068 Optimal volumes and frequencies for each muscle

Welcome back. Thank you for joining us for a another episode. Today we have the second time we have looked at a female plan, which is, I mean, we're what, 60-60 some of the episodes in and only doing too, but you guys may not understand how difficult it is to find silver era and even golden era female plans to be honest. So we've covered a silver era female plan before, and I don't know when, it must have been almost a year ago, but now we're going to look at a golden era female plan, which keep in mind when we go through it just how different it is to what you might see on social media nowadays. Before I jump into the goods Chris, how are you doing today? I don't know if I can stick. Let's do it. So we have, this is a 1980s plan, okay? So this is Claudia Wilbon. So she wants you as competing late 70s, early 80s, and 79, I think she'd come second in the women's world bodybuilding championships in 1980. So when this plan was written, she'd won, I think, Miss California. So a very prominent early female bodybuilder, one of the first sort of, I guess female, I guess leading voices in this space. So very, very interesting figure. And the plan is a six day per week plan. Now, I think it was done as chest and back one day, lower the next day, and then shoulders and arms and repeated twice. So I think it was in that order. It was a little bit unclear for me what order it was in, but I think it was that order. So each worker done twice per week. So we're just going to go through each worker, and then I'll make a couple of comments in the end. Basically every single exercise, almost every single exercise is up to two sets of eight to 12 repetitions. A few exercises, she's added a third set to them, but mostly everything is two sets of eight to 12. So I'll chest and back day. And I think what's going to be interesting here is probably going to be the exercise selection. And there's a lot of exercise exercises are a lot of exercise. So do your best to kind of kick tabs, and then we'll unpack that in a moment. So chest and back, we start with a bench, a standard barbell bench, two sets of eight to 12, then we go into the incline press or incline bench, and then we've got dumbbell flies. So that's our chest work. Then we've got it behind the neck, lap pull down, a neutral grip cable row. So we've got no pull up, but it's not about combination. And then we've got a horizontal back extension. And they were also all done for two sets of eight to 12. So that is our chest and back day done. Then we've got a lower day, and our lower days squats, two sets, leg extension, that's our quads done, are actually not quite. So squats and leg extension, then we've got a lying leg curl, and then we come back to a lunge, two sets, eight to 12, each of those exercises, eight sets done. Now this workout, I think the first two great, one little bit interesting shoulders and arms day. Interesting. This might be, this might be one of the first shoulders and arms days we've covered on this podcast. So shoulders and arms, you've got a barbell overhead press, then we've got a lateral raise, dumbbell lateral raise, then we've got a bent over reverse fly, and that's our shoulders done, all those two sets of eight to 12. And then for arms, you've got a standing barbell curl, a seated dumbbell curl, a triceps push down, and then a dumbbell triceps extension. Now interestingly, all the arms exercises, she's added an extra set. So we've got six sets and total for biceps, six sets and total for triceps. We're going to come back to that in a moment, but that's our shoulders and arms day done. Now there's one little addition to all of this, and that was it she added after, it wasn't after every workout, but after most workouts, there was a little bit vague, it was like after 46 workouts a week, she would add calves and abs. And the calves and abs work was the same each time. So she might repeat that five times, having many times per week. And that consisted of standing calf raise, three sets of eight to 12, seated calf raise, three sets of eight to 12, ab crunch, and those amrop, incline set up, three sets of amrop, leg raises. I assume this was hanging leg raises, but we could have been done on a bench. Two sets of amrop, seated twists, two sets of amrop, and then alternating dumbbell twists. They love their twists and the silver and golden era. And that was not for two sets of amrop as well. Now, before we kind of throw the baby out of the bath water here, I think this is really interesting things in this plan. And I'm not going to commonly further, I'm going to hand over to you. What do you think, looking at this? What's jumping out of you? So what's good is that we've got everything, being every exercise is being trained twice per week, which is not the worst case scenario. Obviously, worst case scenario is it could be one week. So that's a positive step. Also, we're only looking at two or maybe three sets per exercise, which is another positive step, because we've had some golden era plans on this podcast and they've just been insane in terms of number of sets per exercise. Those two points, I think, are important to lead with. Exercise selection is also not horrible. This pretty good selection of exercises, my main criticism of almost every program is not represented here, because we do have frontal plane pull down and such to play in pull. So straight away, that kind of ticks my kind of first criticism box of exercise selection. I mean, you can't get much more frontal plane than behind the neck. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. As regards the exercise, I mean, I think there are kind of gaps here. I think the arm exercises are duplicated. I don't think they are particularly well chosen, as in duplicated amongst within themselves. Yes, it's interesting, because actually both of the triceps exercises you would get long head, and normally that's what you're going to be missing. So it's interesting. She's got two exercises there that are, like you're saying, they're duplicated, but kind of getting everything. It's interesting. So I think, yeah, I think the arm exercises is just way over the top, and not necessarily the way it's being programmed. And it misses stuff, like kind of, there's no kind of focus on brachialis really in there. There's no brachialis focus. I mean, if you really wanted to pack that many sets of arms in there, you would probably spread them out a bit more. I mean, I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to have a specific exercise for every single arm muscle, but if you're doing that many sets anyway, you might as well spread them out. There's a very sort of obvious lack of glute kind of exercises in here. The horizontal back extension actually goes on the back day, which is a bit strange, but that's the closest thing to a glutexizer exists really in the program. I mean, we've got the lunge on the next day, on the lower body day, so the lunge and we get a back essential. So just so that people kind of have a framework in mind. Obviously, the squat is a quad exercise with the hip extents of being primarily the adoctomagnus. The lunge is a little bit the other way around. It's kind of an adoctomagnus exercise with the quad being bolted on. So it's kind of like the opposite of a squat in the sense that your ratio of hip to knee is switched around. So for me, really, those are very similar, just different focus. Lying leg curl is not a great choice of leg curl on its own. If you're going to have a leg curl as your own knee kind of hamstrings exercise, you kind of want to do it as seated leg curl really, but that may be an equipment availability issue. Maybe we haven't seen a lot of leg curls happen to this point. Let's be fair. She has paired it on the other day with the back extension. So it maybe I guess it flashes it out a little bit more as far as hamstrings go. Yeah. I mean, I'd probably want a 45-degree back extension if I was going to call it hamstrings exercise. Yeah. And then I mean, this may be an aesthetic choice, but there's no shrug in there. So that would probably be something else that was missing. Yeah, I think it may well be. Even when you're talking about the bracharadialis work, it's like, well, you know, did she want that? I don't know. Maybe she didn't. Maybe she did. I don't know. I think as if you're doing six sets of elbow flexions. That's the point I'm making. The point I'm making is, you know, like, so just to be clear, if somebody's doing a single set of biceps curls twice a week, or three times a week or whatever, I'm not going to be the person who says to them they need to do, you know, kind of another biceps exercise with another elbow flexion exercise. That's silly, because the clearly it's not important to them. But if somebody's doing six sets of elbow flexion exercise in every single arm workout that they're doing, that clearly implies that they have a goal to improve arm appearance. And they'd be far better off just doing, you know, two sets of three exercises if they want to do that structure. I mean, again, like six sets of biceps twice a week is just over what I would consider recoverable. So it's not actually horrible. I mean, again, volume in this context actually isn't as horrible as it at first looks like. No, when you see the list of a million if an exercise is six different workouts, you think it's going to