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A deep dive into the science of muscle growth. Hosted by Chris Beardsley and Jake Doleschal, this podcast explores hypertrophy training through the lens of pre-steroid era bodybuilding and modern muscle physiology.
Jake (00:00)
And welcome back everyone to another episode of Hyperthrophy Past and Present. And as always today, we've got a new topic for you and we've got a new workout plan for you. And hopefully we've got an interesting conversation for you all. Now, just before we jump into it, I do want to say I've had a few people asking if the captions are available for our podcast and they're all available, they're all on YouTube. So if you're one of the people from one of a hundred different countries of people who listen to us.
then and English is your second language you can hop on YouTube and find the captions there and I'll make it a little bit easier. Anyway, welcome to the show. Chris, how are you today?
Chris (00:32)
I'm doing very well thanks Jake, obviously about to go travelling so a little bit of upheaval but ready to talk about this new routine today.
Jake (00:40)
You're about to go traveling and I'm currently doing a mini travel. So we're going to be swapping roles in a few weeks. So today we have what I think is a nice plan following on from last week's episode. So if you guys missed last week's episode, we were looking at one of Reg Park's plans. Reg Park was the first bodybuilder to lift, to bench 500 pounds, which is a pretty phenomenal effort. And something that
Chris (00:43)
You are,
Jake (01:05)
maybe people don't necessarily know or realize is that some of these bodybuilders, most of these bodybuilders in the Silver Era, not only were they the biggest people on the planet, they were also the strongest people on the planet. So Reg Park, second person ever to bench 500 pounds. Today we're gonna talk about the third person to bench 500 pounds, Marvin Eder. And some of the strength feats of these bodybuilders in the Silver Era were just phenomenal. you know, they were, not only were they
performing these strength feats and doing shows with these strength feats and obviously bodybuilding came out of a lot of these sort of strongman kind of events in the bronze era. But they were even competing at very high levels like in Olympics. So for example, John Grimick was competing in the Olympics for weightlifting. So these people undoubtedly were phenomenally strong. So Marvin Eater, who we're gonna be talking about in one of his plans today, and obviously we're talking sort of
1950 so Maybe there's been some embellishment and I you and I were having a bit of a discussion about this yesterday so take it with a grain of salt is photographic evidence, but obviously photos can be staged whatever else but supposedly Marvin Eater was like I said the third person to bench 500 pounds and he actually did a 515 pound bench and that one I think is fairly well fairly credible because it was many spectators who witnessed that but supposedly he's been credited with doing 12 single-arm chops
and also doing a 197 kilo dip. That's 197 kilos attached to his body. So this is the weight of two large men. And in the photo, there was two large men who were wrapped around his waist as he was performing a dip. Now know you're dying to make a comment, so go for it.
Chris (02:48)
No, not really.
just, think that there are, you know, there are lifts where you can kind of get your head around them and say, okay, no, I understand that. And then there are lifts where you kind of go, no, I just can't, I would have to see that being done to actually believe it. And I think that that dip for me, as somebody who has spent many years getting that dip to a level that other people find quite frightening, you know, I've had people literally stare at me in gyms when I've been doing.
dips with one and a quarter body weight hanging off my waist. You know, to see somebody doing with two and a half times body weight hanging off their waist, that's like double what I could do, which is, mean, and I'm not saying that I'm anything special. I'm just saying that I took a lift to a relatively like extreme obsessive point and to the point where people were like, yeah, that's heavy. And then have somebody double that, you know.
For me, that's just a little bit tricky for me to get my head around. Now, you shared about 85, but that was like, I probably managed to get sort of a double with that, really. It was a very clean single and there was capacity. And I was weighing just over 70, 72, something like that. that was tough.
Jake (03:41)
So what was your max dip weight? Like how much weight?
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Chris (04:00)
you know and i was doing one on chins at the same time so i can kind of like for me that's that's bullpup you know when somebody comes along like okay just another comment on that when i was doing those lifts my my my overall physique looked more like a climber than like a bodybuilder so i was very very lean very very kind of thin if you like really you wouldn't have noticed that i was
you know, lifting weights when I have clothes on, it's just you don't see it because you need to keep your body weight quite low when you're those kind of, well, you don't need to, but it helps a lot. If you look at the picture of Marvin Eder doing that dip with the two guys hanging off him, he looks like a bodybuilder. He looked massive. I think, again, the context, it's like you shared some photos of the guy who's currently got the world record in the dip, which is not far away.
Jake (04:42)
Mm. Mm.
which I think is worth
noting. Yeah, so his dip is, I believe is about 195, 194 kilos, something along those lines. So there's a couple kilos in it, yeah.
Chris (04:57)
So it's very close to the the yeah, his
physique looks nothing like Marvin Edes does. he looks basically like if I kind of look to him now, he looks like a much more muscular version of what I looked like when I was doing sort of silly dips and one arm chins in the past, which is what I would expect. It looks like a bigger version of a climber really. Whereas Edes looked like a bodybuilder who just was doing so for me, the two
Jake (05:04)
He's much lighter as well, he'd be about 20 kilos lighter.
Mm-hmm.
Chris (05:23)
I mean, I'm not trying to hijack this podcast and start debating whether because it's not the point. It's not the point clearly clearly Marvin, he'd had enormous dip strength and whether the point I'm making is When you've done a lift to a point where you know it really really well and you've got to a high level in that lift then when somebody comes along and claims that they've doubled it you kind of go I know what that would take and
I there are discrepancies between what I would expect to see and what I'm seeing. And therefore, I'm just going to withhold judgment on that, because unless I saw it happen, I would be really straining my brain to understand how it happened. I'm not saying it didn't happen. I believe it's probably slightly exaggerated.
Jake (06:08)
I think that's fair, if their metric for measuring the weight of the dip was literally the body weight of these two people, then I think it would be easy enough to be like, yeah, I weigh this much, like on a good day. So I can see that there's probably a few kilos in it.
Chris (06:16)
Yeah, maybe five kilos or so I mean so but the point the point
is clearly it was an enormous dip strength clearly he was enormously strong, you know, and you know, that's kind of the point of using this guy as The marker the kind of example routine of a strength routine in this particular context So yeah, don't don't want to derail this stuff. I'm just you know for me it was just an unusual situation because
Jake (06:33)
Mm-mm. ⁓
Mm.
Chris (06:44)
Most the time we talk about people's deadlift strength or squat strength and I'm like, I'm not an aficionado of those lifts. I don't know those lifts intimately. I know how to do one arm chins. I know how to do, you know, weighted pull-ups and weighted dips to a point that most people will not get to unless they develop a unhealthy obsession with it like I did. You know, and so when I see somebody in the past having a benchmark number in those categories, I become interested in
Jake (06:51)
Mm.
Mm.
Chris (07:12)
I can comment on that because it's something I know about. It's very rare for me to be in that situation. Most of the time I'm talking about physiology. I know that very, very well. But this is one of those very rare situations where I actually do know about the practicalities of a living.
Jake (07:23)
For what it's worth, I think it's interesting to note that the current world record holder who is sitting at 194, 195 kilos, whatever it was, he was also a record holder in his body weight.
His previous lift was 140 kilos. So he's actually upped the record by 50 odd kilos in it was only a matter of one or two years So that might actually tie into what we're going to discuss later today Now moving on from dips Let's talk about the plan. So this was so Marvin Eater obviously very strong guy
No doubt about that. Whether he did the 197 kilo dipper knot, he was definitely strong. Now, this was a plan that he
he put forward in the early 50s and he wrote about in a magazine and he coined this or talked about this as a power mass routine. So he was a big advocate obviously for gaining strength and gaining mass and they you know use terminology like like bulking or you know massing or mass routines here. So this is kind of the premise of this type of plan was one that was going to make someone gain
Strength as well as gain large amounts of muscle now, obviously we've noted that he was a
he had multiple high level lifts, not just a dip, but also the bench, also the chin up. And elsewhere he talks about specializing in those particular lifts and how he would do that and how one might, for example, choose specific exercises around a particular lift. But this is just an example of a power mass routine. So here we have...
What I might do actually is go through the exercises and then I'll go circle back around to how he structured the sets and reps, because it's quite different to what we've seen so far. So as far as exercise selection, as is generally or was generally the case, he was using a full body plan and he started with the squat. He then went into bench.
