Not sure why it gets attention here. The "finding" is the long standing assumption as it is, absolutely nothing new discovered here. It could be notable if it was of some particularly high quality, but here it is 20 untrained individuals doing some dubious exercise regime for 10 weeks and finding out that on average one dubious exercise pattern wasn't particularly better than the other, and overall exercising seemed to be good for all of them, although inter-personal coefficient of variation is up to 28.3%… Like, really? That was the study that impressed 211 upvoters?
These journals keep publishing such studies, because there is nothing better to publish in this branch of, uhm, "science", and I would even argue it's not a bad thing, because something is better than nothing, and it's basically impossible today to do more impressive research in this field (because testing humans is far costlier and logistically more complicated than writing equations and running simulations on your PC). But it's funny that it gets someone's attention.
Why is this article showing up on New Year's Day like the flock of newbie gym customers attracted to the gym only to quit 30 days from now? Every year without fail.
Let's ignore this article for a moment.
Overall factors that REALLY matter building muscle:
1. Consistency - Working out each muscle group at least once a week....every week.
2. Diet - Making sure you are consuming enough protein in your diet, approximately 1gram/pound of body weight...or near it or even best you can. Total calories consumed a day should match any online calculator for your age and activity level.
3. Sleep!
4. Sleep!
5. Vary your workout - some weeks high reps low weight and some weeks low reps high weight. Why? Never let your body know what you're doing and shock it as best you can. Always try to exert yourself enough to be sore within 48 hours of a workout.
Now multiply this over a few years.
Stop reading these studies thinking there is some optimal way! It's just hard work over time.
BTW: In winter I bench press 350 pounds or 159KG. I run 10KM or 6.1 miles twice a week and increase it a little bit in summer. I pull my body in two different directions because I love both.
This is a physiology research article published in a physiology journal, not a Tiktoken influencer peddling "get ripped fast" schemes.
In an ironic twist, you then proceed to peddle your own. In a single paragraph you added more contentious "advice" than in the entire article you're dismissing.
> Stop reading these studies thinking there is some optimal way! It's just hard work over time.
"Hard work" and "learning new things" are not mutually exclusive. Stop presuming you know what I think while I'm reading these studies.
Still, a "given all else, this optimal thing giving +1% growth" is negligible percentage, when all the other mentioned factors are several orders of magnitude more important.
My point is, simply doing it consistently, even if slightly less optimally, will trivially surpass anything else in the long run and there are no "silver bullets" in training.
The only importance is safety, avoiding injuring oneself.
Also, the article also states this: "RET-induced hypertrophy is mediated to a far greater degree by inherent endogenous biological factors"
To be charitable to both the article and the OP - his advice of “hard work over time” is still good advice.
I think many people tend to get stuck in premature optimization, which can take the fun away and thus you end up quitting. I did that a few times, so it might be a me-thing.
Nowadays I exercise 4x/week without really worrying about a strategy or about optimal protein intake etc.
But then again, nowadays my goal is just to live healthy rather than gain strength.
All this advice is mostly harmless and not contraindicated, though some of it is incorrect, but point 5 in regards to soreness is harmful advice. Soreness is not a goal and does not indicate anything other than that you did a lot of eccentric lifting to which you were not recently adapted. Soreness means you waited longer than what was necessary to exercise that muscle group again. If you are getting sore beyond the first few workouts, it is a sign that your programming is suboptimal.
Progress is the weight on the bar increasing. Progress is not you being sore. Excess soreness is counterproductive during training, and should only be sought after if you are exercising as a penance for sins instead of training for some goal.
+1. Point number 5 is probably the worst part of their post.
Beginners should focus on form, consistency, and linear progression of weight. If you can stand the boredom do the exact same program for a year. Probably 2-3 full body workouts that hit each body part twice.
For intermediate+, hitting a body part once a week is suboptimal for most. People who care about results and progression/growth should be progressing from 5 up to 20 hard sets per muscle per week across the span of a few years. (Compounds hit multiple, so it's not necessarily 20 hard times the number of muscles!) What's "hard"? in the 0-2 RIR range, ideally to failure.
For advanced, as i understand it, they need to focus on weekly periodization like hitting 3RIR, 2RIR, 1RIR, 0RIR (test new 1RM), Recovery week kind of cycles. Plus more that advanced coaches can teach.
> The muscle "shock" broscience has been disproven many times:
Variety isn't to shock or confuse the body, it's just to make sure you actually hit all the muscles in as many ways possible. Take your average push/pull gym rat to a yoga class or a climbing wall and they'll be more sore the next day than they've ever been before, because they'll activate muscles they didn't even know they had.
Indeed. It is really just tension x time under tension within a sensible rep range (probably around 5 - 30 reps or so). Menno on Youtube has a bunch of videos on this, the link below being the latest one.
Basically work the muscle harder and get more jacked. It isn't that hard. Full body workouts are also great for this reason: you can hit a muscle more times per week and be fresher when you hit that muscle, so both the tension and time under tension can be higher vs a body part split.
Why you’d actively argue to ignore a study with interesting outcomes and peddle platitudes that i see on a daily basis about everywhere is one thing. But for it also to be the top comment in this thread is a real pity
I believe this should be lean mass, not total mass. I think people tried to calibrate this metric since most people don't have scales that can measure composition... but if you're obese, you're going to be consuming more than you need to, which is counter productive if you're obese.
Yes! The "lean mass" caveat is oft ignored by bro scientists, and even LLMs have incorporated the error due to training on bro science forums.
I use this as a bit of a canary. If you see somebody making this basic mistake (like the post you're replying to did), you should be highly skeptical of their other claims too.
Practically speaking it doesn't matter. Just use your healthy (men 15-20% fat; women +8%) weight and calculate based on that.
If you are healthy fat percentage, just use your own weight. If you are a bit highter, and can financially and practically afford it, just use your weight as well. Won't hurt and might actually help a bit.
So it is only a concern for severely obese people. If you are 50+kg overweight, you can scale it down a bit.
Similarly, these obese people shouldn't use the "my current diet - 500kcal a day reduction" which is sensible for already lean bodybuilders. They should just use the "my maintenance diet if I were of healthy weight".
I just got back from the gym and it was surprisingly empty. Actually, more empty than normal.
My experience from lifting now for 30+ years and seeing thousands of people lift is it is:
1. Genetics.
Everything else is a distant second or third. This was actually something that was widely understood in 90s bodybuilding magazines. Lifting is mostly a display of genetics. That worked when you could sell magazines of genetic freaks working out. Without the magazines you have to sell all this nonsense like 1 gram per lb of protein. Even though I know the early research was 1 gram per kilo and then Americans just changed that to 1 gram per lb. I mean it is just such obvious nonsense that the optimal amount would happen to be the exact integer amount vs body weight that is easiest to remember, how convenient for people who sell protein lol. duh.
It really is just mostly this, and social media has tricked people into thinking otherwise.
I was looking at some photos of myself about 10 years ago. At the time, I had been hitting the gym hard, consistently, and intelligently. I had a huge bench press, squad, and deadlift, and was lifting 4-5 days a week, and managed every facet of my diet.
Now, I'm older, have kids, don't sleep as much, and definitely don't make it to the gym as much. I might lift twice a week - and don't try very hard or do progressive overload at all - and try to get in 3-4 days of cardio.
And I honestly don't look very different. Muscles are roughly the same size. In clothes, most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Can sort of confirm. I wouldn't say so much "genetics" as "constitution". That is, you're born with a set of attributes, and those can also be affected by circumstances outside of your control. Those come together to determine how you respond to exercise and whether you can exercise consistently at all. Someone with active and athletic parents who was affected by undiagnosed childhood diseases and poorly managed injuries (*cough*) is going to have health and performance problems that keep them out of the gym. Someone who builds muscle very slowly but who can just keep at it for 10, 15 years is going to be jacked.
We also don't account for the role of money in these things. Do you make enough to buy good food, afford a decent gym that you can visit regularly, afford a good doctor who can help you manage issues (such as, ahem, low testosterone)?, afford a low-uncontrolled-stress lifestyle? You're good. It's a lot harder when you get hit by roadblocks and don't have the money to resolve them before you've detrained.
> My experience from lifting now for 30+ years and seeing thousands of people lift is it is: 1. Genetics.
Also in first place: steroids.
The bodybuilding magazines loved to talk about genetics because they didn't want to say the quiet part out loud. Nowadays people are more willing to talk about it.
What? I mean.. seriously, what? There are people with great genetic potential that lives like couch potatoes. What good is having the potential of you don't use it. Genetics is important, but there are many elements and just dropping this here is, IMO, irresponsible, because some people will read this and go... Ah, I'm out of shape because of genetics, nothing I can do, oh well.
Muscle soreness is not necessary for hypertrophy, but often enough (but not always) it is a good measure of the effort/volume/weight/technique (so a proxy for the mechanical tension, the thing that we want, but it hard to measure directly).
> Healthy, recreationally active but untrained young males
Yeah this is why. Anything you do as an untrained person is going to get you newbie gains. It's just really easy to improve initially. Doesn't mean it'll work after the first 6 months
> it is possible that the type I fibers of subjects were underdeveloped in comparison with the type II fibers as a result of training methodologies. The type I fibers therefore may have had a greater potential for growth compared with the type II fibers
Maybe a mix of both types of training would be best then?
Perhaps there's some unmeasured influence, but this study was looking only at the difference between growth within subjects vs between subjects. If the subjects were all "newbies", then that doesn't explain the results.
They're essentially saying that individual genetics explain the majority of the variation seen as a response to muscle stimulus in their test subjects, not the mass used, because the variation within the test cohorts was greater than the variation between them. You can argue that, if they didn't test experienced lifters the results might be different in that population, but you can't dismiss the results on those grounds.
Completely anecdotal, but when I was 18, in highschool, I trained in the gym in my hometown, supervised with a trainer, 12 reps per muscle group, very modest gains.
I move to university, start reading a fitness forum where people were saying do max 6 reps if you want big gains.
I also started supplementing with whey protein, and within 3 months the gains were spectacular, everybody noticed, I felt on fire, best time of my life, I miss so much how great I felt in my own body.
I've seen other colleagues and how they trained -- I can say there was 100% correlation that those people who were not training hard also did not have big gains.
People who had enough breath left in them to chat in the gym simply did not gain as much as people I saw as training hard.
Also for me, the 6 reps to exhaustion felt completely different then 12 reps (again, to complete exhaustion) -- immediately after the training it felt amazing to be alive, the world became a comfortable place, my anxiety completely vanished, and in the night and morning after an intense training (especially the legs and back) the erections and libido boost were out of this world, something I never felt with the 12 reps regimen.
The activation energy or stimulus required for hypertrophy in untrained individuals is so low that it’s hard to differentiate the results. Studies like this absolutely need to be done in trained individuals if you want reliable data.
exactly. when you're new, virtually any type of lifting you do is going to create sufficient stimulus to trigger maximum muscle growth, because you're going from 0 to 1. unfortunately, since the only people that researchers can usually convince to participate in their studies are untrained, this has led to an enormous amount of junk studies where they try to extrapolate the results to people who are not untrained.
failing to lift is not the same as lifting until failure.
Consider, if I load up the bench press to 200kg I won't get a single rep. If I try to rep it I'll fail but I'm not lifting until failure.
