Everything You Need To Know About Muscle Protein Synthesis ft. Jorn Trommelen

okay what is going on everyone so what follows in this video is a conversation that I had with Joran tromelin who's currently pursuing his ph.d his area of research focuses on muscle protein synthesis and he's pursuing that over in the Netherlands at one of the leading labs in this field I'm your niz a really smart and well-read guy as you'll see very acquainted with all of the scientific literature on this topic so this is actually just going to be part one of our conversation and in this part we focus mostly on training as so as to max out the muscle protein synthesis of the interview we focus on diet so how to eat so as to max out muscle protein synthesis and we ended up getting a little bit carried away and going down the rabbit hole with training but it turned out to be I think very informative now so I hope that you guys like it now if you would like to hop around I'm gonna have timestamps down there in the description as usual so you can skip according to topic that you're interested in and also make sure you go over and check out your website I'll have that linked in the description it's very helpful and if you'd rather listen on another platform I'm gonna upload this on my podcast I'm still in the process of rebranding that right now but I think if you just search Jeff Nippert you should be able to find it in iTunes and I'll put it up on stitcher as well and so you can listen on the go but for the rest of you feel free to comment down below yarn said he was gonna pay attention to the comments and answer any serious questions that you might have down there so if there's something you're curious about I'm just drop us a comment and we'll do our best to get back to you so without further ado here is my conversation with your n-- tromelin alright so everyone I'm here with Jorn tromelin and we're gonna have a discussion today about protein intake and in particular some of the work that he's been doing on muscle protein synthesis so John I just want to say thanks man for coming on and sharing all your knowledge with us we really appreciate it yeah thanks for having me for sure um so before we dig in with all this maybe you can give the listeners some idea of what you've been up to what you're currently working on yes so I'm a researcher at mistake University and the Netherlands and our research group focuses on muscle metabolism so we got a pretty big group some different research interests but at all centers around muscle metabolism so we have a few people who focus on sarcopenia so age-related muscle loss and how we can prevent that with nutrition and exercise and others are focused on muscle loss and get need patients for example or during an immobilization when you break a leg and then me and a few others are mostly focused on on athletes so either looking at Erika Janik aids like creatine or carbohydrate diets for endurance athletes or protein supplementation for those who want to build strength and size and then our lab is probably best known for the use of metabolic tracers so what you can do for example is simply do a training study and see whether or not you become bigger or stronger from an intervention but we really like to look what's going on in the muscles so we often take muscle biopsies and then we can study the underlying processes and yeah that often forms the basis of better understanding interventions and coming up with even smarter interventions rather than just concluding whether or not something works of course that's also very important but we really like yeah understanding the mechanisms and coming up with future hypothesis gotcha I've noticed just like in the field a lot of bodybuilders and strength athletes have taken a liking to your work because of the I guess crossover application there do you have an interest in bodybuilding or like what's your personal interest that kind of got you into working in this field well I was pretty much the skinniest guy you've ever seen still far from in the physique athletes but we're doing a little bit better I always joke that I no longer have to run to get wet in the shower but yeah so I just yeah started lifting I asked the biggest guy in the gym like how did you get so big and he was like yeah you seemed to work out pretty hard and this was all when I was like teenager but what about your nutrition and this was before YouTube was a thing before social media was the thing I was like nutrition what what does that have to do with anything and then I started to Luke on internet it wasn't that much at that time and then at some point I stumbled upon an abstract and it wasn't like an internet forum I was like what is there is weirdly formatted piece of text so that is basically a summary of a study and then you know I try to understand it without refusing and that's pretty much how I stumbled into research and luckily I have I think more talent for research then then fitness so I'm pretty much gone all-in on that awesome yeah I mean we're so grateful for your work because it really does have quite a lot of application and for any of the listeners who aren't aware like I've drawn from quite a bit of your work especially recently and there's one piece that you have on the internet that's basically like a wiki of everything you could ever want to know about muscle protein synthesis and that was that was really fantastic and really really helpful so if you'd like maybe a more in-depth summary if maybe some of the stuff we talked about here I'll link that down in the description or the show notes so you guys can go check it out it's that was amazing Thanks Thanks so I guess we'll start with is muscle protein synthesis so that's a term you hear thrown around a lot I feel like a lot of people might not know exactly what it is so maybe you can give us a quick primer on what that process involves yeah so I like to say that muscle protein synthesis it isn't really rocket science it's much more complicated than that but the simple version is not that hard so the analogy I like to use is that your muscles are like a wall in bodybuilding you want to build that wall bigger and the bricks of that wall are amino acids so the building blocks of protein so we protein and we want to add those to our muscles so the addition of amino acids to the wall is called muscle protein synthesis but at the same time the wall is also being broken down and that process is called muscle protein breakdown and both processors are always running so it's not like oh I'm anabolic so I'm in a muscle protein synthesis but running it's just if one exceeds the other you're in a positive balance so you're growing or if breakdown exceeds synthesis you're in a neck net negative balance and you're shrinking so it sounds like both are very important but actually muscle protein synthesis is much more important