Currently one of the hottest topics in fitness, especially evidence-based
fitness, is stretch-mediated hypertrophy, and in particular,
the application of lengthened partials. Do you use lengthened partials
in your training? To some extent, but certainly
I don't think it's the be-all, end-all. What I think is, and what I think
we can infer from the literature, is that the lengthened position
has particular importance in hypertrophy. I am still skeptical that that dismisses
the effects of the shortened position. We have very limited evidence that lengthened partials are necessarily
better than full range of motion training. But, I think there's at least
a logical rationale for the implementation
of at least some lengthened partials. And for me, I think that, like any other
advanced training technique, it can warrant a place in a routine,
but I think it's more of a minimalistic aspect of it. And what would be, mechanistically,
the benefits of the shortened position? Well, you know, whenever you talk
mechanisms, it's always highly speculative. So it's really not... not clear
from a mechanistic standpoint. I would just say that from
the longitudinal evidence that we have, most of it
seems to show that there's... we don't have a lot of good evidence with lengthened
partials versus full range of motion. I was involved in one of the studies
which actually showed some benefit, at least with some some of the sites,
the hypertrophy sites. But, you know, look, they are different
mechanistically. The stretch does, we've published on this, has hypothetical benefits from a mechanistic standpoint through Titin, through other
mechanisms, stretch-mediated channels. But there's other... first of all, we're still in the very initial stages
of understanding mechanisms. So when you try to,
you know, really piece this together in itself is just a very difficult task. But I would say that
at least hypothetically, there could be a rationale
where combining the shortened position with the lengthened position
may have beneficial effects. I think certainly from a strength
standpoint, that's the case. We do know that in general, there is a range-of-motion-specific
effect on strength. So you're going to get generally benefits
within about 15 degrees, and isometric contractions, 15 degrees either side of the
of the angle that you're training at. And that would seem at least to apply
to dynamic contractions as well. So if you're really shortening,
I shouldn't say shortening... If you're leaving out the shortened position,
shortening the shortened position, you may reduce your ability
to maximize strength at those angles. Yeah, definitely. And as you say, the studies are mostly on leg extensions and calf raises,
those are the really compelling studies. The other studies are really flimsy,
I would say. And that's probably also not exercises
that are necessarily representative of every exercise. So I think that's a good perspective. Well, I would also add that... I don't know how deep you want to get into this... We can go all the way. There are some who are claiming
that it's all sarcomerogenesis. So I do want to make you...
How do you feel about that argument? Well, I don't think it's,
there's any basis for it. I'm not saying it
may not ultimately play out, but I think that we have virtually zero
evidence that that's the case. The evidence that we have is in muscle
thickness or a cross-sectional area. Right. There's disconnects between
cross-sectional area and sarcomerogenesis. We're seeing
the increases in cross-sectional area, where you would infer that
those were from parallel hypertrophy. I would also say, I'm actually
collaborating on a paper on this right now, but it's questionable
whether there actually is sarcomerogenesis, whether it actually occurs
in resistance training. So we know in certain animal models
with extreme forms of of either casting a muscle or limb or a joint where the muscle is
in a shortened or lengthened position, that's not what happens. Or certainly there's a disconnect
between that and resistance training. Well, what a lot of people are
doing is they're inferring, they'll inferring research based on the fascicle lengths, and fascicle lengths do not necessarily equate to Sarcomerogenesis. You can have, because the fascicle length is getting...
or you see an increased fascicle length, it could be that there's just a stretch
of the sarcomere itself that the sarcomere is adapting to a greater length rather
than having addition of sarcomeres. And I'd also say that I'm somewhat suspect
even of the fascicle length studies themselves, or at least the modes
with which it's studied, because you have to remember that a lot of
fascicles terminate interfascicularly, that we're not seeing
the actual fascicles going from origin to insertion, that they're terminating
within the fascicle. So I think these are all things
that need to be parsed out. And I think the claim that this is, it's or
the thought that lengthened partials are just sarcomerogenesis,
there's no basis for that. And in fact,
the basis that we have is based on muscle thickness and cross-sectional-area studies, which the inference would be that
it would be from in-parallel hypertrophy. Exactly. I think that's a super good point,
that if you look at the research that measures hypertrophy, that in itself
measures the muscles becoming thicker. Correct. And if the hypothesis is that the muscle is actually not becoming
thicker, it's just becoming longer, you would have to have
some very questionable mechanism of how that increases in the length. I've seen some some model of it. It didn't make a lot of sense to me,
but if it becomes longer and then they become kind of bunched up
and therefore they are thicker. Right. Right. But yeah, it's a bit...
