empirical observation of what's happening when they're doing a strength training workout. Before and most were introduced, if you did something that didn't work, you got feedback from that. You know? Which way didn't work into this? You didn't work. You were going to work at the same time. Once you start using an at-well-ox, that feedback loop is broken. You could literally go to the gym and stand on one leg for half an hour and believe that was somehow doing something for you because you were going to grow anyway. Now, I don't think that necessarily training in a way that is suboptimal is going to be completely compensated for by an avalic. What I'm saying is that you are breaking the feedback loop and you can therefore do stuff that doesn't work and you're not necessarily going to know that it's not working because you're going to be growing. So it's like, do I think that somebody who's taking on bikes can literally do whatever they want? Well, yes and no. Yes, they're still going to grow, but no, they would probably grow slightly faster if they trained in a more appropriate way. So I still think that people who are using antibiotics for bodybuilding would benefit from training in a way that is similar to what we described before in silver everybody building, but they aren't going to necessarily know that that is a better way just by observing their own training over short-ish periods of time. Maybe if they looked over a year, they might start to notice a difference. If they do one year training in this way and then actually a training in a silver era way, I think they might notice that the way training in a silver era way is going to be better, but it's going to be very dependent on them using the exact same kind of pharmaceutical assistance as they were using in a previous year. Talked about this on the webinar that I did with Azir. We said, one of the things they're really organo-notes is just how miserable the process of competition prep is going to be. I think somebody who's training in this kind of way is going to have a very miserable experience, whereas somebody who's training in a more silver era type way is going to have a much more enjoyable experience, perfect for competition, because they're not going to be going to the gym doing two and a half hours worth of work to get to essentially a worse output than they would have done if they trained. Of course, the conditioning and that kind of side of things is going to be more easy to obtain when you're not doing a ton of unnecessary stuff on these kind of crazy volumes. I think there are going to be discernible differences, but I don't think that feedback loop, I think ultimately the breaking of that feedback loop is the reason why we've seen all of this crazy stuff started to happen at this particular point in time. Yeah, I can go entirely, like I often, and actually I want to make a point here. A big issue I see when I do see people talking about silver era or talking about not even a silver era, talking about old-school bodybuilding. What I see is almost every time I see it being talked about, people want it all together and they lump in silver era with golden era. They look at plans like what we've talked about for the last six months and then they look at plans like this. There's no distinction of, hey, this is a post-anabolic plan compared to a tree anabolic plan. There's this whole mentality of, hey, these guys sort of knew something that we don't know. There's this intuition that they had and this and the other. This is a perfect example of actually knowing what you've identified there without that feedback loop working. They start to see some really nuts stuff happening. What I love about this example here at Bill Pearl is we can get a first-hand experience of what did it look like before he started taking antibiotics, what did it look like afterwards. Literally, he more than doubled everything he was doing. I've just pulled up another plan if he's a half, which was a plan that he personally followed and very similar exercise selection, but it's literally 30 to 50% as much volume. He's just gone ahead and taken almost exactly what he was doing and doubled or more and also doubled the amount of days that he's training. This is such a good example of, hey, even within this one individual who is getting amazing results doing the classic stuff we've been talking about in the episodes up until now, he still, I guess, was unable to identify what training approach worked best once he has this indifferent factor of and the bollocks that were causing an additional type of growth. Totally. It really strains our ability to believe people when they say that high volume training is going to work in everybody, no matter whether they're using other works or not. Yet, the only time of the point in history where high volume training became popular was exactly the point at which Annabellex started to be used popularly. It's such an obvious inflection point in the trajectory of training practices. We just look at the graph of training practices over time. Suddenly, like the late 50s, early 60s, people started doing double the amount of volume they were doing before. I'm most opposed to believe that that's just suddenly people discovered that that was a good way of training. By the fact that people have been lifting heavy objects since the ancient Greeks. Now suddenly, at this precise moment in history, everyone starts doing double the amount of volume they were doing before. I don't know. Look, that's exactly the point in time when Annabellex become popular. The one who has any degree of cognitive capacity is going to look at that and go, "Oh, those two events are unrelated." Totally unrelated. Come on, be serious. Everyone who thinks about this stuff seriously has got to look at that and go, "Oh, those two things are linked." If we accept those two things are linked, we suddenly now just completely undercut all of the nonsense in the industry about people running around going, "Oh, you've got to do super high volumes and look, there's no muscle swelling going on." All of that nonsense that we see being talked about all the time is clearly that people started using Annabellex to feedback loop broke. Now we don't know what works and what doesn't work. People start chasing all kinds of silly ideas. Maybe I'm not a student of steroid by chemistry. I don't know about this stuff anywhere near as much as some very common data's out there on the internet. I'd be surprised if they don't change your mood, your approach to workouts, how you feel all the kind of thing. People feel like they want to do more and they feel great. They're going to do more. Maybe there's a behavioural drive over there just because of the way that the steroid home makes you feel. But ultimately, none of that really matters. What matters is that if you just look at the prevalence of different training programmes every time, only point in history where high-volving programmes became popular was exactly the point at which steroids became popular as well. Anybody who's got any kind of analytical capacity is going to look at that and go, "All those two events are related." It's not my other situation where you can go, "Oh, well, no correlation doesn't mean causation." I'm like, "Okay, come on, be serious." This is clearly what's driving. One thing is clearly driving the other. This plan was obviously completely different to anything else we've covered so far. Going forwards, I want to present a few more plans like this. I still want to show you guys examples of silver aerial plans and what they did and why we think it makes sense or what maybe could have been done better. But for you guys who've been joining us for this long, you'll see that what there's actually so much consistency in what they were doing, it's a little bit monotonous. It's like, "Okay, we kind of get it now." And now what I want to do going forwards is contrast a little bit to, "Well, what did we see develop when that feedback loop was broken and how did it differ?" So, it's not always going to be a golden-eared plan like this. I will still introduce you guys to some silver aerial plans in future episodes, but we will do a little bit more of this contrasting going forwards. Is there any other point you wanted to make on this plan before we jump into the topic for today? I just wanted to say that commenting on what you've just mentioned there, it would be really interesting to see if there are any trends. Like we've observed trends in the silver aerial. Some of them which are clearly in alignment with physiology and some of them are like, "Well, why were they doing?" I just keep saying, "Why are there no pull-ups in this program? Why are there no frontal plane pulling exercises in this program?" I keep saying, "Why are there no hamstrings exercises in these programs? Why aren't they doing any deadly variations?" Or do they just not talk about them? Is there some kind of secret? I've joked