Comment by weinzierl
20 hours ago
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.
Well one thing can lead into the other over time. If you can lift 405 once, 315 for reps becomes pedestrian and 225 becomes boring. Lifting that much weight will turn you into a monster faster than if you had not pushed for that capacity. I've seen people who can treat a 225lb barbell as if it's unloaded and 100% of them look like dragon ball Z characters.
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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?
Relatively speaking, no. Strength training (as opposed to hypertrophy) calls for fewer reps, around 5 per set.
Many people advise spending about a year doing more sets of fewer (~5) reps to build strength, and then switch to fewer sets of more reps (8-12) when you want to build muscle mass.
Point being, the idea of doing lighter weights until failure is already kind of there in body building wisdom.
3-5 reps per set for powerlifting training. Competition lifts are a single rep.
No that’s definitely considered to be a moderate rep range. Roughly speaking low is 1-5, mid is 6-12, high is 12+. Above 20 is practically irrelevant.
1-3 is few
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.
Andre the Giant said he never worked out, he just wrestled. He had some kind of growth hormone disorder, if I recall.
Think about gorillas, who are pretty similar to us - they don't lift weights in the gym, do they?
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It’s infuriating that this gets parroted so often. The study you’re referring to measures “fat free mass”. Anabolic steroids acutely increase water and glycogen retention. All that study is showing is that taking steroids increases your body weight due to increased muscle fullness.
You won’t gain any significant amount of muscle tissue from taking steroids without training.
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.
I think I know where they're coming from as I used to have a similar wrong model. I thought strength = more muscle cells and endurance = just better heart/lungs to deliver oxygen and clear waste like CO2 and lactic acid.
Turns out muscle fibers mostly grow bigger rather than more numerous, and there are different fiber types (slow-twitch vs fast-twitch) that adapt based on how you train. So for the same muscle, an Ironman runner and a guy doing heavy low-rep squats will develop different fiber characteristics: you can't fully max out both.
I'm simplifying, but learning this changed a lot about how I understand exercise at the biological level.
Since I'm nitpicking let me point out that powerlifters train for strength. Power is an altogether different (though related to a degree) muscular/neurological characteristic. Power would be more closely related to olympic weightlifters or sprinters/shot-putters etc. Endurance could also be broken into alactic/lactic/aerobic capacity which makes a huge difference at the margins where athletic excellence is made. Nits aside your description is 90% there.
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.