be ridiculous. It's not actually horrible. I genuinely think this is from memory, this is probably the best golden era plan we've seen, or the least it's up there. The flashback stages they have all the awful ones. No, but it's just like, you know, kind of the best of a kind of, you know, of a very bad group of programs. But like, the thing that I think probably bothers me most, and it's the thing that you can't really, like I've mentioned before when I look at these kind of programs, I'll say, is this program salvageable or not? Can you just make a few tweaks and run it and have it work? And the thing that for me makes this not really salvageable is the fact that we're doing back-to-back workouts, and not only are we doing back-to-back workouts on the consecutive days, but also doing basically back-to-back muscle groups. When you go from, I know, the way the exercises are laid out. And then the next day, you're doing chest and back, I'm like, sorry, that doesn't work. It's not salvageable. That shoulder's an arm's day is ruining it. The back extension, the horizontal extension needed to go into lower body day, and then the shoulder's an arm's just needed to get distributed. Well, I guess they need to go on the upper day. It needed to turn it up a lot. You can't really do this, I don't think, the way it's written. And that's why I say it's not really salvageable. And that really ties into a comment that has been made on socials recently, which is that people have been asking us to kind of do a podcast and explain how we might go about constructing a body parts split routine where every muscle has been trained once a week. And the response basically so far has been, we can't do it because it doesn't work. And I think there's, and that really again ties into another thing, a comment that I see all the time on social media, which is why, the question basically takes the form of, why do you say X if everybody, if so many people do Y, and it seems to work? I'm like, I'm telling you what a, the physiology says, and b, based on our conversations here, what sort of earbuds we're doing. And that's priest steroids. And those two things miraculously seem to line up perfectly. So my hypothesis is that if you're seeing a ton of people on social media doing something completely different, and it appears to be working for them, I'm not sure it is working for them. I think something else is working for them instead. That's my answer. Or how well is something working as well? I mean like, can you grow any muscle in a breast bit? Sure. Is it going to compare to what you would get on a well-designed program? No. So I mean, there's studies where people wear weight invests and they grow muscle in the lower body. Yeah, it's like, okay, does that mean that's optimal? No. There's, you know, we're comparing apples. The thing is the maintenance, the maintenance literature is really super clear that, you know, kind of, well, up to now, this year, the maintenance literature said that three to four sets, once per week, keeps you exactly where you have been and doesn't make you grow any further. That's where we've been. We've now got studies showing those probably five sets. So, you know, it's just really starting to make the concept of a Bruce split look basically impossible. I mean, who is going to do kind of five sets per exercise? Well, yeah, and I guess that's the idea of a Bruce where you throw so much at it that hopefully there's enough overlap in some of the exercises you've chosen, that those things are going to grow. But that's it. It's just overlap. It's like nobody's doing five sets per exercise. They're doing maybe sort of three or four sets of one exercise, then three or four sets of another exercise. That's a good point. If you're doing a Bruce, but you may as well just pick one and two exercises. Five sets of one exercise, are they? Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. You don't have to do six probably six sets of an exercise at this point. Well, when I've ever talked, I don't think I've ever programmed this, but when I've talked to someone to entertain the conversation about how one would make a Bruce split work, that's what I always come back to is like realistically, for me to have any confidence, this is actually going to work, I'd want to give you six sets per exercise. Per exercise. Yeah. Which, yeah, then does. Now that I'm thinking about it, it is a very funny experience because it's basically like you would do one or two exercises per workout and you would just do your six or seven sets or maybe maybe do one exercise, eight sets. That's your bro spin. There's no point doing these four, five different exercises for the same muscle. No, absolutely. No point. I think I'll actually go right this out and post it online, see what people think because it's not what a bro spin looks like. You know, when people follow the bro spin, that's not it. The benefits of exercise variety do not apply in a bro spin. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I've been going over all of the the matrix literature and single, single workout stuff really heavily over the last week or so. And there was one study I saw, I'll look it to you later, where they had advanced and they had beginners doing five sets once a week. And beginners did a seat growth and the advanced people didn't. And that was on five sets once per week. And that was not a maintenance study that hadn't previously done high volumes and dropped down and whatever else. But, you know, to your point of like how many sets does it take for someone who's who's experienced at all to maintain a grow muscle. And yeah, it seems questionable that five sets might even be enough. Well, yeah. I mean, there was that study that just came out recently with the flywheel that was five sets once a week. Yeah. Yes. True. So yeah. So there's there's sort of mounting research now. I said you think five sets. Yeah. Anyway, that is not the topic of today's podcast. Did you have anything to say on a car for an abs day? Well, there were two decent car, well, there were two complimentary car exercises, which are thought made sense. Yeah. And I mean, we can kind of pick up on cars as we talk about today's topic actually because I think it will be relevant. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, nothing specific about that work. Okay. I did think it was an interesting combination. They see it at and they're standing. And it should be entirely fair. Apart from those couple of gaps you mentioned, exercise selection wise, traps and draco reality hours mainly, it may be the lake girl. I genuinely think that the exercise selection here was very, very good. If we just overlook that arm's day and rejigged what days the exercises were done, I genuinely think this has the makings of a very good program. And, you know, it's interesting. I made the comment at the start, you know, how this would differ to a female plan you would see today. And it's interesting that she was putting so much emphasis on arms. And, you know, maybe a little bit of shoulders like shoulders kind of almost had the own day. And I think females today do stand 10 to still prioritize shoulders. But like you mentioned glutes actually, you really took a back seat here. So interesting to compare how goals and acidic desires change over time. Now I selected this program for today's topic because what we've had a lot of questions over and it seems to always be a hot topic online and it's there's some posts I see online that really triggered me like just it's easy to look past silliness. And then sometimes there's something that's so silly and it's it's hard to to not take the bait. And one of the posts that I find hard not to take the bait on is when I see these posts repeatedly just flash up every other day. And it'll be this is how much volume every muscle needs. And this is how many times per week each muscle needs to be trained. And it's just these completely arbitrary things where it's like the biceps must have exactly 24 sets a week. But then the quads must have exactly 16. And the biceps need to be trained four times per week. But the quads only need to be trained twice. And just like weird arbitrary silliness. And I do overlook it. I do tend to be able to control myself and not take the bait. But I thought you know what this is a topic people are interested in. I've been getting questions on it. Do you need to train? Should you train each muscle the same amount of volume, the same amount of sets, the same amount of times per week. Does it differ? Why would it differ? How does it differ? And even looking at plans like this, we see that these people did think maybe abs needed more work, maybe calves needed more work, calves six days a week. But they're I guess arms really, they were sort of twice a week unless you count the overlap there. So should one train a muscle with different frequencies and with different volumes. And you're already starting to smirk and laugh a little bit. Well, I don't like modal verbs. Sure. I don't like sheds and quads and musts. I mean, it's not really, I don't think you've got me for that. You know, everyone is close to me. I know what's what's what's you, what's you see that you can't see? I force myself to answer when I hit your chord. And then when I'm done, should is out of my vocabulary. And if anyone uses it when they're near me, oh, we'll have a whole conversation about being prescriptive. Don't let me tell you. No, I don't, I don't do prescriptive. So let me propose a structure for us to have this conversation so that we capture as much useful information as possible. And I don't kind of derail us by going down too many rabbit holes. Let's consider the possibility that we could talk about volumes being different for different muscles. We could talk about frequencies being different for different muscles. We could also talk about volume and frequency combinations being different for exercises. So that's a slightly separate thing, but I think we can bring that in. Separately on top of, so Okay, so we've got three things to think about then, okay? So we've got volume frequency on muscle by muscle basis, and then we've also got the exercise kind of add on. Additionally, I think there is a difference between saying that a muscle is ideally trained with a given frequency and can be trained with a given frequency. I think those two things are separate. The reason I think they're separate is because on the one hand, what we're talking about is hypertrophy stimulus and the process of leaving that hypertrophy stimulus period and starting a new one. And secondly, what your muscle damage response is likely to be. 