than muscle protein breakdown for a variety of reasons the first one is that muscle protein breakdown stays within a pretty narrow range so it goes up a little bit with exercise and with nutrition you can reduce it a little bit but in contrast you can influence muscle protein synthesis a lot like three to five fold increases so whether or not you'll be in a positive balance or not almost entirely depends on your muscle protein synthesis so yeah and there's also like pretty much the only thing you can do to reduce breakdown is to eat and you only need a minimal amount of insulin to have the maximal in a bit inhibitory effect or muscle protein breakdown so anytime you're not faster essentially you've done what you could do then the final issue is that it sounds really bad right we want to make that wall bigger so we want to prevent the breakdown of that wall but so imagine you have a house and you want to make it house bigger but there's some cracks in the walls do you really want to make that house bigger or is the whole thing gonna collapse so what you actually see is that most protein breakdown is you so you can genetically engineer rats for example for obvious reasons you cannot do that in humans but if you genetically engineer rats so that they cannot have muscle protein breakdown these rats are actually smaller and weaker than rats that have normal functioning muscle protein breakdown so muscle protein breakdown is a functional process essentially if you could theoretically totally prevent it it's probably a bad thing and it makes total sense if you have cracks in your wall you want to break down that small part of the wall reuse those building blocks and now you have a much stronger foundation to build on so that's why in most studies we only measure muscle protein synthesis it almost entirely determines muscle protein balance anyway and at least in healthy subjects and in those who yeah athletes essentially how high muscle protein rain down rates are is very predictable it might be a little bit different if you're talking about patient populations or Jeff for healthy people muscle protein breakdown rates are not that interesting right I've kind of heard it like with resistance training the goal is to kind of tear the muscle down a little bit I'm still kind of let that like muscle protein breakdown kind of sink in and then with your nutrition after you kind of allow the distance the synthesis side of that equation to sort of exceed it so that the net balance is that you're kind of anabolic is that is that kind of true is that kind of part of the point of resistance training is to break the muscle down a little bit not necessarily so it's a little bit of a debated topic so Brad Schoenfeld has popularized the theories of muscle hypertrophy which are mechanical tension metabolic stress and muscle damage and then the letter to show muscle damage and metabolic stress those are highly debated with some people even saying they have negative impact on muscle hypertrophy and should be avoided if possible so yeah you definitely don't need to induce muscle damage maybe a little bit is good maybe but a lot of these things it's like a curve where a little bit is good and too much is bad or it's a inverted u curve where a little bit or a whole lot is bad but in between is OK so it's not necessarily good or bad might depend on the amount but now the goal is definitely not induce as much damage as possible if that was true you would just go to a boxing gym get punched in the body all day and you would be the most Jack guy ever yeah exactly so so then in what context is muscle protein breakdown good so when when you resist this train is breakdown generally exceeding synthesis is that at least true or not depends on your feeding stay essentially so pretty much any time you eat some protein muscle protein synthesis rates will exceed muscle protein breakdown rates and so yeah if so if you if you eat protein before a workout and we've actually done done their studies then even during training you can be anabolic so in a positive muscle protein balance right so it would would you say a goal I guess would be to always have synthesis sort of exceed breakdown as much as you possibly can to be as anabolic as you possible theoretically yes now in I would say the last five years more research and this has been inspired by the info in a minute fasting movement has looked at the role of auto coffie which is essentially yeah a form of muscle protein breakdown and the idea is that if during aging for example certain proteins get miss fold it and they just accumulate in the body and that's a bad thing essentially so if you fully prevent muscle protein breakdown bad things seem to happen but the ideal situation is a pretty high where there's a lot of protein breakdown so you never have old dysfunctional proteins but at the same time you're making more protein so you're gaining muscle mass but at same time you make sure that you keep renewing your old dysfunctional proteins and that's a little bit similar what you see in the field of diabetes and exercise where you see that endurance trained athletes they have a lot of fat in their muscles and that's a good thing and they can use it as a fuel where people with diabetes also have a lot of fat in their muscles but it's a bad thing it causes inflammation and insulin resistance and the idea there is the same that if you have a high turnover of the fat so continuously synthesis but also breakdown of these fats then it's healthy so if I would summarize it it is everything is just very dynamic and people like to simplify it a little bit with if one is bigger than the other it's good or not but that's not really the case right right so then if if the like sort of narrative that like your your training till I tear the muscle down and then you eat the protein after and it builds it back up that's kind of wishy-washy sort of bro science it seems kind of so then what is the role of training them in in this equation why why does resistance training why is that effective at building muscle basically yeah so well it would be perfect if all we had to do is eat protein so we know protein stimulates muscle protein synthesis and like I said pretty much anytime you eat protein protein synthesis rates will exceed muscle protein breakdown rates however we know you cannot just eat 500 grams of protein a day and become a bell tubular would be would be great but doesn't work like that so your body doesn't really seem to hold on to muscle protein if there's no need to and that is more or less what exercise does it tells your body like we can actually use all these proteins that we synthesized so we know that there's synergy between the two after exercise you respond better to protein so one of the things you can do so this comes back to those tracers I mentioned earlier you can tracers in the protein that