He then suggested going to a bent over barbell row and he used a closer to mid grip here, not a wide grip like we've seen in the past. And then went into a standing overhead press where he was again using a relatively sort of mid grip. And then a wide pronated grip lat pull down, which I'm sure you'll be happy to see. And then he concluded with dumbbell curls. Now.
The set of rep structure for this program actually changed. He used a form of periodization here. And for the first two weeks, he did three sets of eight. Now, just as I read this out, for you guys who listened to our episode last week, keep this in mind or keep those sort of sets that we talked about in terms of recoverable volume in mind as we talk about the sets here. So he did three sets of eight for the first two weeks. He then moved into four sets of six for two weeks.
And then he suggested having a lighter week. Now he didn't, as you know, was generally the case with a lot of these guys, he didn't go into a lot of specificity over what that looked like, but it was some form of a deload. He then suggested going into five sets of five and pushing up to seven, so five by five to seven for a month. And then for the final month, he did three lots of triples and also did three sets of six.
So you sort of combine the lower graphs with the moderate graphs and he did that for a month. And then I suppose he sort of rinsed and repeated. Now, there's a fair bit there. What are your initial thoughts?
Chris (10:38)
Various things, as you say it's really interesting to see somebody who obviously developed their back strength to the point where they could do one-arm chin-ups was focusing on wide grip pull-ups which I think is important because it does give you a lot more back.
or that development thing in terms of the middle and lower regions rather than just focusing on the upper region which you would get from a sagittal plane narrow grip movement. That's interesting straight away.
It's interesting that we've got this periodization appearing very clearly, perhaps the first time we've talked about that on this podcast. But really, the highlight is the point that you've already made, which is that if you look at the rep ranges here, so if we're training three times a week, three sets, three times a week.
for moderate loads, 8 reps. That's exactly what we've been seeing in the recoverability data that we've been talking about forever. If we drop down to a heavier rep range, 6s, suddenly, or 5s even, you can do an extra couple of sets. Well, again, that's what we talked about last week. So it's really, really cool visualization, example of this need to stay within the recoverable volume zone. And really,
Jake (11:23)
Mm.
Hmm.
Chris (11:46)
You know, that's the backdrop for a lot of the controversy that we're seeing at the moment and not going into this and derailing the podcast yet again. But that's the backdrop again for this debate that we're seeing at the moment where people are saying, no, you can do a zillion sets a week and carry on getting stronger and bigger. it's like, hang on a minute. How come every single bodybuilder pre-steroids didn't do that? And they actually nailed
the numbers that we're seeing in the physiology and the recoverability data today. How come they actually nailed those numbers perfectly? Literally three sets of moderate loads three times a week. That's literally exactly what physiology data says today and the recoverability data say today. So how come they were doing that? know, like, and everybody prior to that, you know, was training with lower volumes and higher frequencies as well. So.
Jake (12:13)
Mm.
Chris (12:34)
It's really, really important, I think, to emphasize that observation that you've made, which is that the rep ranges and the, you know, the volumes with those rep ranges in the context of the three times a week frequency stack up perfectly with what we've been saying and what, you know, it's remarkable. It's remarkable.
Jake (12:48)
so well. It's so interesting isn't it? Like you just go back and listen to last week and it's
exactly...
Chris (12:53)
And then I guess really it's interesting that he's focusing on a small number of exercises, similar to Reg Park I guess, focusing on a small number of exercises rather than taking that bodybuilding approach of having a larger number of exercises and covering a larger amount of the body. Clearly he had a very dedicated strength focus which is why we're using that as an example this time.
Jake (13:10)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, and for a little bit more context in Marvin Eater. So he did not compete for very long He was sort of there was a bit of politics happening at the time that he was competing and he competed for York and then he kind of got banned from competing with the Weider Sanctioned events and so he didn't he wasn't a competitive bodybuilder for very long and his feats were more strength based feats So that might also inform some of the exercise selection we're seeing here and I didn't note this but he had a I don't know if it was a record overhead
but it was certainly close to it, but I don't recall exactly how much load it was. So, you know, obviously we see both the bench and overhead press in here, and he was obviously a very renowned lifter for both of those.
Any other comments on either the exercise selection or anything else you see outline wise?
Chris (14:04)
No, I mean, I think this is one of those routines that we will probably come back to as a comparison as we keep doing these kind of discoveries each week and look at more and more routines. think we will come back to this and go, hmm, do you remember when we talked about Marvin either and he had that feature of his routine? Because, you know, there's some interesting stuff here, especially around that periodization model. You know, I think a lot of the time
Jake (14:28)
Hmm.
Chris (14:30)
I tend to just reject periodization because physiologically there's very little going on, if anything. But maybe there's something, like I always say, you know, I don't like to simply reject information out of hand and go, that's irrelevant, I'm just going to ignore it. I don't do that, I just kind of like put it in a drawer and leave it and remember that it's there. And then like, if I then see something later on,
Jake (14:33)
Hmm.
Chris (14:53)
come back to and say, does that now fit with the information that we've already seen? As we go through these routines week on week, will there be a moment in the future when we have some more periodization information or something else that triggers us to come back and look at this and go, actually, that now fits with why they were doing that, and maybe that explains this. And you start to build up a picture of what's going on. Ultimately, you can't really build a picture without all of these little pieces of information. So.
The fact that I can't say anything incisive about this right now doesn't mean that we won't be able to use that usefully in the future is the point that I'm making. So that's the best I can do.
Jake (15:21)
Yes.
Yes.
Which is generally the story of my life when it comes to these Sylvia routines where I see them the first time and I think, that's interesting. That doesn't necessarily make sense to me or even more to the point I might just gloss over something and then six months later, I'd be like, holy moly, that we're doing.
what and then it starts to fit based on something else that we discover nowadays. So we probably will make comments on this again in the future. There was one thing I was going to mention and it's escaping me now. I'm sure it'll come back to me. But I do want to, so I mentioned obviously the current world record holder for the dip and I do want to potentially use that maybe as a segue into what we're to talk about. How is it possible that someone who's a very advanced lifter could
could potentially add 10, 20, 30, 40 kilos to a very advanced lift at late stages in the career. That is unbelievable. And even Marvin Eater, should say, he, for his body weight, he was the first person, I believe, to bench 400 pounds. And then within a matter of one to two years, he was then benching 515, which is just unbelievable increases in load.
Chris (16:30)
Well, basically there would be two ways that that would happen. Either it would be a complete radical change in the technique of the exercise. And you do see that from time to time in athletic situations where somebody changes. I mean, there's some very famous examples, but you know, somebody changes the way they're doing something. And then suddenly the performance of that event just jumps up a notch. The problem is that when you see that happening, what you would.
What you should notice is that everybody within a couple of years adopts that new way doing it and then everybody's now like 20%, 30 % better. If that doesn't happen, then generally speaking, in a context of a strength sport, the only way you're gonna do that is move up a weight class. Those are the two ways of doing
Jake (16:56)
Hmm.
Mm.
Hmm that's very
interesting in the context of bench at this point in time bench records are dropping Like nothing else. So that is interesting. I do wonder what had shifted around the early 1950s where we do see people adding 50 to 100 pounds on Top bench presses in only a year or two. So maybe that's my homework
Chris (17:27)
And obviously
Marvinino was renowned, people talk about his dip strength as being the of the marker of his kind of achievements. And so perhaps that triceps strength and the change from a bench press, which perhaps was wider to one that was slightly narrower. Again, I'm speaking as someone who does not know the bench press intimately like I do other lifts, but you know, that's potentially one of the factors.
Jake (17:49)
And that could be it because he does talk about, because in contrast to someone like Reg Park, Reg was very big on very wide gripping bench and he would often talk about any of these pressing movements to use as wide a grip essentially as possible. And Marvin Eades, he does talk about using a much more narrow grip, not super narrow, but he does use more mid grip. So he's going to get a bit more triceps involvement there. So that may well be part of it.