before, there's some kind of secret agreement that they don't comment on deadlift exercises. Like, I'm doing them, they're just not talking about them. So we've got this kind of weird kind of trends that we've noticed having gone through all of those programs week in, week out. Are we going to see the same kind of thing? Looking at this program we talked about today, are we going to find that everyone's doing a billion dell exercises and no chest exercises? Is that going to be, I doubt that? Is that something that we're going to start to see coming through as a trend? Yeah, that is what I think. I don't know, my bill, probably, I have a suspicion that there's going to be a lot of dell and biceps exercises in most people's programs. You think? I do. He did something he actually, because Bill's natural plan was super light on with chest and actually really heavy on the delts as well. So I wonder if it might just be a feature of his personal kind of weak points and preferences and that kind of thing. Yeah. We will find out. This is interesting to try to use the -- I have a suspicion to what we're going to see and I'm not going to say I'll tell you when finish recording, but I think here there's something I think that will appear, which I think will be quite interesting faster night on. It'll come up. Cool. So it happens. So today. Hello. I have. Yeah. So basically today, I just want to introduce a potential new development, which is not something that I do very often because I think physiologically we've kind of been in a relatively stable place as regards strength training and how it works for a number of years. I don't think there's been anything really new to get our teeth into. We do have a new study. I think it was probably published ahead of print, maybe even as long as it's six to twelve months, but it came out in a printed version in August, but I was kind of on vacation in August as most Europeans tend to be. So I didn't spot it and I only picked it up recently and worked my way through it. Basically, it's a long-term training study and it's the first long-term training study we've got, which compared the hypertrophy after heavy loads and light loads. Depending on your terminology, you might listen to that and go, what are you talking about? We've got a whole kind of load of studies that have compared heavy and light loads and hypertrophy and that's not actually true. If you use the strict definitions of heavy and light, heavy basically is one to five rep maxes. Moderate is six to fifteen and light is kind of sixteen to maybe thirty or whatever. So pretty much every study that has been done prior to this point was done in moderate and light loads. Now, the researchers who are writing up those studies don't think in S&C terms. They think in like, you know, hypertrophy terms. So they think that anything that's like eight to tenor at max is heavy and of course it's not. But from an S&C point of view and a physiology point of view, we divide it into heavy being one to five, you know, and moderate being six to fifteen. So pretty much every study prior to this one that's just come out has compared moderate loads around the eight to twelve rep maxes zone and light loads usually around the sort of twenty to thirty rep max zone. Physiologically, as long as you're using a load that's heavier than about thirty percent of one rep max, you are kind of doing more or less the same thing because you are a clueding blood flow. If you're a clued blood flow, then you can have metabolite related teeth, which allows you to slow down muscle fiber, shortening velocity without impairing muscle fiber force. And that allows you to have high mechanical tension at muscular failure when you're reaching high levels of motina accruement. If you go lighter than thirty percent of one rep max, then even in a concentric phase, blood flow is not accluded and so you end up with blood just leaving the muscle in the concentric phase. And of course that takes all the metabolites with it so you can't build up a tabla accumulation and therefore you can't reach muscular failure with the same, you know, kind of degree in the mechanical tension because you're relying on calcium, amuletive teeth mechanisms to create your local, you know, kind of peripheral teeth. So basically anything up to kind of thirty-five-ish, maybe even higher than that, rep max is going to give you that full occlusion and they're going to allow you to kind of stimulate hypertrophy irrespective of a rep range. So the question is, because that is probably going to be confusing for some people, that's kind of what BFI is doing. Yeah, that's why I do that. So you could create, yeah, so you could literally, you know, kind of create the same effect with BFI on an antenna baked beans. You know, you could literally lift almost no load whatsoever and mimic the effect of a heavy load or a moderate or a light load. And we tend to talk about very light loads when you go off the upper end of that rep range and you start using something that's lighter than 30, 25 to 30 percent of long rep max. And that in normal situations without BFI, I could use 20 percent, for example, of, like there's a famous study which used four different rep ranges, I think it's 20, 40, 60 and 80s and a lot of that. And they found that basically the anything above 30, so the 40, 60 and 80 produce the same hypertrophy as long as using the same number of sets of failure ish, whereas the 20 percent doesn't. And it's because you don't have a tablight a fatigue in the in the 20 percent because you just haven't got that occlusion of blood flow. If you applied, and there's lots of BFI studies using 10 or 20 percent of all of that max, if you apply BFI on that situation, you immediately include blood flow and you create the same scenario as you would do with a heavier load than 30 percent. So either a light moderate or a heavy load, you're mimicking that with what we classify as a very light load, which is that that notch below in terms of you know, the force production of the whole muscle. So yeah, BFR gets you around that issues. For people who have, I mean, I've talked about this before in context to BFR, but people who have some kind of sort of specific restriction on how much weight they can actually lift because of maybe some joint issue or tendon issues like that, you can use BFR in those scenarios and you will get a muscular response even though you are below that kind of critical threshold for including the flow of blood naturally with the muscular contraction. So yeah, it's really that rep range issue is just about whether or not we're creating a tablight lativity. So this study basically looked at three to five rep maxes as one of the training groups. So this is really interesting. Now there's a number of things I want to talk about here, but just to start off when I'm pointing out that I think this is the first study that said we're going to compare two groups, one which is actually heavy three to five, you know, reps per set and one which is light 20 to 25 reps per set and they're going to use the same number of sets to failure in both groups and they're going to use the same rest periods in both groups. Now I think we have got a study prior to that, we used heavy loads and long rest periods comparing with lighter loads and shorter rest periods and of course it was like, was it the rest period that was creating the issue or was it the rep range that was creating the issue and they ended up with about the same I've heard from both groups and more or less. So it was like it fits with what we're going to talk about today, but it's not as kind of controlled if you like in comparison with one that we've got at the moment. Having said that, I just want to make the point that if you want to physiologically control for the effect of rest period, then you would have longer rest periods in the in the higher rep group. So there's not a perfect scenario by any means. If you have say in this context, a few minute rests between sets and you're using a three to five rep max and a 20, 20, 25 rep max, you are not going to find that you've got a full CNS fatigue recovery in light load group because you are still going to be able to breath when you come to do the next set in the context of this kind of type program. Now having said that again, now to qualify my qualification, we are talking about single leg training here. So it isn't as big a deal as it would be if you were doing like squats or something. If you're doing squats, then you would basically expect that your light load group or light load condition would be just completely destroyed by trying to do two minute rest periods. But you know, we're talking about leg press and knee extension in this context and it's single leg versions of the two. So I don't think it's quite as horrible. I would be pretty miserable in that scenario trying to do, you know, 25 reps of a single leg leg press. I would be extremely unhappy, especially taking two minute