Ep 366 - New Studies: Long Muscle Lengths & Muscle Swelling

[MUSIC] Hey everybody, welcome back to Iyer Culture. It is me, Ayrtrix, the joint as always by the Dr. Eric Helms. Helms, how are we doing tonight? >> I'm doing pretty well this not yet afternoon here on Wednesday in New Zealand, but I hope you're having a great Tuesday night over there in the great state of North Carolina. >> Yes. >> All as well on my end, nothing to report. Things are very normal. I do have some housekeeping notes for the people who are very confused and annoyed by details. So folks, we've had a re-numbering of episodes. And I believe we have to draw attention to that. So we had a wonderful crossover episode with Steve Hall, but YouTube is very particular about how you can incorporate those into your playlists. Those videos cannot have alternate titling going on. So therefore, episode 365, which was that became a bonus episode. And episode 365 became 365. And you are now listening to episode 366 for many of you for the second time. But this time it's a different episode than the last time you listened to episode 366. So Helms, I think that clears everything up in a very tidy way with no confusion whatsoever. >> None whatsoever. >> And are we going to need to then update the titles on our podcast feed to match YouTube? Because we can't have YouTube podcast feed disparity, I believe. >> Yeah. >> That results in some type of catastrophic. >> I get a chuckle out of people who are absolutely tortured by those types of discrepancies. But I'm not malicious, and therefore I've already updated the podcast feeds. But it would have been an enjoyable thing for me. Because I know there's at least 15 people out there who that would have ruined their life to know that every week, there were parallel alternate titling and numbering procedures happening to the same episodes. >> Well, it kind of goes well hand in hand with, we have like Schrodinger's name of the podcast crossovers. Because there is any number of combinations between revive stronger iron culture and variations on those names. But I think in our subsequent future, I won't even say what episode number it is. It'll be the second crossover episode that it was Steve Hall. We will be coming to a final consensus and we'll be taking that name out of the box. And hopefully there's no dead cat in there that would break my heart. And we'll just simply have a name for a podcast that is appropriate. >> Beautiful. Well Helms, let's get down to business here. We need to do all of our capitalism promotion, et cetera, so folks. If you like the podcast, it is your job to fight your way through the algorithmic mess and make sure that we are boosted, promoted and inflated. So be sure to like, rate, subscribe, review. Be sure to subscribe. Yeah, I already said subscribe, do that. Sorry, Helms is distracting me terribly. He's drifting in and out of frame with his muscle and strength pyramid books. The new additions which are available. So be sure to buy those, buy several copies, send them out as birthday and holiday gifts if you like. Now the number one way to support the show, the show exists because it is propped up financially and spiritually by the mass research review. So if you like science, fitness, the intersection between them and even health, we do a lot of health as well, which, interesting fact, Helms, did you know that at the time of competition, every champion bodybuilder and power lifter has been alive, at least at the time they won their competition. I'll have to check the books on that, but I will take that it likely true. So if you want to be your best on stage, a huge part of that is getting to stage alive. So that's why we feel comfortable covering health related topics in the mass research review. But be sure to check that out at massresearchreview.com. And of course, if you want to support our friends as well, the good people at Elite FTS have wonderful, high quality merchandise, apparel and gear for in the gym, bands, straps, shirts. I'm sure all sorts of wraps and sleeves, any lifting paraphernalia that you may wish to procure. If you're in the market for any of that stuff and more, head to EliteFTS.com and use our discount code MRR10. We love the good people over at EliteFTS and we love to show them support. Anything else, Helms, before we dive into our science for the evening? No, I think you did a fantastic job. All right, so Helms, in the online fitness world, there are many topics that are perpetually cycling through the forefront of the collective imagination. There are some topics that dominate the conversation and every time a new study comes out, they surge to the forefront of conversation. And a couple of those topics have been in the news again lately, so with various studies that have come out. And so it's one of those things where we've already done deep dives into several of these topics individually, but it's a good opportunity tonight to kind of do like a little research, round up, science, update, type of thing as we cycle through some of these evergreen topics that are kind of perpetually at the forefront of conversation, at least within the last couple of years. So I know we've got some new stuff on length and bias training. I know we've got some new stuff about the role of muscle swelling and studies and how that may impact inferences from studies looking at the effect of training volume on hypertrophy, a common refrain being that hypertrophy studies are actually just edema studies looking at acute transient fluid accumulation and muscle, which has virtually nothing as the clean goes, virtually nothing to do with hypertrophy. So I'm going to hand over the reins and say, you leave the way here because you, these are definitely topics where you have led the charge in terms of writing about them in mass and covering them in various elements over the years. And I have kind of been more of an armchair pendant where, especially for things like length and partial, long length bias training, I kind of have played the role of being in the armchair and just saying, I don't care. However, and then I'll say something about it. So I, for the next 60 to 70 minutes, I will care either performatively or sincerely and I will participate in the conversation, but I do not feel equipped to drive it. So I'm going to bestow that honor upon you. And I will chime in with snarky comments in the occasional question. That's perfect. And I would say those are both in your wheelhouse and you're so good at them. Performative otherwise, I'll take it. For me, I just need a validation from others and that means that performative is kind of just reality. You know, if they could tell you make it is essentially not even a mantra for me, but just the next existential reality. So yeah, I think you teed that up really well. And there's been a couple of big things that have kind of gone on in the evidence-based lifting hypertrophy blogosphere, which is no longer a blogosphere I'm old. But I think one of them is that your colleague, or maybe our colleague, Jeremy Etter, over at Built With Science, he did a pretty big effort to fund a study where they used prime equipment. Those who don't know what that is, prime equipment is a specific brand of machines where they have a unique cam where you can actually intentionally load plates or select a different emphasis and part of the range of motion that you want to quote unquote bias rather than having it just be a fixed variable resistance or potentially, you know, needing to manipulate it with bands or chains or what have you. So you can make the initial or the end of the middle or somewhere in between more than different ways and you can distribute the load stack wherever you want. And it's adjustable, really cool system. And the study they specifically did also used MRI. So that's two really cool features of this study. And what they did was they were able to just kind of isolate one variable, specifically looking at, okay, people using the same movement pattern, the same range of motion, but we're just shifting it so that one group is doing a lot more load or emphasis or bias if you will in the length and position and the other not in the length and length and length and position. And I think, you know, the hypothesis was, hey, we would expect based upon the prior research and the general kind of emphasis on this broader area of training that the group doing more emphasis in the length and position would boom, grow more. But what happened? Well, actually really similar outcomes. And I think I'm comfortable saying equivalent hypertrophy regardless of whatever this this design was, which I don't remember off the top of my head in the two groups. And that is something to talk about in of itself, tracks, but also something that is critical that we need to talk about is how those findings were interpreted, reported, and contextualized into the overall conversation here. And the another really cool thing, last thing I'll say that just to give kudos and shout out to the researchers is they did this in a lot of muscle groups that haven't been necessarily looked at quite as much. So they looked at rear delts, they looked at packs, if I recall correctly, glutes. And I think biceps, which are all great examples of ones that haven't been investigated as thoroughly as, say, you know, the quadriceps, which is an example of one that's got a fair amount of love just because of the ease of measuring it with ultrasound. So MRI fantastic as well as the exercise selection and then the muscle group selection. So yeah, is that a pretty good place to start? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned that there was all sorts of back and forth. Who would imagine on this particular topic that there would be diverse opinions and arguments and things of that nature? But you know, it sounds like there's a lot of back and forth about in this study, it seems pretty clear that there wasn't really much happening in terms of an additional benefit of emphasizing that length and portion. But then the question you said was kind of how it was written up how it was interpreted and then how it was kind of broadly discussed and contextualized. So why don't you take us there and we'll carry the ball forward. Yeah, so if you look at some of the video content made in and around this, it was very much like this changes everything, which some of that's just marketing it's fine and so long as then the content that gets delivered in the video afterwards, they got people looking at it, delivers, I'm relatively agnostic and very understanding to that necessity given the way social media is. But I would say that unfortunately that attitude kind of stayed in through the video and there were you know, legitimate questions on say like a podcast between two two big YouTubers or you know, look or even stating about oh, here are my prior beliefs and after the study, now I think it changes things. Maybe for these muscles, the stretch doesn't matter and the squeeze is just as good, et cetera, et cetera. And there are two issues with that. Maybe three that I want to talk about. One is I think very specific to this or two are very specific to the study itself. I think we need to think about the actual mechanism of why some muscles seem to respond better to this type of stretch emphasis versus another from a broader mechanistic conceptual biological perspective. One, two, we need to think about the specific intervention, not just like this is stretch or squeeze-based training, great way to communicate it. But what does it really mean? And do we just lump things into the same category or can we actually quantify the magnitude of the fact that some of these are having for those who haven't actually trained with prime equipment, you can definitely feel the difference. But to kind of drop a seed or hint here, just because you use one of those settings doesn't mean there's no load in the other position. So it becomes a conversation of thresholds and true differences between settings on these machines. So I want to talk about what does it mean that a muscle might respond better or worse? What does it mean to have a stretch or a squeeze emphasis in this specific modality? And then probably the most important overarching thing that I want to talk about tracks is even if you do a really, really, really well designed study within subject MRI, isolating one variable, great controls, including video to the degree that ethics will allow you, consulting with people in the field, which was done on this to make sure that the study designed for rock solid, yes, that elevates that individual study to some degree above other studies in terms of the veracity of its internal validity and how much faith you can put in did what we observed actually happen in the real world? Are these measurements reflective of what occurred in this study? But what it does not change and there's no way around it unless you really jack up your sample size in ways that is typically infeasible is change the representiveness or overall conclusions about this topic and that comes back to the conversations we've had about sampling variants. And I think we need to talk about all three. So yeah, do you kind of agree on that? Yeah, I was just going to say the only time that you would basically do one study and say this absolutely changes everything is not what you described was really positive things, but they are incremental in nature, right? You measured with ultrasound, which is good, but I measured with MRI, which is more good. Or you know, you used this particular way to bias your training. I used this cool new way to do it. You know, you used a between subjects designed for this and in this context, I used it within subjects, you know, crossover design, which in this particular case would be advantageous. So these are incremental improvements that take you from, you know, a good study to a very, very good study, right? But the only time when you're really going to have a single study that comes out and say, oh my god, this is a fundamental paradigm shift. Throw out all the shit that's been done up to this point would be if you identify like a fatal flaw in the way that this research question has been addressed. And so we're not talking about incremental qualitative improvements. We are talking about fundamental shifts in like, hey, because you included this thing in your study, you completely nullified the results. And we are the first study so far to avoid this catastrophic fatal error that everybody overlooked, right? And that's not the case. And that is a fantastic seed you planted for the next topic we're going to talk about. It's the timing of when we measure hypertrophy in all research, but particularly where we might think that swelling would be quite high, which could master hypertrophy when we measure it with MRI or ultrasound. We'll get to that, dear listeners, in about 10 to 20 minutes. Yeah. So fantastic color you painted there for us in that previously dull and gray picture that I represented. Who's a good plastic painter that does well with color? Who's known for really a beautiful color work? I want to expand my snarky comments I can make on podcasts. You are talking to the wrong person. Okay. We'll look into. I have a, I am a Renaissance man within the narrow confines of lifting weights. Yeah. So like I would describe myself. If not, but not Renaissance painting, you know, if I was going to give someone a similar comment, but turn it into a backhanded comment, like what I call that you're a true Rembrandt or you're a real Picasso. Like I know Picasso has the very absurd, you know, the shapes and inversion of things, you know, things that faces that are all misaligned. But we'll have to, we'll get our top art advisors on that because if nothing else, I want to improve my craft not by learning more about fitness, not by learning more about science, but by getting more snarky and more sharp and cutting with my backhanded compliments. My advice would be to get the Gemini app on your phone, which would probably do a sufficiently good job on this to increase your snark game. Yeah. Don't ask me because I'm aware that those are all painters and that's about the extent of it. Yeah. So we're just going to have to level up the snark game next time. Cool. But I appreciate where you're coming from and you're in your attempt and I like the idea. Yeah, I'll give you that. So let's start with the two kind of within study things. I'm going to give you a carrot at the end of the stick to keep performatively acting like you like this and we'll talk about stats last. Okay. Keep, keep tracks in the game. Yeah. All right. So have you ever trained with prime gear before? No, no, I have not. It's cool. If you get the chance, definitely do it. They have some that are selecturized and then they have some that are, you know, you actually put plates on different parts of the cam to load it differently. Wow. And I would say that it is machine dependent, exercise dependent, how much of a difference you feel like when you load the different parts of that cam, right? And this is just due to the interlapping effects of your actual anatomical differences in muscles and the overlapping curves of when a muscle is strong, you know, when it has the best overlap between acting and myus and as well as when it has higher passive tension, you know, and this is something you'll see a lot of people in this space talk about what part of the length tension relationship that this muscle quote unquote operate on. And then that also interacting with the lever arms and lengths and the way the machine is self is constructed. And then how you put that pin. So all of that kind of goes into a semi black box unless you're really going to understand the anatomy and physics and engineering involved to how does this feel and they don't all feel the same. But I will say that the majority of experiences I've had of prime machines where I do play with, of course, loading the initial position is that they're not unloaded in other positions by any means. And some of them have, you know, you can get a pretty unbalanced resistance curve, but some of them are still relatively smooth and also depends on how strong you are, right? Because it has a kind of a base level of load on it and then you're loading plates on top of that base upon your strength. And to some degree, that's going to influence this as well for my experience. So I think it's just really important to point out that instead of thinking in a broad categorical way of is this stretch or squeeze, we really need to think about is how much of a stretch or squeeze emphasis it is because we could actually quantify force and I would love to see future studies that actually start to look at the specific load that is implemented at each one of those positions and start to see maybe when the difference actually is forthcoming. It's also important to note that they're training to failure and that tends to wipe away a lot of these differences. There's a great study by Placanin colleagues where they compare to hip thrust of squats. And on