If I load it up to smaller weight lets say 100kg and crank out rep after rep I'll get much closer to "lifting until failure."
When I reach the end, the last rep is a rep I won't make. But I'm still not at a point where I can't do no more, just the weight is too big, so I must reduce the weight and go again. When I do this I get even closer to "lifting until failure".
It's like integration, the smaller the infinitesimal the closer to the true value you get when you sum up (integrate) all the parts.
This paper isn’t saying that it doesn’t matter what program you do, it’s saying that other variables, not directly related to the method of weight training, matter more. It also assumes that you can extrapolate data from one individual training each limb with a different program to if that individual performs either program on both limbs. Maybe there are carryover affects to the lower load limb that you get from training heavier with the higher load limb that you wouldn’t from training both at a lower intensity.
Except that the paper did not compare different training methods. The used the same method since it has been long established that training to failure anywhere in the 5-30 reps (perhaps even more, the upper limit has not been established yet) gets the same results from the hypertrophy point of view.
So basically the study's results are "there are individual differences in how people respond to training". Wow, such news, so research, much insight. /s
Therefore study itself is dumb and the misleading title makes it even worse.
Yeah. When was powerlifting seriously I spent months with my deadlift stuck on 525 pounds. I would measure progress by how many times I could just get the weight off the floor, then how far off the floor, etc… The newbie gains were long gone.
> the difference between high and low load programming within [newbies]
Fixed that.
As the comment you replied to noted, newbie gains are remarkably sensitive to any stimulation, and insensitive to the type of stimulation. Because going from zero to any resistance training is a massive stimulus increase, on a long-term under stimulated system.
The study does confirm that. The data it produces is useful.
What this study doesn't do, is help newbies (or anyone) choose the most effective practices to adopt. Because 10 weeks is way too short to identify best practices for any sustained program.
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
The counterarguments don't address what AstroBen noted.: newbies get high gains from any kind of stimulus.
The paper has simply confirmed the common knowledge teached in universities.
The problem is, after you are no longer a newbie you may train for years with very little progress, and that's when you need to start differenting stimulus, being strategic about it - otherwise you may stay stuck.
And unfortunately the paper doesn't address or refute that, while it's coverage (or even the title of this hackernews) may suggest otherwise.
I thought it was already well understood/researched that it's not the weights that matter, but effectively taking your sets to muscular failure. While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights" there is practical aspects to this - you don't wand to spend hours at the gym, and doing heavy weights at 5-7 reps is sufficient as long as you are close or at muscular failure.
There are a few issues with taking every set to failure, the most important being that it will substantially increase your risk of injury. It sounds great until you consider compounds like the deadlift that can ruin your back if your form is bad, and by definition, going to failure means your form will be imperfect at some point. There are lots of macho powerlifters out there with permanently ruined spines who will probably die earlier than they would have otherwise, due to mobility degradation.
Particularly as you get older you become more injury prone and your recovery time slows down. This necessitates being cautious about how quickly you increase weight and how often you go to failure.
The better goal to target is increasing volume, where volume is defined as Sets x Reps x Weight. The literature doesn't conclusively establish that any one of these is "more important" than the others for hypertrophy. The only real caveat when you follow this rule is that at a certain extreme of low weight / high reps (like 50 reps) you wouldn't actually be doing resistance training anymore, it'd be cardio.
2 reps in reserve is fine and far less painful, but you need to go to actual failure often enough to know where failure is on each set. I’m nerdy enough to suggest rolling a 20 sided die for each set, and on a 1 take it to failure it’s not that complicated and keeps your predictions honest.
As I understand it taking a set near failure works reasonably anywhere between 5 to 30 reps, but 30 well controlled reps with good form * 3+ sets for each muscle group gets really boring.
What about longer rest periods? For example if I wait 1hr between sets I can do full weight again without dropping down weights with a 2-5min break. In fact I can get multiple more sets in and significantly increase my total volume if I spread a workout over a day (which is easier with WFH). Any thoughts on this? Is there not enough muscle fatigue with this approach?
Your point about the injury risk going up is valid. That being said going to failure and beyond is extremely effective way to train.
As I mentioned in another comment a possibile way to mitigate the risks is to reduce the load and make the exercise harder and increase the time under load by slowing down the exercise.
Also it's a good idea to swap from a higher risk exercise to a safer one to crank out the last reps.
For example from squat to leg press.
I think the total volume idea is more flawed than you realise. Pretty much everyone would be able to achieve greater volume, on any exercise, just by decreasing the weight, so your high rep caveat is covering up for quite a lot. This is true mathematically for an Epley style model for example.
Has anyone really ever walked to failure on a regular basis? I typically have to stop because of blisters not muscle failure. (The furthest I've done is 12 miles with +10% weight.)
I don't know. All cyclists I know seem to have massive thighs. And these are amateurs who don't do any kind of strength training, just hours and hours of cycling every week.
The weight does matter. You will never get bigger if you don't add weight to the bar, and you will never get bigger if you only train at 1% of your 1 rep max, no matter the number of reps. Producing a training stimulus requires placing the muscle under sufficient tension (enough weight) enough times to be at or near failure.
Novelty of stimulus is a huge factor, especially as training continues over years. Failure from a set of 20 is very different than failure from a set of 5, and bodybuilders will periodize their training to cycle through the different flavors of stimulus. I think a big contributor might be neuromuscular adaptation. Cycling through those different intensities over training periods measured in months will make this apparent anecdotally.
At very low reps and high weight, particularly for highly coordinated motions (squats, dips, pull-ups, Pulver press back-extensions), there's a much higher chance for injury due to insufficient support at one or more positions within the entire range of concentric and eccentric efforts by all activated muscles. We all have, at the very least, minor intrinsic asymmetries that need explicit addressing.
There's also intra-set recovery. Roughly (very roughly) speaking, your endo-neuro-muscular system "adapts best" where there is a refractory period for a reset-to-quiescence between exertions.
There is real truth to "muscle memory" and the exclusive way to achieve that (and avoid injury) is through a sufficient amount of well-formed repetitions. The only way to achieve those repetitions is by using a resistance that's sufficiently low.
Asymmetry is normal and you cannot address it (outside of repeatability of movement, aiming for no form degradation during high load).
As long as your movement does not degrade horribly, asymmetry is fine.
Even before strength training, your one arm is dominant, more precise. But this has an effect on your leg as well.
Doing unilateral work will never change that asymmetry. As you get stronger, due to drastically different activations of the nervous system between the sides, you will get slightly different adaptations.
Looking at powerlifters, most of them have visibly different sizes of hip, leg musculature between sides. They even have drastic flexibility differences where one hip goes deeper, or the musculature makes the barbell sit skewed on the back.
If you were a newbie just getting started.. the ligaments and tendons take much longer to strengthen than the muscle. So the muscles getting stronger will outpace the connective tissue.
Second potential issue is too much training vrt recovery.
A good way to add safety margin when training to failure is to reduce the weights and slow down the exercise and increase the time under load.
For example bench press, do 5s down (eccentric), 5s pause (isometric) and then (optionally) 5s press (concentric). Your weights will go way down because this exercise will be so hard. But the stress on the joints and ligaments will be reduced.
That matches what I've been told by various personal trainers. 6-8 reps if focusing on strength, ~12 for all round, and 16-18 for size/endurance. Do three sets, weight should be enough that the last couple of reps on the first set are a bit of a struggle. Subsequent sets just push through as far as you can.
Generally training to failure is completely fine for say a set of tricep extensions. Generally safe.
However, training to failure on compound lifts like a deadlift or benchpress, or involving sensitive muscles like a shoulder press, isn't.
Technique generally suffers at the point of failure. Making a habit of doing thousands of repetitions in the next decade at the point where technique fails, on an exercise that can mess up your back permanently, or your shoulders, is bad advice.
For these exercises it's better to stop 2 reps short of failure. This is more safe. Also it requires moderate recovery getting you back in the gym quicker, meaning you can compound more incremental improvements in a given training period (say 5 years).
Even then, some still cautiously go to failure to keep an understanding of what their failure point really is. You could go for a PR once or twice a month for example and go to failure, with a proper warmup, spotter etc. But purely for hypertrophy there's not really a point, this is more for strength training.
Generally people that say they train to failure mean 2 reps in reserve. Training to absolute failure on all muscles is very rare and generally advised against.
not an expert, 2 years of serious lifting, but this is probably a good adage for the average person from my current understanding
training to failure puts you at higher risk of injury and there are diminishing returns as you approach your 1 rep max and/or failure
hypertrophy can happen with more reps or more weight
strength gains are usually just focused on progressive overload
though, of course, hypertrophy will happen either way and contributes to increased strength, but this seems to be further confirmation that you can gain muscle size either way
It's definitely way more nuanced than that. You have to approach exhaustion to get the body to eventually build strength. But you need to carefully time your rests/deloads and handle plateaus with more volume.
Failure also taxes your nervous system and joints which don’t take as kindly to stimulus as muscles do and take longer to recover (or accumulate damage in case of joints)
Depending on what you mean by "fail" and "stretching", that sounds a lot like eccentric training [0] (a.k.a. "negatives"). It's effective but notorious for causing delayed onset muscle soreness.
I trained myself to do pull-ups using this method, repeatedly lowering myself in a controlled motion from the top position while I was too weak to actually pull myself up.
There has been a lot of "long length training/partials" information/research in the past couple of years. A very useful information, you should research more (or ask more specific questions).
> Loads for each set were adjusted to ensure that volitional fatigue was reached within 8–12 and 20–25 repetitions for the HL and LL limbs, respectively
I would argue both categories of the study are about low reps. I don't see how the body would tell the difference between 12 and 25 reps. If you said between 5 and 500, like it has to meaningfully take much longer, otherwise why would doing something so similar have any meaningful difference?
The way I think about it is that nature mostly reacts to order of magnitude changes. 12 to 25 is the same thing.
Like why not make a study to see if its more nutritious to eat dinner in 15 or 20 minutes?
I just do light weight nowadays with my strength training. It’s easier mentally. Rather than push myself to go higher on bench, squat, and deadlift, I stick to 1 plate for bench and squat and 2 plates for deadlift. Every single time. Instead of increasing load, I increase rep amount and focus on my form. Honestly, I still find myself sore after most workouts and the simplicity is nice. I’m 25 for reference.
You won't see any progress if you won't push yourself. It shapes your mentality, and running away from work is what will keep you at the same place. Soreness is not a sign of progression most of the time. Bump up the weights, don't run away.
I find the goal of perpetual progress in resistance training strange. Yet it seems to be almost universal. If you are not lifting more today than you lifted yesterday, you are a failure. Gains, gains, gains. It is rather obvious that there are genetic limits on strength and size. Everyone is somewhere on their own spectrum of potential. Someone who doesn’t resistance train at all is likely near the bottom of their potential. Someone who works out 5 days a week, never misses leg day, eats enough protein (1g per kg in Europe, 1g per lb in the US) is likely near the top of their potential. Living in higher and higher ranges of your potential requires exponentially more ongoing effort, dedication/discipline/sacrifice, blood/sweat/tears/pain. Say my absolute maximum genetic potential in exercise X is to lift 100kg. Say I never do exercise X, so my current maximum is 40k. With some effort, like training 3 days a week for 4 months, I might get this to 60kg. Perhaps I could maintain that gain for decades by continuing to train 2 days a week. Or, I could keep pushing and maybe I could get it to 80kg in a few years. With an absolute all out effort, applying all the knowledge of the latest studies and perfect discipline, I could temporarily push it into the high 90s. Everybody can do what they want to do, but it seems to me that seeking the minimum effective dose of resistance training to look and feel good, and be strong enough to do what you like or need to do, is a reasonable approach. No need to push for more gains after that.