you feed through your subjects for example and then you can see how much of the amino acids form your nutrition are being used for muscle growth and even if you don't train some of the amino acids you eat are being used to form new muscle tissue but if you train you simply utilize a lot more of those amino acids in your nutrition very important to note as that effect is pretty long-lasting so very common in the fitness industry is the so called window of potential where you have to eat protein immediately after exercise that's not necessarily true depends a little bit on training status most likely but for at least one to two days after exercise if you eat protein you utilize it better if you've done some resistance exercise so you really need the combination of both if you want to grow mm-hmm so you would say that resistance training basically makes the muscle sort of more sensitive to amino acid uptake after training and that effect lasts for 24 48 or maybe even longer after training so that kind of I guess like D values the necessity of getting those amino acids in right away after training exactly yeah so in regards to training so I guess as I see it you have basically two factors that you can kind of manipulate you have training and diet so as a kind of max out muscle protein synthesis so let's just quickly cover the training side of things first is there anything from your research you think you can pull from that you know can inform us on how to train so as to sort of maximize muscle protein synthesis yeah so I see trading and programming as a combination of science and an art there's the the science gives a few clear guidelines basically the rules within you have in which you have to play so there's clearly things that are just suboptimal but then once you stay within those rules you can essentially program to your desire so yeah basically there's been research and all these variables for example how many sets do you have to do now it's pretty clear that multiple sets for example are just better than one set when I grew up high intensity training hit sir not the cardio variant but just the strength training variance was pretty popular and the idea was all you need is one balls-to-the-wall set anything other than that is overtraining that's just completely wrong multiple sets are clearly superior for most protein synthesis and muscle growth than just one set so how many sets do you need or that for example depends a little bit on your training frequency so there's reasonable evidence that doing about 10 sets is superior to doing less than 10 sets but it's 10 sets a week so it depends a little bit on how you divide your training split essentially so do you do two days with five sets or do you do three days with three sets so you can play around with that a little bit my guess is also that it's highly dependent on training status so if you've been doing 10 sets for a year at some point your body is pretty much used to death and then volume likely needs to increase another variable often discussed is how much weight should you use is there like an hypertrophy range where it's just optimal and then off the new year six to twelve reps I think a CSM which is essentially the the biggest organization in Fitness still recommends that but so Stu Phillips started that research line and very clearly demonstrated that essentially with any amount of weight you can build muscle as long as you train to muscular failure so yeah the goal of training essentially as to recruit and fatigue your muscle fibers and doesn't really matter if you do a very heavy weight and then actually you can only do a few reps or that you do very little weights or even Jeremy Lin ecchi a sho net even without any weights and I'm not talking about body weights training no literally just contracting the muscle so could almost call posing even with that you can build muscle mass as long as you train to fatigue and what are evidence that support that is for example from blood flow restriction where the idea is that you wrap a band for example around your arms therefore oxygen can really get into the muscle and potentially the metabolic products cannot really escape the muscle so your muscle fatigues much earlier so that sounds like a bad thing but because your muscle is fatigued much earlier that is really the only thing the muscle senses so with very little weight and very little reps you already fully fatigue the muscle so the muscle pretty much things I have to grow so weight and reps doesn't really matter as long as you fatigue the muscle then doesn't really need to be failure probably not if you stay one to two reps shy of failure it's probably fine other variables is for example rest periods it's also pretty clear that you want at least two minutes of rest between sets and then of course frequency is also highly debated but again it's pretty clear that you want at least a training frequency of two times per week where you hit each muscle group at least two times per week and then whether more is better is not really clear so those I would say are the general guidelines in which a good training program has to has to play with but then whether it's two three four or even six times its it's highly debatable also what's a little bit difficult in in research is that we all want to do the super sexy studies but it's very simple to do a study to show that training three times a week is better than training one time per week for example but to find the difference between training four times per week and training five times per week that then essentially need a study of 10,000 subjects to find because it's diminishing returns right so all the sexy hypotheses are almost impossible to show in a study which is I guess like the frustration of a lot of people why why do researchers always do these basic studies I thought we already knew this but the thing is if you look at I call it the sexy questions so does the high frequency matter does nutrient timing matters it's very likely that your study is too small so basically you have statistical issues to come through proper conclusions and then people say see it doesn't really matter what training frequency is our nutrient timing doesn't matter which isn't the correct conclusion either it's just a statistical issue so yeah I don't think we'll have any clear evidence what about what's truly optimal because there was yeah those sexy research questions are very difficult but I do think we have pretty good guidelines within which rules we have to play mm-hmm that's yeah that's great that's really comprehensive so just to like quickly I guess try to summarize that you basically are saying you want to be doing at least 10 sets per week that may increase depending on your level of training advancement probably be for the most part in the 6 to 12 rep range but as long as you're within some reasonable proximity