It's very questionable. Exactly. So could it... I'm not again, dismissing, completely dismissing the possibility,
but I think it's a leap to assume that. And, you know, look,
if you if you're looking at muscle volume, I think then you might have a greater,
if you'd see that. But that's not
what the studies are looking at. So if we're looking cross-sectional-area
and thickness to extrapolate the fact that the in-series
hypertrophy would show up as a greater thickness or cross-sectional area is, in my opinion, is a leap. And speaking of mechanisms of hypertrophy,
one of your early super influential papers in 2010 was,
I think it was your Ph.D. dissertation on mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy? It's actually my master's capstone
project. Your master's? Yeah. So that was, I think, the publication
that really put you on the map of a lot of people
because you were one of the first to bridge
the gap between the research on mechanisms and applying it
to program design and really hone in on, okay, what are the things
we have to target in our training? And you came up with tension, metabolic
stress and muscle damage as the leading potential candidates of... to stimulate muscle hypertrophy. Now, tension has been well established
for a very long period of time. Metabolic stress and muscle damage
have remained more, more questionable, I would say. Some people have taken this to mean
that muscle damage, they essentially equate it
with muscle soreness, and metabolic stress with the pump. Is that correct? Is the pump the same as metabolic stress? Well, first of all, no,
those are... that's kind of a layperson's take in trying
to simplify things like that. But no, and I would say that
I just mentioned, people, again this is my opinion,
that people speculate a lot on mechanisms and they are doing
so with very minimal evidence one way or another. So I think we can say with very good
confidence that mechanical tension, which I don't even think
a lot of people fully understand what mechanical tension
is, the ramifications of it. But that I think... Could you briefly summarize for like a lay understanding "what is mechanical tension"? Tension is the force that acts... on a broad term, it's the forces acting upon a muscle, but it can be... It can manifest either as a contraction
across; manifest as passive stretch. So you can passively stretch a muscle
and you're putting tension on that. So people... My point is, I think a lot of people think
of mechanical tension and think about one-rep max is your max tension. But again, it goes way beyond that. It's, when I say way beyond that,
certainly that's a factor, the magnitude. But there's also the the mode. So whether it's eccentric, isometric, concentric. And there's also a time-tension integral. So there's been some interesting research
on this and you can't just look at... If it was all about tension, do
to five one-rep maxes and you should be huge, it should be maximal hypertrophy,
and that's not what happens. So there is a time-tension integral where having a certain amount of tension
for a given period of time. And if you're going to ask me
what that is, we have no idea. Like that's where there's just
so much uncertainty in this information. We do know that... when I say
know, there is good evidence in my opinion that there is this time tension integral,
but where that manifests for maximizing hypertrophy
still needs to be determined. In terms of the other mechanisms,
I still think we're far away from understanding them. I'm less when I wrote that paper,
I think I was more I don't even want to say confident,
but I thought, at that point I think there was more hope for evidence on that, which I don't think
has manifested, but certainly I wouldn't dismiss that
other mechanisms are are involved. I recently collaborated on a review paper
on lactate, and there's, I think, literature on both sides
of the equation showing for and against. There is so many metabolites. So this recent paper showed
I think there was several dozen metabolites were produced
just with resistance training alone. Your H+, your hydrogen ions. There's at least a rationale
where the acidosis may in some ways enhance the hypertrophy,
the anabolic response. And muscle damage, again, I think that
the jury is still out. I'd say this,
that there's quite good evidence that muscle damage does initiate satellite cell activation. We know
satellite cells are highly involved. Now, does that mean,
so if you just look at it from that standpoint,
you can then conclude that, yeah, you need muscle damage,
but it might be redundant. These are things, again,
that we don't know. And one of the big problems with studying mechanisms is that when you try
to manipulate one mechanism, you inevitably will manipulate
another in a different way. And it does make... to tease out the results from this can be very difficult. And in practice
it's also very difficult too, because if there's tension, there's
probably going to be some metabolic stress and there's also probably going
to be some muscle damage. So super hard to tease them out. I was just going to say
and it's questionable if you can have any training stress that does not cause some mild