rest periods, but that's by the by an old man. Basically, the study used these two training groups compared the hypertrophy single leg within subject design, which is awesome. I personally pretty useless for strength gains, but really, really interesting for my hypertrophy point of view, because you got your every subject is their own control. So you've got, you know, one group, one, sorry, one condition, one leg doing, you know, kind of three sets of leg presses, three sets of knee extensions twice a week. Now six sets, especially light loads, is probably not going to be, you know, recoverable really, but the on the heavy load side, probably is. So, you know, they're doing one leg three to five rep maxes, sort of a three to five reps per set, two failure six, six sets across two exercises. So like press and knee extension, probably is recoverable actually. So there's a bit of a recovery difference again. So again, we've got a little bit of a problem there in terms of, you know, comparing these two situations, because we're probably not seeing full recovery in the case of the light load group compared to the heavy load group. A structure is, and again, instructors is two four week blocks with a week off in the middle, the week off in the middle, basically, how the single workout with one set to be checked size. Now, this is one of those great examples where I'm just going to be a little bit rude, because ultimately, if you have read the literature and you know, and it's not difficult to read the maintenance literature, there's only like four or five studies. If you know that literature, you would know that you need three sets once a week to create a stable maintenance situation, or you want to do single sets twice a week, you wouldn't program a single set once a week for each exercise and expect a bit to be able to maintain the state of muscle mass that you've sort of started that week off in. So I don't understand why they structured the training program the way they did, but it doesn't really matter. There's a, there will have been a small amount of atrophy that week. So I don't agree with the way that they designed that, but you know, no training program is perfect. We've recently got a kind of a four week plus a detraining week or a delayed week and then another four week period. So there would have been a little bit of a kind of a benefit for the light load group in the middle where they would have recovered some of that accumulated fatigue with, you know, kind of six out workouts for the single joint quadriceps. But ultimately, you know, it was not horrible kind of training program for our purposes, because it would have been nearly, nearly recoverable. And it's not, you know, four weeks plus four weeks is not a huge amount of time to be kind of worrying about the accumulation of post work out fatigue. And essentially, after all that, we end up in a place where both training groups pretty much produce the same muscle group, muscle growth. So if you've got a, you know, kind of sort of situation where we're seeing, you know, three to five reps per set, producing the same hypertrophy as 20 to 25 reps per set, notwithstanding the issues around rest periods or intra work out fatigue, notwithstanding the issues around post work out fatigue accumulation. What we're saying here is that broadly speaking, we're getting, you know, the same hypertrophy stimulus from a set of 20 to 25 reps as a set of three to five reps. Now, this has two really big implications for two battles that, you know, the fitness industry, all the science-based fitness industry has been fighting for the last year or two. And the easier battle to resolve, really, and I think it's resolved a long time ago, but this is the one that still perpetuates in a number of places. Is that volume load is still believed in some places in the industry to have something to do with hypertrophy. Volume load is the number of sets, times the number of reps, times the actual weight on the bar. So what you can see in this video, they did the analysis is that essentially the light load group is doing anywhere between 2.5 and 4 times as much volume load as the heavy load group. So it's just like it should produce way more hypertrophy. Volume load has anything to do with hypertrophy stimulus. Now, of course, it doesn't because stimulating reps model is probably true. So anybody is running around going, oh, volume volume load, they're the same thing. Volume is the number of sets to failure. Volume load is sets, times reps, time weight. Now, and so people are going, oh no, it's just the total force time integral or is the total, you know, kind of volume load that will work that the muscle is doing that determines hypertrophy. This study absolutely stamps on the hypothesis. It actually stamps on it and does a little dance on top. I mean, it is just destroying this idea completely. If you've got a scenario where one group is doing 4 times the volume load to the other group and they're getting the same hypertrophy, that tells you that your volume load hypothesis is garbage. I mean, it really does. There's no possible way for people to, you know, state the volume load has anything to do with hypertrophy with a straight phase after this study came out. You know, it really is done. The argument is over. But of course, people are still arguing that because, you know, not everybody, you know, does the reading. Secondly, we've then got this idea of, and this is a really interesting bit from my perspective. It's, you know, how are we having a scenario where we think there's probably about five stimulating reps in a set. And yet we're seeing the same hypertrophy with three to five reps per set as we are with 2025 reps per set. Now, within that conversation, there's of course the people who are running around going, well, we think you can get hypertrophy with eight reps from failure. Now eight reps in reserve, seven reps in reserve, we think you can get hypertrophy with that. Well, clearly that isn't going to stack with this study very well at all because if that were true, then your light load set will be getting an extra kind of three or four, you know, kind of stimulating reps per set compared with your your heavy load group. And so straight away, it's starting to come back in the other direction and go, maybe there aren't as many stimulating reps per set as certainly these people are arguing, you know, because if you've got a situation where you can create hypertrophy with, you know, sort of seven eight reps in reserve, then that implies that your, you know, moderate load sets should be producing a bigger stimulus or even light loads that should be producing a bigger stimulus than a heavy load set. So straight away, there's kind of a difference going on there, it's pulling us in the opposite direction from what those guys have been saying, but also it kind of goes well, you know, genuinely are there even fewer than five stimulating reps per set because if we can create the same hypertrophy with three to five reps per set, we can with 20 to 25, you know, is it that maybe there's only four stimulating reps per set and actually five is an over estimate in that in that scenario. So I think this is this is starting to get really interesting because certainly before this study came out, a lot of the literature in the stimulating reps zone, the reps in reserve literature was starting to pull us towards thinking maybe there are more than five stimulating reps per set. I've been on, you know, this podcast and other places saying maybe there's even six, but this is now pulling us back in the other direction and going, you know, actually maybe it's not. And the interesting thing is that these people did have two years of strength training experience. So, you know, one of the things that, you know, many people have noticed is that or inferred from the physiology literature is that when you first start out strength training, basically anything, any muscle fiber that you've got that's above the low threshold zone. So low threshold is kind of the bottom 30 to 35% of the muscle varies between muscles as I said before, posture muscles probably go higher than that, but, you know, like carve muscles probably up like 50% of that. But, you know, generally speaking, you know, muscles are going to kind of be low threshold up to about 30 to 35% by volume above that. You're in the high threshold zone pretty much any of that zone unless you've been active in high force physical activities like you do manual labor or you work in the garden a lot or you do something else that required lifting and carrying, you know, then generally speaking, those fibers of that zone above 30 to 35%. I literally just going to be relatively untrained. You have very low levels of kind of development. You start doing strength training pretty much all of that entire zone starts growing. As you progress through your strength training career, you start capping out those muscle fibers at the