They're increasing reps and therefore total load. That's still a form of progression ('pushing yourself'). This style will slightly favor hypertrophy gains over strength gains.
At 40 I recently made this switch in style as well. The weight was getting so high that my anxiety was causing a mental aversion to working out altogether. Consistency is really 95% of exercise so I think this is a reasonable trade-off.
That said, I understand where you are coming from. There's something to be said about facing the fear of the weight head on. I've already done that in my younger years though. I'd much rather avoid injury and get 80% of the benefits.
I got to 425 max on deadlift. My ego isn’t tied to being stronger, just strong enough to be healthy and fit. I think it’s unhealthy to view this as “running away” and honestly I look good and by putting less focus on it, I have more focus for other things in life I can optimize.
I don't intend to convince you, but for onlookers:
1. As a young male, 1 plate bench/squat and 2 plate deadlift is extremely weak. Please strive higher than this. Anyone can achieve this in 6 months of intelligent training max. Many men start this strong untrained. The majority of young men can squat 1 plate untrained.
1. Soreness is not an indication of anything other than that you did a lot of eccentric loading. It doesn't correlate to progress. It is also a sign that your programming is not intelligent; you generally should not be sore after the first few workouts ever again.
1. Yes it is easier mentally, in the sense that doing easy things is easy. This is not a benefit, because doing hard things results in mental strength as much as physical.
My max used to be 425 on deadlift back when I was taking it more seriously. Doing 5x8 of 225 on deadlift is enough to be strong to be healthy and active. You can only push yourself on a limited number of things in life so some things are just good enough.
I do minimal weight training but in climbing the current consensus is that too many reps increases likely hood of developing an overuse injuries in the tendons. Probably depends on the exercises (climbing is hard on the elbows), but maybe keep an eye for tendonitis
Good call out. I’m pretty lazy so I keep the rep ranges low. And not too many sets. Generally I start with a compound lift to hit everything in the muscle group I’m working then move onto accessory lifts to target more granularly. I think I’m lazy enough my risk of injury is low.
If I read this correctly the gist is that it does not matter if you use heavy weights with few reps (common body builder wisdom) or lighter weights with more reps. As long as you always exercise to
complete muscle fatigue you'll
get the maximum for your genetics (which itself varies a lot).
There's no way this works in practice. A lot of heavy lifting (maximums) is about neurology and mind-body training. You cannot develop the ability to deadlift 405lbs by spending 2 hours using a cable crossover machine every day. Picking up something that weighs 2x more than you do requires your brain to send an extremely strong, synchronized signal. This is something that takes a lot of practice to develop. You have to consistently push your maximum voluntary effort in order to expand this capacity.
There is a minimum weight you must use to create a training stimulus, but yes, you can increase your 1RM with higher-rep sets (again, to a limit, they can't be sets of 100, the weight is too light).
To increase your 1RM at the most optimal pace, yes you need to specifically train the movement so that you can benefit from improved technique and neurological adaptation. But if I do tricep, pec, and front delt isolation exercises at higher reps, to failure, and see significant hypertrophy in these muscles, my bench press will be stronger, other things constant.
This is very interesting and explain why construction workers can lift 200kg but when they migrate to body building they lost that ability less that a year later.
> heavy weights with few reps (common body builder wisdom)
It is strength training (not body builder) wisdom to use heavy weights with few reps. Hypertrophy (i.e. body builder) programmes usually call for 8-12 reps, which implies relatively low weights.
Can we replicate the process of reaching muscle fatigue/failure to spur muscle growth without the strength training or anabolic steroids? Think GLP-1RAs but for this specific biological pathway.
Steroid use has been shown to increase muscle in untrained males by around 25-30% I believe, without adding any exercise. That doesn't accomplish too much. If you want any worthwhile results, you will still have to train, although the steroids produce significantly more results for the same investment.
My understanding is that anabolic steroid are somehow close to what you're thinking about? It's just that as anything taking a simple shortcut , it comes with unwanted effects
The reason no one has found a better way is because hypertrophy is because it’s well understood and there’s no “better” solution. mTOR is the primary hormone pathway.thy increase the adaptation ceiling by increasing RBC, reducing protein breakdown, etc. Thereby reducing rest needed, so mTOR is heavily unregulated.
This is one of the view places where “if we could we would” is the correct answer. There is so much money in the space of anabolic cheating, the clandestine scientists would’ve already developed it.
It’s worth noting that muscle is not all the same. If you’re just into bodybuilding then sure, proximity to failure is what matters. For athletics though, there still seems to be a big impact in the rep range you work in.
This. Muscles can be optimized for volume/endurance or power, or some balance between them. Taking legs as an example: Powerlifters obviously go for pure power, whereas runners need a bit of power but mostly endurance, whereas cyclists need more power than runners but more endurance than powerlifters.
All of these benefit from weight training, but depending on the sport, the programming will be very different.
It is actually common bodybuilder wisdom to go for the lighter version.
Stereotyping, weightlifters who go for max numbers do 1 set of a million pounds and rest three hours between exercises, while bodybuilders do thirty exercises a day for 8 series of 15 reps each.
Age: 22+-3
AND with that weight to ffbm ratio not only untrained, but at least slightly (I’m being generous here) overweight.
With these pre-requisites it almost doesn’t matter what kind of physical activity one does- the muscles will grow anyway. It’s when you are older and/or accustomed to some kind of physical training, that you really noticeably benefit from resistance training.
And still, that ‘almost’ part does a lot of the heavy lifting here.
I don’t believe it’s really possible for a couch potato without any experience to correctly assess their 1RM. People with no experience with pain and effort typically can’t push themselves hard enough, so the entire exercise turns to a half-cardio anyway.
And gauging 1 rep max in a bicep curl is especially difficult (saying nothing of a risk of injury).
I understand the complexity and difficulty of researching the subject, but this entire article is no good and is hardly applicable to most of the population IMO
Are you perhaps reading a personal advice in a paper, disliking the advice, and then finding that due to the experimental design, it doesn't work on you. And then, rather than concluding the paper didn't intend to inform your personal routine, instead conclude that the paper was badly designed?
Or to put it differently. Have you considered how many people live in a way you would never consider close to acceptable?
Because your points make sense but it feels like you are arguing against a bit of a strawman, or arguing for a mostly ideal situation rather than current reality?
For overweight and understrength people, is it not very valuable to know that they don't need the extra steps of resistance training to see real improvement in strength and fitness?
This doesn’t look like a particularly charitable interpretation of my comment, although my interpretation of the article isn’t either, so it’s only fair.
And no, I am not looking for a personal fitness advice in scientific research anymore (too late for that), but am rather trying to see its applicability to others, as per my understanding of those others around me.
Most people in the developed world aren’t 22-year old males.
A significant part of the population is comprised of the elderly or middle-aged, a lot of those people have pre-existing injuries due to under- (too sedentary) and over-use (blue collar work, youth sports).
Approaching physical fitness in those groups has its its own set of requirements and limitations, and I believe that in many cases resistance training is a more safe and efficient choice.
Not saying that the youth and children are unimportant, but typically they are already well covered by the organized sports and pt classes in schools and universities, unlike the adults.
My opinion is that the study is both badly designed (likely in a way to make it easier to implement) and is not applicable to the majority of the population.
> I understand the complexity and difficulty of researching the subject, but this entire article is no good and is hardly applicable to most of the population IMO
Most of the population is untrained, and in many countries a majority is overweight.
I don't think your concern about "correctly assessing their 1RM" matters either - if anything that means the loads are even lower relative to actual 1RM, and their subjects were still getting results.
It may not tell us much about outcomes at the top end, but more knowledge of what advice to give "most people" is important, and if they can get good results at low percentages of 1RM, it seems a lot more likely you'll get people to try.
That is exactly the issue with incorrectly gauging 1rm- if it’s too low, than the supposed ‘resistance’ training with 70-80% of 1rm isn’t actually that.
Is it fair to compare A to B, when the A in question isn’t exactly an A, but rather something closer to B?
They have to start video recording the workouts. Even veterans in this academic field sometimes design workouts that just can’t be done to failure if you’re actually going to failure over 6-12 weeks.
Even 1 workout sometimes has so many sets prescribed where I cant imagine all of them were actual failure
>It’s when you are older and/or accustomed to some kind of physical training, that you really noticeably benefit from resistance training.
Do you have any sources for that? I'm asking because that is a bold statement given the (almost non-) existing literature on pro athlete hypertophy. Especially since athletes in almost every sport don't even care about hypertrophy - unless you talk about pro bodybuilding. And there you have tons of pharmacological interventions, so it's not really easy to paint a picture either. I don't know a single good study performed on a significant set of tested natural bodybuilders regarding hypertrophy.
Studies like this are also aimed at couch potatoes, because that is the normal population, so the results will be applicable to most people, which in turn is important when you want to get funding for your research. In that sense it also doesn't matter that these people will not have reached their full neuromuscular connection compared to actual weightlifters, because most people haven't either. So the results are still relevant. Usually when scientists sell this kind of research to grant departments, they try to provide a benefit to geriatric or otherwise medically impaired people, so that existing treatments may be improved. Studying muscle building itself just for the sake of it in gymbros is not a good strategy unless you want to spend your own money. And this stuff quickly gets very expensive if you want to do it right.
Having only read the abstract... the conclusion makes sense to me. I've operated under the assumption that volume is the most important factor for muscle growth as long as you're lifting something like 1/3 or more of your 1RM. So 12 reps with higher load or 25 reps with lower load are going to be similar volumes (or at least similar enough given the other factors that the two protocols give the same outcome).
What feels counter-intuitive here is that the variable most people obsess over, load, turns out to matter far less than who you are. Intuitively we expect optimization to work like engineering. Change the input, change the output. Lift heavier, grow more muscle.
I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is a single study on untrained adult males.
They use a control of the other half of a person, but that is known to have flaws. Even if you train only your left side, your right will get stronger too.
Wait for other studies to find similar effects, especially in trained individuals
I only scanned to article but did not see mention of the pre-trial condition of the subjects. Were they very new to resistance training? Or had they been doing it on a regular basis for a number of years? Because when you start out, doing just about anything is going to increase muscle mass
As a natty bodybuilder for over 30 years for anyone aspiring towards fitness and starting at the gym my most important advice is
"Put the phone away and bust some ass"
I see way too many people (the great majority) completely sabotage their training by putting the weights down when it starts to get hard and get on their phone.
When the weights get hard is when the real set begins. If you don't do the hard reps you deny yourself the stimulus required for adapting to overcome the stress, I.e the growth.
This is why having a buddy/spotter is so important. On every lift my friend spotted me an extra 3-4 reps that I would not be able to do if I went just myself and kept going until the last rep was 95% him and 5% me. First guy to automate spotting is an instant billionaire.
Depending on the exercise you can also do this without a spotter.