Chris (18:14)
So I think this is a great opportunity to just cover, like we covered, fatigue in previous episodes and tried to encapsulate that in a short period of time. I'd like to just encapsulate how strength gains work. And then as a corollary of that, just describe how hypertrophy contributes to strength gains, really. So just trying to...
get our hands around this or our arms around this subject very quickly. When we talk about strength and strength increases we're talking about an outcome that we're measuring externally. So in the same way when we talked about fatigue mechanisms and fatigue I said fatigue itself is the measurable temporary reduction in strength or exercise performance. It's not a physiological mechanism itself it is an outcome that we measure externally.
When we look beneath that and go, okay, well what's making that happen? Why am I noticing these changes in strength as a result of doing a couple of sets of strength training exercise? Well, mechanistically these other things that are changing and that's what makes the kind of reduction in strength or reduction in performance occur. The same thing happens with strength gains. So if I look at a two, three month strength training program and I notice that somebody's increased their one rep max bench press or whatever by this percentage, that's a strength increase.
That strength increase is not itself a physiological thing. We are not, like I often say in my mentorship course, we're not computer sprites where you can say, I've got 76 points of strength and I, you know, like, no, we don't work like that. The strength is a measurement. So people say, I need to develop strength. I'm like, well, no, you don't because you can't. The strength is the outcome measurement. What you're trying to develop is an increase perhaps in a strength mechanism or an adaption.
Jake (19:36)
You
Chris (19:52)
And that leads us then to analyze, what are the strength mechanisms? And so like this six that I talk about regularly, you you can add an extra one on there just for completeness. And then maybe there's a couple that we can mention that are potentially discussed, but probably don't contribute. So very quickly, we've got three major neural mechanisms of strength gains, three adaptions that happen. We've got improvements in coordination. So we practice the lift and get better at it.
we've got increases in, sorry, let me do them in the correct order. We've got the improvements in coordination, we've got reductions in antagonist co-activation. Now, the reason I like to place this next to improvements in coordination is because many people group them together and that's totally valid. You can do that if you want to do that. So you can just say like it's another type of coordination because it really does work the same way. You're just reducing, like for example, you're doing curls and your biceps are doing the lift, your triceps are actually getting in the way.
They are stabilising the joint but they're producing a braking force. If you reduce the triceps activation your curl strength will go up even though your biceps muscle strength hasn't actually changed as a muscle force output. So you've got this improvement in coordination practising the lift, you've got this antagonist co-activation reduction which is again kind of practising the lift and making that adaption happen. And then thirdly your final major neural adaption that contributes to strength in these kind of maximum strength kind of situations rather than speed situations.
is an increase in motor unit recruitment. So we're increasing the number of muscle fibers you can actually activate. And that's the first time you're really going to see the actual muscle increase in the force output. The coordination and the co-activation reductions are just efficiency modifiers. You're just becoming more efficient at applying the muscle forces that you've got available to you to make the external environment change. And that, just commenting back on what we just talked about, that's where I would say if you see a whole generation of bench presses,
Suddenly jump up by 25 percent. It's because of that that coordination that co-activation Side of things rather than probably because of anything else So those are our three kind of neural adaptions and then just kind of completing the picture. We've got stuff happening more peripherally Obviously, we've got hypertrophy now just a very quick note on terminology here When we say hypertrophy in the wider fitness industry and in the widest possible sense, you know
we tend to just mean an increase in muscle mass. Now technically, hypertrophy actually only refers to an increase in the diameter of single muscle fibers. So if you really want to be complete here, you have to stuff sarcomeregenesis into this category as well. sarcomeregenesis does, well, let me just kind of put them in the correct order. Hypertrophy of muscle fibers, an increase in the number of myofibrils, an increase in the diameter of the fiber, that will increase muscle fiber force. Now,
I'm going to come back to this point and talk through that in more detail momentarily, but I just want to clarify that if you're adding more myofibrils inside a fibre, the fibre will get stronger. If you've got more fibres that are larger inside a muscle, you're to create more of a muscle force that then contributes to joint torque. So it's very difficult to add myofibrils and not have that contribute to an increase in strength. So Alkmaar has added already the same thing. Some people don't understand why that happens. It's because of lateral force transmission, which I'll come
So basically what we've got is an addition of muscle size either through hypertrophy in the strictest sense of the term which means an increase in the diameter of muscle fiber or due to the addition of sarcomers in series which increases the length of the muscle fiber. The other two mechanisms peripherally are then going to be an increase in tendon stiffness. Basically the reason this works is because if you have a compliant tendon when you pull the muscle, when the muscle pulls on the tendon
if the tendon is compliant it gives a little bit and now the muscle shortens a little bit quicker than you're expecting it to as a result it now works closer to the velocity end of the force velocity spectrum than it was doing previously. the muscle, if the tendon does not move then of course the muscle can now move more slowly and that allows it to then produce a higher force in accordance with the force velocity relationship. That's a very small mechanism so if that doesn't make sense to you it doesn't matter that much.
just being complete here for a full analysis of the subject. Finally, we've got this increase in what we call lateral force transmission. Now, this is the one that really I just need to walk through over the space of two minutes because even though it's not enormously important, it does actually require us to understand what's going on. When we talk about muscle fibers, we talk about them essentially contracting and then transmitting that force to the tendon. How do they do that?
Well, they don't do it the way that people think and this is really really a big deal. So we tend to think that the muscle fiber just pulls on the neighboring sarcomeres along the chain. So you've got a muscle fiber made up of sarcomeres and essentially you're visualizing that with each sarcomere pulling on the next one, pulling on the next one, pulling on the next one all the way down to the tendon. It doesn't work like that. And the reason it doesn't work like that is because if it did, then the only force you would be able to see
at the end of the fibre where it pulls on the tendon will be a single sarcomere's worth of force. That's how strings work. If you pull on a string, the tension has to be identical at every single point. So each sarcomere is going to have the same amount of force. And in order to have each sarcomere contribute independently to the tendon, happens is the sarcomere actually pulls on the endomysium, which is the surrounding tube around the muscle fibre. Now, as a result of doing that,
Each sarcomere can now act independently on the tendon and use some sarcomere forces instead of having them essentially, you know, kind of be, you know, just one sarcomere's worth of force along the whole muscle fibre. Now, as a result, if you add new sarcomere, this is what I saying about sarcomere genesis, if you add new sarcomeres in series and they are clipped to the endomysium, they will contribute to additional force of that muscle fibre because you're not, you're basically adding contractile units that are acting independently of each other. So of course you add
Muscle force, muscle fiber force.
Jake (25:27)
you
Can I give a little analogy here, a metaphor? And it's not perfect, but it's what's coming to mind for me as you're speaking. So imagine you've got, you're playing tug of war. And what you're saying is if instead of each person having their hands on the rope, if you had maybe one person had their hands on the rope and everyone else on their side was holding onto each other, like they're linking hands and they were all connected to each other and not to the rope and only one person's connected to the rope, then you're only essentially getting that one person's
capacity of full, pulling in that group.
Chris (25:57)
If you had everybody
linked in a chain, you are limited by the weakest link in that chain. That's what you're saying. If you pull on the rope, you sun forces. You do, correct.
Jake (26:02)
as opposed to everyone then places their hands on the rope and that's lateral force transmission.
That was the only point I wanted to make. Hopefully that's helped some people.
Chris (26:10)
No, that's very, very helpful. I'm stealing that.
So yeah, so basically lateral force transmission allows us to make sarcomeregenesis work in an identical way to hypertrophy itself. Additionally, and this is the mechanism of lateral force transmission uniquely, if you have a muscle fiber that does not have every single sarcomere attached to its endomysium already, you can do...
an additional process where you can add new custom airs which clip the existing salkam airs into that endomysium and now you make the muscle fibre stronger and as a result it contributes to an increase in the muscle fibre force even without adding new contractile material. So lateral force transmission increases the strength of the fibre. Importantly it slows the muscle fibre shortening velocity down because if you have two units of salkam airs next to each other
then essentially if they don't have costomeres in the intervening section between the two sarcomeres, that double sarcomere which you've got basically will shorten essentially twice as fast as two sarcomeres which are both clipped into the endomysium independently. As a result, if you go into a muscle fibre that has very few costomeres and all of its sarcomeres are kind of acting longitudinally rather than laterally, you have a very fast muscle fibre. If you...
start adding costumers into that fibre it will slow down dramatically or increase its force production quite a lot but it'll slow down dramatically. You can therefore see what happens and the Robert Erskine studies have been brilliant at illustrating this. If you look at the way in which an increase in lateral force transmission contributes to increases in strength, increases in power, increases in velocity, actually what you see is a increase in strength is quite substantial either a no change in power or slight
decrease and a reduction in muscle fiber shortening velocity. So you tilt the force velocity relationship of that, or force velocity profile rather, of that muscle fiber quite dramatically as a result of that adaption. So when people look at these sort of situations and they go, hmm, interestingly I can increase lateral force transmission and that changes the power output of the muscle fiber or the muscle or the exercise that I'm doing. Yes it will do, but you have to understand why that's happening.