paper, hip thrusts is a pretty bad exercise from a resistance profile perspective. When the glutes are shortest and you're in full extension, the load is heaviest, squats are the exact opposite. But at the same time, are you limited by glutes when you do a squat or more limited by quads? For most of you, people probably quads. So both groups went to failure and they got equivalent growth. I think 9 out of 10 times, if you're training through a full range of motion and you go to failure, even if you might fail in a more shortened or more relative length and position, it's going to wash away a lot of these small differences. So that's one thing to consider. The second thing to consider is that the idea of this being muscle specific is only like one step away from that broad categorical discussion of the way it's talking my most of the time, at least, of is the stretcher squeeze. People don't have an answer to the follow-up question, well, why would it be different for one muscle versus another? They might kind of have some throw away about whether the muscle operates on which aspect of the length tension curve, but then the question again is, well, why does that muscle operate differently on different aspects of the length tension curve? Because fundamentally, if you actually look at the smallest unit of any given muscle, the sarcomere, you're not going to know in a petri dish whether it's from someone's glute or whether it's from someone's peck, bicep, whether they're male, female, etc. But the fundamental principle is true, at least to the degree we understand it thus far, that the mechanosensors that sense tension, that are experiencing more tension when that sarcomere is stretched to a longer length, are higher. So to whatever degree any individual muscle can be at a longer muscle length and experience tension, active or passive, probably will enhance hypertrophy, are some muscles easier to stretch and can reach longer lengths and therefore higher tension than others? Yes, but it's not fundamentally about the muscle tissue itself. It's more about their anatomy and the limitations of your individual body and the interaction with what you're training with. So a biarticular muscle is something that can be stretched more because you have two joints to play with by articular crosses both. Monoarticular, it's only going to be able to move to the degree one joint does. So I think it's just important to not kind of just file away in your head, oh, that doesn't work for biceps or that doesn't work for this and just think about the more tension you can put in any muscle, the better it will grow and that occurs at longer lengths, relative longer lengths and perhaps for some muscles you just simply can't achieve that anatomically or any practical way and therefore it will appear not to work in that muscle, but that's not a true, I would say muscle physiology difference. It might be a practical anatomical difference. So that's just good to know. So I think it's safe to say that training at longer muscle lengths from a theoretical perspective should work for all muscles and it may not play out for theoretically though, which is just an important note. Does that make sense to you, Trex? Yeah, and it should make sense to my students on teaching exercise physiology this semester. We've got an exam on Thursday and we cover the length tension relationship in detail. So if any of my students are listening, first of all, you're not allowed to, so turn it off, I like to keep those worlds separate. But second of all, yes, yes, so I'm me deep in the length tension relationship. So I'm on board with you, Holmes. I believe that our listeners are following along as well. Okay, cool. So all of those things should be thought about when reading this study. But now, now I'm going to bring Trex back into the fold. This may not even be performative engagement that I get from him now. I remember when we were doing, I wrote an article in Mass about sampling variance and understanding how even if you do everything right in this study and you find discordant results with the rest of the literature or your hypothesis that it may be folly to try to look and analyze your methods like we often do online to try to understand why and go, aha, here's the confounding variable. It's certainly possible that could be the case, but it is also expected that if you were to replicate that study in two different situations, which are entirely common in sports science. If you have a small sample, as well as you're trying to find a small effect. And actually, another third one that is semi-common in sports science, but not as bad as many people painted as, you have a noisy measurement that you will get different results each time. And most of the time, which you will find is something that is a null. So we did a little bit of a modeling experiment where I said, hey, Trex, let's say we got 200,000 people were sampling from. That's our true population. Maybe this is competitive bodybuilders who have at least been in the game two or three years and they're male between ages 1840. That's not an unreasonable representation, maybe they say, I'm error, you know, English speaking countries. And if we do a bunch of parallel group 10 by 10 trials and we're expecting a small on the border of traditional effect sizes, small bordering with trivial on traditional effect sizes, 0.2 standardize mean difference between groups that there's a real true effect of this one intervention, which I would be comfortable saying maybe full range of motion versus a full range of motion with, let's say, a length and emphasis or bias, like was measured in the study that 90% of the time we would get null findings. And about 9.0 something percent of the time we would get positive findings. And less than 1% of the time we'd actually get negative findings if we had enough studies published. And the one variable Trex, which I actually could not reasonably provide to you, besides sample size, the effect size, and the difference between groups was the correlation. I don't want to get the specifically wrong, but this is an important, like basically how much correlation did we expect in the variance between groups compared to standard noise. And that's kind of the unknown variable that you have to guess at. And if you get all the methodological things right that we talked about before, that number can improve, but you cannot escape the fact that you're looking at a 10 by 10 comparison and a small real difference. So you can get really, really, really, really, really, really precise, and you can measure if there was a two difference. But if you're only looking at 20 people, all you can know for sure is, yeah, that happened in these guys or gals. But you don't know whether that is representative what would happen in that one true population, because there are going to be sources of variance that are going to contain biological variability that could supersede, be in excess of any true change between conditions. How did I do Trex? Good, yeah, it's been so, it's been a long time since we did that little simulation exercise. So I was, I felt like I was relearning what we did as you described it. But, but no, I think the big takeaway point that I would reinforce is the fact that I think once I started learning about meta-analysis, I had this like complex emotional reaction that fundamentally changed me. We'll cut that as the lead into the episode. That sounds very dramatic and intriguing. But I was struck by these kind of dual feelings. Number one, I said, wow, meta-analysis is this very powerful tool that's going to help me better understand research. And that is a good thing. And I took this class on meta-analysis during my PhD. And in theory, that's what doing a PhD is for is to pick up those things along the way where you say, wow, this is fundamentally improved my ability to understand research and the acquisition and production of new knowledge. On the other hand, Helms, after you learn about meta-analysis and you learn about sampling error, which is not measurement error. And it's really important to understand the, when we, let's say this, there's this rare chance that we actually literally know the true effect of an intervention. So in the human population, the effect size we know for certain, which is almost never the case, is 0.2, like you said, to use the same number. It's not just that when we do studies in smaller samples, it's not just that it's possible that we will find results that are different than 0.2. It's that it is, it will happen. It must happen. And so like, the thing that's really frustrating about, of course, you can make all that volatility in your estimates at the sample level, you can make that way worse by being bad at what you do. By having bad controls, by having a sloppy intervention, by having measurement error, all that stuff is true. But even as you're alluding to, as you're describing, under perfect conditions where you control very well, your participants are remarkably adherent. Everything goes smoothly. Measurement is excellent. We still expect, we don't brace for the possibility, we expect that there will be something called sampling error, which basically means that when you have massive, massive, massive samples that are almost as big as the full population, then yes, the estimate we get from that study should be approximately equal to the true size of the real effect. But as it gets smaller and smaller and smaller, we expect that you are going to start having larger and larger overestimates and underestimates in