'Cause I think what we're going to find is that, and the calves are a great example of this in the program we just looked at, is that you can, as in, you can get away with training a muscle like the calves every day in a way that you can't with theiceps. - Yeah. - Yeah, so I think there's a difference between saying, you know, what is the optimal approach to, I mean, again, optimal has a bit of a buzzword kind of way to, but, you know, to obtain the ideal result, to obtain the maximum hypertrophy across a long period of time. You know, are we better off training the muscle with this frequency, or that frequency, or this volume, or that volume, or whatever? That I think ultimately, that is one question. And then a separate question is, if I did start training the calves every single day, would that set me back a long way, or would it go away or not tall? If I try to start training the biceps every single day, would that set me back a little way, a long way, or not tall? I think the answer to those questions is resoundingly different, whereas I think, if you talk about the ideal hypertrophy kind of type program, I think the answers are actually quite similar. But, you know, that's kind of dig into this. - Would it work for us to go muscle by muscle? Or did you want to go? - I don't know, it's probably better to go. - To use muscles as an example in each topic category. I think that will give people a better idea of what's going on. - Okay, we can do that. It would be easier for people to know taking if we were going muscle by muscle, but I understand that we'll probably end up eating. - Well, would it though, because what are you referencing stuff again? That's to mean, like, you're just going to get random numbers, which, and those random numbers might differ between people. I mean, ultimately, and this is a problem, I think the, I'm trying to search for polite term here. This is a problem that a group of people have in the fitness industry, which is that they desperately want specific numbers for everything. And the reality is physiology is directional, not sort of specific numbers based. So, you're going to kind of get comparisons, this muscle is in this direction, that muscle is in that direction. Give you a broad kind of number category associated with each of these things. But generally speaking, the direction is the important thing, not the kind of absolute number. That seems to be lost on a lot of people, unfortunately. - And, you know, like you said, we'll anchor it with some numbers to guide you. But, yes, obviously, it's more in the relative to other muscles that's going to be interesting. Okay, so we'll start with, we'll start with volume. - Sure. - Alrighty, now we're talking within session volume. - Of course. - Yeah. - 'Cause weekly volume is, it's not only help or metric. - Okay, great. So, what would I want to consider when it comes to how much volume would be ideal for muscle? Do we need to talk about how many regions that muscle may require? Like how many exercises might be required to stimulate that muscle? - Well, that's actually an even, that's another question entirely, isn't how many exercises do you need for muscle group? I mean, that's an entirely separate question. I mean, ultimately that tends to be the question that we answer when we do a entire podcast on a specific muscle. - Yeah. - So I don't propose that we try and do that today. That would be like trying to do 12 podcasts in one go. So let's not answer that question. Let's kind of stick to volume and, yeah, not try and think too much about separate regions of a muscle. - I mean, ultimately, I think the reason why people assume that different muscles will. Let me phrase it like this. I think what people are saying is that to get to a certain hypertrophic stimulus magnitude, different muscles will require different numbers of sets. Is that a fair kind of statement of the problem? - Yeah, I think there's probably two parts, so it is what is going to stimulate some kind of hypertrophy and then what is the stealing of. - Okay, so you want either end. - Yeah. - So what you're saying then is some people think that a certain number of sets won't stimulate any hypertrophy in one muscle, but it would stimulate hypertrophy in another muscle. And then the plateau, as we go up the set, those response curve, the plateau is going to occur later in one muscle than it might in another muscle. - Yeah, we're two problems, is that fair? - Yeah, yeah. - Okay, let me address the sort of. Well, I mean, ultimately the physiology is going to address both of these simultaneously, but basically hypertrophy's muscle fiber is specific. So the reality is that you might have hundreds of thousands of muscle fibers in a muscle and they don't really interact with each other from a hypertrophy point of view. So you can easily demonstrate this by the fact that if I walk across the room, I'm going to use some muscle fibers. They're going to be loaded in the sense that they are shortening slowly and they're going to be triggered to grow. Now the reality is because I walk across the room every single day, multiple times a day and have been doing that for decades, there's no further capacity for those fibers to grow. So they kind of just cap out. They reach their maximum size and nothing else is going to happen. So they're receiving a mechanical stimulus to grow but nothing is actually going to trigger them to grow further than they have already grown. It's like there is a stimulus but it can't translate into anything. So ultimately, what we've got there then is this kind of layer generally regarded as the low threshold motor unit muscle fibers that are receiving a stimulus. The rest of the muscle fiber is not receiving a, the rest of the muscle fiber is in muscle and not receiving a stimulus. So we've kind of divided off which muscle fibers are receiving a stimulus from the ones that are not receiving a stimulus. So there's two kind of cat degrees of fiber in the muscle. So basically that is kind of one of the kind of basic principles of stimulating rep theory saying that you know, you can kind of just identify loading that's happening and where that loading is happening. So a fiber, the muscle fiber's specific nature is critical. Now if you now consider if the muscle fiber has to receive its own mechanical loading to grow and it doesn't know what any of the other muscle fibers are doing, it doesn't matter whether you've got 200,000 muscle fibers in the muscle or a million muscle fibers in the muscle, does it? I mean like ultimately if you take a large muscle like one of the quadriceps of the vastest lateralis or if you're talking about you know, a kind of a small muscle you know, like a brachialis. I mean like it actually doesn't matter how many fibers there are in that muscle. It's like whether the fiber is loaded or not and they all kind of don't talk to each other. So it's very much a, they're agnostic about whether anything else is, whether any other fiber is growing. I mean, so the very premise behind asking, you know, can I get a, you know, sort of, you know, can I identify a different ideal volume for one muscle from another muscle? It just, it doesn't actually pass the first physiological questioning line. Yeah, okay. So ultimately you've grown an all the way down into muscle fibers, which is what this questions, this whole thing is about if we're looking at hypertrophy or we're looking at hypertrophy of individual muscle fibers. And so the same magnitude of stimulus is required for any fiber to grow, provider that fiber can still experience growth. Well, what I'm pointing out is that the main reason why two muscles will be different from each other in size 'cause that's the main, I'm assuming that's the main reason why some almost say the quads need more volume than the biceps or something like that. Yeah, okay. So you're saying why do they even come up with that conclusion? Yeah, I suppose they are saying bigger muscles. What do they say? Bigger, bigger muscles, not, but they normally say smaller muscles can be trained more often. So they're such to me. Do it with frequency in a minute. No, I know, but it's what bigger