bottom end of the high threshold, and then you start doing the most strength training training period. So you end up with a situation where you're going to get to higher levels of recruitment before you start seeing any kind of meaningful hypertrophy. So I think most strength training, most strength training, people are in a zone where they have to kind of get to a pretty high level of effort before any fiber starts receiving a stimulus that makes it grow. Growth in fibers lower down. Sorry. Yes, you can create stimulus in fibers lower down, but they're not going to grow in response to that's doing this because they're already fully grown. Interestingly, somebody asked me a question recently about why, you know, kind of the magnitude of the electrobiography signal is not related to the hypertrophy of the results. This is one of the reasons why because you can have a whole bunch of fibers that are fully grown already and they're going to display a high level of activation. You've got high action potential, you know, kind of propagation in that area. And they're not going to grow because they're already maxed out. So you've got this inherent problem there, especially in strength training people where your magnitude of electrical signal is not going to reflect the magnitude of the hypertrophy because you're stimulating stuff that isn't capable of growing. It's a straight away. You've got that inherent problem with that relationship. Anyway. So when we're looking at strength training people there are going to have to get to much higher levels of recruitment, which means that in number of stimulating reps by definition is going to be smaller. I think if you've got an untrained person, pleatly untrained, never done any kind of physical activity. And I guess that's worth sort of dwelling on as well because I've often pointed out that when I started strength training, you know, my generation was very physically active, you know, before we even started strength training. I mean, I could do like, I don't know, you know, I don't know, six to eight, pull ups before I even touched our weight. You know, so, you know, it was like our generation was always being physically active, climbing trees, running around doing stuff, you know, kind of getting into trouble in the classic Gen X kind of childhood. So the first time I picked up a barbell, I think I did lift a double body weight. You know, there was just walked in the gym and did that. So it was a very, very different kind of starting point from people who, you know, are starting from certain tree behaviors. So I think again, it's like I'm not necessarily saying starting from zero strength training. I'm saying starting from zero development, whether that's been done from color, stomachs, gymnastics, whatever else sport you've been doing that requires those kind of, you know, physical kind of activities that produce high levels of recruitment, high levels of forced production. Working with a client once who had spent about a year gaming, like he basically hadn't left his bed and had just spent the whole year at sedentary and he'd lost so much muscle mass, like even walking was difficult for him. And he decided, you know, I didn't stop this and he going to the gym and the amount of muscle that he was able to gain in a fairly short period of time was from exactly that's the opposite end of the spectrum. I mean, it's like from the sublime to the ridiculous, he takes someone who's been doing a lot of gymnastics, a lot of calisthenics, you know, a lot of other kind of different physical activities, maybe doing some grappling, you know, arm wrestling, that kind of stuff has never lived to the way. And they start going to the gym and they expect these wonderful results and nothing happens. I mean, that was really kind of my experience, I kind of started strength training, very little happened, you know, because I've already kind of got most of the way I was going to get anyway. I mean, from a coaching perspective, coaches don't do as much like the transformation stuff anymore, but when I started out, that was what everyone did 12 week transformations and you passed it up on social media. I mean, we all knew as coaches, the best kind you could have who would walk in the door, would be someone who had no background whatsoever for any kind of physical activity sport, they just been sedentary. Perfect. Like what you can achieve into our weeks is going to be amazing. Exactly. I think that's the different. Somebody with only a sedentary background is going to probably have up to 10 stimulating reps per set. I think that's probably the kind of territory that we could be expecting to see maybe even 12 or I don't know. But that's that's kind of what were their experience with somebody who's done two years of strength training or similar physical activities. They're probably going to find that they're limited to that sort of classic number that I've been, you know, kind of had stapled to my forehead, which is five. You know, I mean, everyone's like, oh, yeah, he's the guy who says there's only five stimulating it's per set. Well, that's not ballpark wrong, but that's not what I'm saying. So yeah, I think I think this is just such a fascinating study to kind of start to look at and say, well, does this pull us down in terms of estimates of stimulating rep number per set in strength training individuals. So let me just add some of my thoughts on what's going through my head when I look at this study and the results of the study and what I think is is going on. So firstly, what I've always said is that when we look at two different groups now within subject is great because we're removing the sort of inter individual difference effects that we can get with between group kind of study designs. But we still are going to have the problem of it being a statistical kind of calculation with measurement error and all of that stuff. So one of the issues with volume is that when you compare volumes, different volumes between groups, you aren't going to detect small differences in volume. So if you look at the literature, you often were going to find the classic study design one set versus three sets versus five sets per workout. One set versus five sets almost always produces a difference. One set versus three sets and three sets versus five sets often doesn't. So people are like, oh, yeah, volume always makes a difference. I'm like, well, go and look at the results. at the literature and you'll see for yourself that often small differences in volume, even one or two sets per worker, you know, don't make a difference. And it's not because they don't make a difference. They do make a difference. It's just you can't see the difference because our measurement error is disguising the real differences underpinning the physiological effects. So again, when people look at the proximity to failure literature, they go, you know, one from reserve is exactly the same as failure. No, one reprimand over statistically similar to failure. But if you look at three reps in reserve versus failures, always a difference. So people are like, oh, no, no, no, you can literally just miss the last rep off and it doesn't matter. When I hear people say that, I'm like, this person doesn't understand the difference between evidence and science. It's like, for them, evidence is like, you know, the results of the study are the law. It's like, that's what happens. No, no, no, no, no, that's the statistical, you know, result of the study. To understand what happens, you have to go below that and go, what do I think is mechanistically physiologically occurring, you know, and do I think that I can just continue extrapolating and this is just, you know, I'm not noticing the effect because it's not big enough. Or do I think there's something actually going on? If from a science point of view, if somebody goes, there is no difference between a one reprimand and failure in terms of hypertrophy, my question to them is going to be, tell me physiologically how that happens. And they're going to be, what do you mean? The studies show that there is no difference, man. The studies are telling you they can't find the difference between those two things. Now it's either because it's too small or it's because there's something else going on that changes the direction you've been going. If you look at all the other reps in reserve studies, pure reps in reserve you take, close to failure you get, the more hypertrophy you stimulate. Okay, so what's magical then? What are you saying is changing about going from one reprimand to zero? Because you're telling me the trajectory changes. So what physiologically is changing? And again, they look at me as if I've grown an extra head and they're like, what are you saying? Because they're thinking in evidence based terms, not science based terms. I'm saying, tell me what's changing? Because the trajectory up to that point has been telling me that I'm expected to see a continued amount of hypertrophy occurring with continued proximative failure, close to failure. So when I think about it, if they want to make that case, they've got to explain to me, why am I getting no mechanical tension stimulus on the muscle fibres, live facial motions in that final repetition? That makes no sense. This is one of those situations where you have to go scientifically. I'm expecting that to be a difference, even though evidence based, data driven kind of long-term trials based, I'm not actually seeing one. I'm just inferring by drawing a line between the two things and going scientifically, physiologically, I think that this overall trend is going in that direction and I'm just flinging the gaps. So someone could say, well, I think it's maybe not having a beneficial effect because it's taking away from that next set by causing extra fatigue and whatever. They could come up with a physiological explanation. But they don't do that. That's the point I'm making. So what they're doing is they're framing the question in an evidence based point of view is to say, if I can't find a statistical difference between these two things, then they are ontologically, they are the same. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, that's not what your data is showing. Your data is showing you the difference is too small to detect or it doesn't exist. So if you want to tell me that it definitively doesn't exist, you're picking one of the two possible answers there. You've decided to pick one of those two. You didn't realize you're doing that, but your evidence framework requires you to do that. You've decided that they're actually the same. Okay, tell me why they are the same. Tell me why it's not just a difference that's too small to detect. So my position is to look at the physiology and go, do I think it's one or the other? Do I think it's that there is no difference or do I think there is just a difference that's too small to detect? So often when I'm looking at these volume studies or looking at this proximity to failure studies, I'm going physiologically, I'm just going to draw a line and go, I actually think that this is just a spectrum and that the difference is you're measuring it is too small. So I do think there's a difference to one certain two sets, one certain three sets. To be honest, I think most other people do as well. It's just that when I look at this and I don't see a difference, I'm not picking the answer automatically. This says there isn't a difference. I'm picking the answer. This says there is a difference, it's just too small. And I think that because physiologically, underpinning all of that mechanistically, my model says that there should be one. And I'm looking at this load study now, I'm going three to five reps versus 20 to 25 reps. Do I think there should be a difference, you know, as a result of maybe missing one or two reps off my heavy load set, I think they probably should be. I think that if you're doing a three, especially if there were lots of three reps in there, I think that you probably would be missing some stimulating reps as a result of doing that, you know, because ultimately a five rep set is going to give you a stimulus and every single rep of the set if it's a five rep max. So there's a three rep max, but three rep max has two fewer repetitions. So I'm expecting that to be a small hyper hypertrophy stimulus in that particular situation, that comparison. But again, coming back to what I said earlier, the light load group would definitively have been suffering both intro workout fatigue mechanisms that were greater and post workout fatigue mechanisms that were greater. You know, really, if there is a hypertrophy research, you're listening to those who hasn't pulled out all the hair already listening to me, you know, they could control better for rest periods by letting the resting heart rate or heart rate get closer to a specific threshold relative to resting heart rate between sets. So they could decide, you know, resting heart rate plus whatever 10 beats per minute or whatever, 20 or whatever they want to do. And they could go, we're going to let heart rate come back to this level and then we're going to do the next set and it's going to be an individual rest period basis. And then you would physiologically control for the CNS fatiguing effects of your respiroid. You wouldn't control necessarily so much for the, you know, peripheral stuff. Certainly on the calcium amulet side, you can't control for that. You're going to get more of that with the light load than you're going to have you load, but that's intrinsic to the rest to the rep range, not intrinsic to the respiroid. But you should control for both of the tub light and the CNFT because of two aligned. So if you actually wanted to control for respiroid in a better way than we're doing at the moment, you would use respiroids, it's a respiroid. You would use resting heart rate basis and come down to a certain level relative to that. Obviously, if you, you can't really come back all the way down to resting heart rate levels because you'd be there all day, but you could come down to some threshold above that percentage above that or number of beats of other. And if you did that, you would probably be much more controlled for the behavior of light loads in terms of the cardiovascular system. So again, I think you could potentially say, well, is it that the measurement difference is to measurement is not accurate enough to detect the difference between the heavy loads and the light loads, or is it because we're losing a little bit in terms of the heavy loads because we're losing a stimulating rep. But on the light loads where we're accumulating fatigue and we're also suffering intra-workout by having a higher degree of super spinal CNFT because we're not actually cardiovascularly recovering from sets set. And you could say, well, maybe those things do things are equaling each other out. But this is a physiological analysis of a study, you know, and we're always going to be kind of having those things going in opposite directions when we're comparing different training programs. I mean, again, this is one of the things that people don't realize when they start comparing rep brain, sorry, rep brain is what we're doing today, when they start comparing ranges of motion. So you've got a study that has multiple set protocols and one's got a high large range of motion, one's got a smaller range of motion. People don't realize that the larger range of motion is going to give you more calcium and lactobt. It's like we, you know, so are you controlling for that in the context of what you're investigating? Are you really investigating a single thing or you're investigating a cluster of things? As far as a large range of motion in a quad exercise, I'm expecting to get some stretch mediated, I've heard from you from doing that. But at the same time, getting more calcium and lactobt which is going to impair the effects of the stimulus of future sets in that workout, but potentially also impact on a subsequent workout as well. So you're not actually measuring a single variable. You're actually measuring the impact of multiple things that are happening as a result of changing one very. Yeah. How much do you think, so in this study, obviously, they're doing six sets per workout. So even if they were saying that Habit load group is averaging four repetitions per set, we're talking 24, it maxed me stimulating repetitions. At a certain point, we would expect that this not really going to be much additional stimulus within a single workout. How much do you think that's. Well, that's the other issue, isn't it? It's like if they were doing single sets, we'd have probably seen a much bigger potential for difference. And the single sets would then obviously control for the intra-work-aftity and also the post-work-aftry calmer. Yeah. I mean, really to sort of detect meaningful differences between training variables, it makes much more sense to limit volume. You're going to see a much bigger difference between, you know, single set protocols. If you're interested in range of motion or if you're interested in rep range, it's much better to do single sets. We do a whole bunch of sets per week. We need a volume load at least. This will not enable us to really see. I mean, to be honest though, I think you probably still would have seen meaningful differences in volume load. Now, basically, what do you say, these were like four times higher? There's two and a half in the next engine and four times in the leg press. I mean, it's just. It really does. I mean, if nothing else, it makes that whole idea nonsense. I mean, anybody who's running around going volume load is related to hyper-trophy, you know, they're just. They're not paying attention, you know. This. I mean, I've been showing data on this for five or six years, but never to this extreme extent. I mean, I think the previous data I've shown maybe has the