each individual study. And what you start to, the reason I had these dual emotions in that meta-analysis class was to be honest, Helms. For a little while, it made it really hard for me to get excited about running a study. And the reason I say that is because the mature version of me could say great, we are helping inform the next big meta-analysis, we are just one data point of many, of dozens and dozens and dozens. But man, I grew up reading all the pop psychology or hearing about it just like everybody else where you hear about the great scholar who came up with a wonderful idea and did a three experiment series, published bundled together in one paper, and that fully established how we view the morality of lying. And like, and the reason I bring that up is social psychology, Jesus Christ. It was how the field function for like a hundred years. Basically, you wrote your one great paper, which had three experiments in it. There was no regard for replication. There was no regard for, hey, maybe we should wait to limit analysis, kind of combine some results. It was just, this is the trexler effect, which is the weird little thing that happens in human psychology, right? So not to bash social psychology, but sorry guys, you kind of, I mean, the scoreboard exists. - But they're on the other side of the worship pool. - Yeah, no, no, they reckon with it. They reckon with it, they've grown past it. Of course, I mean, let's be honest, the old school folks are kicking and screaming as they get drug through it with the field, right? 'Cause they like the things that they named, right? The things that kind of built their career. But what I'm getting at without being to meandering in verbose is it became really hard to get excited about doing one study 'cause I couldn't trick myself into believing when I do this one study and do it better than everyone else, I will get the real truth in this sample of 21 people, right? So unfortunately, you have to zoom out and it's okay, you know, it's valuable to acknowledge, ooh, this study was done fundamentally better than this other study. So I'm gonna put a pin in that, make a mental note of it. And if it comes down to a point where I have to describe why there's some kind of weird inconsistencies, I can then lean on some of these study by study assessments. But your first pass through, you have to zoom way out and just say, here's this entire aggregation of studies. Some say nothing happens, some say there was a huge positive effect, and most say that there was a kind of boring, small positive effect. We need to plot those out, do the meta analysis and actually see where we're getting a convergence of data. But like you said, Holmes, I think when I first got into research, there was that tendency where there would just be exactly two studies on the topic. They both have 11 people per group. One study found a significant positive effect. The other one didn't, you'd say, oh, I guess this only works if the average sample is 27 years or older and this one was 22 year olds. You start looking like fishing for these little tiny differences in the sample or the method or how it was done. And in reality, you were just getting a full dose of sampling error and what you were nitpicking between the methods of the different studies is a complete, it was a complete illusion, right? You gave a false sense, yeah, a red herring, a false sense that you could sort through the real truth when in reality you need about 24 more studies so you can zoom out and start to piece it together. Like, Holmes, the paintings that are made of all those little tiny dots. - There you go. And another reference that I can't help you with. - Yeah. - But you're doing great. You're building upon it. Every attempt you're getting better, my friend. - Yeah. So I think that was a perfect lead and to then think about, okay, if we know that, now how do we frame the discussions that occurred around the study and what's the issue with them? 'Cause this is not just something academic for researchers to consider. This is really important for science communicators. And the reason why the replication crisis and social sciences hit so hard is because it contains the vast majority of pop science anecdotes. You know, hungry judges. You know, like, we associate these things with these colors. And as they went through the replication crisis found that most of their research did not replicate and they had to reconcile with that and then move forward with some of these advanced perspectives and more caution and waiting until replication before we said something as a true principle. That's occurring in the science communication world now in the modern social media landscape. So let's pretend that Jeremy et Thea and the funded study and all the researchers did fantastic work on this had 10 different parallel universes where this occurred at slightly different times with slightly different people. And therefore it was the same intervention done perfectly well but we got slightly different responses. My guess if I had to go to singularity Vegas and bet on how these would play out is we would probably see seven to nine of those 10 studies find no results and maybe one or two find positive and I don't think we'd find any that found negative results based upon the overarching data and the underlying theory here. And just to now are find negative result here means a significant detrimental impact as training it, training it along by it. Yeah. Yeah, so it would be probably reported as a positive result for training in the squeeze. Right. Yeah. Right. But the vast majority of the time, eight out of nine, maybe all 10 of these times we would find the same thing we found in our current universe. Right. Now imagine if we were in a world where they found the squeeze was better in the stretch, that rare occurrence that I don't think we would see but could. Or if we had the rare error but still rare 10% of the time where there was a small beneficial difference for training in the stretch. What would the video be like? And based upon the narrative that was painted that I described, it would be very different. It would say yes, you know, we doubled down with our methods, we did a good job within subject, all the stuff, it applies to all muscle groups and this is definitely the way to go and we would see a rash of people getting a lot more enthused about length and parcels, training it longer muscle length stretching all the above. Yet we still, we're looking at different, yes, versions of reality, but still measuring that same actual one true effect that was a small potential difference that maybe might make something for a competitive bodybuilder but probably not worth reporting and say public health guidance, right? Yeah. And that's an issue because what you really want to be doing is trying to get closer to that one truth. And yes, you can say, hey, our study really gave us a precise estimate. You know, you can see it when you met an analyze it, it's got a low degree of heterogeneity. It has smaller variation, more precise estimates, but it is still just that same proverb of five blind men trying to touch the elephant. And one thinks it's a snake, one thinks it's a bigger snake because they're touching the tail and the trunk, one thinks it's our anosterous because they're just touching the hoof. Another person just thinks it's tree bark because they found a really rough part of its knee and they're all wrong, right? It's an elephant. And that is essentially the perspective that I think that you could talk about when coming to meta analysis. And it could be pretty frustrating from a consumer's perspective because it is not reasonable to expect you, dear listener, to read all of the 40 different studies on various iterations of training at longer muscle lengths. And it's barely reasonable to expect your favorite science communicator like Jeremy Ethiated do it. It is reasonable to expect someone like me to do it because it's my freaking area. And I'm a full-time researcher. And that's not to say I'm on a pedestal, but it is to say you need to know this as a thing so that you can contextualize the perspectives from the people you consume information from. So you don't find yourself running down every red hairring sampling variance that you see. Yeah. Another way that you can look at this is that if you alter some of these variables, the size of the effect, the population, you can get closer to this truth earlier. And one thing that was noted by Jeremy, and I think in a podcast talking about this, was hey, you know, it's pretty consistent that we see shortened partials get outperformed by lengthened partials. So while that's true, I don't know if it's true that it would just bias the stretch. And we go, hold on. Those are just really when it comes down to it. As Zach Robinson might say, almost everything in resistance training research is the dose in disguise. It's the same thing just turning up the dose so that we see a really big difference. If it is, and we're pretty sure, that the initial range of motion on most exercises provides a greater per range of motion stimulus, if you will. And that's most identified by comparing the shortened verse to lengthened. Emphasizing the lengthened verse to shorten is the same thing, just way lower volume. So the noise is still there. It is just too low of a number of decibels for you to hear. And sometimes those decibels can't get so low that it doesn't matter. This is the difference between say 2.1 versus 2.15 grams per kilogram of protein. If we were to actually map