muscles need more volume but then like less strength and see it. I'm pointing out that the difference in size between muscles is completely irrelevant for anything because the reality is that every fiber is active is behaving on its own and it's hypertrophying on its own. So it doesn't matter if you've got two muscles that are completely different sizes. The fibers don't know that they're in muscles of different sizes. They just don't know. Yeah. So, you know, it's like that just drops away. Now, conversely, if you wanted to say, well, okay, does fiber type make a difference? You know, am I going to see different volumes being required to create the same I hypertrophy in different muscle fiber types? Well, interestingly, you aren't going to get the same I hypertrophy in a slow twitch fiber as you are in a fast twitch fiber. It's going to grow at different rates. Can you apply more volume to that slow twitch fiber? Potentially, you couldn't and recover from it. Yeah, potentially, you could. But the problem is that you still got some fast twitch fibers muscle. Even though it's a generally slow-twitch muscle, it's still well some fast-reached fibres, he's still going to have that damage problem at the top end of the muscle anyway. So you're going to have a frequency issue if you start loading a muscle with too many sets. So it's not only that slow-twitch fibres have a lower ceiling for how much growth they can experience. Also grow slow, yes. They will also grow slow, even with a comparable stimulus. Yeah, yeah. Okay, now I guess you sort of pointed to the bigger muscles, the smaller muscles, I suppose when people are saying that they should be fair to them, maybe they are kind of alluding to what you've just said there as far as fibre type makeup. I think those are the only two things you could, unless you want to point to regions in which case it's exercise variety, not actually the volume per second is the issue. But if you wanted to point to two factors that would be reasonable to discuss, it would be size and fibre type proportion. That's the only two things I can think of apart from the region's specific issue. But size itself, like you said, it doesn't really matter because one size is a is a fiction. Yes, it's not just for as far as family well with fibre type, no? Not not brilliantly. I mean, there is a tendency for bigger muscles to tend to have more slow-twitch proportion, but you can easily find, like if you point to the quarter and then at the the soleus, you'd clearly see there's a discrepancy there. And you can point to some really, yeah, I mean, it doesn't work perfectly. I'm just trying to think why is this idea of muscle size become a thing and that's a better thing. I don't think it's confounded by fibre type proportion. I think those are two separate things, but again, I mean, I'm not the right person to ask about belief systems in the fitness industry. Okay, so we can do away the muscle size thing. And so now you've mentioned the fibre type makeup will influence how quickly it'll grow if it's more slow-twitch fibres. Well, it'll influence how quickly each individual fibre agrees. And that's my point because even in a slow-twitch dominant muscle, you're still going to have fast-twitch fibres at the top end of the muscle and they're going to get trashed the bits if you start hitting the whole muscle with a larger amount of volume. So you're going to have a frequency issue if you start playing around with volume for that reason. So let's use two. But equally there's, but just to be clear, when we look at the bottom end of the spectrum and say, okay, do you actually need a different number of stimulating reps or sets in order to produce hypertrophic stimulus? The answer is no. You'll get a hypertrophic stimulus with a minimal amount of volume. I mean, literally one set will do it. And the amount of hypertrophy will be still there a few days later. So if you train twice a week, then you know, you'll grow. It won't last a whole week, but you know, it's enough to get you to the next training session if you're training twice a week, and if you're training three times a week, then it's probably less than one set. It's probably like three stimulating reps. So the reality is the bottom end of the spectrum is much lower than most people. I mean, I still get questions from people saying, you know, I'm training three sets twice a week is that enough to cause hypertrophy? I'm like, what planet? Yeah. I mean, I still get questions like that. I mean, that is mad. I mean, I don't know what brainwashing has happened over the last couple of decades, but people literally think that unless they're doing a billion sets in the gym every time they go, and they're not triggering any muscle growth. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, like you said, they're the floor is very low. Single set is enough for every muscle we're talking about. Like it's it's not going to change from a muscle to muscle basis. Now, give let's use an example of a very fast twitch dominant muscle and very slow, which I guess the classic slow twitch example is going to be the cars. What would be a very fast twitch muscle elbow flexes the example. Yeah, the example that the research literature uses pretty much all the time is is the elbow flexes. So say we had someone who is doing one set of cars compared to one set of biceps. It's reasonable to assume that the biceps would be growing quicker than the cars. Well, it depends on your starting point. I mean, the other issue is that if you've already kind of reached your maximum kind of, I mean, one of the problems that we have when looking at growth rates of fiber muscle fibers are different types is that and this and the opposite problem we actually talked about this in the same problem actually occurs in the opposite direction when you look at atrophy. Actually, a whole episode on how fiber type doesn't determine the rate of atrophy. It's muscle fiber size that determines the rate of atrophy. And the reason that research got itself so in a knot around that question is because they weren't controlling for the state of fiber size when they started the atrophy process. So there would take a muscle muscle with a bunch of muscle fibers in it, different fiber types. And you know, look at say a muscle with predominantly fast twitch or muscle with predominantly so to which they would see different kind of rates of atrophy in those muscles. But if you control for the starting fiber size, those differences go away. So I think one of the problems we've got when we look at say, for example, you know, looking at how fast does the calf muscle grow? If most of the muscle fibers in the calves are already maxed out in terms of size, then you're not going to see a lot of whole muscle growth in that situation. It's not going to happen. You know, so that and that, you know, that if it's a postural muscle and you're sort of using a high percentage of your maximum kind of strength every day and therefore a high level of recruitment every day, just using that muscle. It's going to be max, you know, kind of the level of plateau is, you know, the fiber size is going to be quite higher and size principal sequence. So I mean, you can kind of do this in animal models and you can look at muscle fibers so and fast. You can generally see that slow twitch fibers will grow slower than fast twitch fibers. But the problem is if you're taking the average of a whole group of muscle fibers and 80% of your slow twitch fibers are already maxed out and only 10% of your fast twitch fibers are already maxed out, then you put both of the same training and you get very small growth in your slow twitch fibers and very large growth in your fast twitch fibers. It's like, oh, clearly, fast twitch fibers grow faster than slow twitch fibers. Well, no, it's not anything to do with that. Is it? It's literally that most of the fibers that you're training the slow twitch group just couldn't grow. Yeah, okay. So really, you're saying let's, if we use our example, they have calves and bioseps to reality is someone may have many more muscle fibers than the bioseps that they're able to grow. They can still grow. You've got to be really careful with what you're actually measuring and what it means. And this is one of the things that I get very aggravated about with high-perture searches, where, you know, they don't take basic physiology into account in these kind of scenarios and they just kind of go, oh, you know, slow twitch grow, grow very little and fast twitch grew a lot. Therefore, you know, this is the conclusion. I'm like, well, hang on a minute. What happens if most of the fast twitch muscles were capable of growing because they got capacity and most of the slow twitch fibers couldn't? You know, you're skating over something that's got nothing to do with fiber. Well, it indirectly does have a little bit to do with fiber type because the size, the maximum size that you can reach is smaller with an oxidative fiber. But it's not actually the fiber type that's driving that problem. So to go back to our cars and buy such example, so adding more sets in that single workout for the carbs while they may be able to do it because they are largely slow twitch, that may not necessarily equate to substantially more growth comparatively to something like the biceps. And this is a, this is a great point of again, why physiology actually has huge