Extreme Volumes, Extreme Gains? (Part 2) (Episode 128)
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- Опубликовано: 11 июн 2024
- In the second and final part of the extreme volume for hypertrophy series, Greg, Pak, and Milo delve into the research on volume for hypertrophy. They review the remainder of the evidence and practical concerns, then answer audience questions.
Most of the research discussed in this episode can be found here:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31868...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25546...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30153...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32058...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27941...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30160...
journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Ab...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
www.researchgate.net/publicat...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33156...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
Note: The full list of sources and notes can be found on the episode page on strongerbyscience.com/podcast-episode-128 here.
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:11:13 - Evidence for high volumes
01:02:53 - Evidence with neutral outcomes
02:04:51 - Discussing other volume review papers
02:33:07 - Diminishing Returns of Volume for Hypertrophy
02:48:58 - Can you use high volumes for multiple muscles at once?
03:04:07 - Are participants really training hard in these studies?
03:18:27 - Hypertrophy vs. Muscle Swelling
03:35:25 - What role does rest time play?
03:46:01 - Practical Strategies to Increase Training Volume
04:24:35 - Audience Questions
Want to get your question answered on the show? Send a voice memo to podcast@strongerbyscience.com
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Finally, a proper length episode. Thank you.
4.66 hours? Holy shit, and fuck yeah.
“Not going to do another aspartame episode”
Just starting this one guys. On Brigatto (first study discussed) 32 sets were not significantly different that 24. I think this is important and wasn't mentioned. However, what is more important is that they used A-mode ultrasound. In my opinion this is not valid for measuring muscle growth. We tried to measure swelling using A-mode in my lab and it was extremely difficult. I am very doubtful that this technology can be used to measure growth.
Maybe we should do a video on both a-mode and b-mode to provide people a visual?
I'm a bit less doubtful. The ultrasound model they used has been validated (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38426639/), and the technique itself at least CAN perform similarly to b-mode (www.mdpi.com/2306-5354/11/2/149). I do think A-mode is probably more reliant on the skill and experience of the evaluator, and would be more strongly influenced by the strength of the standardization procedures used, but both use fundamentally the same technology.
But has it been validated for muscle growth? This is moot as there were not differences between the moderate and high volumes...but I didn't even include this in our paper solely based on how the technology works. You can't do live imaging, you can't center the bone to take the measurement. Its a shot in the dark. Again, this is a worthwhile point.
@@strongerbyscience
@@samuelbuckner I mean, that's not true. I've played around with it. You do get a continuous waveform that changes as you move the probe (unless you don't consider that to be live imaging), which is just a 1-D slice that could be 1:1 transposed onto a 2-D B-mode image (b-mode ultrasound is just multiple simultaneous streams of a-mode ultrasounds, with different waveform amplitudes given different brightnesses). As you adjust the angle of the probe, the bone is pretty unmistakable, since it produces the largest amplitudes of anything the wave is going to encounter. So you can just find the edge of the bone on either side, and go right in the middle. It certainly takes more skill, and I'm sure it's easier to get it wrong, but it's fundamentally the same technology, so a skilled a-mode ultrasound technician should be able to get results that are comparable with b-mode.
You can't live image as you do no b-mode ultrasound. You can't identify the interfaces in the same way. I would 100% suspect that the error is going to be much much greater over 8-12 weeks. Being validated for measuring muscle thickness does not mean that it can track a change. @@strongerbyscience
Don't you have a little issue in your discussion regarding muscle damage/swelling?
Basically you try to transfer what has been observed while investigating the RBE to the discussed volume RT studies, concluding that muscle swelling after e.g. a 12w RT protocol is unlikely to be a concern given that in the RBE studies swelling basically disappears even after a single bout.
But can you really compare that?
RBE studies simply repeat the _same_ bout. I.e., subjects to 'A' today and they do exactly 'A' again the next time.
I might be wrong, but to my understanding thats not how typical RT studies work. In them, training load (weights) usually increase over the course of the study protocol. I.e., while they start with 'A', they then go by 'A+x' , 'A+y', ... and end with 'A+z'. That weight increase is offsetting the RBE.
Therefore, I'd totally expect significant swelling after whatever length of the RT protocol.
But happy to be corrected.
This is such a fantastic podcast. Practical advice at the end is pure gold too. Thank you, Gentlemen.
Yeah, i love this deep dive... Even though i'm very lazy, i had to write a comment on youtube to this podcast, because i was hearing it on google podcast and there is no chance to like and comment it. I love this stuff and it's nice that the real doctors Dr.PAK und Dr.Wolf now part of the SBS-Podcast!!
Not bad but I think you should go for 12 hours next time
The rest time stuff on your phone is actually so true. My 1 hour workout started to turn into 90-110 minutes and I was baffled why it was taking so long.