that out into deficit, and hey, we did that in our meta regression, technically one is better than the other, but it does not matter. And we're close to that realm with some elements of lengthened bias training for some muscle groups, but it is not a fundamental difference in muscle physiology nor a fundamental difference between lengthened versus shortened partials versus lengthened bias versus shortened bias for range of motion training to failure. We just should expect that those would be much more similar to each other than different compared to the former of doing lengthened versus shortened partials. Does that make sense, Tracks? - Yeah, I mean, let me ask if this is like a fair, not a direct analogy, but to kind of reiterate what you're getting at with the lengthened bias versus lengthened partials, in terms of those comparisons. So for example, let's say I had a wacky idea with training where I'm like, okay, we wanna compare high load, low volume versus high volume, low load, right? So we're gonna say this group over here is gonna do, their first set is a really heavy set of three. This group over here, their first set, a really light set of 30. But then we're going to have both of these groups do four back-off sets of eight. And so you're like, okay, well, we got this little tiny bit of the difference, but then we're kind of washing it out with the whole other stuff. And that difference is probably going to get lost in the wash versus you're going to do three heavy sets of three. You're going to do three sets of 30 and you're not going to do any of those moderate in the middle back offsets. Right? And so it seems to me like that's kind of what we're getting at with the, you know, length and partial versus the, sorry, my computer is telling you about it. Like the biased versus short. Yeah, yeah, full range training. Exactly. Yeah. It's a matter of how different are these actual interventions? And to the extent that you're still doing the full repetition, you're kind of clouding that massive distinction versus when we do pure partials at one length versus the other. Exactly. Or we do something like take you through a full, like all your range of hit flexion and do leg curls, like even though the range of motion is the same on a seat versus lying leg curl, the relative starting position and where you're at on that length tension relationship with a hamstring is vastly different, right? So if things are different, we're much more likely to see a difference. But if they're really similar or both turnative failure, it's the same biomechanics. So same portion of the length tension relationship. You know, if you, this would be like doing not seated versus lying hamstring curls or a length and partial versus a short and partial hamstring curl, it's doing a full range of motion hamstring curl in both cases. But just shifting the resistance profile, what I consider is a relatively small amount and then both groups trained to failure. So you're absolutely getting to the point. And even that shortened bias training condition, because you're going all the way to failure that you are at high tensions for individual sarcomeres because you're say two, three RIR all the way to the last few reps, you're moving through that length and range. It's not quite as loaded, but the velocity slow, you're getting muscle fatigue, you're getting exposed to the long muscle length and just the tension is slightly lower, but it's increasing throughout the set and aggregate and you're failing somewhere along the way. So I think we just really shouldn't be expecting too much of a difference. But that's good to know. Right. Like can I try to take home is yeah, you know, like it probably won't make a huge difference. I was going to say my take on this, which is more I'm trying to I'm struggling how I would describe this, but I was almost happy to see this like over aggressive jerking of the steering wheel back against long length training, because you remember when when it the when it first became like this huge topic and everybody was talking about it all over the place. I didn't dispute the evidence, but I was like, guys, let's let's just chill for a second. Like I think when the dust settles, we're going to find that this is not the massive game changer that it's currently being presented as, right? Not by everyone who was excited about it, but there were a lot of people who are like, I don't think I'm ever going to do anything other than a length and partial the rest of my life, right? And I'm like, well, I don't know if we need to fundamentally rewrite the concept of how we do resistance training based on these these results that are coming out. And so I think that the initial buzz surrounding length and bias training and length and partials, it's not that it was directionally wrong, but it in terms of magnitude, I felt that it was tremendously overstated in a lot of cases. And so in a weird way, I felt like the balance of the universe was being restored, not because we were triangulating toward the center, but because we are now having this like strong counter, you know, pull in the opposite direction. And it's like, well, I guess if we're not going to like have this very nuanced, easy cruise to the middle, at least we could also put some strong people on this side of the metaphorical tug of war. And maybe that middle line will eventually as as everyone keeps yanking, find its way toward the middle. Again, a purely unscientific perspective, but it was almost like a very American perspective. Yeah. That's basically the American politics solution. Well, we can't be moderates because, you know, yes, we're idiots. We're the United States. So instead, let's just get more polarized. Well, and then that will definitely work in a bring up the middle. I know it's such a dysfunctional way to think about it and not remotely scientific, but it almost felt like with the initial hype and the initial buzz of it, it felt again, Sabar on the political metaphor. It felt like the overtin window was just careening away from reality, where the even the moderate position felt like a fringe position of just saying like, I just don't think this is quite going to totally redo everything we believe about how you lift weights. So in a way, it was almost like, hey, can somebody pull the overtin window and give me a little breathing room as I kind of sit in this moderate position? The problem is, is that actually the overtin window now in modern times in politics sits everywhere. And depending upon who you're talking to and where you're hanging out, you are saying something uncontroversial or that makes you either stall on or Hitler. Correct. I yeah, chose those both intentionally because I also think, you know, the horseshoe theory would be good to get thrown in with with the overtin window. Yeah. And I will also say that that's not unique to lengthened partials or long lengthened bias training. It's literally everything works right now. I just came off of a podcast on creatine. And it's not just in our little evidence-based bodybuilding sector. The questions were all related to taking creatine an older life. And I had to repeatedly point out that perhaps lifting weights in progressive exercise is a bigger and more important thing than creatine, which is going to cure your dementia, prevent TBI's, turn back the clock, give you a sleep deprivation effects and also supercharge your muscles and prevent osteopenia as well as sarcopenia. And I kind of put my hand up and I said, Hey, this is the best supplement we have for most of the performance. And we've already acknowledged that may not be quite as good based upon the emerging research on cognitive performance. And you would never notice minus the placebo effect, whether you're on creatine or not, if I just dropped you in and out of your body in two different worlds, if the effect is real. I know I was, I was, I'm, I, this is not a length and partial thing. This is a science, communication, algorithm, social media thing. So I will actually reject the premise that the solution is to know, get constantly jerked back and forth between it does work. It doesn't work. It's the best. It's the worst. Again, I don't think it's good for anybody. I thought it was emotionally satisfying. That is fair. That is fair. And you know what? The same thing is true politics is why it keeps staying that way. Like I'm, I'm tired of these. I didn't lead the charge. I said not a word of it. I just watched this play out. I was like, well, that at least now the, the exaggerated perspectives are balancing themselves out a little bit. But no, I will say this now. This feels good. I will, I will say it's emotionally satisfying and you're allowed to feel things. You don't give you that permission. When it comes to creatine, I think that the easiest way to kind of, don't go down a creatine rabbit hole. No, we got to talk very briefly. I'm giving you some, some free information that you can utilize in future positions like that. But when you're trying to like dampen some of the like out of control, like, you know, totally off the rails enthusiasm right now, which is very speculative about some of these effects of creatine. It's like, you can just tell people, I've been in the fitness industry for, for you, it'd be 50 years at this point. And you'd say, I, for the last 40 years, I have all these young kids who come up to me and say, hey, Dr. Helms, I've been taking creatine for two years. How do I tell if I'm a responder or not? Like Helms, how many people have asked you that? So it's like, we're