light group producing one and a half to two times as much volume load. I think people kind of saw those numbers and just were like, "I'm just going to ignore that." Four times as much volume load. It's like, no, compensation is over. Anybody running around now saying volume load does anything to do with hyper-trophy is just, as I say, not really paying attention. It's not a valid hypothesis. It's gone. So, you know, it's got to be rejected, really. So, yeah, I mean, that at least, as you say, is something that was definitively demonstrated by this study. Really, the stimulating reps discussion is more difficult to get to because there's so many things going in different directions. I just think overall it pulls the feeling of the data back in the opposite direction from where it was creeping beforehand. As I say, you know, the last couple of years people have been pulling out studies that show reps and reserve of larger and larger magnitudes producing hypertrophy. And they say, "Oh, you know, come on, we've got, you know, 5, 6, 7 reps and reserve potentially producing a little bit of hypertrophy here and there." You know, and now this study is coming back and pushing us in the opposite direction going, you know, maybe that's, that's, you know, kind of not really valid. Now, if somebody wants to consider the alternative hypothesis that the stimulating reps are both of these not valid, then they've got to come up with an explanation of, you know, how do you end up with, in many studies, identical hypertrophy with different rep ranges. So moderate and light loads and now here, heavy versus, you know, light loads. How do you end up with, you know, the same hypertrophy occurring with the same number of sets of each rep range? And yet, balanced that with situations where potentially you think these studies showing high degrees of reps and reserve, like 5, 6, 7 reps and reserve. How do you balance that with those still producing hypertrophy? Have you got a model that will explain that to a better extent than stimulating reps? And as I've said a number of times, if you think you can solve that problem, that phenomenon, that set of observations in a better way than my stimulating reps model does, please write it up and send it to me because, you know, I'd love to see a better explanation than one that I've got and there isn't one at the moment, you know, be cool to actually have some degree of competition for the model. Anyway, so really, I'm just kind of bringing people's attention to this very cool study, which is, you know, showing us that this gap in the literature that we've had for a long time now, you know, where everyone's just been measuring moderate 8 to 12 versus light 2025. Now suddenly we've got this, you know, definitive study constructed in exactly the same way. Now as a point of that, and this podcast, there are limitations with structuring studies in that way with the rest periods and post-workup to your accumulation, I like that I think, but fundamentally at least it is comparable with the prior studies, which have done the same thing with moderate versus heavy, whether they've done three sets, a couple of times a week, whatever, three to five sets, couple of times a week, and they've done, you know, the same rest periods between sets for both groups. And that now transposes that model into a new territory where we've now got heavy versus light as well, and it gives the same answers. It's a little bit, you know, kind of quoting this idea. Interestingly, people have been quoting for a long time the idea that any rep range between five and 30 gives you the same my purchase, as long as you do the same number of sets to pay the per worker. That five at the bottom end of that range was always a little bit dubious because if you weren't trying to find studies that would show that you couldn't find them, they kind of start around, you can argue maybe around the six to eight zone, but more reasonably it's around the eight to 12 zone. So if you were being realistic, you would have said that three, that five to 30 isn't really true. It's more like eight to 25, but people have always said kind of a five to 30 because it's round numbers. But eight to 25 is probably a fair description of the literature up to this point. Now this pulls that eight all the way down to, you know, maybe four. So now we're kind of fairly in that original territory where people have said five to 30, well now it's probably four to 25 is probably a better zone. I mean, there are the occasional study that drifts higher than 25, not saying that I don't think that would happen. I think probably 35 would probably do it, but I'm just saying in terms of what data there exists to support that kind of claim. Yeah, really such an important study, you know, that is is well worth having a read off. So I guess I should read the title so that people know what it is. The title is "Diversion Strength Games", but similar high perch we have to low load and high load resistance exercise training and trained individuals. So people want to look up. It was published in August, um, 2025. So for me, application standpoint, like you said, this kind of fills in some gaps. It doesn't necessarily change a whole lot of kinds of grounds, what maybe, you know, we've been talking about for a while, but you would say that say you've got a total beginner. Obviously, as you've identified earlier, they could actually achieve more stimulant repetitions in a set. So a total beginner doesn't necessarily like may not get the same gross from doing these low repetition sets. These heavy sets of we're talking about here, a total beginner could be getting away, you know, could actually get ultimately better results with say sets of, you know, 8, 10, they're about. And then as someone becomes more experienced over time, obviously those repetitions are going to drop down, then in terms of how many stimulant repetitions per set are going to drop down. And so in this study, obviously, these people were two years trained. We would say that someone who has, you know, a couple of years of training experience, this is where potentially those, you know, maybe four, five reps sets could potentially make sense for them, yeah? Yeah, totally. And again, it's going to depend on, you know, the exercise and the, you know, training history and that kind of thing of the person. I think that, you know, from my perspective, and again, and whether or not the person is using antibiotics, one of the issues that has come up over, you know, time when I've been talking to people, coaches who work with athletes who use antibiotics is that they can get so ridiculously strong that heavy loads start to become an issue, right? Typically in terms of just going around and stealing every single plate in the gym, which makes you very unpopular. And also into terms of, you know, just the joints are the same sizes, anybody else are joints and they start to, you know, kind of creek if you're using insane amounts of weight. So they're going to be scenarios and then that is an issue. If you have a history as well of some specific strength sport, like for example, I've often talked about how when I do that exercises, it's a different experience for me for doing pressing exercises. So when I did a lot of one on chin training, now when I do that exercises, I have a different, it's for me. If I were to try and train in that heavier load zone, I'd have a not the same problem as somebody using antibiotics, but I'm drifting in that direction. If I start to use heavy loads in that exercises, I'm starting to basically max the machines out and I start to creek in contrast, pressing exercises, no problems at all because I never got to the same degree of strength that I got to in those point exercises in my pressing exercises. So I think even as a natural athlete, you can kind of push in that direction. We start to find that heavy load zones become practically, you know, less attractive from the kind of the, but yeah, from everything else that I do, I can drift into heavier zone territory and it isn't, you know, cause me an issue. I think a lot of people. Point, let's just have in that high-end physical and because I do see that a lot where when stuff like this comes out, then the narrative becomes, okay, for only every due sets of four to six and you should never do anything else that I'll never do more, never do eight, never do ten, it's about idea. And obviously, you know, we've talked about in this episode that yes, it can be some additional fatigue that comes along with those moderate or high repetition sets, but as you've just said there, you know what, there's times where that could make a little bit more sense. And in my own programming and with my clients, my groups, I do use actually quite a lot of low repetition sets of stuff, you know, going sometimes even singles and you know, I'll do that a lot with classes, but I'll often use doubles, triples, sub five repetitions. And I find especially