I started to time my rest periods and I realized my “3 minute rest period” ended up turning into 5-10 minutes-for bicep curls. TikTok be damned.
This was a good talk. I like hearing about all the limitations of research, and this stuff has made me start reading the intro and discussion section of every paper where I start wondering why they did what they did to get the result. You learn a lot that way, but not much from one individual paper. You have to read like four to five papers and then hunt down another handful of papers from the citations and read those too. Research is like a Russian doll.
But if you smash out push ups to failure as Pak suggests at 4 hr 7 ish. Then do them again in the afternoon. Aren’t you just hitting a muscle that needs repair before it’s ready to train again?
Great talk. I'm a well trained individual with 22 years lifting experience. I'd volunteer to do some N-1 experiments on myself in regards to this topic. To start, I can take my MOST trained muscle, and triple the volume to see what happens. I'll try to do this for 3 weeks and see if I get overtrained doing so and what the overall effects are. I can also try a separate muscle group and unilaterally drop one side drastically to see the effect. Just for fun. But anecdotally I've seen that relatively high volumes (not so high that I get tendinitis or drop in work output over a few weeks) is best, and too low a volume has noticeable effects.
High volume training is likely to have a higher potential for hypertrophy if limited to one muscle or muscle group. High volume for your whole body would limit recovery capacity, whereas high volume for only one body part would allow for better recovery. I'd be interested in seeing training blocks that specialize in one muscle group at a time with extremely high volume (while other muscles are at maintenance volume) _vs_ a balanced training program that has moderate volume the entire time. Volume would be equated, of course. In other words, would specialized training blocks win out over non-specialized training over a 6-12 month period, volume equated? Even a bro-split would have some recovery overlap that would send a different signal than exclusively hammering arms for 2 months straight.
A mason will have giant hands/forearms, a professional cyclist will have giant quads, and a sprinter will have giant hams/glutes. Another way you could think about it is how to best train a person to be a mason, cyclist, and sprinter... One 4-month block of specialization for each with maintenance volume for 8 months or 12 months of mixed training?
Is it still true that roughly 1-4 sets provides about 60% growth and 5-10 sets provides about 80% of growth ? I have heard this mentioned before from Dr. Helms and Dr. Pak
I guess the question is what is the baseline of 100% that is used? Do these high volume sets now change what it the new 100% and thus move down the percentage received from those to set ranges?
@@timothywhetzel2971 that brings up a good point. I guess they mean 100% of maximal potential. And im assuming hypertrophy continues to escalate until you reach your limit to what you can recover from.
A lot probably depends on prior training status too, like if you’ve been training for 10 years does doing 5-10 sets now provide 50% of the maximal growth, and you have to increase volume to see any growth or very slow improvement ?
@@wesrobinson7506 The 80% is based on the finding that 8 sets get you 80% of growth potential is based on the finding that the moderate volume groups always grow at roughly that rate of whatever the high(excessive) volume groups do.
The closer you get to your potential (i.e. after 10 years of hard training) there's not much to gain and a lot of bodybuilders don't seem to find a big differencebetween 6 and 18 sets per week.
Looking forward to listening to this one. After reading some of the comments, it would be really interesting to hear a discussion between you guys, Sam Buckner, maybe even Grant Tinsley (latest manuscript related) for a sort of hypertrophy roundtable. Particularly speaking on the limitations of muscle measurements in the lab and how much we can really lean on recent findings within the volume literature due to those limitations. Cheers!
If all participants are willing to, of course!
The conversation requires mutual respect. Nevertheless….I am hopeful something like this could happen! The discussions are certainly worth having in my opinion!
And add a discussion on lengthened partials too please
Judo often makes me realise that I'm willing to give up when it feels like I can't do more and when things start feeling bad. And learning that it's not the stop, that's the beginning of the battle. But it's tough mentally. Of course it burns and hurts and your breathing is struggling, but it's the psychological side that's difficult, that tells you if you feel that you should stop and how it feels like you're forced to stop. While actually if you battle that mental state you can stretch quite far. Or sort of forget it, push it to the side and just think "I must do this". Sort of like in the military. And I wouldn't do it anywhere else without being motivated for some goal where my feelings aren't equally important.
People in the social media age have the massive illusion and misunderstanding that if they start anything, it should be optimal. Regarding the inconvenient high volume being possibly better for maximizing results. Most of them don't apply optimising to their training anyway due to many reasons. They are not attempting to be a competitive top athlete in it either, they can handle suboptimal. I don't think most people *really* want to even get the maximised results at the gym. Many are happy with athletic bodies, not competitive bodybuilder bodies. I guess Greg said it.
Average training in surveys on people who train is something like 22 sets (iirc might be wrong but it is high, i think men do a lot for upper and women for lower). In most studies people actually reduce training volume, gains happen in most, i don't think it is relevant. Other than that +20% study, it seems that what you did before does not matter.