to failure probably doesn't matter that the actual rep count generally want to be resting two minutes or so between sets is there something special about two minutes or is it more so that it just allows recovery so you can sort of use more load in later sets yeah that that seems to be it so if people don't want to wait two minutes a simple option is superset exercises so do for example a bench press and then do something easy like a leg extension to be fair so this is again it's difficult and research is pretty clear that longer rest periods are superior to short rest periods but then what's being compared is like six sets of one-minute rest for the six sets of five-minute rest and then the conclusion is that five-minute rest is superior but you could argue your training lasts for five times longer what if you use all that time to do more sets mm-hmm right so it's there's so many variables you can play around with that it's almost impossible to get the perfect answer so that's why I always say it's a little bit of an art and that's why we need personal trainers that yeah can tailor it to the needs of the individual right yeah that's what I said too on the point of frequency I think it's become relatively uncontroversial that at least training twice a week is is better than once a week for hypertrophy and Naturals there are some people I think still pushing this that like one times a week one time a week really does seem to well work well if volume is you know matched between conditions and in my experience in the field there are tons of natural bodybuilders at the very top who are still running bro splits for 20 years and they get fantastic results doing it I guess you could always argue that they might get better results or they might have gotten even better results if they had gone twice a week but I feel like the question of frequency tends to be diminished by just simple training age and consistency over time so it's like within a one-year period or something you might get more results if you trained more frequently even with fixed volume but across a 10 or 20 year career I just don't know I feel like at some point you're just gonna hit your your genetic limitation perhaps regardless I don't know how you feel about that and then I'd also be curious just to know like from a muscle protein synthesis researcher if you think that there is at least mechanistic potential benefit in getting those more frequent blips and muscle protein synthesis because as you probably know it doesn't that the sensitivity to the amino acids following training doesn't really last that long like it's not lasting a week right are probably not anyway so it seems like you're at least wasting some potential spikes and synthesis if you wait too long between training how much do you think this really matters in the real world so the longest increase in muscle protein synthesis that has been shown after exercise is 72 hours so that this fits nicely in line with you need to train at least two times per week then the question is also even if you do like a super bro split that you do chest on one day and you do delts on another day and maybe even triceps where you start out with a Close Grip branch how many times have you trained each muscle group right so that's almost like you have four chests have like a heavy day and an and motor a day and maybe the delts you even train three times so even if you do a full-on split how many times have you hit all those muscles really that's that's always difficult yeah it's my guess is that yeah that frequency matters a little bit but yeah like yeah it's like you mentioned it's as well if you train 10 years you're you should be more or less at your genetic potential either way you could argue that your genetic potential is like 5% higher if you optimize things that you never reach that level if you don't have everything dialed in I'm always very pragmatic so like 90% of the discussions in Fitness are just perspective so you have I call it the minimalists essentially to say nothing matters it's just about total amount of protein just about total volume those are the two things you should worry about nothing matters and that's for them it's perfect right if they would have to worry about every possible technique that could give like a 3% increase in gains they would go completely nuts it's more or less a hobby the only one if it's essentially like the a 20% rule like focus on the 20% that gives 80% of the results and then you have competitive athletes that yeah by definition they want to win they want to do everything and for them it's just annoying when you say like oh it doesn't really matter it doesn't really matter no they are like what can I possibly do to beat the guy next to me so things like frequency it it really depends if you enjoy training once a week and your goal isn't to be a competitive bodybuilder do it perfect it's only dangerous when people and online argue like oh it doesn't really matter like yeah to me it's all perspective mm-hmm so always yeah in a discussion people should make clear like I think this gives 80% of the results I don't really care about doing five times as much work for a little bit extra and you know if that's hopefully communicated then it's like fine I'm gonna give this a try because it might be beneficial right right yeah and I think I should say that I guess that whole like 10 year argument where frequency isn't going to matter I guess that I'm saying that in the context of assuming all the other variables are in place like you are training sufficiently intensely you know you do have sufficient volume you're good exercise selection and you know all those other variables are in place I feel like frequency kind of does take a step or two back in terms of priority within that context I mean maybe to add on real quick so yeah probably one of the reasons why high frequency trading got popular more in the evidence based fitness community so to speak is that there's some research that suggests that that increase in muscle protein synthesis becomes shorter the more trained you are and therefore if you're very trained you should train almost daily because you're lucky if your MPs increase even less a day if you're trained to be fair that is not as well-established as some people suggest so when you when we measure muscle protein synthesis we can look at different types of muscle protein synthesis essentially so in all our studies we just looked at what's called makes muscle protein synthesis you just look at whatever protein is in the muscle and you see how it responds but you have all kind of different proteins in the muscle so we are interested in myofibrillar proteins so these are the proteins that can contract so give you strength but are also the big ones that give you muscle mass for example you also have for example mitochondria which we can measure mitochondrial