practical implications because if the reason for the lack of slow twitch growth and something like the cars is because most of the fibers are already maxed out, that tells you there's not really much you can do about the problem. You know, and is adding more volume to it is not going to suddenly make their slow twitch fibers. In fact, it's going to be the opposite of helpful because if your problem is the only fibers that you are capable of growing are right at the very top end of the moat unit pool, then your strategy has to be to increase recruitment and make sure that any loading that you do has very high recruitment. If you spam a whole load of extra sets, your recruitment is going to go flying down and you can spam most of your time wasting a whole load of repetitions in a zone that doesn't actually do anything. Okay, so to put some numbers or some, some muscles to our, we've covered that the floor is a single set for any muscle. That's irrelevant of what muscle we're talking about. A single set is going to be enough that it's in like growth. And then to talk about this sort of ceiling, are we saying it sounds to me like we've kind of arrived at a point where it doesn't really change from a muscle to muscle standpoint in terms of like, okay, you may have a muscle that can withstand more volume, but the volume probably isn't giving you more growth because the very reason it can withstand more volume means that it's not going to get more growth from that more volume. Is that fair to say? So ultimately, a muscle that has mostly slow twitch fibers is going to be able to withstand a higher volume in a single session without giving you a lot to pose for a cavity. Now the issue is though that there could be one of the reasons for that could be that you've actually, you know, kind of talking about postural muscle, that has a high level of crew and a lot of fibers are already maxed out and there's no real, no way you can really go with that. If you had a slow twitch muscle, that wasn't kind of being loaded all the time at a high level of recruitment, then, you know, you could, if you wanted to train that. I mean, I know that the trapezius is kind of a postural muscle in the sense that it helps you kind of stay up, right? But it's not in the sense that it's actually kind of, like, you know, ground reaction forces. So it trapezius is probably an interesting one, but if you wanted to, you could probably do more trap work for you and you could probably do more sets and it would probably give you a little bit more hypertrusal. So this is kind of the thing I was kind of really thinking off when I sat out this categorization because I think there are muscles that can tolerate a higher volume and that might, I mean, in the same way, that two different people can tolerate signs. Sure. And we talk about how three sets, you know, kind of three times a week is kind of the sort of max for the average kind of person most of the time. You know, I think probably at this point in my life, I'm probably at two. You know, I don't think I can probably do three. I mean, maybe for some exercises I can, and actually, that's probably a good point. I probably can't, but for like half hours is a problem I can't. And, you know, and that's kind of the point I'm making here that I think there probably are. But again, is that helping me? I don't know. Maybe not. But if I did like three or four sets with trap work with shrugs, maybe it would be helpful. You know, so I think what I'm saying here is that categorization wise, if you want to kind of a matrix, I think, I think there are some muscles that probably can be trained with a little bit more volume than others. Do you need to know 100% no? Absolutely not. It's not necessary. The kind of threshold levels to me is the same for every muscle, so you don't need to. Can you get away with it? I think you can. Is it going to make a difference, probably not in kind of muscles that are already kind of pretty much maxed out like the calves and in the traps, it might make a difference. You might be able to get, so I think there's something interesting in here where you can say, well, you know, you don't need to, 100%, you don't need to. You can, and it probably doesn't, and the worst case scenario with the calves is you've just wasted two or three extra minutes with the traps. Maybe you're actually getting something and I'm not nailing my colors to the mast here with those two specific muscles, I'm just trying to find examples. Yeah, I'm creating a, a, this table in my mind with no legs and yes, no, yes, so directionally speaking, what other muscles would we be putting towards that sort of, you know, more able to tolerate some higher volume there? Well, very broadly speaking, the lower body tends to drift slow twitch and the upper body tends to drift fast twitch, obviously the exception being the traps, especially the middle and lower drops. So realistically, glutes and quads, I would probably put in that leaning towards that. Can you get to it with a little bit more volume? I would say for me, if you said to me, practically speaking, in my programme or a programme for somebody that I know well, what muscle groups would I consider adding an extra set, it would be calves, quads and glutes and traps, sorry, I already said traps, so I would be a bit honest. I think that's totally valid. The reason I kind of didn't suggest it in my case is because it would probably upset them quite a lot, but yeah, I think you probably could, we probably could, yeah. And then everything else would just be on the opposite end there. Yeah, I think I would probably say that most of the stuff would fall into the gut to give it three sets being a pretty hard limit. And amongst the elbow flexes is then much variation between brachuradiolus, biceps, brachy or they're fairly similar? I think there is a bit of difference, but I don't think it's that easy to really kind of lay one off with it. I don't know, I'm sure some of the guys in Tik Tok have found a way to do that. Yeah, well maybe we'll have a guest on the podcast you can talk to him. Okay, so is that the whole volume bit then covered? Well, I hope so, but again, it depends on why people think they are requiring different volumes to different muscles. And I didn't really do a kind of social media review to identify the rationales. And sometimes the rationales are just absolute nonsense. Most of the time that is none. I can tell you that now when I'm looking at these places, there's nothing. Okay, you may touch in this in a little bit, I'm not sure, but is it worth flagging that of those muscles we've just mentioned that one could potentially give them a little bit more volume? That is going to potentially depend a little bit on the exercises one is selecting for those muscles two, well that's one of the reasons why I said I think exercise selection is very important here as a category. So exercise volume is going to differ. So if you're doing leg presses and if you're doing hip thrusts, then those are two totally different sort of your post workout damage dose response is going to be very different between those two exercises, because of the stretch position. So with a leg press, you're loading muscles and stretch position with the hip thrust, you're loading them in the contract position. So you're not going to get the same amount to post workout deep per set. So you can I've said this before, you can spam hip thrusts if you want to. That's really not a problem, but you can't do that with leg presses. So insofar as a muscle is able to be well activated in a shortened position, then that muscle or that exercise that is doing so we could probably push more volume into that exercise. Yeah, and so if you have a coincidence between a muscle that I've already mentioned is potentially kind of more resistant to post workout deep like the glute, and then you contracted position exercise is what you're going to use to train that muscle. If you have both of those two things together, then it magnifies, and that's I think that's one of the reasons where you can see glute training programs with a lot more volume in than you would see, you know, kind of many other programs, and it's just the confluence of those two factors is going in the same direction. Yes, assuming you are using those types of exercises, you're trying to do a lot. I mean, yeah, sure. I mean, if you're trying to do it in the stretch position exercises, you've got some pain and suffering coming your way, but you know, I mean like I think a lot of good glute programs now are built around the hip thrust. So in the silver era, there was a tendency when people were adding volume for their legs for the quads, and this this do tend to be a little bit more in strength based programs. But something that is quite common to see is that they will do say multiple sets, say three sets or so with a quarter squat or a half squat, and then they'll follow that up with a couple of sets of full depth squat. Would that be an example there where adding something like a half squat, obviously, they weren't really using leg extensions a lot of the time back then, and you could use a leg extension now, but we're doing something like a partial squat, potentially allow one to do more squat volume for the quads than if they were doing a full depth. So from a muscle physiology perspective, yes, practically I don't like partial squats. I think it turns into