muscle damage after the bout that there'd be some perturbations
of the structural integrity of the of the tissue and how that manifests. And again, it perhaps can just be
in the extracellular matrix, which the ECM has been shown to have very relevant influence on the anabolic response. So again, this is still, we're in the Wild West
in terms of really understanding this. And I think there's some people,
particularly influencers, who don't have... really don't
have any background in the field and they can make things very, they want to oversimplify things
without really understanding the complexities of these topics
and the difficulties in studying them. And from an actionable point of view,
do you think soreness and the pump, do you have a lot of bearing on
optimal program design? Does it mean
much? Is it useful to look at them? So I think soreness there is a correlation between soreness
and damage, but it's certainly not a there are other factors that can get involved. Like I said, whether the damages
to the actual tissue, the fibers themselves or the extracellular matrix
is different types of damage even. Usually you're going to get
the soreness and some damage by novel... it comes about through novel prescription. And generally
once you've become a trained individual, that's mostly through different exercise
selections. So varying exercise selection. If you keep your exercise selection
quite similar, you're probably not going to get much soreness. Does that mean you're not growing? No, I don't think there's good evidence. And we see in our studies all the time,
which again, they're not in highly they're not in elite bodybuilders,
but they're in trained subjects for the most part
have been training quite a while and they grow
and we're doing the same, basically the same program over
an eight, ten week period. And they report virtually no soreness. By the end of the... They get sore
at the beginning of the study and then several weeks in,
they're not sort of more. And I don't think all the, even though
we're not testing hypertrophy every week, I don't think they're getting
all their growth in those first two weeks. What does really matter?
What do we know are... What are the fundamentals,
the absolute essentials? If someone asks you, "Hey, Brad,
I want to get big. I want big biceps. What do I do?" Well, the most important thing is... there's two. The most important thing is consistency, is to train, you know, to do it over and over again
at least several times a week. Training hard is the ultimate. I think that we the one thing
we can conclude from the literature is that training in a fairly close
proximity to failure is going to be the requisite factor
in terms of making progress over time. And that was... What is fairly close? Are we talking five reps in reserve? Ten? One? I think that's... no. I think that's pushing it,
say five or ten, but I think two to three maybe. Again, we don't have good clarity on this,
but we did a meta analysis on this. I'm aware of a study coming out at least the last I spoke to the person, that seemed to show that
within a couple of reps of failure, you're getting just as good results
as going to full failure. So you need to be training I would consider that
close proximity to failure. I think when you start getting below
two to three RIR, you're probably not stimulating the muscle
sufficiently at the beginning. So again, if you're a newbie, yeah,
you can be even further away and still get decent gains because you're a newbie
and that's, it's a new stress. It's a novel challenge to the muscles. After that... Volume has been shown, I think to be a driver of hypertrophy,
an important driver. I think all the variables have certain factors, have certain influences. Part of the issue again, when you're when you're looking at variables in terms of studying them, is
that when you manipulate one variable, you're often manipulating
another variable. So I mean, it gets to be difficult. Let's say you want to manipulate rest intervals. So if I'm going to do, one one group is going to have a one minute rest interval, the other group is going to have a three minute rest
interval, you're going to reduce, if you're going to try to keep them
in, let's say a ten RM, you're going to have to lighten the load
a lot more. So you're you're now influencing load. And how much is that a factor? So trying to again tease
some of these things out does become difficult in itself. But I think other factors
then, so training hard I think volume then,
and then I think the other variables can in some, under certain circumstances
be important. Like you want to talk about load. I think there's no topic or no variable that I would say with greater confidence
that you can get similar results across a very wide spectrum of loading ranges,
anywhere between, you know, 3 to 5 reps,
up to 30 to 40 reps. If you're going in close
proximity to failure, training really hard, you can get very similar
whole muscle hypertrophy. However,
I do still think there is the possibility I'm less optimistic than I was probably
five years ago on this, but I still I still think there is some evidence
and some blood flow restriction evidence has been coming out