The strength has actually gone up. Power has either stayed the same or decreased slightly, and muscle fiber shortening velocity has gone down. And that's because of the mechanism by which this adaption is actually happening. So those are what I would describe as the six or maybe seven, depending on how you define hypertrophy as being whether it's just fiber hypertrophy plus sarcomere genesis or just both at the same time. You've got three mechanisms of neural adaptions, which are mechanisms of strength gains. You've got these three peripheral.
mechanisms. Some people also talk about increases in rate coding, which is an increase in the firing frequency of motor units. That doesn't actually contribute to strength gains. That's a factor that contributes to an increase in speed. We only really see that happening in fast movement situations. We don't tend to see that happening at the low velocity end of the spectrum.
You could also, for completeness, say, what about increases in myofibrilla density? Well, yeah. So this is a really interesting thing about sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. I get a lot of questions about sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. People say, can I make sarcoplasmic hypertrophy happen? You know, is there a way of training for it? At the moment, data is pretty limited. Don't really know whether you can or can't. There's some interesting mechanistic explanations, and you can go into that. But honestly, I think it's pretty thin.
The thing that really kind of makes me sit up and take notice is that if you look at cross-sectional data, you tend to find that people who have been training a long time actually have higher myofibrilla density, as in less relative sarcoplasm to myofibrils than people who've been training for a shorter period of time. honestly, what I think probably happens is you actually increase the density of myofibrils rather than increasing the volume of sarcoplasm relative to the myofibrils with increasing periods of training. Now, can you train for that? I don't know. I mean, again,
thin data, not really sure what's going on, but I mentioned that as a possible kind of contributor to strength gains over time. The muscle kind of maturity effect that some people maybe talk about old man strength. You know, I don't know whether that is even a thing. But anyway, and then finally, you know, hyperplasia, does it happen? Can it happen? Yeah, I mean, we're well into speculative territory here again. I think it probably does happen if you push muscle fibers to the point where they start to.
bump up against their maximum possible diameter in accordance with the size principle of striated muscle. But, you know, like I keep saying to people, they say to me, well, what would happen if that happened? And I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that. It's like, I'm not going to build a speculation on top of a speculation and then find myself building another speculation on top of that. And then before we know what we're talking about, it's like I'm living in a different universe where none of this really applies anymore. Like, I'm happy to take my...
Jake (30:29)
Mm.
Chris (30:41)
speculations one step further forward on top of what the existing literature supports. I'm not going any further than that. So, yeah, maybe hyperplasia does happen a little bit. And if it did, obviously it would contribute to a strength gain in the same way that hypertrion sarcomeregenesis does. Much more than that, I'm not really going to say. So that hopefully has been a super quick summary of the mechanisms by which we can get stronger.
As I say, you can divide it into individual adaptions and you can then talk about if you want to, you can talk about how do you target each of those adaptions. And just finishing up on this little kind of sort of section that I've walked us through, if you want to increase strength, you can't do that directly. You have to do that through one of these mechanisms. And this changes everything when you want to write a strength training program.
Because what you're going to do now with this knowledge is you're going to look at your strength training program and go, which part of my program is designed to improve coordination? And with that, most likely reductions in co-activation. Well, which part of it? What are you actually doing actively to make those things happen? Are you practicing with intent to improve your coordination? Are you using an external focus of attention, for example, very, very good way of improving coordination?
Are you perhaps training in an unfatigued state to make sure that you maximize the quality of your movement and thereby allow yourself to gain those improvements in motor learning? Are you improving motor unit recruitment? How are you doing that? Are you seeking to maximize recruitment in the exercise that you're doing in order to make sure that that, you know, adaption then happens?
When it comes to peripheral side, are you talking? I most people are listening to this podcast know exactly how to target hypertrophy and sarcomere Dennis and those things But you know, what are you doing to make those things happen? And is it going to happen in a way that supports the strength goal that you have and of course tendon stiffness Are you making that happen? Are you making sure that tendon is exposed to the heavy loading that triggers that adaption? And are you triggering lateral force transmission increase as well? Honestly, who knows what makes that adaption really happen, but it does seem to be associated with
heavier loading rather than lighter loading. I wouldn't want to go much further down that road, to be honest. But, you know, I think there's definitely like a suggestive data suggest that that is the way. just kind of, yeah, finalizing this comment is like when we're trying to make a strength gain happen, we are actually not trying to make the strength gain happen directly. What we're trying to do is make an adaption happen. And when you change your perspective and say, I'm not trying to increase strength, I'm trying to increase this adaption.
The way you approach programming alters. And that's why it's very, very difficult to answer questions when people say, you know, you've you've explained how this this this hypertrophy works and you've got this model and it's really simple. Yeah, of course it is. It's one thing. Like and now you're asking me to model six or seven things and, you know, have a system that you can't do that. It's not a valid construct.
You can't have something like a weekly net stimulus model for strength gains because it's not a valid construct. It's seven or six or seven things and they all respond in different ways to different training variables. So the way to construct a strength training program is many, many, many times more complicated than constructing a hypertrophy training program because you're seeking multiple things happening simultaneously. Or, and maybe this is actually the key to understanding
Marvin Eder's periodization approach, maybe he is training different things at different points. Maybe he's you know, instinctively, not necessarily physiologically, cognitively, but instinctively, he's thinking, you know, I'm training this aspect of what makes up strength in this period of time, and then I'm moving on. I don't know. I'm just kind of thinking aloud here. But you've got to be thinking in terms of different adaptions rather than, you know, strength as a single thing, because it's not a single
Jake (34:08)
Hmm.
There's a lot I wanna ask you.
around this. Now, I'll try not to take down too many tangents, but for starters, just to reiterate one important thing you said is we're not talking about strength as one thing. Obviously, we're talking about it as six or seven things. And so you made this point, but in case anyone missed it, obviously you've talked about the weaklinet stimulus when it comes to hypertrophy, and you've got this model that predicts based on frequency, based on session volume, based on you can sort of choose your own kind of stimulus period and stuff like that.
predict what the hypertrophy stimulus over that week would be. And you're saying people are asking you to do this for strength and you can't because strength is not one thing. So you might be able to do it for potentially for don't know coordination or like one of these things but you can't do it for all six or seven things combined. Now that in and of itself is potentially new information to some people listening. Some people listening are probably thinking hang on I thought hypertrophy was one thing and strength was another. You're telling me strength kind of is this nebulous thing that's all these other things combined and
Yeah, that's exactly what you're saying. Now based on that, what I wanna know is of those, let's say six-ish things, they're not, well, A, they're not all equally going to contribute to total strength gains, right? So some of these are gonna have a larger magnitude of effect than other things. So I'm interested in A, which of the things which are going to have a bigger impact.
And I guess a part of that conversation, some of these things are kind of coming along for the ride. Like some of them we're going to do most likely by virtue of maybe chasing some of these other adaptions. So can you speak into those two things a little bit?
Chris (35:56)
So what we tend to see, and this is one of the biggest problems with analyzing strength gains, is that the relative contributions of each of these adaptions changes according to the exercise that you're doing or training, trying to improve the strength of, and the training status of the person who's doing the training. So to take an extreme example,
If you pick a beginner and you ask them to stop training or practicing a multi-joint free weight exercise, you are going to see coordination improvements that shock you. know, the strength gains will be extraordinary. Like one of my favorite studies tried to, in a very simple way, get under the skin of how much coordination contributes to strength gains.
And they actually picked a knee extension exercise because they wanted to limit the magnitude of the effect. They like, we're going to pick something that we actually think requires almost no coordination at all. And they basically just had people do knee extension training, untrained people do knee extension training. And they basically compared the strength gains in that trained knee extension exercise in the gym with a dynamometer knee extension that was matched as closely as possible to it.
