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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 (00:01)
Welcome to hypertrophy past and present. This is our first episode of our new podcast. And in this podcast, what we aim to do is take the example of pre-steroid era bodybuilding and examine it with modern muscle physiology. And I think if we do this, we can actually learn a lot about how these old timers trained and what they knew about how the body worked and how muscle worked and how hypertrophy worked. And I actually think we're going to learn some lessons that we can actually employ today.
So I'm joined with my co-host Chris Beasley. Chris, how are you today?
Chris (00:32)
doing very well thanks Jake.
Jake (00:34)
And I'm excited to jump into our first episode. This is a topic we've both discussed a fair bit in the past. And something we've both realized over time is a really interesting thing to talk about. Because as we look at bodybuilding and we look at iron culture and hypertrophy and hypertrophy methods, what we see is that as time went on and as anabolic to introduce, we see training methods change completely. And I think we would both say they changed in a way that
kind of moved away from muscle physiology. Like it made less sense over time. So what we wanna do with this podcast is actually go back in time and examine what were these guys doing before anabolic? When there was only one variable that influenced hypertrophy, that was really what you did in the gym before what you were injecting outside of the gym influenced it. And what I think you guys might notice is, sometimes when we think about pre-historic era bodybuilding, I don't know if you guys ever think about it, but when I think about it, I kind of plump it all together. And what I think is really interesting is we actually see, or we can see over time, how these guys developed and what they learned, what they realized was working, wasn't working, and how these plans actually shifted. What people don't realize is when bodybuilding started, the first bodybuilding show is 1901. So between 1901 and arguably about 1954, that's when anabolic can introduce into bodybuilding, give or take. We have 50 plus years of these natural bodybuilders learning what was really working. And if we look at that timeline, we can actually learn how did they evolve? How did they take these techniques and refine them to become more more effective? So that's the plan for this podcast. And then we're gonna talk about how it fits in perfectly with the model you've created as far as how hypertrophy works.
Chris, is there anything you wanna start with or should I jump into one of these old timer plans?
Chris (02:23)
No, I think that was perfect and I really like, and I'm not going to steal your thunder at all, but I really like the way that you've, because you obviously sent me the first routine that you're planning to talk about today for our first episode. And I'm really, it's really cool that you've chosen one of the earlier ones. You know, I think, and that fits perfectly with what you just saying about showing people how these things are going to change over time. So if we can bring one of these routines to people regularly on this podcast and we can talk about it and show a development over time, I think that's going to be really cool project to do. So I'm really excited about this. As you say, I think, or we both think that the physiology of hypertrophy fits perfectly with the way that these guys were training. So yeah, I think this is going to be a really exciting project. So let's do it. Let's jump straight into the first one.
Jake (03:08)
a lot of these training programs, they were called courses back in the day. And so there would often be like mail out courses, people could sign up, they could get these courses delivered to their letterbox. And one of the first or the first kind of main published course that was like widely produced was by a company called Milo Barbell Company.
Now, just a quick history 101, we've got, you might hear me talk about the silver era of bodybuilding. That's generally what we're referring to when you talk about the pre-stereoid era of bodybuilding. We do have before that the bronze era. Now that is more like circus, strongman type events. Eugene Sandow is a key figure of that time. And that sort of existed, I would say probably up until about 1900. Once we had the first bodybuilding show in 1901,
we start to get this shift occurring and we kind of have this like middle ground where it's not quite the silver era people that people will know that'll be people like Reg Park, Steve Reeves these big names, yeah, Mr. Universe winners. We don't get that until about 1940, but we kind of have their foundation that's leading into that. So what we're gonna talk about today is a plan that was produced by a company called Milo Barbell Company. And they were the first company selling barbells.
and they were the first company that put out a course like this. Eugene Sandow had put out his own course, which is a little bit different, maybe we'll cover it another time. But Milo Barbel Company, this was about 1911, give or take, where they put out this course, they refined it a little bit over the next decade or so. And what I find so interesting about this is this is very much the beginning of this kind of bodybuilding idea. So up until this point, it had been circus events, strongman feats.
And now they had started to develop this idea of bodybuilding. And so we're 10 years post having a bodybuilding show. And what we can actually see when we look at this program in a moment is there's some body parts that are maybe getting a little bit more emphasis, somebody passing in a little bit less emphasis. And I'm gonna do a bit of a spoiler here and tell you why. Because this is very much in this middle ground of bronze to silver. And the bronze era, like I said, dominated by people like Eugene Sandow, that was actually modeled.
off like Greek statues, like God statues. And what Sandow would actually do is travel to these places, take measurements of these statues, come back and try to emulate them. And part of that sort of aesthetic was no chest. So what we see in these really early programs that are based off that kind of idea or that kind of physique is it tends to be a lot less chest development. So that's something we're gonna see here, but I'm just going to talk through what the program actually entails.
And then we might pass over to you Chris and you can unpack it a little bit more about what you see about it. So as a foundation, what we do is we've got what the course consists of is 12 different exercises. Now each exercise is done once and you move through the entire 12 exercises and then that's it. So there's no sets. At this point in time, sets didn't exist. if you look at any of these old books, you might ask like, they're not specifying sets, what's going on?