an upper body exercise because of the weight that's being used, or because of the sheer insane amount of weight that you have to use to, do I see reach muscular fat there in that scenario, you can see, I don't think it's a good idea. You could probably do a similar thing with a lot of exercises, but then that comes back to the question of is that muscle like a bench, for example, yeah, I also see that in the silvia as sometimes again, mostly strength plans where they're doing a top half bench, you know, bench from blocks or whatever, and then they'll follow it up with a few sets of full depth bench, but the question now will be, well, is that top half bench really giving you what you want from a chest standpoint? I mean, that's always the issue with exercises that other have differing muscle contributions across the range of motion. - Okay, this is interesting so far. We've, I mean, people are gonna quote you like, wow, you've just said people can do four, five, 17 sets of glutes in a single worker. - I'm pretty sure I did this. - In a single worker. Okay, so the flip side of this then is how often can you do it? And what do we need to think about when it comes to how often a muscle can be trained? - So I think again, the two physiological variables that get quoted are muscle size and fiber type. So people will go, you know, the muscle is big there for it kind of takes longer to recover, the muscle is small there for it recovers quickly. I mean, I've seen some pretty famous internet sports scientists making that claim a number of times. And the issue is that the literature actually uses two muscles that often get quoted in that context, the quads and the y-inch or the elbow flexes. Literature actually uses the particular literature which exercise scientists often don't read. And it uses that, those two examples is the opposite way around. So the quads gets used as the example of a muscle that recovers quickly and the elbow flexes gets used as the example of a muscle that recovers slowly. So ultimately the smaller muscle is taking longer to recover. Why is that? It's 'cause it's fast twitch. Size actually doesn't really come into it very much. In fact, bigger muscles tend to have bigger volumptu activation deficits, which makes them a little bit more protected against post-workout damage 'cause they're recruited as many of the higher threshold motunits, which have the fast-reached fibers attached to them. So generally speaking, the bigger a muscle the harder it is to recruit all the motunits, therefore the less post-workout did you go into create. I just don't get why muscle size, why that's something that people have, because we live in this kind of framework that I've kind of popularized, which is the hypertrophysiomusophobic specific. And it is. And, you know, kind of the research literature accepts that point, but they don't actually pull on the thread and go, well, if that's true, what does that mean? And that's what I've spent the last kind of 10 years doing is pulling on the thread going, if that's true, what does it mean? It means all these things that we talk about now and that, you know, kind of get repeated across TikTok every single day, hundreds of thousands of times. Even if it weren't true, why would they make that claim, though? I can't even rationalize. Well, when people think of a muscle as a single kind of homogenous thing, then they kind of, they like, they think of it in terms of being something that, you know, experience is more damage, because, you know, you've kind of, you've got more of it, you've got more, yeah, right. There's more damage, more of it. Well, I'm primitive. They don't think of it as a single fiber phenomenon. It's a whole great thing, 'cause they're looking at it from the outside and they've got no more of it. You're spreading out just stimulus amongst such a big thing. So obviously that big thing. Oh my gosh, I know it's mad. And you've got to kind of step outside of this model that we live in in order to appreciate where some other people are coming from. But also why those people haven't actually moved forward in 10 years. It got nowhere to go. It's funny, I mean, even in the city, I don't hear any weird explanations like that. Like they, you know, they said some pretty wack physiological things back then, but I didn't see that. I don't know why that's again. So I think the frequency thing is mirroring the volume thing in the sense that people think of in terms of being, you know, can I, you know, have a different frequency, because it's either a bigger muscle or smaller muscle on the recovery rates are different, and then, you know, kind of fiber type is really the bigger driver. It's like, you've got really fast-rich muscles. So the same thing really applies. But we kind of covered this with volume, 'cause I said, look, can you train with more sets? Well, yes, for the same recovery, you can do an extra set or two with a muscle like the glute or the busiest or the rear delt, like you suggested. But it's now we're just talking about the flip side. Can you train with a higher frequency? Well, if you kind of want to tune up to a limit, the reality is, if you start training inside the 48 hours, do me this period, you're probably not going to be adding ideal results. So I mean, I think you can, like a really, really slow-twitch muscle training with a contract position exercise. You could train it daily, and it probably wouldn't kind of set you back. Would it give you an enormous benefit? I think it's questionable. And I don't really want, we're given the data as they are at the moment regarding post workout, stimulus periods, being really kind of gnarly and difficult to pause. I don't want to come down harder on one side of the question here. So I'm going to say, I think it's probably debatable whether you could get a benefit out of it, but I don't think you would create a serious problem. Yeah, okay, okay. So I think if you tried to train biceps every day, I think you'd probably run into pain and suffering quite quickly. So we're using the same sort of exercise group, muscle groupings that we use a moment ago. It's literally the flip side of the coin, because when we talked about the volume question, I was literally arguing it from a point of view of can you, based on the recovery potential. Frequency is literally the opposite side of the equation. It's like, all we're saying now is can you train it more frequently because of the recovery potential? Well, yes, you just gotta be aware that your 48 hour recovery period is still, sorry, your 48 hour stimulus period doesn't change just because your recovery period is changed. Again, I know that the bodybuilding community tends to think the recovery and stimulus periods are identical, they're not. Yes. Okay, so let's put some numbers to this. So can even a muscle that's easily damaged, let's go with the biceps again. Could one do a single set of biceps and be recovered again in 24 hours? Yes, I mean, you could do a four at max. Yeah, I think you'd probably be recovered in 24 hours. And obviously we're not saying every single person who's listening to this as I think I'm going to be the case. But probably speaking, okay, one could do something that's not going to cause tremendous amounts of damage for even a very fast fitted-dominant muscle, fiber type muscle, and still be recovered probably in 24 hours. So certainly if we're talking 48 hours, which is our kind of like start point. Yeah, I mean like 23 sets of biceps curls, you should be done in 48 hours, most people. Yeah, okay. So as a, again, as like a bit of a floor there, we're saying kind of everything should be fine for at least sort of two sets, probably even a third set, every four to eight hours. You know, assuming you're not doing anything a little bit silly, very high reps, whatever, yeah. Very slow eccentric, whatever. Now, again, if we go to those muscle groupings you've used, so you sit basically those ones that are easily damaged, okay, they can probably do two or three sets. Those ones who are, who, which are, you know, harder to damage, potentially, potentially double that. I wouldn't go as far as that. If you wouldn't hit trust, you don't think double. Well, again, I mean, it depends on rep ranges and stuff like that. But yeah, I mean, you can definitely add a couple of sets on that. I mean, I think probably five sets, three times a week of hip thrust is probably okay. Yeah, I mean, everybody's going to be different. When I give numbers like three times, three sets, three times a week, that is designed to capture the vast majority of situations for the vast majority of people. Yes, if you're in this way, you should get good results. It's like, you don't need it. It's not applicable to give you a recommendation that captures every scenario and every person all the time. That's why I have to give you numbers. It's like the five stimulating reps. People get really upset about the fact that I've said there's five stimulating reps and they're like, oh, no, no, no, it could be six or it could be four. And I'm like, I've literally written articles about that. That's not how a model works. You're not saying, you know, I'm giving you a summary best, best possible answer for the vast majority of people. That's how that's how it works. When I do my health consulting work and I write health protocols, I obviously use a lot of supplementation. And one thing I always teach