Either do cheat reps and focus on the negative (works with small exercise such as bicep curls) or drop set or super set.
My personal fav is the cheat and negative and I do it a lot for example in cable pulldown. Use a bit of bodyweight to pull it down and then 5s negative.
The quality of evidence in exercise training is generally pretty terrible. 10 week study with untrained college students tells you very little about what happens over a lifetime of lifting. Personally I’ve found that switching rep range on an exercise is a great way to break through plateaus.
Ultimately you’re engaged in an n=1 study and general advice is of limited use. You need to learn what tools are available, how your body reacts to different stimuli, what keeps you consistent etc. Everything is context dependent, trying to find some universally “best” way is a wild goose chase.
Getting more muscles leads to more strength (because the strength of the muscle is determined by the cross-sectional area).
But you can definitely be natually strong without having a lot of muscle.
And you can definitely get much stronger without getting much muscle.
In other words, any person with big pecs and triceps will be strong in bench (even without training). But strong bencher will not necessarily have big pecs/triceps to show.
That's the whole premise behind the popularity of the Anatoly gym pranks.
Strength as measured by mostly powerlifting is impacted by a huge factor by the body mechanics, i.e the length of the various body parts, secondarily by tendon attachments and then finally by variations in tissues
Thats the variation within the classes. And there will always be outliers, but even if you look at bodybuilders in 100+ kg, they are not what you’d call weak even if they don’t optimize for strength.
I thought hypertrophic focused routines were their own subset. Starting with a high rep, like 20, decreasing something like 2/week while increasing the weight. You technically can increase load, but in my experience it isn't strictly necessary. 10-12 weeks down to 1-2 reps then 3-4 off to reset. This isn't a strength routine, simply for size relative to lift.
The study assigned different training regimes to different limbs of the same person. If you think their measured effects do not reflect your own experience, I'd be interested in your fitness status and your result when you do the same. Otherwise it sounds a little like you are disputing the study because it showed something different to your belief.
I know it's practically de rigeur to jump into the comments and immediately complain about methodology for any study that makes it to the front page, and I want to emphasize I don't distrust their findings, but I would like to see an equivalent study go out longer than 10 weeks. When I've been taking weightlifting seriously I feel like I don't even start to notice hypertrophy until 8-10 weeks. I feel like 6 months is the actual period where results would matter, to me, but I assume "subject compliance" is pretty difficult to get for such a timeframe, if you're really watching dietary intake and ensuring subjects go to failure (which, to its credit, this study did).
This is par for the course with exercise science. It's mostly fake. No blinding, small sample sizes, researchers with agenda, low duration, low funding etc. The good news is that doing almost anything works.
> Abstract: [...] In conclusion, training protocols with the same TUT promote similar strength gains and muscle hypertrophy. Moreover, considering that the protocols used different numbers of repetitions, the results indicate that training volumes cannot be considered separately from TUT when evaluating neuromuscular adaptations.
I’m not at all a biology expert, but if the squat is actually pushing you somewhat close to your limit (it’s not super easy), you’ll definitely get stronger. Case in point: isometric exercises. Also: folks who do planks for a few weeks/months.
The group that did lower reps with higher weight, had the better one rep max at the end of the study, but they didn’t measure if the higher rep group had greater endurance. Which seems a bit odd, considering their conclusion is both groups grew the same amount of muscle which fine but if the muscle is adapted for something different in each group, you would want to capture that.
I don't think so? If last week I could do 50 reps @ 5 lbs, and this week I can do 50 at 6 lbs (or 60 at 5lbs), then that's measurable objective progress
If that's what you're training for, sure. If you just want to be strong, you can achieve that and avoid the highest injury risk by sticking with 5 reps or so.
You can do the goofiest workout you can possibly imagine as a young untrained male and put on muscle. You will do so at roughly max rate regardless of what you do as long as it’s vaguely productive. This isn’t useful research ngl.
I am afraid of trying to lift to failure.
never once been in a gym, or trained for anything except marksmanship, but have alwayse been physical, with a lot of what I call "dirty lifts" in the course of getting things done,pushing 60 now.
I do notice that after a stretch of realy hard work, and taking a day or two to rest and EAT, I will bulk, but nothing is by the numbers, except the day I took over the old blacksmith shop and we took the gentlmans anvil down, and lifted mine up, each of us grabing one end with one hand, my anvil weighs 460lbs, he was in his 80's and I was in my late 20's.
I muscle everything around, steel, wood, round bales,but follow the philosophy of "just because you can, dosn't mean you should"
which I believe is especialy true for realy big guys, because while you can build huge muscle, your cartlige and coligen is no better than an size small office guy with that florecent tan, where I have seen in the same frame, a big guy pushing 40, not moving good anymore, and foccused dweeb gettin his lunch zipps right through, doesn't even see the hulk.
my point, if I have one, is that nothing counts, unless you can style it
Yep, lots of different ways to get jacked. That means if you couldn't care less about strength, you can do pretty much any decent exercise that targets the muscle(s) you want to grow in a very wide rep range. Most people want a combination of both size and strength, so you can just do some sets of 5-10 if you aren't already. If you want to have a strong deadlift or squat or whatever, you should train that movement. Not as complicated as fitness social media people want to make it seem: train for what you want.
I don't think this is true. I've been following a fairly standard progression on several of the standard exercises over the last year and half. I've seen steady progression on leg press, which is a strongly stabilized and isolated exercise. I saw the same rate of initial progression on squats but then it dropped off and I haven't really seen any progression for six months.
The issue is stability. I have to provide the stability for squats. The machine gives me stability for leg press. I won't get the stability I need for further progression, at least not at an optimal rate, just from squatting. I need to do complementary exercises.
I agree with this, but for those newbies be careful at what you define as "failure".
I've f.up my MCL by not listening to my body and I have the stability of a typical 85 year old while I try and 'heal'. It takes longer as you get older (you're probably not 20 year old) and stupid stuff can really take you out.
When training for muscle size atleast, but not strength. Presumably there are increased injury risks overall when lifting heavy (based on a brief search).
fairly new to lifting myself (2+ years taking it seriously) but this thing seems to jive with what I've read across different areas
bodybuilders can build muscle size with high reps and lower weight or lower reps and high weight as long as they do it close to failure with only a few reps in reserve (rir)
powerlifters, or those focusing on strength, usually go for high weight and lower reps because they might be training for a competition that focuses on 1 rep max and/or the body can really only handle so many reps when pushing it at 80-90% of 1 rep max
neither is inherently better but a matter of what goals you have in mind, plus, hypertrophy contributes to overall strength, too
If it's not painfull you are not exerting enough effort at least that's the case in the gym. People who are refreshed and more energetic after going to the gym are the same people who won't improve beyond intermediate levels. The ones who let go of the any set at the first feelings of unease and never take a set close to failure.
It's actually fascinating how an ancient proverb could line up with modern science so perfectly.
This is really terrible advice that just discourages people.
You absolutely can get significant improvements without (much) pain. DOMS during the initial stages is going to be the most uncomfortable part. Once you're past it, you don't need to push yourself to a breaking point, just to the point of mild exhaustion.
This will provide you enough resistance to gain muscle mass and improve the bone density to healthy levels.
Yeah, "no pain no gain" is probably the worst advice I've ever received. It encourages sedentary people to go hard for a week and then quit, which is the exact opposite of what works: starting with consistent easy sessions and adding progressive overload.
Dynomight has a good blog post about this[0], but applied to running rather than resistance training.
I think propensity for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) must be genetic or something because I've never been able to get "past it," even after many years.
I know this is not in the spirit of HN, but I feel it's my ethical duty to say something about this topic because of the impact the topic has on the psychology of young men. This study is misleading or more likely just false. I do not know what the flaw in their methodology is, but I know it is false, regardless of how many peers may have reviewed it. Please do not start lifting 20-25RM to gain hypertrophy, because it will not work well, and you will not achieve your goals.
No one in the history of lifting has ever achieved an impressive physique via light weights. It simply does not work. The literature, to the extent it exists, is wrong on this and on many other related topics. The traditional view, taken in general, is correct: lift big to get big. Strongmen and powerlifters are very hypertrophied below their fat. They do 3-5RMs. Bodybuilders may do up to 12RMs. No one successful, even moderately, does or ever has done 25RMs because that weight is too low to drive adaptation in the stress-recovery-adaptation cycle.
Not sure why it gets attention here. The "finding" is the long standing assumption as it is, absolutely nothing new discovered here. It could be notable if it was of some particularly high quality, but here it is 20 untrained individuals doing some dubious exercise regime for 10 weeks and finding out that on average one dubious exercise pattern wasn't particularly better than the other, and overall exercising seemed to be good for all of them, although inter-personal coefficient of variation is up to 28.3%… Like, really? That was the study that impressed 211 upvoters?
These journals keep publishing such studies, because there is nothing better to publish in this branch of, uhm, "science", and I would even argue it's not a bad thing, because something is better than nothing, and it's basically impossible today to do more impressive research in this field (because testing humans is far costlier and logistically more complicated than writing equations and running simulations on your PC). But it's funny that it gets someone's attention.
Why is this article showing up on New Year's Day like the flock of newbie gym customers attracted to the gym only to quit 30 days from now? Every year without fail.
Let's ignore this article for a moment.
Overall factors that REALLY matter building muscle: 1. Consistency - Working out each muscle group at least once a week....every week. 2. Diet - Making sure you are consuming enough protein in your diet, approximately 1gram/pound of body weight...or near it or even best you can. Total calories consumed a day should match any online calculator for your age and activity level. 3. Sleep! 4. Sleep! 5. Vary your workout - some weeks high reps low weight and some weeks low reps high weight. Why? Never let your body know what you're doing and shock it as best you can. Always try to exert yourself enough to be sore within 48 hours of a workout.
Now multiply this over a few years.
Stop reading these studies thinking there is some optimal way! It's just hard work over time.
BTW: In winter I bench press 350 pounds or 159KG. I run 10KM or 6.1 miles twice a week and increase it a little bit in summer. I pull my body in two different directions because I love both.
This is a physiology research article published in a physiology journal, not a Tiktoken influencer peddling "get ripped fast" schemes.
In an ironic twist, you then proceed to peddle your own. In a single paragraph you added more contentious "advice" than in the entire article you're dismissing.
> Stop reading these studies thinking there is some optimal way! It's just hard work over time.
"Hard work" and "learning new things" are not mutually exclusive. Stop presuming you know what I think while I'm reading these studies.
Still, a "given all else, this optimal thing giving +1% growth" is negligible percentage, when all the other mentioned factors are several orders of magnitude more important.
My point is, simply doing it consistently, even if slightly less optimally, will trivially surpass anything else in the long run and there are no "silver bullets" in training.
The only importance is safety, avoiding injuring oneself.
Also, the article also states this: "RET-induced hypertrophy is mediated to a far greater degree by inherent endogenous biological factors"
To be charitable to both the article and the OP - his advice of “hard work over time” is still good advice.
I think many people tend to get stuck in premature optimization, which can take the fun away and thus you end up quitting. I did that a few times, so it might be a me-thing.
Nowadays I exercise 4x/week without really worrying about a strategy or about optimal protein intake etc.
But then again, nowadays my goal is just to live healthy rather than gain strength.