protein synthesis very relevant for endurance athletes not so much in fitness and strength and what you see is if you're untrained and you start lifting pretty much every type of protein in your muscle is like what is going on I need to adapt to this so you see with an untrained person if he's going to Train mitochondrial protein synthesis is stimulated for example so if you measure mixed muscle protein synthesis you say oh this is going up a lot and after like three months you're mighty ganya no longer need to adapt to resistance training anymore and then if you only look at mixed muscle protein synthesis you say like oh the response is now down but it is the other irrelevant type of proteins that are no longer adapting when you actually look at the mind fiddler protein it's not that clear that that response becomes shorter so the theory that the MPS response becomes shorter the more advanced you are it's not that clear to be honest I wouldn't be surprised if it's shorter but it's not as clear as some people make it seem what I also want to add is maybe even if it's true maybe you should train more freaking but the alternative is what happens if I double the volume of my workout that might also simply increase and prolong the muscle protein synthesis various ways you can play around with your training programs the only thing that is just clear is you need to force your body to adapt otherwise nothing is going to happen so just I'll just messing around with frequency on his own is not gonna do that much I think you always your weekly volumes should increase the more advanced you are which makes sense if you think of Sun Tanning for example you need yeah low intensity maybe once a week to get a little bit darker but then yeah the more advanced you are yeah but more often higher intensity longer that's ultimately always yeah you simply need a bigger stimulus now I would argue the higher your total weekly volume gets in practice you almost always need to improve your frequency to to handle that because yeah are you gonna do 30 sets of legs one day that seems horrible yeah yeah I hear you yeah and I I guess the only issue that I have with that like very essentialist line is that you know you mentioned like people will say okay all you need to worry about is your weekly volume and your protein intake I feel like in that context training intensity and by that I mean intensity of effort does almost unfairly take a back seat it's like this volume is only important in the context of a sufficient training intensity so I feel like if anything should come first especially in light of all this research showing that you know it's provided the sets are taken sufficiently close to failure you can get similar hypertrophy across all these spectrums of rep ranges I think that that should put almost intensity in the driver's seat at least in the passenger seat I don't know so so based on that what's really interesting is like pretty much like you mentioned so if let's say you could do 20 sets of legs on a day how much is that 20 set word because your performance will be horrible because there's already muscle damage etc and fatigue on the other hand your muscle doesn't care about the weight similars with the blood flow restriction you're doing a amount of weights and your muscle just experiences it as difficult so I wouldn't be surprised if your xx set is pretty worthless but at the same token I wouldn't be surprised if it's just as valuable as your first set because just even though your performance is horrible your your muscle is like again set to fatigue so yeah a lot to love left to discover in that topic well one last quick training question for you what what is your thought on progressive overload how important do you think that is for hypertrophic adaptations over the long term again depends on definition of it to me progressive overload is essentially that tanning analogy again it can be anything so if you go tanning more frequently that works if you tan longer that works if you improve the intensity of the tanning that works a lot of people just take progressive overload this oh you need to do heavier weights overtime and then they think if they have a ten repetition max this week and then in two months they do more weight but for eight repetitions that it's progressive overload but you're just trading weight for less reps in that set so that's not truly progressive overload so either your total weekly volume needs to increase for example or you need to do more weight but for the same amount of reps so yeah I absolutely believe progressive overload is the basis of everything but it's not necessarily more weight ideally it's more weight because just practically you cannot simply add more and more and more sets not just from a time point of view is support them all probably also from an [Music] from a recovery aspect so in the ideal world you keep your volume relatively low and just add weight every week maintain the same amount of reps each set that's the perfect world then you're clearly progressing linear progression everyone's happy but at some point that will no longer work and then you have to add weekly sets and that's just another form of progressive overload mm-hmm I would I would say that yeah the classical definition or at least that's most used in the online community is getting heavier over time is a pretty good indicator so it you can do up you can add all the volume you want if your bench isn't going up your five repetition max or maybe your ten doesn't really matter isn't going up then probably that volume isn't really working either you're overtraining or still under training so I would say that is a very good indicator or of if your other stuff is working essentially mm-hmm I got you I guess like recently I wouldn't say I've become like skeptical of the principal I guess I've just been become a little bit like I guess less enthralled with its position in this whole like dogma because if you just look at a lot of body builders who are at the top a lot of them don't apply progressive overload they go in and use muscle confusion and get fantastic results so I would potentially argue just based on that basis that maybe progressive overload isn't required for hypertrophy but it just like accentuates the the progress if that makes sense or would you say it may be these people who are using muscle confusion do in fact have some form of progression in place they just don't realize it I think the letter I think they have progression without realizing it but I have no clear data on it I don't have clear empirical evidence either but I can assume if you just always like what we do know is that different exercises stimulate different types of muscle fiber soda well I'm not talking you're about type 1 or type 2 muscle fibers but more that just the angle how we online we always call this muscle this exercise