simultaneously living in these parallel universes where the people who just heard about creatine are like, oh my God, I might be unstoppable if I, if I take five grams a day. And the people who've been taking it for two years are like, I'm not, should I have been feeling it yet? It's, it's two years enough that I would know if this is doing anything at all for me. And it's just so hard to imagine we live in a world where both of those things are happening in parallel. And if we could just get those two cohorts to speak to each other and sort it out amongst themselves, that'd be very helpful. Well, the issue is that never high enough dose for cognitive effects. Yeah. And as we all remember, the loading phase did turn us into Nobel Prize winners and super saying God-like individuals. But, and then we just stop doing it. We're like, you know what? I don't want to keep loading. Let me get one, you know, no effects after this. Yes. Too expensive to use 20 grams. Yeah. No, I agree. No, okay, but that's sad. That is the extent of my going off the rails to indulge my emotional satisfaction at the expense of scientific rigor and also to indulge anecdotes about how creatine is both going to change everything and also can't seem to change anything at the individual level, at least in a detectable way. But, Helm's, here's what I'm going to propose. So we were also going to talk about muscle swelling. What if we give people the condensed, concise version because you actually wrote about a new study on muscle swelling that is going to be published in the Mass Research Review on the 1st of March year 2026. So that's coming up in just a couple weeks. So we can at least give people the kind of highlights and let them know what they're in store for as they crack open that new issue of the Mass Research Review. I will see your request to keep me on not only on track, but also contained to a more high level short take. and I will do my best to accommodate it, knowing the limitations of being air counts. So, new study comes out, Alvarez and colleagues. And this is one that was done very well, but otherwise probably would not have been talked about in evidence-based fitness if it wasn't for another study that has recently gone from preprints to full publication, and that is by the good pellent in colleagues over at FAU, along with Dr. Zach Robinson, Dr. Mike Zerdos, who runs the lab, the Florida Atlantic University Muscle Lab, where they published a meta-regression on over 1,000 people and almost 3,000 studies showing that there was this diminishing returns relationship with volume. And there really kind of rubbed a lot of people the wrong way who had strong beliefs about low volume training. And after many various ways of what seemed to be from my perspective, throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck, oh, no one trained to failure. Actually, 80% of them did. Oh, these are all untrained participants. Well, why would that be different? And also this has seen no trained participants. They've landed on, you know what, let's just kick over, not even poison the wall. Let's kick over the wall, smash it, pave it out, and do some pit mining around it. - There's no more walls. - Fill it with cement. Yeah, seal it up like a sarcophagus. - Exactly. - Yeah. - Yes, and they came to the conclusion, well, actually, this is swelling. And here are some speculative comments about, we need to wait longer than 48 to 72 hours. That is the typical standard waiting period before measuring hypertrophy or you're capturing swelling. And of course, as we know with no evidence to support it, but it's seen as reasonable when I say it, swelling scales linearly with the volume you do. So the supposed relationship that we see of hypertrophy and volume is just capturing increasing levels of edema to where people who trained with high volume are essentially just walking around with perma pumps and fluid leaking between all the interstitial spaces and their muscles at all times. - Yeah, when they walked to the case, when they walked by, you can just hear them sloshing around within their own. - Yes, musculoskeletal sense. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, when I met Arnold, a shook his hand and I went, yeah, like that. That was the noise it made. Ironically, I did not meet Arnold, and I did not meet, not shake his hand, but that's why I imagine it would have been like, because of this high volume. - Not Ronnie, how'd you miss on that? - Well, I guess, I mean, no offense to Ronnie, but he's not quite on that own level, you know? He wasn't the governorator, okay. - Okay, fair enough. He was on a different type of level, but quite a level. - Yeah, I would say he was on a higher level in terms of pure competitive bodybuilding, but he was not, you know, like our last action hero, nor was he a two-time Republican governor in a heavily-blue state, which basically, he got there because he's Arnold, right? - Yeah. - Anywho. So that was the narrative. So really, this study is important because of these claims online that were more related to Pellan, and while I just straw-man the argument, I'm gonna steal in it for a second. One of the main rationale for why this was held up was also contained in the same meta-analysis. Metameteraggression, they looked at the strength data and would, hey, after five or six sets, we're not seeing reliable increases in strength, so what gives? Maybe ignoring the fact that there was only about 40% overlap in the studies, maybe ignoring the fact that when you do have a lot of untrained participants, they will grow quite well, but there's only so much motor learning they can get, so much strength, you can gain in a short period, and made me most importantly ignoring the fact that the best way to assess the influence of a variable on hypertrophy is that I don't know measure hypertrophy, not strength, but I can understand what they're coming from. So, Alvarez, what did they do? Why does it matter? They took trained participants and randomized them in a counterbalanced, but also within subject crossover design. So that means that there were other own controls, and sorry, not within subject, it wasn't left right, but they did these various protocols, where they did squastal, leg press leg extensions, so a lot of lower body volume, and they either did seven sets all in one session, 14 or 21, and these sets were pretty hard. They started with 90% of their 10 RM, doing eight to 10 reps, and they dropped load once they couldn't hit eight to 10. So they were starting around a two to four RIR, and then each one of these exercises had two to three sets in a seven set condition, and then double that, and then a third more, and then the 21 set going from 14 to 21. So in the 21 set condition, especially, there was a lot of sets to failure. Now here's the crazy thing. They measured performance, the ability to, see how many reps they could get with that same 10 RM load that they pre-tested with at 24, 48, and 72 hours. They also measured PRS, so they're perceived recovery status, as well as their session RPE, and then the big ones, the ones that are most important that they measured here, was two things, muscle thickness. So this is, when measure either swelling or edema, and there's an important distinction between the two, and echo intensity, something that people probably aren't familiar with, but it's basically when you look at the image, how bright or dark is it. Now this is a useful measure for a lot of different areas. It will be brighter when someone has more fat infiltration, as well as connective tissue and muscle, and that's generally a less healthy muscle. You'll see that in sedentary populations, people with metabolic disease, and it also occurs with sarcopenia and aging. - How is the analysis of this, yes. - I was gonna say, I used to do a lot of echo intensity work during my PhD, and it was really striking, man. When you do a muscle ultrasound, we would do studies on, very sedentary people with obesity, and then we would turn around and do a study on very, very high level athletes, who are single-digit body fat, or very low double-digit. And I mean, the muscle, it's difficult to explain exactly how different they looked within the image. And yeah, the athlete, he's beautiful, dark image, like a black hole. And then on the alternative side, you'd see so much of this fat and connective tissue and filtration is really striking. - And you know, actually a really good way to contextualize that to the lay population is never even looked at an ultrasound, except for related to babies and movies, or maybe their own child, is to think about the reason why, probably Trex and I are flexitarian, pescutarian, vegan vegetarian different times of our career. If you look at the lives that a, say, factory-farmed, cow has, right? And you look at the meat when you get it, and it's marbled and a lot of infiltration from fat and tissue like that, which might taste good, in some cases, maybe not. It actually prefer a lean or cut. And then you look at venison, hunted venison, deer, entirely different. One is just straight lean meat, cooks up fast, you gotta cook it differently, different flavor. Some of that's related to iron and other things, but that is very visible on ultrasound. And while you can look at, quote unquote, muscle quality, and fat infiltration using it, it also tells you when there is damage to the muscle. So when there is actual mechanical damage, and you have what's called z-line streaming, and actual disruption to the sarcomers, and you see leaking into