that seems to suggest this as well, that there could be a fiber-type
specific effect by perhaps doing some training at lighter loads and
some training at somewhat heavier load. So again, that would suggest
that combining different loading ranges may optimize,
if your goal is to optimize. Again, I want to emphasize too that
this is important for you or me or people who are just looking to maximize
every morsel of their genetic potential. For the vast majority of people,
get in the gym, train hard, even fairly minimalist routines, you're
going to get the majority of your gains. And then with volume, volume is indeed... in research, I would 100% agree, one of the bigger drivers
of all the training variables supported by a number of meta analyses. Now, if you look at the results of individual studies,
they vary wildly. And you had a famous, infamous study on showing that up to 45 sets,
and not the only study, there have been multiple studies now. Yeah,
that's why I don't know why it's infamous. I mean, it's been replicated
by numerous different independent labs. So yeah, it became very popular
and controversial, let me put it that way. In which scenarios do you think, would
you put, for example, a client. Would you give them 45 sets
per muscle group per week? What are we talking? I've never done that. So again, this is, I think, one of the
gaps in terms of people's understanding. So the study that we carried out,
had the total number of sets in the week,
weekly sets was 105. 105. So that's for all the muscle... that's all the muscle groups. That is a real modest, you know certainly not a high-volume
routine if you factor that out. Let's say you talk about nine,
ten major muscle groups. You have your chest, your back,
your shoulders, biceps, triceps, quads, hamstrings,
glutes, calves and abs. It's like ten, on average, if you want to average that out. If we did it for every muscle group,
it would be like ten sets per muscle group. Which is really at the lower end
of what the data seem to show. So you think there's a difference
between systemic and local maximum volume? Well, yeah, exactly. So what I certainly What I don't think you can do
is extrapolate out that you do 45 sets that if we were to give 45 sets
for every muscle group, that it would have, you know, panned out the same. I would certainly speculate
it wouldn't have I think we would have ended up
trashing the individuals. First of all,
it would have been impractical. You'd be in the gym 18 hours, the old Arnold routines
were pretty close to that. But what I would say, to me, I think
where you look at some of these studies and I think the interesting aspect is they lend credence to the theory
that there may be benefit to specialization cycles, that you can employ
these types of volumes within one muscle group, generally,
perhaps two. But to me, I think you need to look
at the total volume of all the sets because you're going to drive systemic. The systemic response ultimately is going
to drive nonfunctional overreaching. I hope we could agree on that,
that it's not, you don't get localized overtraining. Like if you do 100 sets for your biceps or whatever and then do nothing, you're not going to be overtraining per-say. So I would hope that we can at least come
to some agreement that the overtraining or nonfunctional
overreaching is a systemic response. It's more often seen
in cardiovascular exercise where it's just a matter
of a lot of volume, duration-wise. Yeah. It's also incredibly rare,
I think the likes of, for example, Milo, maybe not so much Milo,
that they kind of argue that, well, maybe everyone can in fact go up to much higher volumes
than we've been considering so far. Well, that's a different argument, but
I don't think you can extrapolate that. You can't extrapolate that
from the studies. You can make that case
and try to do a study and see. I would I would disagree with that. But that's a hypothesis
that's worth testing, I think. But I do think that, well,
I should also say I do think people are capable
of higher volumes than they think but I don't think, I think that to me
would be a real stretch to say I think if you're pushing it
from the 20 sets, you know, in total when to maybe 180 sets per week,
that would factor out... I think that's a lot of sets. But with that said, I do think that the volume studies
that we have would suggest that if you then say, all right,
let's say we're going to look at 130 sets 140 sets
for all of the major muscle groups, that would be kind of a volume budget
that you would look at, you look at and say, all right, here's the volume that I can apportion
between all my muscle groups. How do I want to apportion that? It's kind of like a you make money, you want to you decide
what you're going to spend your money on. If you want to spend it on a fancy car,
you might not be able to buy the fancy house that you want
or go out to restaurants all the time. So I think then apportioning it where
you're more well developed, muscle groups get less volume
and you then specialize and and I would also say
from a frequency standpoint that it to me would be beneficial
then to try to space out that volume when you're doing these quite high
volumes. Let's say you went up to 30.