hits this muscle from this angle so the better enough recruitment is is different so I can imagine that if you week one all you do is bench then second week you do flies for example that you overload essentially or fibers well you more or less maintain the training stimulus like it's so obviously a weaker stimulus for the outer fibers but it's enough to not go down and then third week you do dumbbell press for example and then you go back to the to your bench but the sort of people who do muscle confusion so to say they don't track their workouts so they because they don't really care about that right so they are more about like yeah the mind muscle connection so they might not realize that over a year their bench has still increased so yeah I think yeah power lifters for example they always track their workouts so they know whether or not something is working while more bodybuilders they don't focus on it but my my god is that they are progressing over time right as otherwise it seems weird to me that if you if you would continue to switch around variables and then five years later they come back to your bench and you still lift you can still bench the same time the same as what you did the first time you ever benched like Evolutionary that makes no sense right you've got all this muscle mass and you still cannot really you're still not adapt to do anything so yeah my guess is there is there is progressive overload right I guess like the only other counter example I would think of I'm not sure if you've seen this but there's this case study where this guy had this really rare muscular condition I forget what it was called but it basically caused the muscle to constantly be contracted or at least it was like contracted way more frequently than a normal person would be and if you just look at this guy he never weight trained at all but if you look at the guy's back it's like extremely muscular so that seems to be an example of hypertrophy in the absence of progressive overload but yet in the presence of a lot of muscular activation or at least contraction or what-have-you so I'd be just I guess just like I don't know conjecture Lee like what where does sort of like muscle act vation fit in with this whole like progressive principle because I could see progressive overload being applied in a very like laxity Segel way whereas if you have like high levels of activation high levels of effort I feel like you could see significant muscle hypertrophy even in the absence of progressive overload perhaps it's a controversial statement and I'm not sure so this rumor not so this pretty much comes back down to that study from Jeremy Lin ecchi who showed that even with just contracting your muscles without any weight people could stimulate muscle growth right so my guess is that when he was 15 he wasn't as big as he when he was 20 so his muscles were contracting as a result there is some hypertrophy and then they contract again but just harder mmm so yeah I think the biggest issue is that progressive overload is used synonymous with doing more weight but that's not necessarily true so I bet if you take an untrained guy let him pose right now look at us even though perhaps EMG data is not optimal to see how how much tension there is in the muscle but let's just use that for now see how hard his muscles are contracting then let him continue posing for the next six months and then afterwards do the same thing I bet that after six months he is able to pose a lot harder and that his muscles are able to generate a lot more force but he hasn't used more weight but just in exposing positions the muscles are still trying to contract as hard as possible and he is generating more force so I want to dig into the the dietary factors here but really quickly you just Park my memory when you said EMG and I guess I've received quite a bit of criticism for using EMG research to support the use of certain specific exercises and there was only a paper published you probably read it and roof I got ski was at least one of the authors on it and it basically like just called into question the validity of using the mg to support exercises and it doesn't really scale with hypertrophy well or at least there's no evidence of that and having read the paper it seems like the main line that they take against using a mg to endorse like training actually training recommendations is that you know the general China line of reasoning is that higher EMG amplitude means greater neuromuscular excitation which means greater activation greater motor unit recruitment greater rates of muscle protein synthesis and then greater hypertrophy over time they took an issue which I think a lot of people do with that final link which is basically muscle protein synthesis over time correlates with more hypertrophy over time apparently that isn't as well-established as people think or it's definitely come under quite a bit of criticism recently what do you think of that criticism and so muscle approach synthesis is my baby so people are calling my baby ugly so figures all with a grain with a grain of salt but so I I have no experience with EMG date on no expert on it we have people down the hall that that do they are they are more skeptical of that initial step that the EMG translates to higher muscle protein synthesis but I would rather not comment on it because it's not my expertise but obviously the idea of measuring muscle protein synthesis is to look at the anabolic potential of an intervention either of certain exercise program or from nutrition and then pretty much the study that that yeah triggered this whole discussion I remember it clearly that paper came the first paper came aligned I'll discuss in a second and I walked through one of the authors who was currently working here I'm like what did you guys do this is gonna be a shitstorm and yes it is so that first study ascent what they did as untrained guys they exercised resistance exercise and the measured muscle protein synthesis for four hours after exercise and then they trained for I think ten weeks or so and looked at do the rates of muscle protein synthesis after that first session correlate with muscle mass gains so the guy who has the highest most protein synthesis after exercise does he also gained the most muscle oh that didn't seem to work out and then a lot of people said seed and most protein synthesis is useless blah blah blah yes my baby so but so I think the main issue is that I come back down I come back to the to the rocket science the muscle protein synthesis stuff is really complex and in my opinion most people don't really get it sorry just come to conclusions where they should like like me with EMG people should say like I don't fully understand this and be a little bit careful with their conclusions so we mentioned earlier muscle of exercise can stimulate muscle protein synthesis