the interstitial space, and the subsequent inflammatory response of the body trying to heal it, that also shows up as a brighter image. So echo intensity can tell you about inflammation, as well as actual tissue damage. So if you were to look at someone with a true muscle tear, you're gonna get a nice bright white spot. And that is why some physiotherapist and physical therapists will use ultrasound in addition to other imaging techniques. If there's a suspected muscle tear, and I could see where it is, how long it is, and they can measure it, that good stuff. So they looked at echo intensity, as well as muscle thickness, immediately post, and pre, of course, to get a baseline measure. And then at 24, 48, and 72 hours after these training protocols. And again, this is not 14, seven, or 21 sets in a week of quadricep training. It's in one session, right? So these are all what you might argue is relatively high volume protocols. If you had two leg days in a week, and you did seven sets on just quads, that's 14 sets a week. If you had two leg days in a year of 14, that's 28. If you did 21, now we're at 42 sets, right? Now we're up in Crazy Land with some of the studies that have been, you know, critique, you know, the 52 set study and whatnot. So the wild thing that they found tracks across all these measures is that, yes, they perceived it to be harder. There weren't necessarily differences in a perfectly linear way, but especially when you compare the 21, the seven set group, you're seeing higher session RPE, lower perceived recovery status, which persisted across the days. And the reason is, because they also tested performance. So 24, 48 and 72 hours, even though they didn't train, except for quote unquote training, you know, 24, 48 and 72 hours ago, they had to do that 10 RM repetitions to fail your test again on squats. So imagine you're recovering from this crippling 21 set quad day, and then every subsequent day, you got to put the bar in your back, load your 10 RM, that you got in pre-testing and go to failure until you actually missed and got spotted. So yeah, it's going to persist with not feeling recovered, but you're actually practically recovered, because here's the thing. Performance was elevated above baseline in all three groups with no differences between groups. So they could still knock out a slightly better performance compared to pre-test. And you might go, well, that probably means the pre-test wasn't valid. And I go, well, you know, it doesn't mean, though, is that the 21 set group that trained near to failure felt racked, wasn't still recovered despite the fact that they might have had a slightly low tenor of initial test. And there was no differences between conditions or even like trends when you look at it. Really similar numbers, right? Additionally, muscle swelling only went up at post. It did not stay up, it returned a baseline, and not even again a hint or any kind of indication, even greater variability. 24, 48, and 72 hours it fell right back to baseline. And the main critiques of this go right back to what we talked about before. People were like, "Ah, no, they didn't have a large amount of sample size. They did post-hot power analysis. It was only 13 people. Yeah, but it was a 13 person crossover, so with those perfect controls between conditions. And while I will agree, a sample size, even in a crossover design of 13, means that I don't know if these 13 dudes for another thing, that's only guys, well trained dudes, though, are just have a unique combination of a genetic predisposition and a training history that makes them very, very damaged resistant. They had a robust repeated bout effect. That's possible. But we've got other data that actually corroborates this. And probably the most notable one is the one that we were both part of. And that was Dr. Martin Reflow's PhD research, where he had people doing a actual within subject design. And I did my arms, but at the home, I can't show you my legs. Where they were doing leg extensions and leg curls to one to two RIR, or to momentary failure for eight weeks. And a really cool thing that Martin decided to do was he measured them at 48 and 72 hours, standard protocol, looking at ultrasound muscle thickness. Then they waited another 72 hours. So now we're at the 120 to 144 hour mark. So now we're into day six and seven after the last training session and no training in between and measured again. And he did agreement and reliability statistics on those values. And there was almost perfect correlations between the measurements that were taken on day six and seven and day two and three. And these individuals were highly trained. Many of them were competitive bodybuilders as well as competitive power lifters. So robust repeated bout effect. And the training protocol they did was 10 to 17 sets per week of quads. So we're talking about moderate to high volume. I would argue or moderately high volume at the very least. And that was scaled to their habitual volume. So I think this is probably the most ecologically valid or I should say the most specific way to answer the question of are we seeing hypertrophy being confounded by the measure things? In that study where it wasn't even the main research question because it wasn't just an acute study over 72 hours. It was actual measurements when we think hypertrophy would have occurred. And I would say six and seven days is enough to maybe even be seeing the start of hypertrophy if you're not careful. So all in all, I think between those two studies and again, there's actually others. I am pretty confident that in most cases when you're doing anything besides extremely novel levels of very high volume and high intensity training, 48 to 72 hours should be plenty for you to especially in trained lifters. But probably even in some untrained cohorts, if they're healthy and they're not doing anything nuts, to gauge true hypertrophy is occurring. So when you see someone purveying that narrative still to this day that basically any time there would be something that would cause swelling, we can't trust the research, I would say they're either misinformed or just holding on for dear life to a narrative that enables them to maintain their current beliefs instead of learning something new. Because I was going to say I would imagine a lot of the people who are pushing the anti-volume narrative high intensity, extremely low volume to maximize hypertrophy, I'm sure they reviewed this data, found it to be compelling and then retracted their last 10 years of content. Well I would say that would be like the last two years of content. I would say that it's a calendar version. Yeah, first hit the pre-pint servers. Another thing that they also did was they definitely considered with equal levels of critique studies on training to failure, which has also been shown to elevate the time course of muscle damage. They said, "Hey, this also equally applies to not training to failure versus training to failure." When I advise you to do low volume failure training, we actually can't trust the data on that. So we don't know anything about training and I'm going to retire and become a groundskeeper. Yeah. Now Helms, I did want to ask, I know this isn't really a sexy conclusion to kind of put the cherry on top, but you mentioned the difference between swelling and edema. Can you elaborate on this? Yes, absolutely. So one way which makes it difficult to measure, like when people say swelling, you should ask a deeper question because it is well established and it was even observed in this study that immediately after training, there's an increase in muscle size. And that is due to hyperemia and hypohydration. That's just the ismotic effects of training that drive muscle into the cell. Even in a hydrated state, you're going to get roughly a 10 to 20% increase in muscle size if you measure it by thickness from just lifting with any kind of sufficient effort. It's the pump and it persists for a while and some studies suggest it can persist for a long time. Now if you're also doing novel training, a lot of eccentric high volume and a failure, you're going to be getting not only that immediately from training and it might persist for maybe several hours or two a day if it's totally novel and you just haven't had that kind of thing happening before and you've got that perma pump feel that you could sometimes get after certain training sessions, but you're also getting damage. And the thing about muscle damage is that the inflammatory process that occurs afterwards, there is a delay before you are typically seeing that occur. That's why I really like that they measured echo intensity as well as muscle thickness changes because the way they a priori operationally defined measuring a dima, which is increase in inflammation and fluid retention in a region consequent to inflammation, I think is probably the way we describe it in the context of muscle versus muscle swelling, which is just that transient pump and increase in muscle hydration and blood volume is essentially the time course and the presence or lack thereof of echo intensity. So echo intensity did increase immediately. So there was some degree of increase in either inflammation or some possible acute muscle damage and fiber disruption, but it was totally gone by 24 hours, both the swelling and echo intensity returned to baseline and then stayed that way to through 72 hours. But let's say they had observed similar muscle thickness increases at post and at 24 hours with no echo intensity change and then echo intensity went