I think would be real difficult and I've never gone up
that high to 40 plus. But let's say 30, and I have done that with a high-level bodybuilder
and it worked quite well on a short term basis, but we spread it
out over over a nine day period. So every third day he would do
ten sets for the given muscle, which was hamstrings, ten sets
for his hamstrings, first in the workout and then worked his split around that. Yeah, it would make sense. That's the benefits of high frequencies
become more apparent or even only relevant when you are dealing
with very high volumes so that you can spread out the session. You have better stimulus,
the fatigue ratio. The marginal extra returns
you get off another set of bench presses after you've done 20,
it's probably not great. Correct. And do you think there's also a time
component in the response? So there might be a limitation
of total body volume. There might also be a limitation
of how long you can sustain a certain volume for.
You think that would make sense? Like this would work for eight weeks,
but not for eight months? I do. So again,
it's purely speculative on my part, but I think there's certainly
a good logical basis for it. So there's the, I'm sure you're aware
of the General Adaptation Syndrome, which was coined by Hans Selye,
an Austrian physicist, and basically it's the, it's
this kind of a basis used for periodization, but it says that
the body undergoes a stress response. And we know that the body
is extremely resilient. So we can handle a high amount of stress
for relatively short periods of time. So I do think
that is another volume strategy that you can start with,
let's say on a total basis, total body basis, a somewhat lower volume,
then build up to a more moderate volume and then have a peaking phase
where you have a higher volume and then restart that. Again, we have no, no objective data on this so that this is just the hypothesis
in mind that I have used and I think it works well, but we need,
we need to definitely study that. What about cycling the volume essentially
just for the sake of it in a periodization aspect, you think it makes sense?
Do you think for bodybuilding purposes there's a big need to periodize
the training volume? I'm not clear so come again? Let's say you want
you want maximum hypertrophy. Can you just stick with the same volume? Let's say we find the optimal volume
and we just stick with that. You need to cycle it?
Well again, to say need, we don't know. But my speculation is
that there could be a benefit, that it could help to enhance. That if you then, basically pushing your body
for a short period of time to promote
a functional overarching response and then having a deload, or whatever,
some type of recuperative cycle that goes in there, short
cycle, could help to enhance the process. Now, I if you're asking me,
is there evidence of that, no, there's no objective evidence
and we have some, I have some anecdotal evidence of that, but
that is something that needs to be tested. I've used that
when working with high-level bodybuilders to good effect, and it does not, I've never had a time where someone has said
they really needed that deload where we basically factored it out
and they were just trashed. Let's switch topic to diet. You had a very influential paper on the optimal meal
frequency to build muscle. It's actually debunking the old idea
that you need six meals a day, but positing that you probably want
about four for maximum hypertrophy based on the available data at the time,
which suggests that there are very sharp returns to every individual meal
In terms of muscle protein synthesis. You've got a relatively short response
and also in particular a capped response like 20-40
grams seems to be pretty much where you maximize
muscle protein synthesis. And then just putting in more protein
doesn't seem to do a whole lot. Now, we recently had a study
that you're also familiar with. You posted about it, by Trommelen et al., showing wildly different result compared
to some previous studies, at face value that even a 100 grams protein
can be used effectively to synthesize muscle proteins
for up to 12 hours and probably longer. How have your view shifted on the minimum
amount of meals someone would need to maximize
muscle hypertrophy? Yeah. So I think the paper that you referred to
that I collaborated on with Alan Aragon, I was more leaning towards three. We talked about four,
but I think, even three would have in my opinion, like if you had breakfast, lunch and dinner
that were evenly spaced out, it was more about the spacing
and four my maybe have optimized it, but I'm not sure how much difference
that would be 3 to 4 if you're going, let's say seven in the morning, one in the afternoon and seven at night
and then going around. So a couple of things. First of all, excellent study by Jorn. And like you said, it did show that 100 gram bolus of protein was just as anabolic as it exceeded
the antibiotic effect of the 25, which again goes against the fact that the body can only utilize
a certain amount of protein. A really interesting study. One study
never changes my opinion on anything. So I think, number one,