Now the dynamometer is an interesting situation because you strap people in for that exercise so there's no way you can really do anything other than just rotate the knee. You can't do anything else. There's no positioning yourself on the seat. You can't, you know, stabilize yourself to a greater extent by holding the handles or anything like that. So all of that sort of extraneous stuff that you do when you're sitting on a knee extension machine to position yourself and maximize your performance, you can't do that in a dynamometer.
And the dynamometer strength gain was about half what you got from the knee extension in the gym. I'm like, that is incredible. Like what you're telling me is that in a machine knee extension exercise, a single joint machine exercise, half the gains in strength in untrained person over a couple of months training is actually coordination. Now extrapolate that to multi-joint and then extrapolate it again to something like a, you know, kind of free weight barbell exercise like a squat or something like that.
Jake (37:55)
Hmm.
Chris (37:57)
and then extrapolate it again to something like a one arm chin up and like the jumps in coordination are just absolutely going to be enormous each time that you do that. So what I think is important to start with is that if you have a unstable or less stable exercise, a more difficult coordinate exercise, something that requires a lot of skill, you are going to find that coordination starts at at least half of your strength gains as a beginner.
and goes upwards from there, probably, you know, exponentially as you're working, working through that. Now, obviously, once you've got a well-trained, not trained, well-practiced, because we're talking about a skill here, once you have somebody who's practiced that exercise for months, maybe even longer, then of course, the contributions of coordination drop off dramatically. But just as a scale of things, I think what we're talking about is that if you
training beginners in a strength training exercise, you're starting from it being half of your strength gains and going upwards from there quite steeply, I think. So this is the problem with strength gains in beginner situations, because what you're going to find is that coordination obliterates anything else that you're going to do. And that's why when people go...
Jake (38:57)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Chris (39:11)
Why is this strength gain the same in this group that trained with this proximity to failure and that proximity to failure? Because coordination obliterates everything. Absolutely obliterates everything. You're looking at coordination improvements in beginner people as a contributor to strength gains. It is going to be the lion's share of what you're doing. That's just axiomatic.
Jake (39:17)
Hmm.
Hmm.
This is why presumably back in the day people used to say beginners, you would achieve all these general adaptions first and hypertrophy came second. know, there used to be this sort of idea that.
Chris (39:40)
Actually not
true because basically it's not. Yes, the coordination improvements come first. So we've got some really nice data showing you can literally go in the gym and, you know, practice and exercise for half an hour, come back the following day and your strength has just jumped really, really high upwards from that first day, like tens of percents upwards. you know, that is what's happening.
with the untrained population when they're exposed to an exercise that they've not done before. Neural adaptions regards co-activation reductions are very slow. Neural adaptions regarding motina accruement increases are delayed by a couple of weeks. what the hyperchir researchers believed initially was that you got your neural adaptions first and then hyperchir became second. Not actually true. The coordination improvements happened first.
Jake (40:19)
Hmm.
Chris (40:30)
And then you start see some hypertrophy and then you start to see the increases in recruitment and then much later on you start to see the reductions in co-activation. Now, strictly speaking, everything is happening more or less simultaneously. I don't actually think the recruitment increases happen until the coordination is at a point where you can actually devote all of your maximum tolerable section effort to recruit recruiting motor units instead of, you know, kind of worrying about the fact that the exercise is getting away from you because it's difficult. But ultimately.
That's the kind of timelines that we tend to see. So coordination is the thing that's kind of dominating that first kind of week or two of training. But the point I'm making here is that that is why when people are confused by strength gains in beginners, and they're like, why is this weird? Why are we seeing all of these strength training programs produce more or less the same strength gains regardless of what training variables we throw at them? It's because coordination is getting in the way. It's such an enormous fact.
Jake (41:21)
And so then you've got someone who is a more advanced lifter and they've rehearsed some of these lifts for potentially years. Then at that point, what are going to be the main contributors to increasing their strength level on that lift?
Chris (41:33)
Yeah, so what we tend to see in the literature is that the coordination has this enormous increase in the early...
weeks of practicing a new lift. Neural adaptions wise, as I say, recruitment tends to be dominating in the next three to six months. That tends to be the period of time in which most recruitment gains happen. It does continue increasing after that, but much more slowly. And technics co-activation takes a very, very long time to max out, like years. So I think when people say, well, trained lifters don't get neural adaptions, well, yes, they do. It's just...
Predominantly a reduction in co-activation rather than anything else. On the peripheral side of course You know you've got the you know the hypertrithic sarcomeregenesis. Sarcomeregenesis in a particular exercise is going to max out within months so that again is not really going to be a trained lifter issue. Tendent stiffness is a tricky one. It probably scales with load on the bar so I think it's a lifetime adaption as long as load carries on increasing you're going to see tendon stiffness changes.
lateral force transmission probably does cap out to certain point because you can't add costumers to a fiber if it's full of costumers. The places for adding costumers don't exist, so you're not going to get any more of that. So what we tend to see then is you can create a scenario or you can create an imaginary model where you go, what is going to be like, take the opposite example of what we talked about earlier. If we have a
very well trained bodybuilder who's been doing knee extensions for you know three years plus what's going to contribute to an increase in their knee extension from week to week well there's not really much that can contribute in that scenario apart from hypertrophy it just isn't and that's why when you you talk to lifters who've been training many many many years and they're improving knee extension strength or
know, kind of lateral raise strength on a machine or something very stable where they're not really going to see a coordination change or anything like that. They're talking like it takes them three or four weeks to add a rep. Well, yeah, because the only thing that can contribute in that situation is the hypertrophy. And I think that's why when in the past I've talked about using progressive overload as a marker for making, you know, being confident that you're adding
muscle size over time, it's in that context. It's in the context of me talking to somebody who's got multiple years of training behind them and they've got exercises that they've practiced that are very stable and they're doing a very consistent routine week on week on week and they're taking a couple of weeks to add repetitions. I'm expecting that hypertrophy is the primary contributor to strength gains in that situation.
Jake (44:07)
You mentioned a lateral raise. So I've been training now for coming on close to two decades and throughout the whole time I would have been doing lateral raises and I did a video on this not too long ago where I was using a new lateral raise machine. Obviously that's a very stable exercise and there's not a whole lot of variation in that type of exercise. And just using this new machine I was adding about one new plate every single week for probably about a, maybe not quite a month, but several weeks. And that's...
Chris (44:31)
Yeah. It's really, really
difficult to, you know, unless you go looking for this stuff, you don't realize it's happening. It's like, but yeah, absolutely. You go and you sit yourself down on a new machine and you're like, oh, wow, this is amazing. It's like so much fun because, you know, the waves are just going up and up and up. And you're like, this is coordination. I'm getting myself used to this new situation. like, and then suddenly you just hit a wall with it. And it's like
Jake (44:41)
Hmm.
Yes. ⁓
Chris (45:00)
No, you can't do that anymore. You've got to a new machine to play around on. But that's the point. It's like, what are we really doing this for? Are we doing this as entertainment or are we doing this for the purpose of increasing muscle size? And the problem is that if coordination is, I mean, just kind of jumping back from this and talking about hypertrophy training for a moment, because we're trying to talk about strength gains here very, very quickly. And I know we're rushing through this, but we have limited time to do this.
Jake (45:02)
and then you go find a new machine.
Hmm.
Chris (45:26)
But just briefly talking about hypertrophy for a moment. If our purpose is to maximise muscle growth, we don't want a situation where coordination is a limiter. Because if your brain is devoting effort to the cognitive process of coordinating the movement for you, because you can't do it instinctively, you are not able to maximise motor unit recruitment. That's not going to happen.
we actually want to get very quickly to the point where this very rapid strength gain isn't happening. if we take a step back and go, yes, we accept that it's fun to see these numbers jumping upwards over week on week on week, but actually it's bad because it tells us that we're not actually maxing recruitment out in that period of time. We want to be in a situation that actually nobody wants to be in, which is the grinding bit where you basically week on week on week just hitting the same numbers and you're like, is this
ever going to increase in the repetitions then finally you see the number go up one repetition like fantastic okay
Jake (46:20)
Well, that's exactly the point I wanted to make and I wanted to actually go down that path a little bit further because I think it's an important point for people who do obviously want to focus on hypertrophy.