if we're keeping reps and reserve, because we need to identify that if we're saying, hey, potentially an advanced athlete might only have, let's say, four maximum extreme linear repetitions in a set, well, that's a set to failure. And that's assuming they're taking each set to failure. And not say we're keeping repetition or two repetitions in reserve. Well, you know, we could actually be doing fewer repetitions in a set for that essentially same purpose. So we need to identify, you know, obviously how many repetitions can that person be achieving in a set to failure. And then like you said, there's going to be times where simply it's just not going to be feasible to do those heavy sets and you know, it might be that they're injured. It might be like you said, machines might just simply not go heavy enough and okay, you might be able to load a million plates or get a gym pin or whatever, but then you're stuck in this situation where it might take 10 to 15 minutes just to ultimately set up that exercise, do your warm-up set so you don't break apart when you do the set. And it's like, well, is that actually going to be, is that going to lead to a better outcome? If you're spending all that time actually tearing plates all over the gym and loading the machine, it might be better for you just to do that set of 10. You don't need to be scared of doing that set of 10. So while we're saying, hey, you might only be able to get for ish, maximally stimulated repetitions, that does not mean that that's all you should ever do, yeah? Well, this is an interesting observation from a psychological point of view because one thing that I've noticed in talking about how strength training works on social media over the last decade is that a lot of the people on social media cannot differentiate between what's happening physiologically and what's happening practically. They can't draw a line between those two things, you know? So what we're describing here is that physiologically this is how something works. Practically you might need to modify that in one direction or another in order to get the best outcome for you in the gym context. And people don't seem to draw a line between those two things. It's like physiologically this is what is happening, you know, and you can't argue with that. And so when I go, you know, yeah, 46 reps per set probably is the optimal scenario from the muscles point of view. If you can't do that because the gym machinery doesn't give you the ability to go that heavy or because it hurts or because, you know, whatever reason there is, then obviously we move away from the physiological kind of principles driving the decision making process. And we now have additional practical concerns that mean that that isn't ideal. What I see all the time on social media is people being unable to like take that two step process. I used to joke when I did the podcast with Paul that people couldn't hold more than one thought in the mind at one time. And that's why we have this scenario where, you know, you know, you say to people, hyperstri is driven by the combination of high-motonic acrym and high mechanical tension per fiber. And it's like, people can't understand that. It's like, no, no, no, give me an answer. The only is one variable. Because it actually fundamentally is a two-variable system. You know, I think we're seeing the same kind of issue here where people go, you know, tell me what the perfect thing to do in a workout is. And I'm like, well, physiologically is this, but you know, practically, you might have to modify it for these reasons. And they're just like, you see the kind of the smoke rising from the brain as it explodes. You've just given me a two-part answer and I can't process it. No, seriously, come on. It's like physiologically, this would be perfect, but if that isn't possible for these practical reasons, then you have to modify in the directions you're going to end up in a slightly different place. I mean, honestly, sometimes I just despair, you know, about the human race, you know, and like, come on guys, it's not difficult to start with one set of parameters and then have to modify that because of some other scenario that is changing that, you know, doesn't mean the physiology is wrong. It means the physiology is. And then practically you have to change it because there are other factors. It's just like saying to somebody, well, this is the perfect exercise for the goal that you have. And they're like, oh, when I do that, that hurts. And okay, fun. We'll find a different one. You know, we just modified the perfect scenario for your personal situation because you have this limitation. Or somebody might say to me, you know, I want to develop my hamstrings the best extent, but I don't have any leg core machines in my gym. I'm like, okay, well, we'll figure out something that gets you. Yeah, you're not going to say, well, just do the leg core. Well, I don't have a leg core. Exactly. It's like we're starting with what, what, you know, the perfect answer would be. And then we modify accordingly depending on the other, you know, factors that modify your existing scenario. You know, and I think instinctively people can do that. But for some reason, when they go on social media, part of their brain falls out and they can't do that in that particular situation, they feel like they need one, one answer to drive everything. So that's not how this works. A couple of suspicions about that. And I think one of them is, I think sometimes people always need permission to believe or think a certain thing or do a certain thing. And so I think when the narrative repeatedly is, no, you can only do this. You can only work in there for six or four or eight for a period of whatever that particular topic is. I think at that point, people think they're not allowed to think outside that box and they're not allowed to try them solve in the way that, you know, intuitively makes sense. So I think sometimes I actually just give you people permission. Hey, you can actually take, you know, these physiological principles you're talking about and you can think outside the box and think how it's just going to work best for you and how can you apply it? That's okay. If it looks a little bit differently to how your favorite influence it does it, that's okay. If that makes sense for you, I honestly think sometimes people are just going to be told you can do that. I don't know why that's to say the things, but I think that's that's what we see a little bit online. And one other point I want to make there is sometimes what sometimes that adjusts, I guess, that people make may not even be less optimal. So you've given the example, hey, I don't have a lake girl. How do I maximally develop my hamstrings? Well, okay, maybe the solution there is in fact going to be a little bit less optimal. But sometimes what's less optimal physiologically may in fact still be again, the optimal option to do because of these other factors that I guess we weren't necessarily accounting for initially. So what I mean by that is again, that example where let's say you're using so much load and an exercise that you in fact do need to walk around the entire gym and collect every single weight plate in the gym. Well, that's actually most likely not going to be the optimal option. I was going to be very demotivating when everyone is staring at you with hate filled glairs because you're literally droppers of result and you're going to find that your equipment isn't as high. The same thing happens. I mean, you're doing an exercise and it causes pain. Then the pain is going to cause you obviously to reach maximum tolerable potential of effort a lot earlier. Therefore, you're not going to have as high levels of equipment in the target muscle. So, you know, there are going to be scenarios where you're absolutely right. There are specific, you know, kind of other things happening, which is going to impair your ability to maximize the perfect scenario. So, you have to then find an alternative that is going to give you a better result. No, I mean, but that doesn't change how the physiology is working. No. You know, and I think that's the bit that people, you know, brains don't seem to go to process. It's like, you know, you tell them how this is how the physiology works and they kind of hear it as, you know, the law of the universe. Am I? No, it's like. And ultimately, they want to say that it could be like another physiological factor, I guess, that you have considered in that scenario. Exactly. Exactly. Because we're not able to kind of go through and say, you know, here's how the physiology works, you know, except, you know, and here are 10 exceptions to that. If I'm not going to start listing all those out every time I give, you know, kind of broad brush, kind of descriptions of how something works. But incidentally, you could figure those out if you actually know the underlying physiology. So, if like, the example we just give