we need replication of that. But I mean, it was first of all,
Jorn's an excellent researcher in his lab
is an excellent lab from the Netherlands, come on! And but I'll say this, I'm still not throwing out the idea that it might still be best
if your goal is maximal anabolism that having a, portioning it over more meals may may somewhat enhance it. But I will say this,
I think it shifted my thinking to think it probably is less
than what I would have thought. It does kind of line up with some of
the intermittent fasting data. Now the intermittent fasting data overall
does not show much... longitudinal data when we look at actual hypertrophy,
does not show much of a difference between traditional meals
that are spread out over the day. There's a lot of issues
I have with those types of studies. Trying to get... a training
study is one thing, when you're trying to get people
in doing dietary when they're not in the gym
and trying to have them know how they're actually
eating across a day, I'm skeptical as to the quality,
as to the actual accuracy of the data that you end up getting. The researchers can only do what they can do. But unless you're locking them up
in a metabolic ward, which they're not, I think you have to take some of that data
with some degree of skepticism. But overall, I think it does, I think a couple of things. I think, number one,
for the general public, I don't think there's any difference
at this point. I would well, again, within the context
of a single study that I think needs replication, but based on this data
and taking it at face value, I think for the average
person you want to eat say, one meal
a day, if they can get 130 grams or whatever it is, their optimal protein intake and they did cap it, but they did say that
they thought it could go higher than 100. That's speculative. You have to also remember,
I think the one thing that's important to realize
is that this was not a longitudinal... They didn't look at muscle growth, so they were looking at muscle protein
synthesis. And you cannot necessarily take what happens in an acute
study like this and extrapolate that it would continue
to occur over weeks and months at a time. So the body may,
there may be a refractory effect where ultimately
the body would not do as well. So it could have been
just a novel response to getting that. But we don't know. And I think that it bears more study. But really interesting results
that I do think at least has shifted the thinking to skepticism on the topic. Yeah. Another big limitation is
that it's indeed an acute study of people consuming a meal after an overnight fast,
after a workout, and essentially showing that if you're only meal of what is a 24 hour
period, 26 hour period? Is that 100 grams protein,
your body can use it, right? Correct. That's that's different than saying, well,
a bodybuilder with multiple meals spaced across a day, they're going to get
the same results with four as with one. Well, and this is an issue again, when you're
talking about these acute studies is they so there's a tradeoff
between being sterilized to try to take out confounding issues
and then the real-world effects, ecologically valid effects,
which is why, again, you need to study these things
on a longitudinal basis and actually look at hypertrophy to get a sense
of how people are in the real world. But you're able to isolate and make sure that the people are doing
what they're supposed to do in the lab. If you're going to have a study, you say, "All right, I want you to eat
just one meal a day and have 190 grams or whatever,
160 grams of protein in that meal. And then not eat for the rest of the day." You got college kids or whatever. I mean they're... how do you know what... they're going out
to McDonalds at night and saying, yeah, I have my just
my protein shake in the morning. So if you had to put a number on it, advanced Bodybuilder
seeking to maximize every ounce of muscle, what would be the minimum meal frequency? Let's say everything's
optimized, spaced out. Are we talking to two, three, one? I think 3 to 4. And again, I think with
when you're talking bodybuilding, it's really difficult especially if you're looking for maximal muscle growth, when you want to be
in at least a small surplus and you're somewhat bigger,
you know, bigger bodybuilders, let's say you weigh 90 kilos,
getting all those calories in. I mean, you're talking 4000 calories a day
or so usually to support your growth phase, try getting that
in one or two meals a day. I mean, you could,
but it's gets to be tough. And generally not the best use of your calories. Next question is by Alan Aragon Do the crocodiles in the moat
around your house where we are now, do they eat only organic food
or do you also feed them conventional sometimes? I think Alan is projecting here
because Alan is the one with the moat you really have to, the next time you see Alan,
ask him about that. You can see I do not have a moat. We have a pond
with a little fish in there. Yeah, I we have some issues
with Alan's mansion and the airport. The heliport? Yes, yes. Yes I would, so we couldn't get in there but I'll definitely interview
at some point. Let him know. All right. All right.