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All this advice is mostly harmless and not contraindicated, though some of it is incorrect, but point 5 in regards to soreness is harmful advice. Soreness is not a goal and does not indicate anything other than that you did a lot of eccentric lifting to which you were not recently adapted. Soreness means you waited longer than what was necessary to exercise that muscle group again. If you are getting sore beyond the first few workouts, it is a sign that your programming is suboptimal.
Progress is the weight on the bar increasing. Progress is not you being sore. Excess soreness is counterproductive during training, and should only be sought after if you are exercising as a penance for sins instead of training for some goal.
+1. Point number 5 is probably the worst part of their post.
Beginners should focus on form, consistency, and linear progression of weight. If you can stand the boredom do the exact same program for a year. Probably 2-3 full body workouts that hit each body part twice.
For intermediate+, hitting a body part once a week is suboptimal for most. People who care about results and progression/growth should be progressing from 5 up to 20 hard sets per muscle per week across the span of a few years. (Compounds hit multiple, so it's not necessarily 20 hard times the number of muscles!) What's "hard"? in the 0-2 RIR range, ideally to failure.
For advanced, as i understand it, they need to focus on weekly periodization like hitting 3RIR, 2RIR, 1RIR, 0RIR (test new 1RM), Recovery week kind of cycles. Plus more that advanced coaches can teach.
>1. Consistency >5. Vary your workout
The muscle "shock" broscience has been disproven many times:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35438660/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349502442_Does_Vary...
> The muscle "shock" broscience has been disproven many times:
Variety isn't to shock or confuse the body, it's just to make sure you actually hit all the muscles in as many ways possible. Take your average push/pull gym rat to a yoga class or a climbing wall and they'll be more sore the next day than they've ever been before, because they'll activate muscles they didn't even know they had.
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Indeed. It is really just tension x time under tension within a sensible rep range (probably around 5 - 30 reps or so). Menno on Youtube has a bunch of videos on this, the link below being the latest one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmOBmTZARq8
Basically work the muscle harder and get more jacked. It isn't that hard. Full body workouts are also great for this reason: you can hit a muscle more times per week and be fresher when you hit that muscle, so both the tension and time under tension can be higher vs a body part split.
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The reason for varying your workout I have heard is to avoid injury, not to be stronger. Of course it may turn out that is false too.
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It doesn’t really affect hypertrophy but it matters because imbalances will get you weird injuries and/or mobility restrictions in the long term.
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Why you’d actively argue to ignore a study with interesting outcomes and peddle platitudes that i see on a daily basis about everywhere is one thing. But for it also to be the top comment in this thread is a real pity
"approximately 1gram/pound of body weight"
I believe this should be lean mass, not total mass. I think people tried to calibrate this metric since most people don't have scales that can measure composition... but if you're obese, you're going to be consuming more than you need to, which is counter productive if you're obese.
It's actually not, because nothing provides as much satiety as protein.
Every calorie you get from protein reduces your cravings for food significantly more then the equivalent carb and fats.
You still need to get over the initial insulin normalization though from reducing sugars. Nothing reduces that pain, no matter what you try.
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Yes! The "lean mass" caveat is oft ignored by bro scientists, and even LLMs have incorporated the error due to training on bro science forums.
I use this as a bit of a canary. If you see somebody making this basic mistake (like the post you're replying to did), you should be highly skeptical of their other claims too.
Practically speaking it doesn't matter. Just use your healthy (men 15-20% fat; women +8%) weight and calculate based on that.
If you are healthy fat percentage, just use your own weight. If you are a bit highter, and can financially and practically afford it, just use your weight as well. Won't hurt and might actually help a bit.
So it is only a concern for severely obese people. If you are 50+kg overweight, you can scale it down a bit.
Similarly, these obese people shouldn't use the "my current diet - 500kcal a day reduction" which is sensible for already lean bodybuilders. They should just use the "my maintenance diet if I were of healthy weight".
https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...
Yep it’s the most broscience myth that simply won’t go away.
>Every year without fail.
>First published: 31 December 2025
I think the poster means that around this time of year these types of articles appear
I just got back from the gym and it was surprisingly empty. Actually, more empty than normal.
My experience from lifting now for 30+ years and seeing thousands of people lift is it is: 1. Genetics.
Everything else is a distant second or third. This was actually something that was widely understood in 90s bodybuilding magazines. Lifting is mostly a display of genetics. That worked when you could sell magazines of genetic freaks working out. Without the magazines you have to sell all this nonsense like 1 gram per lb of protein. Even though I know the early research was 1 gram per kilo and then Americans just changed that to 1 gram per lb. I mean it is just such obvious nonsense that the optimal amount would happen to be the exact integer amount vs body weight that is easiest to remember, how convenient for people who sell protein lol. duh.
It really is just mostly this, and social media has tricked people into thinking otherwise.
I was looking at some photos of myself about 10 years ago. At the time, I had been hitting the gym hard, consistently, and intelligently. I had a huge bench press, squad, and deadlift, and was lifting 4-5 days a week, and managed every facet of my diet.
Now, I'm older, have kids, don't sleep as much, and definitely don't make it to the gym as much. I might lift twice a week - and don't try very hard or do progressive overload at all - and try to get in 3-4 days of cardio.
And I honestly don't look very different. Muscles are roughly the same size. In clothes, most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
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Can sort of confirm. I wouldn't say so much "genetics" as "constitution". That is, you're born with a set of attributes, and those can also be affected by circumstances outside of your control. Those come together to determine how you respond to exercise and whether you can exercise consistently at all. Someone with active and athletic parents who was affected by undiagnosed childhood diseases and poorly managed injuries (*cough*) is going to have health and performance problems that keep them out of the gym. Someone who builds muscle very slowly but who can just keep at it for 10, 15 years is going to be jacked.
We also don't account for the role of money in these things. Do you make enough to buy good food, afford a decent gym that you can visit regularly, afford a good doctor who can help you manage issues (such as, ahem, low testosterone)?, afford a low-uncontrolled-stress lifestyle? You're good. It's a lot harder when you get hit by roadblocks and don't have the money to resolve them before you've detrained.
> My experience from lifting now for 30+ years and seeing thousands of people lift is it is: 1. Genetics.
Also in first place: steroids.
The bodybuilding magazines loved to talk about genetics because they didn't want to say the quiet part out loud. Nowadays people are more willing to talk about it.
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What? I mean.. seriously, what? There are people with great genetic potential that lives like couch potatoes. What good is having the potential of you don't use it. Genetics is important, but there are many elements and just dropping this here is, IMO, irresponsible, because some people will read this and go... Ah, I'm out of shape because of genetics, nothing I can do, oh well.
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hormones can be tweaked despite genetics
The fact that you state that muscle soreness is necessary for hypertrophy shows that ignoring studies is bad advice.
Muscle soreness is not necessary for hypertrophy, but often enough (but not always) it is a good measure of the effort/volume/weight/technique (so a proxy for the mechanical tension, the thing that we want, but it hard to measure directly).
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> Healthy, recreationally active but untrained young males
Yeah this is why. Anything you do as an untrained person is going to get you newbie gains. It's just really easy to improve initially. Doesn't mean it'll work after the first 6 months
Brad Schoenfeld felt the same way, so he did the study on trained participants, and made the same finding: https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/fulltext/2015/10000/Effec...
Oh that's interesting
> it is possible that the type I fibers of subjects were underdeveloped in comparison with the type II fibers as a result of training methodologies. The type I fibers therefore may have had a greater potential for growth compared with the type II fibers
Maybe a mix of both types of training would be best then?
That is a very underpowered study, only 18 participants
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Perhaps there's some unmeasured influence, but this study was looking only at the difference between growth within subjects vs between subjects. If the subjects were all "newbies", then that doesn't explain the results.
They're essentially saying that individual genetics explain the majority of the variation seen as a response to muscle stimulus in their test subjects, not the mass used, because the variation within the test cohorts was greater than the variation between them. You can argue that, if they didn't test experienced lifters the results might be different in that population, but you can't dismiss the results on those grounds.
> not the mass used.
Completely anecdotal, but when I was 18, in highschool, I trained in the gym in my hometown, supervised with a trainer, 12 reps per muscle group, very modest gains.
I move to university, start reading a fitness forum where people were saying do max 6 reps if you want big gains.
I also started supplementing with whey protein, and within 3 months the gains were spectacular, everybody noticed, I felt on fire, best time of my life, I miss so much how great I felt in my own body.
I've seen other colleagues and how they trained -- I can say there was 100% correlation that those people who were not training hard also did not have big gains. People who had enough breath left in them to chat in the gym simply did not gain as much as people I saw as training hard.
Also for me, the 6 reps to exhaustion felt completely different then 12 reps (again, to complete exhaustion) -- immediately after the training it felt amazing to be alive, the world became a comfortable place, my anxiety completely vanished, and in the night and morning after an intense training (especially the legs and back) the erections and libido boost were out of this world, something I never felt with the 12 reps regimen.
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The activation energy or stimulus required for hypertrophy in untrained individuals is so low that it’s hard to differentiate the results. Studies like this absolutely need to be done in trained individuals if you want reliable data.
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exactly. when you're new, virtually any type of lifting you do is going to create sufficient stimulus to trigger maximum muscle growth, because you're going from 0 to 1. unfortunately, since the only people that researchers can usually convince to participate in their studies are untrained, this has led to an enormous amount of junk studies where they try to extrapolate the results to people who are not untrained.
Also, it's more difficult to reach true failure with lower load, people tend to stop too early.
False,
failing to lift is not the same as lifting until failure.
Consider, if I load up the bench press to 200kg I won't get a single rep. If I try to rep it I'll fail but I'm not lifting until failure.
If I load it up to smaller weight lets say 100kg and crank out rep after rep I'll get much closer to "lifting until failure."
When I reach the end, the last rep is a rep I won't make. But I'm still not at a point where I can't do no more, just the weight is too big, so I must reduce the weight and go again. When I do this I get even closer to "lifting until failure".
It's like integration, the smaller the infinitesimal the closer to the true value you get when you sum up (integrate) all the parts.
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From my recollection, this is a quite common issue with studies in this topic area.
This paper isn’t saying that it doesn’t matter what program you do, it’s saying that other variables, not directly related to the method of weight training, matter more. It also assumes that you can extrapolate data from one individual training each limb with a different program to if that individual performs either program on both limbs. Maybe there are carryover affects to the lower load limb that you get from training heavier with the higher load limb that you wouldn’t from training both at a lower intensity.
Except that the paper did not compare different training methods. The used the same method since it has been long established that training to failure anywhere in the 5-30 reps (perhaps even more, the upper limit has not been established yet) gets the same results from the hypertrophy point of view.
So basically the study's results are "there are individual differences in how people respond to training". Wow, such news, so research, much insight. /s
Therefore study itself is dumb and the misleading title makes it even worse.
Yeah. When was powerlifting seriously I spent months with my deadlift stuck on 525 pounds. I would measure progress by how many times I could just get the weight off the floor, then how far off the floor, etc… The newbie gains were long gone.
this wasn't a study of absolute growth (sure - newbie gains), but rather the difference between high and low load programming within individuals.
> the difference between high and low load programming within [newbies]
Fixed that.
As the comment you replied to noted, newbie gains are remarkably sensitive to any stimulation, and insensitive to the type of stimulation. Because going from zero to any resistance training is a massive stimulus increase, on a long-term under stimulated system.