The point I was making is I'm a fairly advanced lifter and I'm still seeing that. So how long do we think some of these coordination improvements, even in these stable exercises, how long is one likely to actually experience this big chunk of coordination improvement occurring for? Presumably we're gonna see that for weeks, maybe up to a month or so. What would you anticipate?
Chris (46:49)
It's absolutely a nonlinear relationship. you go in and you start practicing the exercise. And just again, clarifying for people so they understand motor learning is a instantaneous learning process. So if you start practicing, your brain is instantaneously in that moment upgrading your software, if you like, to make you better at that thing.
There isn't, you don't need to go home and sleep on it. The brain is doing it instantaneously. So if you sit down on the machine and you do a couple of repetitions and you do them, you know, with the goal of improving your movement quality, you will instantaneously improve that. If you then walk around the gym a bit, come back, you should now be stronger.
Jake (47:30)
Well, you see this, if you're a lifter who's done an exercise in the past and then you haven't done it for a month and you come back to doing that exercise, your first set, you'll be significantly weaker and you come back and do a second set and you'll be significantly stronger in that second set.
Chris (47:43)
Your
brain just like the process of how the brain stores and retrieves information is obviously still pretty opaque to us. But my mental model for how it works is just that the information never goes anywhere. You actually store everything. It just becomes a little bit harder to retrieve it if you bury it under other stuff. And I'm not saying that's exactly what happens. It just for me, that mental model works really, really well because
If you think of it in that terms, it's like, yes, I did this particular overhead press or this lateral raise machine, you know, six months ago and I was down in a different city and now I come back and I sit down at the first time and it doesn't seem to work. And then as you say, you walk around the gym, you come back and immediately it's like it's better again. Now that learning process is way too fast to be a true new learning process. It's like the brain has just figured out where it stored that information. It's now retrieved it again. And now you're doing it the way that you were doing it before.
Jake (48:32)
Hmm.
Chris (48:40)
So this like coordination never goes anywhere. It just gets buried under other stuff. Now neuroscientists can tell me that I'm talking rubbish, but the model for me actually works pretty well for as far as I want to use it. So basically, yeah, we kind of want to avoid that situation as far as possible, but it is a thing that does carry on happening. Now nonlinear.
Non-linear changes are very noticeable. we see these huge improvements when we start practicing a new machine and we start to see slower and slower improvements on top of that and it starts to plateau but it never really, really fully plateaus. So you just end up with this very, very, very slowly ascending line that just carries on going up forever. And ultimately it's just because the brain is always collecting information and if it notices
that you've just randomly done something that was even fractionally superior to what it was doing the previous time. It just upgrades its model. And yeah, those upgrades are tiny, but they are still there. So coordination is one of those things that just carries on happening. It just happens less quickly the further down the road.
Jake (49:48)
there's still a threshold at some point where once you get to that point, now you can start to see more increases in things like motor unit recruitment, right? So.
Chris (49:55)
Of course, because
it's the perception. we're dealing with, what we don't want is like, we don't want a situation in which we perceive that the exercise is requiring cognitive resources from us to control. You're basically looking for a scenario where you're instinctively controlling the weight without having to devote your conscious mind to that process.
Jake (50:16)
almost a point where it feels like second
nature to do that movement.
Chris (50:19)
Yeah, it's... Yeah, the threshold we're looking for is the point at which the exercise doesn't really require any cognitive resources because then you're devoting all cognitive resources to effort. Ultimately, this is why, you know, we point people towards more stable stuff and easier stuff because you just kind of get to that threshold much more quickly. You can get to that threshold with more complicated exercises, it just requires a lot more months of practice.
Jake (50:43)
So from a practical standpoint or application standpoint, so.
what we've just said there is it takes a while to get to this point where you're coordinated enough that you're gonna see these other adaptions take place a bit more quickly. Now, that means that there has to be enough rehearsing of that particular movement that takes place. So when I see people program and they program an exercise, say, once per week, just from a coordination standpoint, what that's going to do is slow down that timeline or stretch out that timeline of achieving those coordination improvements, right?
doing an exercise once per week compared to doing it two or three times per week then obviously it's going to take you longer to get to that said point.
Chris (51:20)
Yeah, exactly. And if you'll forgive me, I'm just going to expand this point and hijack it very, very slightly to link back to something that I mentioned earlier, which is that I can't build a weekly net stimulus model for strength gains because strength isn't a valid construct in the way that hypertrophy is a single construct. The coordination improvements that we are trying to achieve in this situation have a completely different profile.
across the week from something like hypertrophy. So when we talk about hypertrophy, we have this like stimulus period, we have an atrophy thing going on, we have the stimulus that we can achieve that's nonlinear in the workout. Okay, great. We understand that, we put that together in a model and we end up with the weekly net stimulus model. Coordination basically will improve if you show the brain a better way of doing what you're doing than you're already doing. That's it. It's literally, that's the only thing that matters. If you...
If you perform the movement and the brain notices because it has an effort perception sensor built into it, which we all know. So we have an effort perception sensor. Your brain does the movement. If your brain notices that that's interesting, what you just did was less effortful than what you previously did. So I'm going to upgrade what you previously did with this new motor program. We're to do that one going forward. That's kind of how coordination improvements work. So on that basis, if you can do like
that every 10 minutes, every day, forever, then you'll just carry on improving coordination forever. And actually, if you look at sports like snooker or, you know, sort of other, like darts, for example, like where there's no fatigue really, then you can practice those for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours every single day and just carry on getting better because there's no limiter, because fatigue is the thing that really breaks down movement patterns.
and starts to stop us from actually upgrading the ones that we've got because it makes the ones that we're doing now worse than the one the brain has stored so it just doesn't upgrade anything. So you can basically see situations where like coordination follows an absolutely completely different pattern. You can just go in the gym and practice a lift and if you don't create so much fatigue that your next lift and suffer so you just do singles with several reps in reserve and you just keep doing those you're just going to keep on getting better.
And there's nothing that's going to stop that from happening as long as fatigue isn't there. Because it's an instantaneous upgrade process. So you can't map that on top of a hypertrophic stimulus model. You can't map those two things because they're absolutely completely incompatible. like people say to me, well, how can I program for strength games? I'm you can't. You can improve coordination as a goal. You can improve recruitment as a goal. You can improve muscle size as a goal. So all of these different things are different goals.
Jake (53:44)
Mm.
Chris (53:50)
And ultimately, they're not going to sit in the same model. It just cannot work. And I guess I'm getting a little bit kind of emphatic about this because I just receive so many questions of people saying, please build a strength model. I'm like, you don't understand what it is you're asking me to do. It's actually impossible. I'm not saying that because I'm trying to make it sound difficult. It's not difficult. It's impossible. The two things are different.
Jake (54:15)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Chris (54:16)
So
ultimately, coordination is a really amazing way to illustrate that because you can literally just improve indefinitely as long as you don't interfere with the movement program, sorry, the quality of the motor program that you're actually engaging in, and fatigue is the primary reason why that's gonna happen.
Jake (54:32)
It makes things quite murky, because when you were saying that, it made me think, the classic piece of advice is someone's plateaued on a lift. What do people say to do? You take that lift and you put a first in a workout. Okay, I understand that you're now training that in an unfatigued state, and so the idea is that there potentially is more motor unit recruitment going into that exercise, but.
what you said there is well actually you're training it in an unfatigued state so now you might actually see more coordination improvements as well. So when we're talking about progressive overload it actually gets very murky as to what is it that's causing that progressive overload. We can't separate it out into is it just hypertrophy or is it these other adaptions.
Chris (55:10)
Absolutely, I mean the main reason I ask people to put the lift first is because you're more likely to a higher level of motor unit recruitment if you put it first so you're going to get access to more muscle fibers and you might even see an increase in recruitment so that again is as you say murky is the problem the problem is you're doing multiple things at the same time you're improving the chances of coordination gains you're improving the chances of recruitment gains you're improving the chances of hypertrophy because of those recruitment increases and the improved in the gains in recruitment it's like
All of these things are happening simultaneously and sometimes they are moving in the same direction as each other. And so you can say, OK, well then that's all good. But actually, sometimes they go in opposite directions from each other. Like we were just talking about a moment ago, coordination and hypertrophy being completely and utterly different strategies for making those two sets of adaptions happen. So again, like strength gains is not a vanilla.