Thank you so much for the interview. Are there any things that you're
currently working on that you think are very interesting and you're interested
to share any details on? Yeah, got a bunch of things. So one of the studies we just
finished, it's currently in review now. It was a within subject design,
so we randomized subject's legs and these are trained individuals,
men and women, and the thigh, we did exercises for the thigh and the calves,
the quads and the calves, and one leg did it was randomized. So the quads we were looking at leg
press versus leg extension. So one leg was doing the leg extension,
the other was leg press. And for the calves, one was doing seated
and the other was doing straight-legged. And we found, which actually was pretty mostly confirmed our initial hypothesis. But the leg extension had greater
rectus femoris growth. We looked at the individual growth
of the heads; the leg press had greater vastus lateralis growth. So it basically would show that
if you want to maximize hypertrophy, don't just, you can't just do squats.
Well we didn't do squats, but we would assume that from a multi joint
standpoint, if anything, I think leg press I would have thought,
would have somewhat greater effect than a squat because of the degrees
of freedom that you have. But anyway, you'd need to do
both a multi joint and a single joint move
to optimize results. And for the calves,
the medial gastroc showed much substantially greater growth
in the straight-leg position. The lateral gastroc really
was not affected too much. Slightly greater
hypertrophy for for the straight leg, but much,
much less than the medial gastroc. And the soleus had we were expecting pretty, you know,
decently greater growth in the seated. It was a little bit,
but really nothing that I would say, wow, that you really need to do
the seated to target the soleus. So it's quite interesting results and it did
really give some insights into programing. So that was a good one
that should hopefully be published soon. We just should be... We just received acceptance on our paper looking at deloads, and
we did a pre-print on this, but basically now when we did the...
it was a nine week study. We had one group train for the full nine
weeks, the other group did four weeks training, took a week off and then did
another four weeks of training. So our deload was not the somewhat
traditional. Deloads, can be done in multiple ways, there's no "this is the way you have to do the deload." And what we did was, the reason we did
it was based on evidence that you can re-sensitize muscle if you took
a short period off, didn't happen. So there was no re-sensitization in terms of hypertrophy. There was actually a slight detriment
to strength, which we at least preliminarily of attributed
to maybe the kind of some of the subjects reported
feeling a little off, that they felt they had to come back in and they were not because I guess we didn't do the
traditional, let's say, just a reduction in volume and load. But anyway, it was interesting and I think the one thing
that I would take home from that I had previously been
in favor of prescribing, I felt that people could not, generally lifters were not good enough
to auto-regulate deloads and that they didn't, they might
not realize that they needed one. It was better to just take one. Every four weeks or so. I've shifted my opinion in that,
I don't think four weeks at least. And we trained them really hard. I mean, there was 20 sets for the quads,
20 sets for the quads and hams
and 20 sets for the calves. So it's just a lower body.
Volitional failure, right? And every set to volitional failure
per week, this is a weekly. And then we had them doing an upper body. Now the one of the caveats, the upper body
we had them do on their own. So it's a two day a week lower body
that was supervised. But we we got their training diaries and, you know,
they these were all trained subjects. So we don't know. I'm assuming they did not push quite
as hard on their own as when we pushed them. But we know we pushed them
really, really hard and and all of them at the end of the study
said, "I don't think I need a deload." I'll definitely be reviewing
the new studies that you publish for sure. And I wanted to get you on the podcast
because I think you are literally one of the best things that has happened
to evidence based fitness. The amount of research you put out of a super high quality
that is relevant for both practitioners and from the scientific
point of view is probably unparalleled. Currently in fitness. So I want to thank you very much for
both the interview and everything you do. My pleasure. And I'm a big fan of yours, as you know,
and it's always great catching up. Brad Schoenfeld, everyone. Where can people go
if they want to find out more about you? Google me. Google him!