you over pain or lacking or low motivation because you've got a whole bunch of people staring at you, waiting for you to finish using all your all the plates in the gym, those things you could actually have deduced that if you understood how Mark or his psychological model for teabworks and the context of strength training, if you understand that, you would understand how those two things can make a difference. So this really just comes back to having a proper understanding of the physiological principles, underpinning these issues rather than just going, they said this exercise is best. So that's why I'm going to do that exercise or they said this rep range is best though. That's why I'm going to do the exercise. There's rep ranges. But why did we say that? I mean, incidentally, I mean, obviously there's a lot of fuss about, there's always fuss about things in the science-based lifting community. I mean, people are always whining about something. But, you know, there's fuss at the moment about various bits and pieces and some of the people making a fuss and arguing about things are not actually giving a physiological explanation of their point of view. They're just going, you know, I'm saying this is true and then they stop talking or they make a, you know, sort of emotional appeal. But that isn't moving anything forward. Tell me, you know, why you think that and what it is you think is happening. So if you think, you know, for example, if you think an exercise reaches 100% motine recruitment, then, you know, tell me why you think that's possible and tell me what you think the mechanism muscular failure is going to be a fuss after me because if you're hitting maximum recruitment, then what is it actually admitting us in reaching muscular failure? Because it's not the maximum dollar of association effort anymore, is it? So, you know, yeah, there's lots of the situations people aren't taking the extra step and going, well, okay, well, what needs to be true for that statement to be true? That's an interesting point. That's an interesting question to ask oneself when one makes a statement like that, hey, because sometimes what you're, what you'll find is the implication is actually major and that if one, what seems like a small statement is in fact true, we're actually essentially, you know, an entire model for the part. Yeah, I mean, literally as soon as you start running around, saying there's no such thing as a voluntary activation deficit, then your entire model of muscular failure has to change. You know, you can't use the psychological model of fatigue anymore because you've already hit maximum recruitment and therefore you can't limit recruitment by having an extra tolerable association effort going on in there. So, you know, what is it that's causing muscular failure? Are you saying that it's a local fatigue mechanism? Which case we've got some very interesting implications going on there because you're going to have, you know, some serious problems down the line in terms of what the muscle fibers are experiencing. So, you know, again, asking the question of what has to be true for that statement to be true, I think is a really useful exercise. Okay. That was, it's great that there's something new that filled in a few gaps. That is true. It's been a very long time since I saw something genuinely. I mean, I come up with new stuff from time to time simply because I go away and I spend, you know, two or three weeks working through an area that is tangential to what I already know. People know that I've been talking a little bit more about preserving muscle mass in the deficit recently. It's not something I've ever looked at, but it's now something that I'm working on a lot more. And so, I bring that physiology that's already been, you know, kind of in place for usually decades into the kind of science-based lifting community. This is actually genuinely genuinely new, it's totally different, you know, this rarely happens. I mean, even like you could argue that there's been some new stuff on the stretch media's hypertrophy front, it hasn't really, because all that's happening is that the studies are coming out confirming what the psychomerigenesis research was already told us years ago, a decade ago, you know. So, like when people go, oh, we now know that, you know, stretch media hypertrophy doesn't happen in strength-trained lifters because the only two studies that have ever measured in strength-trained lifters show there's no benefits of training to a more straight position. I'm like, well, yeah, but the psychomerigenesis literature told you that decades and decades ago, and the fast-collect literature has told you that pretty much every day since that point onwards. It's like it's not telling us anything new, it's just confirming something that we already knew. Whereas this, actually, this is genuinely new territory. And as I say, it does tilt my kind of, sort of, expectations of what that exact stimulating rep number might look like in trained people. Which to be fair, I feel like I've heard you said that for quite a while that you've thought the experienced lift is those potentially fewer than. I actually grew by my very first article that I wrote about stimulating reps, some like about seven or eight years ago. They're ready. So, you know, it is there from the beginning, because, you know, the size principle is tried to muscle tells you that it must be there. So, you know, the thing is, again, just kind of everything that I said, is pretty much nothing that I say that isn't just a basic physiological principle applied to strength training. I mean, I've said this a number of times, people just don't believe me. Now, all I'm doing is saying, look, here is a physiological observation like, I don't know, bilateral force deficit. Bialatrophore deficit shows you that, you know, you've got a higher level of recruitment when you use a single limb versus when you use two limbs. I mean, incidentally, the bilateral force deficit will be impossible to have. have if you had the ability to maximise every single muscle in an exercise. If you say you've got 100% activation, I don't have a single muscle to train by any exercise, then you would never have the bilateral force deficit because it would be impossible to have because I wouldn't be able to go from a two-on-by-step guilt to a single-on-by-step guilt and increase with the crew. They just wouldn't exist. So where does that 20% increase in strength and the single-on-by-step comfort? Is it magical? So again, people are saying things without reference to the observations that exist in the literature. So ultimately, I lost where I was going with that. I was saying that you've been sort of filled while saying that advanced, let's just probably have fewer than five repetitions. That's in the single-on-by-step repetitions anyway. You said you wrote about that seven years ago. Yeah, no, no, no. It was right to the very beginning. No, I was thinking about, I was going in a different direction. I was thinking about something else. But yeah, so essentially, we've got, for the first time in this particular study, something that is actually taking as an interesting direction that gives us some new information, most of the stuff that we've been looking at prior to that point, I think, or I've been looking at prior to that point, is just developing, padding out areas or moving into areas that I haven't previously talked about quite so much. So it's a genuinely interesting, cool development, and it's really exciting to see. I say, I have criticisms of the exact study design, but they're not criticisms that make it a flawed study. They're just criticisms that could have made it slightly better if they'd just done two workouts instead of one in the in the D-load period and single sets. They're doing fantastic. And really, everything else is just kind of a compromise. It's like, would we have been better, like you say, doing single set protocols to see the differences genuinely between rep ranges without resp period being a problem, without postwork appetite accumulation being a problem? That is definitely a possibility. But would we have needed like a 12 week study to see that then from a statistically significant point of view? Would we have benefited from seeing the big differences in volume load in that scenario? So again, it's like, what compromises do you want to make? What specific things are you trying to extract from that study design? Well, thank you guys for joining us. Hopefully you found that interesting. You want to just read out the name of that study once more if anyone wants to go and have a bit of a look? Sure. So it's divergent strength gains, but similar hypertrophy after low load and high load resistance exercise training in trained individuals. So it's published 19th of August 25. So very cool to have a look at that if you get the moment. Cool. Thanks to Johnny Us, hopefully you'll join us again next week for another episode.