It is a extremely complicated problem and the only way you're to make sense of it is to break it down into its component adaptions pick an adaption or multiple adaptions that you think are most valuable to chase after chase after those and make them happen and then pick something else and again this maybe this is why periodization is useful practically for making a strength training program work because you pick something to work on and you work on that and then you pick something else to work on and you work on that
and then maybe that allows you to make maximum progress over time.
Jake (56:31)
I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of additional questions as to how to focus on those particular adaptions and maybe that could be something we do in a future episode. the last question I have for you is I touched on kind of the mercantiless with progressive overload and obviously with these adaptions some of these do not or are not tied to hypertrophy and then obviously hypertrophy is tied or is one of these adaptions that leads to an increase in strength.
Can we just go down that path for a moment longer? Because that seems to be a bit of a misconception online that there is, that hypertrophy does not equal increases in strength. And yet you're saying it actually is one of these adaptions that lead to an increase in strength.
Chris (57:08)
Absolutely. So essentially what we have to do is understand that you can increase strength without increasing muscle size. So that's the first starting point, because as you just pointed out, hypertrophy and I'm just going to I'm just going wrap sarcomere dendrites up into that for the purposes of this conversation, because it doesn't it doesn't really matter. So an increase in muscle size hypertrophy is a mechanism of strength gains, but
I can also increase strength by improving coordination, by reducing co-activation, all those other things. yes, and you can pick climbers as my favourite example, like a sport that I do have a passing acquaintance with. You can pick climbers as a great example of a group of people who can get absurdly strong, just frighteningly strong without really adding a lot of muscle mass. So ultimately, yes, we can see
very large gains in strength and you can construct training program as hopefully what I've just spent the last half an hour explaining you can construct a training program that will add a lot of strength to a particular lift without necessarily seeing an increase in muscle size. So that starting point is absolutely true and that is the focus of a lot of the engagement and discussion and an argument online is people observing that repeatedly and then doing a victory lap.
And that victory lap is premature because that's not what anybody is saying when they're pointing out that hypertrophy is connected to an increase in strength. That's not what they're saying. They're not saying that at all. What they're saying is if you actually do start increasing the size of a muscle fibre in the context of an exercise and then you go back and you measure the strength of that exercise, the strength of that exercise will have gone up. Now, the reason I say that is because if you understand how
neuro-mechanical matching works. Neuro-mechanical matching is not going to use a muscle fiber for an exercise unless that muscle fiber contributes to joint torque in that exercise. So if your brain is going, okay, which motor units am I going to use to make this movement happen? It goes, okay, these are motor units that I'm going to use to make that movement happen. Let's say I'm doing a biceps curl or a pull down or something like that.
Marengo's I need these muscle fibers to contribute. No, it doesn't think that it thinks I need these motor units to that particular exercise and it recruits them great. No problem the muscle fibers that are part of those motor units have got leverage to do that activity if I now go and add myofibrils or sarcomeres inside those muscle fibers I've now got bigger muscle fibers that produce more force and they are connected to the tendon and they are part of the motor units that have leverage
Therefore, I now have a stronger, sorry, I produce a larger joint torque.
There isn't really a scenario outside of sort of outlier situations in which adding myofibrils to those muscle fibers fails to increase joint torque. The only scenario in which you could really do that would be if maybe you were lacking a lot of custom hairs in a particular muscle fiber that was part of a motor unit. But that would be like almost instantaneously fixed.
because you would immediately start adding those custom errors because the internal nature of the MOSFiber lacking custom errors would immediately cause it to start adding new custom errors. you'd fix that problem almost instantaneously. So even those outlier situations would get fixed. And when I say outlier, think you're not going to see that happening most of the time, but you theoretically could imagine it occurring. The point I'm making is that because neuromechanical matching works the way it does,
if you have a muscle fiber that's been loaded in an exercise, it will contribute to strength gains in that exercise simply because it has leverage and therefore it is going to contribute to joint torque. You can't have a muscle fiber that's being activated as a result of a recruitment process and it not contribute to joint torque, it will do. And I think this is the nature of the debate, which is that on the one hand, yes you can increase strength without increasing muscle size and nobody who understands the physiology is debating.
On the opposite side of the equation you have this comment which I'm standing behind which is that if you are testing strength in the trained exercise then the muscle fibers you've used and loaded and hypertrophied will contribute to joint torque in the exercise that you've been training because that's how neuro-mechanical matching works.
This is one of those great examples where you actually have to use multiple areas of physiology to form your model. If you just go into a situation and go, well, we don't know. Well, yeah, we do know. The number of times I hear hypertrophy researchers, influencers say, well, we don't know. And I'm like, well, speak for yourself, because I think the model is actually very clear. When they say they don't know, what they mean is we don't want to do the reading outside of that area to inform us on how this thing might work. They say, well, that's your problem.
Jake (1:01:42)
You
Mm.
Chris (1:01:52)
I'm just kind of reading stuff and trying to make connections and figure out how all these things fit together and how it makes sense. I've been very lucky in the sense that other people seem to think that analysis works. Well, great, fantastic. I'm glad it helps, but I'm doing this because I'm interested in how this works. And I think that the new mechanical matching principle is an amazing key that unlocks a lot of these problems. And this is one of those where it actually does inform as well, which is to say that I can't...
I'm not going to see a scenario in which muscle fibres are growing but don't then contribute to the exercise in which they are trained in because new organica matching which wouldn't let that happen.
Jake (1:02:29)
It's odd that it's even contentious because I mean that's just what progressive overload is. So it's it's strange that people are happy unanimously to agree that progressive overload matters and is the backbone of of hypertrophy training and yet this still seems to be some contention as to whether hypertrophy will always...
Contribute to strength or with yeah, I guess ultimately that that you know, you get stronger? Or can you get bigger without actually getting stronger that seems to still be a debate which doesn't make a lot of sense ⁓
Chris (1:02:58)
I think
the reasons behind that are sociological rather than whatever it is that we're doing here. I think ultimately what it comes back to is a, and this is not, absolutely not something I want to get derailed into, but I think what it comes back to is what's your framework for establishing how something works?
The framework that I'm using is to gather as much information that's available as possible from as many sources as possible that I think are sufficiently trustworthy to use. And that's why I really enjoy these conversations that we have where we bring in information from anecdotal data that's pre-steroids because as I've said repeatedly for last however many years, if somebody has anecdotal data today, I just ignore it.
you know, in the nicest possible way, because I just don't know, it doesn't meet my threshold for trustworthiness. And like, you know, the person could say, well, don't use, you know, don't use anabolic. I'm like, well, thank you for telling me that information, but I don't know whether it's true or not. So I'm just going to go back to a point when I know for a fact that they didn't take anabolic because they didn't exist. And now suddenly I have this confidence in those anecdotal data that I don't have in the anecdotal data of today. You know, and so
incorporating that and I bring in everything I can about Exos physiology from every single place that I've managed to gather information and you form it into a picture that starts to make sense and that's been, I feel incredibly successful in connecting dots and making a picture that works. On the other hand, on the other side, what I see people doing who criticise this approach that I take, what I see people doing
is drawing a box around a certain very limited amount of data that they think is acceptable for including in forming a conclusion. And they go, we're only prepared to incorporate these. And if you take that to an extreme, what you find is that some people say, the only studies I'm prepared to look at for answering this question that I have are those studies that were designed literally to answer that question. So for example, they might say, when it comes to stretch-median hypertrophy, the only studies I'm interested in kind of looking at are
these training studies that have compared training at different joint angle ranges of motion. And I'm like, so you don't want to talk about sarcomere adenosine literature, because you don't think that's relevant. You don't want to talk about neuro-mechanical matching, because that changes which muscles are getting used in different parts of the joint angle range of motion. You're to have really hard time explaining how things work and understanding how things work, literally using those 12 studies that you've identified as being the only acceptable ones for answering that question.
if you literally just bring in exercise physiology from neurochemical matching and sulcan-ray genesis, your debate goes away and you can move on and solve another problem. But in those, and we had like a year or two ago, people having literally this exact problem where they said, no, we don't want to talk about your exercise physiology, know, kind of investigations that you've pulled all this data together and you've used it to answer the question that we're wrestling with. We just want to use our 10 studies that we think are...