for 72 hours probably in practice most often 24 to 48 hours so measuring muscle protein synthesis in the first four hours doesn't make that much sense right it's like measuring the first five kilometers of a marathon and then say well that guy's sprinted the heart the fastest in the first five kilometers of marathon so it's clearly gonna win doesn't really work like a third let's say we put you in a deck so right now you exercise and we put you in the deck so again tomorrow and then say well you didn't gain any muscle mass so resistant exercise doesn't work you know the method has certain assumptions and if you violate those assumptions the method becomes useless but the problem is that most people don't understand the assumptions of muscle protein synthesis so one of them is that the timeline that you measure muscle protein synthesis has to capture the the muscle protein so I would fully agree that it's a bad idea to measure muscle protein synthesis for four hours when the actual response is more like 48 hours that is pretty much the conclusion from that study so then that's that research was followed up with a next study in which subjects trained for six weeks but now they didn't measure muscle protein synthesis after one exercise of sorry after one training session they measured it over the entire six-week period and lo and behold good correlation so this time when you actually measure muscle protein synthesis over the whole period that you measure muscle mass gains then all on a sudden it makes sense so again the time period that you measure muscle protein synthesis is very important now theoretically you should be able to measure the muscle protein synthesis response to one exercise session and predict muscle hypertrophy over a longer period but again in that case your muscle protein synthesis measurement has to capture that entire muscle protein synthesis of that exercise session so at same authors from that first paper that didn't find it did a study where they essentially learned from their mistakes and improved their study and now they measured muscle protein synthesis for 24 and 48 hours after a training session and so essentially capturing that whole training response and in that study again muscle protein synthesis dead predict muscle mass gains one one extra notice it didn't in completely untrained subjects and the reason there was that when you're completely untrained you cover this a little bit earlier like all proteins in in your in your muscle essentially get damaged muscle doesn't know what's going on and there's a very high muscle protein synthesis and used for a muscle gain the muscle protein synthesis is used for repair so it's essentially artificially high but not to build my fibula proteins but to repair the other proteins but that's only true in completely untrained subjects after just four weeks of training essentially the muscle protein synthesis response becomes specialized to focus on my fill or protein synthesis and then there was a very good correlation so essentially from the three studies that we have two of them who make sense clearly show a good correlation the only study that shows no correlation also makes completely sense that in that condition there is there is no correlation it would almost be weird if it was a correlation now I've seen some people who have you know kept up with this research and now came to the conclusion oh you should measure muscle protein synthesis over longer periods and a four-hour period is bad that's not true either at least not necessarily true so again the time period should match the muscle protein synthesis you're looking at so if you're looking at the most protein synthetic response to training then it should probably be at least 24 hours but if you're looking at the muscle protein synthesis - protein ingestion that muscle proteins synthetic responses maybe four hours so if I would give you a protein shake now measure your muscle protein synthesis over the next four hours I probably would see a nice increase and that's the correct conclusion however if I give you a protein shake now and measure your muscle protein synthesis over the next three months I wouldn't see an increase in muscle protein synthesis because of this one shake that is because I measure too long much longer than that your protein shake works so essentially the message here is your measurement period has to match whatever you're looking at but if you don't realize that then yeah obviously you're gonna draw the wrong conclusion so the bottom line is yes muscle protein synthesis rates should and indeed do predict muscle mass gains but only if the measurements are done logically which again is also true for a Dex are any any measurement one thing I would add I would even argue that muscle protein synthesis measurements are often even better than the long term studies and here's why so unfortunately gaining muscle mass is a very slow process so okay let's if I wanted to become really popular online here's what I would do I take anything that's controversial let's say foam rolling I would take two groups one group does foam rolling for six week the other group doesn't take let's say ten subjects in each group and measure muscle mass before and after and now my conclusion what would be most likely there's no difference in muscle mass grades between those two groups but realistically even if foam rolling would increase recovery therefore better training more volume etc etc and best it would give like a 10% increase and in order for that 10% increase to be detectable in the study subjects would have to train much longer so if you gain a kilogram in sex weeks and the other group would gain one point one kilogram of muscle mass that's not significantly different if both groups would train six months it would be like four kilograms and four point four like the difference is now four hundred grams of lean mass and that might be statistically significant so the problem is that a lot of long-term studies are just very underpowered so the proper way to do it would be to do one gigantic study so like let them train or let them foam roll for six months and have probably three times as many people in each group nine you have sufficient statistical power except that your study is 18 times bigger six times three so either I can do 18 wrong studies at least the wrong conclusion and people would love me because I would have 18 publications so oh you're on you're busting all these myths sea foam rolling waste of time only hurts la la la I would be the most popular guys but I would know that one big study would give a better well actually the real correct conclusion so in I have a lot more faith in most muscle protein synthesis studies than in most training studies that find no significant differences between groups that are you know the small studies like if it's less than ten weeks of