The study does confirm that. The data it produces is useful.
What this study doesn't do, is help newbies (or anyone) choose the most effective practices to adopt. Because 10 weeks is way too short to identify best practices for any sustained program.
"HN dismisses study without understanding it"
this is peak gym bro science
> Yeah this is why.
Guys, the study has been refuted by AstroBen. No need to read it.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. The counterarguments don't address what AstroBen noted.: newbies get high gains from any kind of stimulus. The paper has simply confirmed the common knowledge teached in universities.
The problem is, after you are no longer a newbie you may train for years with very little progress, and that's when you need to start differenting stimulus, being strategic about it - otherwise you may stay stuck.
And unfortunately the paper doesn't address or refute that, while it's coverage (or even the title of this hackernews) may suggest otherwise.
I thought it was already well understood/researched that it's not the weights that matter, but effectively taking your sets to muscular failure. While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights" there is practical aspects to this - you don't wand to spend hours at the gym, and doing heavy weights at 5-7 reps is sufficient as long as you are close or at muscular failure.
There are a few issues with taking every set to failure, the most important being that it will substantially increase your risk of injury. It sounds great until you consider compounds like the deadlift that can ruin your back if your form is bad, and by definition, going to failure means your form will be imperfect at some point. There are lots of macho powerlifters out there with permanently ruined spines who will probably die earlier than they would have otherwise, due to mobility degradation.
Particularly as you get older you become more injury prone and your recovery time slows down. This necessitates being cautious about how quickly you increase weight and how often you go to failure.
The better goal to target is increasing volume, where volume is defined as Sets x Reps x Weight. The literature doesn't conclusively establish that any one of these is "more important" than the others for hypertrophy. The only real caveat when you follow this rule is that at a certain extreme of low weight / high reps (like 50 reps) you wouldn't actually be doing resistance training anymore, it'd be cardio.
2 reps in reserve is fine and far less painful, but you need to go to actual failure often enough to know where failure is on each set. I’m nerdy enough to suggest rolling a 20 sided die for each set, and on a 1 take it to failure it’s not that complicated and keeps your predictions honest.
As I understand it taking a set near failure works reasonably anywhere between 5 to 30 reps, but 30 well controlled reps with good form * 3+ sets for each muscle group gets really boring.
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What about longer rest periods? For example if I wait 1hr between sets I can do full weight again without dropping down weights with a 2-5min break. In fact I can get multiple more sets in and significantly increase my total volume if I spread a workout over a day (which is easier with WFH). Any thoughts on this? Is there not enough muscle fatigue with this approach?
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Your point about the injury risk going up is valid. That being said going to failure and beyond is extremely effective way to train.
As I mentioned in another comment a possibile way to mitigate the risks is to reduce the load and make the exercise harder and increase the time under load by slowing down the exercise.
Also it's a good idea to swap from a higher risk exercise to a safer one to crank out the last reps. For example from squat to leg press.
I think the total volume idea is more flawed than you realise. Pretty much everyone would be able to achieve greater volume, on any exercise, just by decreasing the weight, so your high rep caveat is covering up for quite a lot. This is true mathematically for an Epley style model for example.
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>While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights"
The caveat is that you need anaerobic training. Low enough weight and it’s cardio, you don’t get giant legs by walking to failure for example.
Has anyone really ever walked to failure on a regular basis? I typically have to stop because of blisters not muscle failure. (The furthest I've done is 12 miles with +10% weight.)
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I don't know. All cyclists I know seem to have massive thighs. And these are amateurs who don't do any kind of strength training, just hours and hours of cycling every week.
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Well you’re not applying much mechanical tension to the quadriceps when “walking to failure”. This is nowhere near analogous.
The weight does matter. You will never get bigger if you don't add weight to the bar, and you will never get bigger if you only train at 1% of your 1 rep max, no matter the number of reps. Producing a training stimulus requires placing the muscle under sufficient tension (enough weight) enough times to be at or near failure.
Well understood, but not widely known. The myths and superstitions around anything health related are frustratingly durable.
Novelty of stimulus is a huge factor, especially as training continues over years. Failure from a set of 20 is very different than failure from a set of 5, and bodybuilders will periodize their training to cycle through the different flavors of stimulus. I think a big contributor might be neuromuscular adaptation. Cycling through those different intensities over training periods measured in months will make this apparent anecdotally.
They mostly cycle for health (injury prevention) and sanity (not to do the same damn thing).
> bodybuilders will periodize their training to cycle through the different flavors of stimulus
Some will, many won’t. It’s clearly not necessary.
There's also the risk of injury.
At very low reps and high weight, particularly for highly coordinated motions (squats, dips, pull-ups, Pulver press back-extensions), there's a much higher chance for injury due to insufficient support at one or more positions within the entire range of concentric and eccentric efforts by all activated muscles. We all have, at the very least, minor intrinsic asymmetries that need explicit addressing.
There's also intra-set recovery. Roughly (very roughly) speaking, your endo-neuro-muscular system "adapts best" where there is a refractory period for a reset-to-quiescence between exertions.
There is real truth to "muscle memory" and the exclusive way to achieve that (and avoid injury) is through a sufficient amount of well-formed repetitions. The only way to achieve those repetitions is by using a resistance that's sufficiently low.
Asymmetry is normal and you cannot address it (outside of repeatability of movement, aiming for no form degradation during high load).
As long as your movement does not degrade horribly, asymmetry is fine.
Even before strength training, your one arm is dominant, more precise. But this has an effect on your leg as well.
Doing unilateral work will never change that asymmetry. As you get stronger, due to drastically different activations of the nervous system between the sides, you will get slightly different adaptations.
Looking at powerlifters, most of them have visibly different sizes of hip, leg musculature between sides. They even have drastic flexibility differences where one hip goes deeper, or the musculature makes the barbell sit skewed on the back.
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Brad Schoenfeld Has been on this body of work for a long time, and he is "Mr. Hypertrophy" in the field. So yes
Training to failure for me personally only brought injury and set back my progress by weeks.
If you were a newbie just getting started.. the ligaments and tendons take much longer to strengthen than the muscle. So the muscles getting stronger will outpace the connective tissue.
Second potential issue is too much training vrt recovery.
A good way to add safety margin when training to failure is to reduce the weights and slow down the exercise and increase the time under load.
For example bench press, do 5s down (eccentric), 5s pause (isometric) and then (optionally) 5s press (concentric). Your weights will go way down because this exercise will be so hard. But the stress on the joints and ligaments will be reduced.
Fifty is excessive but you’re better-served doing 12-20 reps more than fewer, heavier reps if you’re pushing hypertrophy and already well-trained.
This article claims that's false, that 8-12 at higher weight leads to the same result as 20+ at lower weights.
That matches what I've been told by various personal trainers. 6-8 reps if focusing on strength, ~12 for all round, and 16-18 for size/endurance. Do three sets, weight should be enough that the last couple of reps on the first set are a bit of a struggle. Subsequent sets just push through as far as you can.
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What about the old gym adage "training to failure is failing to train" - is there any physiological basis for this, or is it mental, or just a myth?
That’s a Pl/Oly mindset rather than a BB/hypertrophy mindset. Totally valid advice in the right context.
Long story short, failed reps get much more risky and problematic as the weight you’re lifting approaches your 1RM.
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It holds true, but with some caveats.
Generally training to failure is completely fine for say a set of tricep extensions. Generally safe.
However, training to failure on compound lifts like a deadlift or benchpress, or involving sensitive muscles like a shoulder press, isn't.
Technique generally suffers at the point of failure. Making a habit of doing thousands of repetitions in the next decade at the point where technique fails, on an exercise that can mess up your back permanently, or your shoulders, is bad advice.
For these exercises it's better to stop 2 reps short of failure. This is more safe. Also it requires moderate recovery getting you back in the gym quicker, meaning you can compound more incremental improvements in a given training period (say 5 years).
Even then, some still cautiously go to failure to keep an understanding of what their failure point really is. You could go for a PR once or twice a month for example and go to failure, with a proper warmup, spotter etc. But purely for hypertrophy there's not really a point, this is more for strength training.
Generally people that say they train to failure mean 2 reps in reserve. Training to absolute failure on all muscles is very rare and generally advised against.
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not an expert, 2 years of serious lifting, but this is probably a good adage for the average person from my current understanding
training to failure puts you at higher risk of injury and there are diminishing returns as you approach your 1 rep max and/or failure
hypertrophy can happen with more reps or more weight
strength gains are usually just focused on progressive overload
though, of course, hypertrophy will happen either way and contributes to increased strength, but this seems to be further confirmation that you can gain muscle size either way
It's definitely way more nuanced than that. You have to approach exhaustion to get the body to eventually build strength. But you need to carefully time your rests/deloads and handle plateaus with more volume.
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I’ve never heard that, it’s usually the opposite- people do strip sets and the like to reach failure
Failure also taxes your nervous system and joints which don’t take as kindly to stimulus as muscles do and take longer to recover (or accumulate damage in case of joints)
Not being able to do a rep with proper form is the definition of failure.
How about making muscles fail by stretching them under load?
Depending on what you mean by "fail" and "stretching", that sounds a lot like eccentric training [0] (a.k.a. "negatives"). It's effective but notorious for causing delayed onset muscle soreness.
I trained myself to do pull-ups using this method, repeatedly lowering myself in a controlled motion from the top position while I was too weak to actually pull myself up.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentric_training
There has been a lot of "long length training/partials" information/research in the past couple of years. A very useful information, you should research more (or ask more specific questions).
Sounds like a great way to injure yourself, also would only work for eccentric motion
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> Loads for each set were adjusted to ensure that volitional fatigue was reached within 8–12 and 20–25 repetitions for the HL and LL limbs, respectively
I would argue both categories of the study are about low reps. I don't see how the body would tell the difference between 12 and 25 reps. If you said between 5 and 500, like it has to meaningfully take much longer, otherwise why would doing something so similar have any meaningful difference?
The way I think about it is that nature mostly reacts to order of magnitude changes. 12 to 25 is the same thing.
Like why not make a study to see if its more nutritious to eat dinner in 15 or 20 minutes?
This is spoken like you've never done any reps at all?
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I feel like I would definitely notice if I went from 12 to 25 reps on any exercise I do. Although typically I max out at 8 before adding more weight.
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I just do light weight nowadays with my strength training. It’s easier mentally. Rather than push myself to go higher on bench, squat, and deadlift, I stick to 1 plate for bench and squat and 2 plates for deadlift. Every single time. Instead of increasing load, I increase rep amount and focus on my form. Honestly, I still find myself sore after most workouts and the simplicity is nice. I’m 25 for reference.
You won't see any progress if you won't push yourself. It shapes your mentality, and running away from work is what will keep you at the same place. Soreness is not a sign of progression most of the time. Bump up the weights, don't run away.