Radielli lasted 6 months... and all the literature on trained folks (actual lifting, not "something trained") with 1> year of training results with low volume, Ostrwoski low for ex, less volume than radielli low (iirc) and they did fine.
There is no evidence that the volume dose response is different from trained vs untrained also!
Over long time scales: there was that 6 month study in which people benched 3x week 3x sets, a group benched the whole 24 weeks, another took 2x3 week brakes, gains the same. Long term can go both ways.
Individual differences is likely why we get such wacky results... We did not need meta analysis to show that long rest > short rest at study level. If subject A does well in low volume and subject B does well in high, we will get nothing.
I think you guys commented too little on the individual difference literature... we have more and more direct and indirect evidence by the day that some people do well in low, some on high, on some does not matter, and that might solve all the individual experiencies, wacky study results (low vol good, mid vol bad, high vol good ?¿?¿? and stuff like that), etc.
That is the key, confirm if those differences exists, if so, what are they correlated to (can we predict them)? Not getting more studies with more and more sets and doing more metas... useful (ant it is cool to see how far we can go on average) but ignoring the individual differences NOW that we have actual hard evidence when some in the industry were hammering the saliva testosterone study so hard back in the day.
Volume prescription is probably individual. More is better for most, indifferent to some, worse for others. I mean, some people might be like: more = better, most people will do likely better yes, some might not : /.
Aspartame pt. 2 let’s goooooooooo
That’s what I’m sayin
Content game stronk. Awesome stuff.
I would like to see the different ratios of lean mass to fat mass gained in a low, medium, and high volume group with respective low, medium, and high caloric surpluses. Protein intake could perhaps be equated to a fixed percentage of total calories. You could add caloric maintenance and deficit groups as well. You could even get really technical where you break each volume category down into low, medium, and high caloric surplus subgroups. That would be a dream study that could lend some real insight into recovery capacity. Anyone have a billion dollars they want to spare?
I have never seen Greg so triggered like in ~ 01:55-02:01 😂. I feel with you - I had similar attacks somewhat often the last years.
For the algorithm
When they mock your paper and laugh the entire time they discuss
It…. you know it won’t be a fair and critical review.
If anyone listens to this I hope you check out my recent episode on revive stronger where we discuss issues in the volume research.
They say that we rely on statistics, however in their pod every time something is not significant they point out the means are different…this is just as problematic.
Finally, when comparing changes in muscle size (in our review on the topic) we limited ourselves to biceps and quads because this is the muscle we regularly measure in our lab and have a very solid understanding of. When you focus on changes in those muscles it is clear that some data stand up as remarkable.
Just copying and pasting this from IG so it doesn't look like we were unwilling to respond. But I'd prefer to keep the discussion there, rather than having the same discussion with the same person in two different places.
I'll admit that my opinion of your paper was probably colored by how it was presented to me by your coauthor. It was presented as a piece to "paint a better narrative for the current bias towards high volume training that exists among the influencer social circles" (i.e. it was presented as an attempt to craft a narrative, rather than as a dispassionate evaluation of the data).
As a rule, that type of thing doesn't really interest me, so I just replied that I'd be more interested in seeing a meta-regression.
The response was that "it's important to consider what data is included in the regression," followed by a singling out of the Schoenfeld papers, noting, "the only other papers we were able to find with growth of these kinds of growth are in publications with anabolic steroid use or papers that have been retracted (the Wilson study with HMB)."
Since I literally had a data sheet open in front of me when I read that, with multiple studies reporting growth of a similar magnitude, it made me question the thoroughness of the search and the carefulness of the analysis.
The response I got back didn't address any of those papers I mentioned (either why they don't threaten the validity of the perspective the paper was trying to put forth about the Schoenfeld studies, or why they didn't come up in the search [if they didn't]), and just seemed to sidestep the issue by mentioning the journal's word count limits. Which, if those limits are such an issue, why not publish elsewhere?
So, then I dug into the paper, and the whole thing came across as axe-grindy and not particularly rigorous. There are systematic ways to quantify how large of outliers the Schoenfeld papers are (if they are truly outliers), but since the comparison search was non-systematic and clearly missed other papers reporting robust growth, and wound up only lumping the Schoenfeld papers in with the Wilson and Barbalho papers, that part came across as very cherry-picky and intentionally designed to paint the Shoenfeld studies in the most uncharitable light possible.
This also wouldn't be that challenging of an area of research to meta-analyze, which would just be far more valuable in a vacuum, and would also provide an opportunity to test whether the inclusion/exclusion of the Schoenfeld volume paper in the analysis meaningfully affected your effect sizes or beta coefficients (again, another way that this could have been addressed in a more rigorous manner).