Jake (1:05:52)
You
Chris (1:05:53)
Look who's managed to get to the right answer though. After all this time, kind of, that group of people has now almost vanished from the internet. know, what we used to call the stretch cult, they're pretty much gone. I mean, maybe I'm, I don't know, I don't follow what goes on. You know me, I just live in my own little world, so maybe I'm mistaken. But I don't see them having the same clout as they did a year or so ago. You know, whereas a lot of people now are talking about psychomagensis and neuro-mechanical matching, they're accepting those concepts. And it's like,
Jake (1:06:04)
Mm.
Chris (1:06:19)
I think rejecting information out of hand is an error. I think the people who are trying to limit the inclusion of information are definitely going to find that they suffer in terms of their ability to find the answers to questions. Whereas people who are prepared to incorporate more information, as long as that information has a trustworthy characteristic to it, they're going to find that they...
are more likely to reach a satisfactory answer. So again, I think we could talk for hours about the sociological reasons why people are doing this, but at the end of the day, it is what it is. And there's a group of people who we're talking to who like to include lots of information and try and piece it together. And then there's a group of people who we're not talking to who...
Jake (1:06:51)
Mm.
Hmm.
Chris (1:07:04)
you know, get a bit aggravated with us, who are trying to limit the information and just go, we only want to talk about these tiny numbers studies because our, you know, I don't know, epistemological approach or whatever it is you want to describe it as requires us to limit the sources of information to solving the question. Now, why people do those, why people take those two approaches is a philosophical question, you know, or sociological question, I should say.
that you could spend hours analysing, but that's why we are where we are, because our fundamental approaches to answering questions are different.
Jake (1:07:32)
Hmm.
I've always found that interesting where there's often this sort of idea of like in the particular field you're in, like that's where you need to find those answers. And if an answer pops up in an adjacent field, it's like, well, that's not kind of okay. I can't take that on board for whatever reason. It's a competing belief, competing field, whatever. And I've always thought, well, hang on, no matter where that sort of truth or that information pops up or that knowledge pops up, like that is, if we're seeking what's true, then we should be integrating that regardless of where we're finding it.
Chris (1:08:04)
Yeah, you know where I'm coming from with this. I see it as a sociological phenomenon whereby gatekeeping is a power play. You gatekeep the power of your field by limiting the number of people who have the right to comment and argue. That's why you see people at the moment saying, can't use that information to answer this question. I'm like, stop me. Go ahead, stop me. You can't.
I can draw whatever conclusions I want from whatever data I want. You can tell me that my opinion is not important to you as a result of me taking that approach and I'm going to turn around and say I don't care because I don't need your approval. This is fascinating to me where people say, you know, you can't use that data to answer that question. And I'm like, yeah, I can. You may not approve of me, but I'm not seeking your approval. I'm not part of your community.
Jake (1:08:37)
You
Chris (1:08:53)
I'm doing my own thing and if people are interested in that, fantastic, I'm glad to help, but I don't need that. And this is what the internet has done in many ways. It's kind of allowed everybody to be able to just present their views and it's broken down a lot of those barriers to the gatekeepers. And the gatekeepers are now finding that they're fighting a losing battle because if somebody has a better way of answering a question, which I think I have, got a better way of answering these questions.
Jake (1:08:57)
Mm.
Chris (1:09:18)
then people just start adopting that. And they find themselves now screeching and saying, no, no, no, you can't do that. You're not allowed to do that. We don't approve of that. like, well, we don't care. So it is a sociological phenomenon, what we're seeing here, in the sense that one group of people is saying, no, no, no, no, no. We're gatekeeping the way that this question can be answered. And maybe.
before the internet, would have been, or social media especially, that would have been impossible to gatekeep. You'd have been able to do that. And now you can't. And now you've got this situation where, you know, like an entire generation of, or the next generation of, exiles scientists are growing up listening to us and these issues being talked about. And they will then go into exiles science with these approaches and thought processes behind them. And there'll be a conflict in terms of this.
Jake (1:09:47)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Chris (1:10:07)
one gatekeeping approach and one much more open approach, and we're gonna see some conflict there. And that's a sociologically fascinating situation that I'm not gonna have to deal with. So I can just kind of sit and watch it and go, it's like a slow motion kind of collision happening. But it's very, very interesting to watch. I think, you know,
Jake (1:10:15)
Mm. Mm. Mm.
Chris (1:10:28)
I'm going to be curious to see how many people start to notice it happening or how many people just kind of go along with it because what you'll find obviously is some people just, you know, carry on with the gatekeeping approach because it suits them and because, you know, that's just habitual for them and that's what they're used to. And then there's other people, as we're seeing, who are just going to go along with the like, well, what information have you got? You know, use whatever is useful.
Jake (1:10:54)
Mm.
Mm. Mm.
Chris (1:10:55)
And I think it's very attractive
for people who are not part of the old system and are not benefiting from the gatekeeping approach to actually use that, well, what information have you got? Because ultimately, practicality is to use whatever you've got rather than be a gatekeeper and say, no, no, no, you're only allowed to use these five things because those are the sanctioned
yeah, so anyway, rambled extensively there at the end and topics that I really shouldn't have rambled on because they're not my area of expertise. But hopefully that would have been interesting.
Jake (1:11:22)
Well, I think it's helpful as a final point on that for people who are listening, when you do, whether we present something or whether someone else presents something, if someone is saying you can't do this or you can't make that argument or whatever.
simply assess based on what? Based on what evidence can you not make that claim? And I think what I see happening is that people will hear someone say you can't do X and they'll say, well, this person said that, therefore that opinion is, or that belief is right or whatever. And then someone else might say, but Chris said you can and therefore you can. And that's not the right approach either. Ultimately, the right approach in my opinion would be to actually assess both of those arguments for their own individual merit.
So as opposed to just aligning yourself.
Chris (1:12:05)
Terminology
wise, I would say you can do anything. What we would do is we would say you can do that, you can make any argument you like. You can. It's just that the weight of the argument will be scaled downwards in accordance with the validity of the information in the context that you are using it. you can...
Jake (1:12:10)
Fair. Yep, yep, yep.
Yep.
Chris (1:12:29)
you can bring in all kinds of arguments into the equation. Most of them are going to have a modifier of such a low number that they become essentially irrelevant. you just say they're not relevant. So terminology-wise, you can do pretty much anything. The reason I'm highlighting the usage of the word can and should in these contexts, I made a story about this on Instagram, say modal verbs are tricky, because they kind of tell you that the person who is using them is an or-
Jake (1:12:41)
Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm.
Chris (1:12:56)
framing themselves as an authority figure who is gatekeeping. You know, they're saying, we, you know, the authority are telling you that you what you can and can't do. Now, again, trying to stay on track here and avoid derailing myself yet again, that's just an indicator of the strategy that they are taking in this sociological situation. My situation is like, well, you can do anything you like in this context of arguing some.
Jake (1:12:59)
Mm. Mm.
Mm.
Chris (1:13:21)
But I might say that I don't accept your argument because I don't think it has any weight. And that's a separate approach. I'm accepting all information. I just will dismiss the conclusion if I think it's irrelevant. But when somebody starts using modal verbs, for me, that's a gigantic red flag that they are positioning themselves as a gatekeeper, as an authority figure. And straight away, again, trying to avoid derailing myself here, straight away, I frame that in that way.
Jake (1:13:45)
Hehehe.
Well, you did a good job at summarizing exactly the purpose of this podcast and why we started this in the first place.
which was to combine these new elements of what you're talking about and the knowledge and the information, the data that we can obtain from all these different areas and the questions we can flesh out and pursue and how we can then examine this anecdotal evidence, if you will, from the past. So hopefully you guys are enjoying these episodes. Chris, is there anything else without derailing you that you want to finish off? No, you're all good for today.
Chris (1:14:15)
No, I'm absolutely done. need
to stop.
Jake (1:14:17)
Well thank you guys for tuning in, hopefully you've enjoyed our episode on strength and sociology and we hope you'll join us again next week.