I find the goal of perpetual progress in resistance training strange. Yet it seems to be almost universal. If you are not lifting more today than you lifted yesterday, you are a failure. Gains, gains, gains. It is rather obvious that there are genetic limits on strength and size. Everyone is somewhere on their own spectrum of potential. Someone who doesn’t resistance train at all is likely near the bottom of their potential. Someone who works out 5 days a week, never misses leg day, eats enough protein (1g per kg in Europe, 1g per lb in the US) is likely near the top of their potential. Living in higher and higher ranges of your potential requires exponentially more ongoing effort, dedication/discipline/sacrifice, blood/sweat/tears/pain. Say my absolute maximum genetic potential in exercise X is to lift 100kg. Say I never do exercise X, so my current maximum is 40k. With some effort, like training 3 days a week for 4 months, I might get this to 60kg. Perhaps I could maintain that gain for decades by continuing to train 2 days a week. Or, I could keep pushing and maybe I could get it to 80kg in a few years. With an absolute all out effort, applying all the knowledge of the latest studies and perfect discipline, I could temporarily push it into the high 90s. Everybody can do what they want to do, but it seems to me that seeking the minimum effective dose of resistance training to look and feel good, and be strong enough to do what you like or need to do, is a reasonable approach. No need to push for more gains after that.
They're increasing reps and therefore total load. That's still a form of progression ('pushing yourself'). This style will slightly favor hypertrophy gains over strength gains.
At 40 I recently made this switch in style as well. The weight was getting so high that my anxiety was causing a mental aversion to working out altogether. Consistency is really 95% of exercise so I think this is a reasonable trade-off.
That said, I understand where you are coming from. There's something to be said about facing the fear of the weight head on. I've already done that in my younger years though. I'd much rather avoid injury and get 80% of the benefits.
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I got to 425 max on deadlift. My ego isn’t tied to being stronger, just strong enough to be healthy and fit. I think it’s unhealthy to view this as “running away” and honestly I look good and by putting less focus on it, I have more focus for other things in life I can optimize.
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[dead]
I don't intend to convince you, but for onlookers:
1. As a young male, 1 plate bench/squat and 2 plate deadlift is extremely weak. Please strive higher than this. Anyone can achieve this in 6 months of intelligent training max. Many men start this strong untrained. The majority of young men can squat 1 plate untrained.
1. Soreness is not an indication of anything other than that you did a lot of eccentric loading. It doesn't correlate to progress. It is also a sign that your programming is not intelligent; you generally should not be sore after the first few workouts ever again.
1. Yes it is easier mentally, in the sense that doing easy things is easy. This is not a benefit, because doing hard things results in mental strength as much as physical.
My max used to be 425 on deadlift back when I was taking it more seriously. Doing 5x8 of 225 on deadlift is enough to be strong to be healthy and active. You can only push yourself on a limited number of things in life so some things are just good enough.
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I do minimal weight training but in climbing the current consensus is that too many reps increases likely hood of developing an overuse injuries in the tendons. Probably depends on the exercises (climbing is hard on the elbows), but maybe keep an eye for tendonitis
Good call out. I’m pretty lazy so I keep the rep ranges low. And not too many sets. Generally I start with a compound lift to hit everything in the muscle group I’m working then move onto accessory lifts to target more granularly. I think I’m lazy enough my risk of injury is low.
If I read this correctly the gist is that it does not matter if you use heavy weights with few reps (common body builder wisdom) or lighter weights with more reps. As long as you always exercise to complete muscle fatigue you'll get the maximum for your genetics (which itself varies a lot).
There's no way this works in practice. A lot of heavy lifting (maximums) is about neurology and mind-body training. You cannot develop the ability to deadlift 405lbs by spending 2 hours using a cable crossover machine every day. Picking up something that weighs 2x more than you do requires your brain to send an extremely strong, synchronized signal. This is something that takes a lot of practice to develop. You have to consistently push your maximum voluntary effort in order to expand this capacity.
Right, but this post is about hypertrophy (big muscles). Not about heavy lifts.
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There is a minimum weight you must use to create a training stimulus, but yes, you can increase your 1RM with higher-rep sets (again, to a limit, they can't be sets of 100, the weight is too light).
To increase your 1RM at the most optimal pace, yes you need to specifically train the movement so that you can benefit from improved technique and neurological adaptation. But if I do tricep, pec, and front delt isolation exercises at higher reps, to failure, and see significant hypertrophy in these muscles, my bench press will be stronger, other things constant.
This is very interesting and explain why construction workers can lift 200kg but when they migrate to body building they lost that ability less that a year later.
> heavy weights with few reps (common body builder wisdom)
It is strength training (not body builder) wisdom to use heavy weights with few reps. Hypertrophy (i.e. body builder) programmes usually call for 8-12 reps, which implies relatively low weights.
is "8-12" not "few" for you?
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Can we replicate the process of reaching muscle fatigue/failure to spur muscle growth without the strength training or anabolic steroids? Think GLP-1RAs but for this specific biological pathway.
https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/lilly-terminate-obesity-t...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
Steroid use has been shown to increase muscle in untrained males by around 25-30% I believe, without adding any exercise. That doesn't accomplish too much. If you want any worthwhile results, you will still have to train, although the steroids produce significantly more results for the same investment.
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My understanding is that anabolic steroid are somehow close to what you're thinking about? It's just that as anything taking a simple shortcut , it comes with unwanted effects
The reason no one has found a better way is because hypertrophy is because it’s well understood and there’s no “better” solution. mTOR is the primary hormone pathway.thy increase the adaptation ceiling by increasing RBC, reducing protein breakdown, etc. Thereby reducing rest needed, so mTOR is heavily unregulated.
This is one of the view places where “if we could we would” is the correct answer. There is so much money in the space of anabolic cheating, the clandestine scientists would’ve already developed it.
It’s worth noting that muscle is not all the same. If you’re just into bodybuilding then sure, proximity to failure is what matters. For athletics though, there still seems to be a big impact in the rep range you work in.
This. Muscles can be optimized for volume/endurance or power, or some balance between them. Taking legs as an example: Powerlifters obviously go for pure power, whereas runners need a bit of power but mostly endurance, whereas cyclists need more power than runners but more endurance than powerlifters.
All of these benefit from weight training, but depending on the sport, the programming will be very different.
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It is actually common bodybuilder wisdom to go for the lighter version.
Stereotyping, weightlifters who go for max numbers do 1 set of a million pounds and rest three hours between exercises, while bodybuilders do thirty exercises a day for 8 series of 15 reps each.
Unless I’m missing something, this has already been known, though the hypertrophic benefits start to reduce beyond 30 reps.
Age: 22+-3 AND with that weight to ffbm ratio not only untrained, but at least slightly (I’m being generous here) overweight.
With these pre-requisites it almost doesn’t matter what kind of physical activity one does- the muscles will grow anyway. It’s when you are older and/or accustomed to some kind of physical training, that you really noticeably benefit from resistance training.
And still, that ‘almost’ part does a lot of the heavy lifting here. I don’t believe it’s really possible for a couch potato without any experience to correctly assess their 1RM. People with no experience with pain and effort typically can’t push themselves hard enough, so the entire exercise turns to a half-cardio anyway.
And gauging 1 rep max in a bicep curl is especially difficult (saying nothing of a risk of injury).
I understand the complexity and difficulty of researching the subject, but this entire article is no good and is hardly applicable to most of the population IMO
Are you perhaps reading a personal advice in a paper, disliking the advice, and then finding that due to the experimental design, it doesn't work on you. And then, rather than concluding the paper didn't intend to inform your personal routine, instead conclude that the paper was badly designed? Or to put it differently. Have you considered how many people live in a way you would never consider close to acceptable?
Because your points make sense but it feels like you are arguing against a bit of a strawman, or arguing for a mostly ideal situation rather than current reality?
For overweight and understrength people, is it not very valuable to know that they don't need the extra steps of resistance training to see real improvement in strength and fitness?
This doesn’t look like a particularly charitable interpretation of my comment, although my interpretation of the article isn’t either, so it’s only fair.
And no, I am not looking for a personal fitness advice in scientific research anymore (too late for that), but am rather trying to see its applicability to others, as per my understanding of those others around me.
Most people in the developed world aren’t 22-year old males. A significant part of the population is comprised of the elderly or middle-aged, a lot of those people have pre-existing injuries due to under- (too sedentary) and over-use (blue collar work, youth sports). Approaching physical fitness in those groups has its its own set of requirements and limitations, and I believe that in many cases resistance training is a more safe and efficient choice.
Not saying that the youth and children are unimportant, but typically they are already well covered by the organized sports and pt classes in schools and universities, unlike the adults.
My opinion is that the study is both badly designed (likely in a way to make it easier to implement) and is not applicable to the majority of the population.
> I understand the complexity and difficulty of researching the subject, but this entire article is no good and is hardly applicable to most of the population IMO
Most of the population is untrained, and in many countries a majority is overweight.
I don't think your concern about "correctly assessing their 1RM" matters either - if anything that means the loads are even lower relative to actual 1RM, and their subjects were still getting results.
It may not tell us much about outcomes at the top end, but more knowledge of what advice to give "most people" is important, and if they can get good results at low percentages of 1RM, it seems a lot more likely you'll get people to try.
That is exactly the issue with incorrectly gauging 1rm- if it’s too low, than the supposed ‘resistance’ training with 70-80% of 1rm isn’t actually that.
Is it fair to compare A to B, when the A in question isn’t exactly an A, but rather something closer to B?
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They have to start video recording the workouts. Even veterans in this academic field sometimes design workouts that just can’t be done to failure if you’re actually going to failure over 6-12 weeks.
Even 1 workout sometimes has so many sets prescribed where I cant imagine all of them were actual failure
>It’s when you are older and/or accustomed to some kind of physical training, that you really noticeably benefit from resistance training.
Do you have any sources for that? I'm asking because that is a bold statement given the (almost non-) existing literature on pro athlete hypertophy. Especially since athletes in almost every sport don't even care about hypertrophy - unless you talk about pro bodybuilding. And there you have tons of pharmacological interventions, so it's not really easy to paint a picture either. I don't know a single good study performed on a significant set of tested natural bodybuilders regarding hypertrophy.
Studies like this are also aimed at couch potatoes, because that is the normal population, so the results will be applicable to most people, which in turn is important when you want to get funding for your research. In that sense it also doesn't matter that these people will not have reached their full neuromuscular connection compared to actual weightlifters, because most people haven't either. So the results are still relevant. Usually when scientists sell this kind of research to grant departments, they try to provide a benefit to geriatric or otherwise medically impaired people, so that existing treatments may be improved. Studying muscle building itself just for the sake of it in gymbros is not a good strategy unless you want to spend your own money. And this stuff quickly gets very expensive if you want to do it right.
Having only read the abstract... the conclusion makes sense to me. I've operated under the assumption that volume is the most important factor for muscle growth as long as you're lifting something like 1/3 or more of your 1RM. So 12 reps with higher load or 25 reps with lower load are going to be similar volumes (or at least similar enough given the other factors that the two protocols give the same outcome).
What feels counter-intuitive here is that the variable most people obsess over, load, turns out to matter far less than who you are. Intuitively we expect optimization to work like engineering. Change the input, change the output. Lift heavier, grow more muscle.
I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is a single study on untrained adult males.
They use a control of the other half of a person, but that is known to have flaws. Even if you train only your left side, your right will get stronger too.
Wait for other studies to find similar effects, especially in trained individuals
I only scanned to article but did not see mention of the pre-trial condition of the subjects. Were they very new to resistance training? Or had they been doing it on a regular basis for a number of years? Because when you start out, doing just about anything is going to increase muscle mass
Untrained individuals. Typically University students.