up at 48 hours. That would coincide with what we'd expect to be the inflammatory process and the repair of muscle damage, right? And that's why they call it delayed onset muscle illness, not just arms or you know, because there's a sound weird, but B, the delay is there because you don't get sore immediately from well, you do sometimes if you really blast yourself, you can get immediate soreness from training. I've done that. And that's like immediate fiber disruption for mechanical reasons, but most of the time delayed onset muscle soreness peaks after the muscle damage has occurred and it's actually part of the repair process, which comes from inflammation and puts some pressure to our best guess on the nosy sectors, the pain receptors in the muscle. So when you're actually, and that's sometimes why I encourage people to not worry too much about training wall sore, because you're actually training when you know you're in the process of recovery. And oftentimes you're going to find that you're pretty well recovered. And I hit PRs wall sore on muscle groups, not like cripplingly sore, but it changes my my motor pattern. But that's why you see typically there's a disassociated time course when you do time series muscle damage studies with when is performance suppressed, like say peak torque or volume capacity or maximum strength compared to when doms peaks. And I've even seen studies where there's an inverse relationship between the two when doms is higher performance is actually on the upswing. And it's going back or even above baseline if you actually got some type of adaptation out of the person. The soreness isn't indicative of the repair, not the damage. Yeah, no, it's really interesting. I remember being fascinated this whole idea of like the delayed kind of inflammatory effect. I remember taking a class with more physiology medically oriented and they were talking about what at that time is kind of an innovative way to treat spinal cord bruising. Right. And so when you have a severe spinal cord injury, there's a possibility you sever it. You have either a full or a partial perforation of the spinal cord in that injury and that's catastrophic. Like they know. But if you've ever noticed, I like American football. Unfortunately, there's more than a few instances where there are severe spine injuries and neck injuries. And sometimes on the interview that are like on the broadcast, they'll say, by the way, they're in the hospital and we're just going to wait for a couple days and see how bad it is. And it's like, well, what do you mean? Like, I mean, what what happened? You do not do the imaging. But when you have bruising of the spinal cord, the reason they say we have to wait and see and everything's dicey and there's a lot on the line is they're waiting to see how severe the inflammatory process is going to be. And sometimes that inflammatory process responding to the bruise in the spinal cord is kind of like the stereotypical character in a movie who wants to do their best and wants to fix things and unfortunately, despite their best efforts and good intentions, they come and just bungle everything up. Sometimes that inflammatory insult post injury is what actually is going to determine will this person regain feeling? Will they regain movement? And that's why some of the more innovative procedures we're learning about at the time, which I think are less innovative now because time has passed, is very aggressive cooling process. protocols immediately after spinal cord bruise injuries to try to clamp down pharmacologically using temperature, using every means possible to really clamp down on trying to attenuate some of that immediate kind of inflammatory wave that's responding to that bruise on the spinal cord. So, just kind of a fascinating parallel where, yeah, sometimes it's like, you think it's bad now with that muscle soreness, but wait until there's that kind of, I don't want to call it overkill, but let's call it a very exaggerated inflammatory response that's going to come and really have you wobbling around for a few days. That's really interesting. I actually didn't know that, Tricks. And that's because, you know, and that's one of the consequences of being ignorant to, and this isn't the whole Eric's anti-American. I don't watch other football, any football. Yeah, you don't have rugby down there, I'm sure people have all sorts of spinal cord lilies, scares in rugby. They do. As we know, the only sports I watch that are, at least need to be adjacent to a barbell in some way, either in training the combine or in the actual performance or practice. Yeah. What gets you to the competition or what you actually do in the competition. And I will accept dumbbells as well for something, you know, especially big, big silly circus dumbbells. 100%. Yeah. All right, Helms. If people want even more information about muscle swelling, edema, what this means for everything we have been purporting to know about hypertrophy over the last decade, that article is coming out, like I said, March 1st in the Mass Research Review, but I think you did, I think you did a stand up job of giving people the goods, not giving away the whole totality of all the value to be gained for reading the article, but also not doing that kind of shady thing where you peek people's interest and then pull the rug out and say, by the way, go to the other side of the paywall if you want to pay off, right? So I think that you, I think you did a good job delivering while also leaving plenty for people to dive into March 1st. Thank you, sir. All right, Helms. Anything else you want to tell the good people before we sign off for the week? No, just that I am going to be getting into writing about critical procedures to manage terminal diseases and even cure them in some cases in Mass, but I will save that style of content for those like, Hey, you're going to die in the next three weeks. Check out our Mass article coming out in four weeks for what you need to do, not going to spoil the goods that's behind the paywall. Perfect. Yeah, it's, it's all about that balance of profitability and ethics. Speaking of which, speaking of which, Helms, I've got a doozy of an article about personality types and in social media interactions. It was our last episode where I was kind of brainstorming some things. I really have progressed those ideas and flesh them out more and put them into an article. That also is coming out March 1st. And in the process of doing it, here's my little spoiler that I actually won't deliver on. I, Helms, as I, I facetiously say in the article, some of my best friends are influencers. So how could I be accused of anti-influencer rhetoric? It's preposterous. But as I started putting the ideas together, I kind of realized that like, if you were in some kind of perverse thought experiment where someone said, this is what the dark triad set of personality traits is and you need to turn that into a business model, it would be the model of influencer. Oh, as someone who at least is influencer adjacent. I'm deeply offended. Again, I don't think you're wrong. No, I acknowledge in the article like there is a meaningful percentage of influencers who are just people publishing a public, publicly following their passions and love in every second of it and they are joyful, wonderful folks. Everyone come along for the right. It's beautiful, right? No, like if you did say, hey, like we're just interested in the bottom line, how do we turn dark triad traits into an actual business? It would be the business of influence. And so that is the teaser for my weird article that is rooted in the science of personality and how it pertains to evidence-based fitness and online communication at large or in general. It also has these weird little extremely cynical turns and also very charitable assumptions mixed in. It's a wild ride, I think. I don't know if you've read it in its entirety yet, but I think it's a very unarticle. That's the best part. I'm jumping into peer review today and I'm only peer reviewed Mike's article. So I have all the viewers to do and Lawrence, which I'm going to have to jump into years next because it sounds like I will need to have somewhat of an existential crisis coming home and then a very quick degree of narcissistic denial to maintain myself as the hero world. So I can peer review the rest. I put enough in there that it will jump off the page that you would say, "Helms, none of this could possibly be about you." You know how valuable you are. I've got all these. Once I walk you up to the brink, I think I timed well the little snippets that remind you. This doesn't apply to you. I don't mention you by name, but let me know if I was too light on those and we can insert them. Well, as you know, if there is one thing that's really important to do when you are in business with a sociopath, is make sure that they don't think that you think they're a sociopath. Yeah. Or that typically goes poorly for you. So I think you know that I can pretend that I don't know that to maintain my own worldview and we'll go from there. Beautiful. Yeah, listen, we talk it up every month, but I do think this is a really fun issue of mass. Lawrence got a really cool article about peptides coming up. It's a doozy. So this is the time to get on the ship because the rocket ship is careening toward the moon, Mars, and whatever lies beyond. So all right, folks, thanks so much as always for joining us on Iron Culture. Really appreciate you. And we will be back in seven days with yet another episode. Take care.