my mentoring clients is there's supplements that could work. There's good literature and some supplements, but some supplements have either high side effects or the percentage of people who they work for is quite low. Like it might work 50% of people or 50% of people. And for me, when I write protocols, I don't want to use a supplement where there's a 50/50 chance it will help that person or not. Yeah, I want to use a supplement where I feel fairly confident, 80%, 90% plus that this is going to have a beneficial effect and that person's not going to have, you know, negative side effects or whatever. I think that's how we're looking at this. It's like, okay, could some people listen to this add an extra set or add an extra cheese? That's what I'm, yeah, you could. But, I mean, seriously, I've told the story a hundred times. But, you know, when I was working as a personal trainer, very, very, very long time ago, I used to do some strengthening conditioning work with endurance cyclists. And those guys would literally be able to bang out set, have to set up to set up to set of back squats. And they could come back in, they could have come back in the following day. I don't know, again. But usually they would come back in a few days later and they'd do the same thing again. And it would just be nothing. It wouldn't even register as fatigue for them. Just know that. It's absolutely insane. I mean, and do you've actually worked with an endurance athlete and seen what their slow-toed fibers are capable of doing? It's really difficult to believe. Like, and I would contrast that one, I would be kind of doing, you know, my strength. training at the same period of time, and I was contrasted with what they were capable of recovering from, what I was capable of recovering from, and it would just be like world to part. That same conversation with a friend this way, he trains with a lot of endurance type athletes, and he was saying like the volumes are they capable of doing with just, you know, very little recovery time. It's just not, it's not what we're talking about when he comes to most people like these. No, it's not. Okay. Now, I'm just to be clear, there's some really nice, there's some really nice literature showing that. If you take a group of untrained people, take a group of untrained people, and you give them a really horrible kind of muscle-damaging kind of eccentric, only workout with elbow flexors, for example. So you're looking to create a really kind of big muscle damage effect. You give those people, this group, large group people, you just pull them off a university campus and kind of, you know, gone through the protocol with them, and they've, you know, agreed, and then you've kind of sat them down on the dining on the turn, you've got them to do, you know, whatever it is, a hundred reps of ease and dream-buy zips girls. Like, and then they come in the following day, and you measure their elbow flexors strength, and some of those people are going to crawl in the door, and they're going to basically display a level of strength that's like 30 or 40% of what it was the previous day. I mean, these people will not have been functional in their daily life with that arm that you trained the previous day, that's not right. Okay. Now, contrast that with some other people are going to bounce in the door, and they're going to be 5% stronger. Yeah. Yeah, that's why. And that study exists. Yeah. I mean, it's insane. And so, like, again, people are going, oh, well, you know, can I do this? Can I do that? Can I do the other? I'm like, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. But on average, the big group of people in the middle of the normal distribution, we kind of have this fairly good idea that, you know, three, six, three times a week of pieces, every 48 hours is a pretty good kind of benchmark. Can people fall by the side of that? Yes, absolutely. Can muscles fall by the side of that? Yes, absolutely. And generally speaking, a couple of muscles are going to fall that side and the couple of muscles are going to fall the other side. And that's all we're talking about today. And as a coach, if you're listening to this and you're a coach, you can learn, or even yourself, you know, you can learn yourself and you can learn your clients well enough to know when you can quote unquote break these rules a little bit, but these general guidelines we're giving, you know, this is, as you said, now designed to work for almost everyone who's listening. So if your muscle can be trained every 48 hours, okay, we've established that. And so the idea that some muscles can only be trained twice a week would only be true if someone was using so much volume in those sessions that they obviously weren't recovering from. Yeah. I mean, that's a volume problem. Yes. I mean, like if you were, if you were to throw one set, I mean, and this applies to exercises as well. So like I know that some people said, oh, you know, you can only train squats twice a week. I'm like, well, no, I mean, absolutely do your single set of squats three times a week. I mean, there's nothing stopping you. And it's your bodybuilders for your 1950s. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and it will be better than whatever you're currently doing with squats. I promise you. You know, so, you know, frequency is so much better than volume. It's not funny. You know, we've been through that before. And so you mentioned, a moment ago, you mentioned around the stimulus period. And you said, okay, like the stimulus period about two days, give a take. We've done whole episodes on this. But that's there's, there's no case where again, if you were to do a muscle with low enough volume one or two sets, there's no case where training that again two days later doesn't make sense. In terms of you don't, there's, it's not like a muscle somehow has some muscles have a longer stimulus period. And therefore they should be trained too. No, that's not, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, the only thing that's going to differ is the recovery period according to the fast twitch five motion and the voluntary activation percentage. And then if you've trained it with a contract or a stretch position, okay, ultimately, but ultimately, I mean, like just coming back to this idea that you might be better off training a muscle or a specific exercise with a lower frequency. Ultimately, anybody making that case is going to run face first into the dose response curve. Yes. Face first. Yeah. Absolutely. Face first. And and it's going to make it very clear that they're wrong because the dose response curve is super clear that as soon as you've gone past that first set, your second set is just 40% dish of your first set stimulus. So the idea that you would want to do more volume in fewer sessions is insane. I mean, like anybody recommending that is not looking at the data. Yeah. So I, you know, I think ultimately the question has to be, is can I recover from that? Well, yeah, you can, there's pretty much no, unless you're doing super max on these entries, there's no scenario in which you can't recover from like a single set in 48 hours. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So your dials of which data set you use, everything is showing that that second set is less stimuli than the first set. Yeah. I mean, like we can argue over percentages, but at the end of the day, it's still a, you know, kind of curve that is not linear and still plateauing. And even if it was 90%, you know, even if it was far more simulating than any of the data suggests, it's still not as similar. So yeah, I mean, and this is ultimately why we can estimate this model works and nobody's been able to produce a model that's better because everybody else wants frequency to not matter. And I'm like, you can't, you can't say that frequency doesn't matter. It has to matter. Now, how much does it have to matter? In the sense that we've established now some muscle, maybe even all muscles could be trained every single day and be recovered. Now, I know he's done the episodes on this. I don't expect to go super deep into it, but is it a case where it's worth doing muscles or training muscles more than every second day? I honestly, I think we've answered this as best as I possibly can in the, in the stimulus period episode that we did until this new data, I don't think I can give a better answer than I've already given. It's, I mean, it's, it's really, really difficult question to, to get an answer to because muscle protein sins is rates alone. Don't give you the answer. Because they're doing other things as well. You know, those rate televisions are doing damage repair, they're doing psychimogeances. I mean, okay, sometimes they just don't turn over because the muscle has available protein that it wants to use. I mean, like that's what happens after protein feeding. So when it came to volume, we had some, some sort of exceptions or some muscles there where it didn't necessarily have to look the way that it looked at other muscles. Some, some muscles could potentially use higher volumes and whatever else. But when it comes to frequency, I'm struggling to think of in a situation where this answer is not trained that muscle every second day if possible. Obviously, there'll be some outliers. Maybe someone's, as I say, the only scenario in which, the only scenario in which people start to argue that muscles need to be trained less frequently is because they aren't, they're doing too much volume for them in a single session. And if they're making, and if they're doing that, then they are going to basically be arguing against the dose response curve. Yes, because it will always be more effective than to spread out that volume. Yeah. So really, what we're saying is, is, if your volume is stopping you from training that muscle again two days later, then it is best to reduce the volume to the point that you can then train that muscle again two days later. Of course. Yeah. But that's the essence of how the dose response curve works. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So now we've got, so I mean, ultimately, as we're working through this, you could write a plan alongside it in your mind. And the plan so far would look like full body every other day, but the only thing I would differ is some muscles might have, and obviously, you know, your goal is going to change, yeah. But yes, some muscles have an extra one of two sets. Yeah. Okay. And then the last point was, remind me, something around exercise, I think we're going to cover it in advance. We've gone along. Well, yeah, we can talk about their psychomygenesis. Was that part of it or not? So I think, I mean, so my analysis is a really interesting one, because on the one hand, it looks like it dissipates more quickly than hypertrophy does when you stop training it. But on the other hand, there's been a rash of studies in the last couple of years suggesting that the maintenance volume is lower. That's why when the new Floral Study came out showing the maintenance volume is actually higher. I was like, hmm, okay. That makes more sense. So, you know, we'll see. But I think where we're going to probably end up is that psychomygenesis is probably behaving more or less the same as hypertrophy, perhaps with a little bit more of an aggressive loss of size in scenarios where you completely remove the stimulus. But, you know, I don't know. So the practical part of that for this episode would be if you do have a muscle that benefits from been trained in that stretch position, let's say the quads, then we've now established the best program here would probably be to train the quads, let's say three times a week or every other day, do you need to do that stretch position exercise for the quads in each of those sessions, or so you could do, you could do leg extension, bear with me, you're going to say this too much, but you could do leg extension in each of those sessions and you could do, say, a set of squats on every second session and the squats they could be maintaining the sarcomyogenesis and then the leg extension could be your main sort of, yeah, but bear in mind the squats were also doing a whole bunch of other stuff, yes, yes, so, but if you just need to be interested in quads, then yeah, I mean, you know, I suspect that the actual volume stimulus for sarcomyogenesis is probably quite a lot lower than a single set, but you know, I don't know, yeah, so potentially, potentially could do like a rep or two every every other day, I think you probably could do a rep or two, yeah, yeah, interesting. And obviously in that scenario squat makes no sense, but you know, a leg press, single leg leg press, you probably couldn't make that work, yeah, but if you set it up at that point you may as well just do this, hey, well that's the issue, I mean that's the issue is some of these complex exercises, but by the time you've kind of got to the point where you're doing your work, so it's like, well, I've just spent 20 minutes getting this far, I'm not going to just do a single set at the stop. The flywheel seemed really interesting, maybe wonder why don't gyms have flywheel exercises, machines? Well, because they create super max eccentric learning, and you can actually hope so, I'm doing that if you're not careful. Okay, safety issues, rooting the world. Okay, is anything else in, is that, is that the whole how often and how much volume she would be using for each muscle, topic covered? Well, yeah, I mean, I kind of wanted to set that as, you know, what from a high-perture stimulus period, you know, optimal solution, what would be the answer, and basically frequency doesn't really change on that front, volume might change a little bit, you might be able to get an extra set, and in some cases, it might not be doing anything really, in some cases, it might be giving a bit of a benefit, so my example that I was carved, carved muscles, it might not really be doing anything extra, because by the time you got to your extra set, your superstar fatigue is kicked, and you're not really getting much of the volume in the place that you need it, whereas maybe the glue or the kind of, re-adults, it might be a beneficial effect, so you kind of, there's this stimulus period and volume combination, sorry, volume frequency combination, taking to account the stimulus period, taking to account effect, you can do a little bit extra volume on those muscles, okay, fine. You know, and then exercise selection, if you overlay that on top, and you can kind of say, well, if I'm doing a strict position exercise, I'm going to have to be a bit more careful, I'm doing a contact, the position exercise, I can be able to get a bit more aggressive, and that's all it really does, but you're only ever changing volume up and down slightly around about the midpoint, you're not changing frequency, because that's insane, because you're arguing against those response curves. Yeah, and similarly with exercise selection again, yeah, well, it's going to do is move you up and down against the midpoint, it's like, you know, it's a super damaging exercise, really strict position, okay, well, you're going to notch the volume down slightly in the workout, if it's a much more conduct position, you can notch it up a little bit, I mean, that's literally all the changes, you're just nudging the kind of midpoint, it's very, very simple. Yeah, yeah, so if you are programming, and you know, you're looking at, like, let's say you wanted to quote unquote, volume act, you particularly wanted to add more sets for particular muscle for whatever reason, then you would be selecting those exercises that are training that muscle in a more contractive position where possible, and if you just weren't concerned, and you just have your loads, and you'd leave a rep remissive here or there, yeah. But if you were just doing your single sets or, you know, two sets per muscle, then arguably you would probably pick an exercise, which is training that muscle, where in a more lengthened position, where it has good activation. Yeah, and just kind of make a point that needs to be repeated, adding extra sets is going to have very tiny beneficial effects. If you've already done a couple of sets for a muscle group, you are talking about maybe adding 10, 20% of your first set stimulus by doing another set. I mean, it's tiny. You know, it really is worth, if it makes you feel tired or not motivated to do the rest of your workout, then don't do it. I mean, it's absolutely. Yeah, obviously, you'd be looking to the whole programming context. Yeah, I posted, I posted a study this week where pitchesmen did one set in one limb, three sets in the other limb, three times a week, and the limb that they were doing the two extra sets, each workout, it grew 60% more, right? That's kind of roughly what we would expect based on the production purpose. Yeah. And everyone was losing, might be like, of course, you would do the two extra sets, why wouldn't you do that so much more growth? And I'd say, yeah, okay, but now I spread that across every single muscle. No, imagine you're doing like 15 exercises per worker and a full body routine. Yeah, you're going to do 45 sets instead of 15, no, you're not. And then the solution is break it up and spread the muscles out into a split. It's like, now you've been smacked into the dose response curve and you've just lost all your points. Yeah, congratulations. Back to the bottom. Goodness, okay, I think that's it. I think we've covered that topic. Any final words from you before we wrap up? No, no, I was just answering your questions. Okay, I'm going to conclude with this. I had a kid stop me in the gym this week, and he doesn't listen to our podcast. I can't even shout him out of here, but he does, obviously, follow us on social, obviously, he does follow us on social media and he was saying how much the stuff we talked about and post and whatever has helped him. It was a 17 year old kid, and it was, it was talking me through his workout plan, it was talking me through like, sort of the neuromacalical matching aspect of the different exercises he was using. And I was just like, man, I wish I was having conversations like this when I was 17. I mean, when I was 17, I was probably doing Grande style eight sets of eight or German volume training, 10 sets of 10, and I just absolutely nonsense stuff. And the fact that kids nowadays are doing intelligent, he'd been trained, been lifting for like less than two years. And the kid was jacked and you know, kudos to him. Anyway, it filled me with a little bit of hope and a little bit of jealousy that wasn't my early lifting experience, but it is what it is. So that's my good news story for you to finish with. Okay, guys, thank you for tuning in. Join us again next week for a new topic.