Summary: train to failure. Duh.
As a natty bodybuilder for over 30 years for anyone aspiring towards fitness and starting at the gym my most important advice is
"Put the phone away and bust some ass"
I see way too many people (the great majority) completely sabotage their training by putting the weights down when it starts to get hard and get on their phone.
When the weights get hard is when the real set begins. If you don't do the hard reps you deny yourself the stimulus required for adapting to overcome the stress, I.e the growth.
This is why having a buddy/spotter is so important. On every lift my friend spotted me an extra 3-4 reps that I would not be able to do if I went just myself and kept going until the last rep was 95% him and 5% me. First guy to automate spotting is an instant billionaire.
Depending on the exercise you can also do this without a spotter.
Either do cheat reps and focus on the negative (works with small exercise such as bicep curls) or drop set or super set.
My personal fav is the cheat and negative and I do it a lot for example in cable pulldown. Use a bit of bodyweight to pull it down and then 5s negative.
The quality of evidence in exercise training is generally pretty terrible. 10 week study with untrained college students tells you very little about what happens over a lifetime of lifting. Personally I’ve found that switching rep range on an exercise is a great way to break through plateaus.
Ultimately you’re engaged in an n=1 study and general advice is of limited use. You need to learn what tools are available, how your body reacts to different stimuli, what keeps you consistent etc. Everything is context dependent, trying to find some universally “best” way is a wild goose chase.
For beginner lifters that might be true initially, but eventually weight will matter.
Even if true, high rep is impractical, otherwise we'd see people doing body weight exercises only reach high levels of bodybuilding.
Even around 1900, it didn't matter if you were a genetic freak, you needed a barbell to win competitions.
You cannot be strong without being big and you cannot be big without being strong.
Of course there are levels to this, variations within “weight classes”… but in general this holds true.
Also consistency trumps any program.
Wrong.
Getting more muscles leads to more strength (because the strength of the muscle is determined by the cross-sectional area).
But you can definitely be natually strong without having a lot of muscle.
And you can definitely get much stronger without getting much muscle.
In other words, any person with big pecs and triceps will be strong in bench (even without training). But strong bencher will not necessarily have big pecs/triceps to show.
That's the whole premise behind the popularity of the Anatoly gym pranks.
False.
Strength as measured by mostly powerlifting is impacted by a huge factor by the body mechanics, i.e the length of the various body parts, secondarily by tendon attachments and then finally by variations in tissues
You start off by confidently stating wallaBBB's statement is false.
But nothing you said invalidates what they said.
Thats the variation within the classes. And there will always be outliers, but even if you look at bodybuilders in 100+ kg, they are not what you’d call weak even if they don’t optimize for strength.
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I thought hypertrophic focused routines were their own subset. Starting with a high rep, like 20, decreasing something like 2/week while increasing the weight. You technically can increase load, but in my experience it isn't strictly necessary. 10-12 weeks down to 1-2 reps then 3-4 off to reset. This isn't a strength routine, simply for size relative to lift.
Lift heavy things, lightly. Lift light things, heavily.
The study assigned different training regimes to different limbs of the same person. If you think their measured effects do not reflect your own experience, I'd be interested in your fitness status and your result when you do the same. Otherwise it sounds a little like you are disputing the study because it showed something different to your belief.
I know it's practically de rigeur to jump into the comments and immediately complain about methodology for any study that makes it to the front page, and I want to emphasize I don't distrust their findings, but I would like to see an equivalent study go out longer than 10 weeks. When I've been taking weightlifting seriously I feel like I don't even start to notice hypertrophy until 8-10 weeks. I feel like 6 months is the actual period where results would matter, to me, but I assume "subject compliance" is pretty difficult to get for such a timeframe, if you're really watching dietary intake and ensuring subjects go to failure (which, to its credit, this study did).
This is par for the course with exercise science. It's mostly fake. No blinding, small sample sizes, researchers with agenda, low duration, low funding etc. The good news is that doing almost anything works.
How would you blind it? This isn't pharmacy where you can hand out sugar pills.
Doing almost anything works better than doing nothing.
Firas Zahabi on focusing on consistency over intensity in training.
https://youtu.be/_fbCcWyYthQ?si=gf39MLiqid9e6Szu
What about Time Under Tension?
"Equalization of Training Protocols by Time Under Tension Determines the Magnitude of Changes in Strength and Muscular Hypertrophy" (2022) https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/fulltext/2022/07000/equal... :
> Abstract: [...] In conclusion, training protocols with the same TUT promote similar strength gains and muscle hypertrophy. Moreover, considering that the protocols used different numbers of repetitions, the results indicate that training volumes cannot be considered separately from TUT when evaluating neuromuscular adaptations.
So could I just do one super slow (some minutes) squat per week at like 60% and get all the benefits still?
I’m not at all a biology expert, but if the squat is actually pushing you somewhat close to your limit (it’s not super easy), you’ll definitely get stronger. Case in point: isometric exercises. Also: folks who do planks for a few weeks/months.
The group that did lower reps with higher weight, had the better one rep max at the end of the study, but they didn’t measure if the higher rep group had greater endurance. Which seems a bit odd, considering their conclusion is both groups grew the same amount of muscle which fine but if the muscle is adapted for something different in each group, you would want to capture that.
> both groups grew the same amount of muscle which fine but
The focus was on hypertrophy, so 1RM or endurance doesn't matter in their case
It does matter. It's the only objective way to measure progress. A study doesn't negate that.
I don't think so? If last week I could do 50 reps @ 5 lbs, and this week I can do 50 at 6 lbs (or 60 at 5lbs), then that's measurable objective progress
isnt the 1RM the measure of progress?
If that's what you're training for, sure. If you just want to be strong, you can achieve that and avoid the highest injury risk by sticking with 5 reps or so.
You can do the goofiest workout you can possibly imagine as a young untrained male and put on muscle. You will do so at roughly max rate regardless of what you do as long as it’s vaguely productive. This isn’t useful research ngl.
I am afraid of trying to lift to failure. never once been in a gym, or trained for anything except marksmanship, but have alwayse been physical, with a lot of what I call "dirty lifts" in the course of getting things done,pushing 60 now. I do notice that after a stretch of realy hard work, and taking a day or two to rest and EAT, I will bulk, but nothing is by the numbers, except the day I took over the old blacksmith shop and we took the gentlmans anvil down, and lifted mine up, each of us grabing one end with one hand, my anvil weighs 460lbs, he was in his 80's and I was in my late 20's. I muscle everything around, steel, wood, round bales,but follow the philosophy of "just because you can, dosn't mean you should" which I believe is especialy true for realy big guys, because while you can build huge muscle, your cartlige and coligen is no better than an size small office guy with that florecent tan, where I have seen in the same frame, a big guy pushing 40, not moving good anymore, and foccused dweeb gettin his lunch zipps right through, doesn't even see the hulk. my point, if I have one, is that nothing counts, unless you can style it
Yep, lots of different ways to get jacked. That means if you couldn't care less about strength, you can do pretty much any decent exercise that targets the muscle(s) you want to grow in a very wide rep range. Most people want a combination of both size and strength, so you can just do some sets of 5-10 if you aren't already. If you want to have a strong deadlift or squat or whatever, you should train that movement. Not as complicated as fitness social media people want to make it seem: train for what you want.
I don't think this is true. I've been following a fairly standard progression on several of the standard exercises over the last year and half. I've seen steady progression on leg press, which is a strongly stabilized and isolated exercise. I saw the same rate of initial progression on squats but then it dropped off and I haven't really seen any progression for six months.
The issue is stability. I have to provide the stability for squats. The machine gives me stability for leg press. I won't get the stability I need for further progression, at least not at an optimal rate, just from squatting. I need to do complementary exercises.
So resistance is futile?
When < 1 ohm
> Twenty healthy young male participants completed thrice-weekly resistance exercise sessions for 10 weeks.
Not sure how much can be concluded from this.
I think the downvoters need to read up on underpowered statistics.
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tldr appears to be that if you work to fatigue it doesn't matter if you fatigue out with high weights vs low weights
I agree with this, but for those newbies be careful at what you define as "failure".
I've f.up my MCL by not listening to my body and I have the stability of a typical 85 year old while I try and 'heal'. It takes longer as you get older (you're probably not 20 year old) and stupid stuff can really take you out.
There is certainly a difference in a slow twitch vs fast twitch muscle adaptation though
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8139349/
When training for muscle size atleast, but not strength. Presumably there are increased injury risks overall when lifting heavy (based on a brief search).
fairly new to lifting myself (2+ years taking it seriously) but this thing seems to jive with what I've read across different areas
bodybuilders can build muscle size with high reps and lower weight or lower reps and high weight as long as they do it close to failure with only a few reps in reserve (rir)
powerlifters, or those focusing on strength, usually go for high weight and lower reps because they might be training for a competition that focuses on 1 rep max and/or the body can really only handle so many reps when pushing it at 80-90% of 1 rep max
neither is inherently better but a matter of what goals you have in mind, plus, hypertrophy contributes to overall strength, too
I.e.
No pain, no gain.
If it's _painful_ you are doing it wrong
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bx3gkHJehRCYZAF3r/pain-is-no...
If it's not painfull you are not exerting enough effort at least that's the case in the gym. People who are refreshed and more energetic after going to the gym are the same people who won't improve beyond intermediate levels. The ones who let go of the any set at the first feelings of unease and never take a set close to failure.
It's actually fascinating how an ancient proverb could line up with modern science so perfectly.
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This is really terrible advice that just discourages people.
You absolutely can get significant improvements without (much) pain. DOMS during the initial stages is going to be the most uncomfortable part. Once you're past it, you don't need to push yourself to a breaking point, just to the point of mild exhaustion.
This will provide you enough resistance to gain muscle mass and improve the bone density to healthy levels.
Yeah, "no pain no gain" is probably the worst advice I've ever received. It encourages sedentary people to go hard for a week and then quit, which is the exact opposite of what works: starting with consistent easy sessions and adding progressive overload.
Dynomight has a good blog post about this[0], but applied to running rather than resistance training.
[0] https://dynomight.net/2021/01/25/how-to-run-without-all-the-...
I think propensity for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) must be genetic or something because I've never been able to get "past it," even after many years.
Wait, why are we figuring this out only now?
Figuring what out? This low-quality study didn't find anything useful nor novel.
A paper doesn't necessarily mean the information is new, but that there is now some/more evidence to support it.
True, but this kind of information is so basic it almost fits in the "world is round" category.
I know this is not in the spirit of HN, but I feel it's my ethical duty to say something about this topic because of the impact the topic has on the psychology of young men. This study is misleading or more likely just false. I do not know what the flaw in their methodology is, but I know it is false, regardless of how many peers may have reviewed it. Please do not start lifting 20-25RM to gain hypertrophy, because it will not work well, and you will not achieve your goals.
No one in the history of lifting has ever achieved an impressive physique via light weights. It simply does not work. The literature, to the extent it exists, is wrong on this and on many other related topics. The traditional view, taken in general, is correct: lift big to get big. Strongmen and powerlifters are very hypertrophied below their fat. They do 3-5RMs. Bodybuilders may do up to 12RMs. No one successful, even moderately, does or ever has done 25RMs because that weight is too low to drive adaptation in the stress-recovery-adaptation cycle.