And, the paper itself situates the Schoenfeld paper within the volume literature in a way that comes across as dishonest, since it discusses the other relevant studies that could be used to argue against more growth with higher volumes within the body of the article (in the section "Evidence Against a Dose-Response Relationship Between Training Volume and Muscle Growth"), but the section purporting to present evidence in favor of a dose-response relationship only presents the Schoenfeld paper, making it appear as if it's the only study reporting more growth with higher volumes. Instead of, for instance, also discussing Brigatto in that section, the second paragraph in the section (which is, again, supposed to be presenting "Evidence for a Dose-Response Relationship Between Resistance Training Volume and Growth") instead presents more evidence against a dose-response relationship by focusing on Aube.
I think I mentioned this in the episode (forget if it was about your paper, or some other argument against higher training volumes, but this applies to your paper as well) but my issue isn’t that I don’t take seriously the possibility that higher volumes don’t contribute to greater muscle growth past a certain point. My issue is that the paper comes across as dishonest in subtle ways (not saying you’re a dishonest person, or that that was your intention. May have purely been due to word counts. Just commenting on the effect of the paper itself), and presents a case that comes across as lazy and weirdly personal (bringing in the rest interval paper - which crunches your word counts for discussing papers that are directly about volume - seems like a weird choice if the purpose is to discuss interpretations of the volume literature, rather than trying to cast skepticism on Brad’s work overall), when I DO think there’s a much stronger and more rigorous case that could be made. And, again, the way the paper was framed when it was shared with me (i.e. the purpose was to “paint a narrative”) also didn’t do it any favors.
"When they mock your paper and laugh the entire time they discuss
It…. you know it won’t be a fair and critical review."
I have no life, rewatched the segment and tried to keep track of every time they chuckled or laughed or just dared to slightly smile:
2:06:55 innocuous mention of a gag name for narrative paper
2:09:11 chuckling about their inability to pronounce names
2:10:50 Pak slightly hints at a smile cos he forgot a journals name
2:11:35 Here they indeed chuckle about a quote in your study. Why? ->From 2:30:20 to 2:31:30 Greg sums it up here. So you want an unfair insinuation to be treated with an absolute poker face? Weird.
2:18:56 Pak laughs because his lover misspoke.
2:20:50 Greg smiles geeking out about datasets
2:22:25 Greg smiles because he gets to share the result of his joyful data inquiry, pushing back against one of your claims.
2:25:55 about a random social media post
2:27:50 smiles about Pak's conversational indecisiveness
2:28:38 Greg smiles about his cynic personality, staring at the abyss within.
2:30:20 - 2:31:30 chuckles about your claims that can be interpreted as unfair insinuations
2:32:30 - 2:33:00 tongue in cheek summary of a less conspiratorial interpretation of the data, which is fine, as they made their more detailed critical remarks before already.
That's it. Doesn't look like mocking and laughing the entire time to me. In fact, the imo only concrete examples at 2:11:35 and 2:30:20 directly refer to a specific quote in your paper which they judge to be against scientific etiquette and out of line.
I also find it interesting, that out of your four paragraphs, only the very last one makes any content-related counterargument. The first one is just a unwarranted personal attack, as I corroborate above, the second one a plug, the third one... "They say that we rely on statistics" What does that even mean?
@@strongerbyscience It would be good to publish that list with similar growths i. Other papers then.
If I were you, I'd take this comment down. They weren't mocking or laughing at your narrative review. They did criticize it, but at no point did they act the way you claim. It sounds like you emotionally reacted to listening to this criticism, which led you to leaving this comment - which, honestly, doesn't make you look good.
Maybe I'm too used to CS academic twitter (where people are assholes and have insane egos) but there's just no way I would call their discussion of the paper mocking and laughing. This is a bad look man.
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After watching a few of these podcasts I realized that paying attention to these studies with tiny sample sizes and tons of unaccounted for variables is just a waste of time. Just go out and experiment to see what works best for you.
100
155
250
400
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idc wtf u say,52 sets of squats is pure bs.
First
Nuckols doesnt know a lot in this podcast 😂 I mean I dont know
...
The Milo guy is insufferable please leave him out next time
Milo is a permanent host of the podcast moving forward
Do you think rest times influence how much volume and sets you can do? James krieger did an analysis in his volume bible, and per session basis if you rest more than 2 minutes 6-8 sets seem to be enough. Do you think there's any difference doing 20 sets with 1 min rest versus doing 20 sets 2 min rest?
Just to add: AMIRTHALINGAM ET AL. also directly assessed thickness of arms and legs by ultrasound but YOU said it was just DEXA.
I believe that was just the case for the 6-week study, not the 12-week study: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5969184/
Do you think higher volumes is more sarcoplasmic hypertrophy and not really muscle swelling or edema? Also might be a reason why people doing higher volumes and deload or do less sets say they lose size its because they lose sarcoplasmic proteins.