training and it doesn't have like 20-plus subjects in each group I have very little faith in the study doesn't mean that it's worthless because all that data can be used later in a meta-analysis but that study on his own is pretty well I would say deceiving because you get the wrong conclusion but it's just a statistical issue yeah that's an interesting take I usually don't hear it that way it usually goes like well this you know MPs data is good and all but we need the chronic long-term studies to kind of corroborate it but I definitely hear what you're saying just because of the methodological issues with that longer-term research just the way it's usually set up so just to very quickly add there so what people might not realize is that these muscle protein synthesis studies for example they seem easier because it's you can do it in one day often but actually the amount of money that these cost they're much more expensive than most longer-term studies so if we or others thought that the longer-term studies were better we would happily only do those and do like the coolest long-term studies but the reality is like you need all types of evidence right so you need the mechanic of the mechanistic stuff you need the long-term and ideally you do both so I you have the long-term measurements of muscle protein synthesis during a training study but essentially anyone who dismisses any line of research even the animal work even the in vitro even the observational just doesn't really get it if there seems to be inconsistencies between studies you need a good explanation you have to explain why muscle protein synthesis doesn't translate to the long term study and for example the conclusion could be well the long term study was statistically underpowered for example about 80% of protein supplementation studies show that protein supplementation does not increase muscle mass and the only reason is because the studies are just too small too little subjects not long enough so if we didn't have the muscle protein synthesis studies that clearly showed an anabolic response to protein we would have given up on protein altogether like 50 years ago yeah and only like in I think like it's now nine years ago we did our lab did the first meta-analysis that for the first time convincingly showed that protein works but only when you combined all those small protein studies essentially so yeah main takeaway you need everything and if something doesn't seem to be consistent you need a solid explanation and if your explanation is well that doesn't translate to that what what it really means is I don't get that so I'm gonna ignore that right right yeah it's always been a bit of a weird line for me to see or to read because it to me it almost sounds like saying like just going back to your wall analogy it's like adding bricks to the wall doesn't correlate well with wall size it's like it's it really should so to argue the others I mean you need a really good argument to tell me that it doesn't correlate right so I think the mistake that people made there is that they read a lot about the molecular markers of protein synthesis which is like gene expression and stuff like that and the thing is most protein synthesis is literally the physiology so it's not something theoretically it is literally looking our amino acids being added to the wall so it's the finition of getting bigger yeah so yeah like you say if it doesn't correlate something weird is going on yeah but so I think people confuse it with like gene expression right and that doesn't necessarily mean you're growing that's just a signal that your body says hey maybe we should grow but then just to address that very very briefly let's say that your genes say hey maybe we should go grow because she did exercise but if you don't eat and you don't have two building blocks to build nothing's going to happen so the gene expression stuff doesn't necessarily translate but the muscle protein synthesis is literally the wall is growing so of course you're grown yeah yeah yeah and even just to make this case from another side I guess I I've always liked I haven't always said but at least since I've encountered this criticism I've kind of realized that if you combine other research so if you look at research say comparing so it you know giving subjects soy protein versus giving them milk protein you tend to see greater spikes in MPs with the milk protein and then when you look at the the chronic trials and different studies you also tend to see more hypertrophy with the milk versus the soy I'm so you know putting those two together it seems they're really line up that that of course you know one is predictive of the other I think so the way I see it is that the muscle protein synthesis like muscle protein synthesis can go up three to five fold easily so it's much easier to see the anabolic potential or something but then in how much muscle gain does that actually result for that you kind of need the long term studies because what the mistake people make is that Oh most protein synthesis is increased by 50% so I'm gonna make 50% more muscle mass gains but that doesn't really work because how long is muscle promoter protein synthesis is elevated by 50% the whole day then yes that should translate but if you have wavers a soy for example and it increases muscle protein synthesis for with 50% the weight compared to the soy for the 3 hours after exercise and essentially you need to divide that by eight to get 24 hours to see how much extra muscle mass gains that's gonna resolve it okay so Joran I'd like to jump into all the diet stuff and protein stuff to make it a little bit more practical first I think we're gonna take a quick little break here just for the listeners and then when we come back we're going to dig into all the the protein stuff to do with this [Music]

Channel: Jeff Nippard

Views: 180,227

Rating: 4.949533 out of 5

Keywords: vlog, vlogger, iifym, science, bodybuilding, legs, arms, chest, back, fit couple, build muscle, jeff nippard, christian guzman, summer shredding, lean, ripped, abs, diet, lose weight, fat, fitness, flex, biceps, shredded, gymshark, alphalete, physique, motivation, natural bodybuilding, canadian, jorn trommelen, interview, protein, how much protein do i need to build muscle, how much protein jeff nippard, muscle protein synthesis

Id: _otSunLL8AU

Length: 62min 51sec (3771 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/thesacrednipple]

Haven’t finished it all the way through and have already heard some things that I hadn’t known before, like how 2 minutes of rest is most optimal. Really interesting stuff

[u/[deleted]]

If I rested 2 minutes for every set, I'd probably be in the gym for 3 hours minimum

[u/5fingeryangbang]

fantastic. cardio will suck less tomorrow

[u/RedNation2k]

I don’t buy the rest period thing. Workouts would be way less intense.