The idea sets didn't even exist. They would tell you how many times you would do that exercise, how many repetitions, and that's it. So we've got 12 exercises, one set of each. And what we begin with is a barbell curl. Now you've got to remember that these guys, they're using one barbell, okay? So what they're doing is having to make exercises work around the available equipment. They don't have machines, they don't have cables, they've got a barbell, a kettlebell, that's usually it. And they don't have squat cages or racks or stands and anything like that. So we've got a barbell curl, one set, five to 10 repetitions.
Chris (06:47)
That's a really interesting point. I hadn't realized how much of a difference that observation makes but now after you've said that and I'm not going to spoil the contents of this workout just yet because that's your area but I'm looking at the list of exercises and if you look you can see that they're probably adding weight as they go through a sequence of exercises. So they start with the barbell curl which is going to have very little weight on the bar and then as they move forward into the next exercises those exercises
Jake (06:54)
Hmm.
Chris (07:16)
will involve more weight on the bar. So it's like you've got the one barbell and you start with it and you're like, okay, well I'll do an easy exercise, sorry, not an easy exercise, I'll do an exercise that requires a little weight and then I'll add some more weight and do an exercise that's going to require a little bit more weight and then I'll do another exercise that's going to require a bit more weight and you can kind of see them and it's not perfect by any means but it's just a really interesting observation that you just enlightened me that I didn't think about that when I looked at this program when you sent it to me but that absolutely does make sense because
Jake (07:35)
Mmm.
Chris (07:45)
some other really big exercises the squat variations are towards the end whereas you've got this easy kind of easy it's not easy it's just it requires a lot less weight on the bar to do it so that's that's pretty cool that's pretty cool
Jake (07:57)
And a lot of the time these programs are actually done in groups of people as well. So a lot of the later ones, so Milo got bought out by York, Biobel company and York they talk a lot in their programs about, because this is the time of war, right? So often people would be in the military perhaps doing these programs together. So they would design it in a way that they could do the whole program with one Biobel between multiple people. So the sequencing was heavily influenced by what they had available.
So barbell curl, one set, five to 10 repetitions. You go into a seated overhead press after that. Now, this is before benches even existed. So the seated overhead was done sitting on the floor, which I think you would call that a Z press. I think that's what you call it today. And so that was a set of five to 10 repetitions as well. And then you go into a bent over barbell row, an overhand, a pronated grip, one set of five to 10. And you go into a standing behind the neck press, shoulder press, one set of five to 10. That exercise behind the neck, all Silver Ero bodybuilders swore by that. That was an absolute favorite. Anyway, they then move into a barbell pullover. So flat, you're on the floor, again, there's no bench involved. And this actually went five to 20 repetitions. Sometimes they use wider ranges and I assume it's because of, you know, limited exercise, limited weight availability.
And then they move into a weighted crunch where they're holding the, they're actually using a barbell for the weighted crunch. And that was one set of five to 10. And then a straddle squat. Now this I found quite amusing. So in the course, in fact, I'm actually gonna show you Chris listeners, you're not gonna be able to see this, but I'm going to explain it to you as well. The exercise description actually has an image of them doing a squat holding a barbell, standing on kitchen dining chairs. So again, no boxes, no benches, nothing like that existed. Literally standing on wooden dining chairs.
Chris (09:52)
I think that position actually in some places is called a Jefferson deadlift.
Jake (09:56)
Yes, good point. And so they did one set of 10 to 20. Now I found that quite amusing as well because I don't think I'd want to do any fewer repetitions in 10 standing on a wooden dining chairs. Anyway, so I started 10 to 20 of that. Then they went into a barbell vertical shrug, a set of 20 to 40, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a moment. And then a heels elevated barbell squat. Now, back in the day, they call this a deep knee bend. So they weren't even, it wasn't even called a squat at this point. And the heels elevated, for a long time, they did all these deep knee bends with their heels elevated. Now they didn't actually place anything under the heels at this point. So they literally like, I guess, lifted up on their toes and squatted away with their feet very close together of here, a set of 12 to 24. And then they're moving to a one-arm dumbbell overhead press.
Chris, I don't know if you know the name for this lift. It's not like a strict military style overhead press. It's more like a, almost like a momentum type one where you kind of lean into the weight and then as you extend, you kind of lean into the weight again as you extend. So it's more like a, I guess like a cheating one arm overhead press.
Chris (11:13)
I think these are done in the kettlebell community. I think these guys do a variation of that. So it definitely looks very, very different from the standard overhead press that we would normally do. So I think it probably does create a different effect from the other overhead pressing that they're doing. But again, it's like this very strong emphasis on overhead pressing, you know, kind of that we can see in here. got three exercises, haven't we? We've got the seated barbell, we've got the standing barbell behind the neck, and then we've got this one, one-armed dumbbell.
Jake (11:27)
Hmm.
Chris (11:41)
There's clearly a huge focus on shoulder training in these programs. I think as you say that probably comes from that Bronze Era focus on the Greek kind of statues and trying to create that look. It's amazing that nobody's really picked up on that and kind of done a marketing thing on it. Now you can kind of really go to town, couldn't you? say, look like a Greek god. mean, that's pretty much what people want anyway. So anyway, it's just really interesting. Yeah, but I think that exercise probably does do a different thing.
Chris (12:08)
from the
Jake (12:09)
And interestingly, that exercise stayed as a pretty popular exercise throughout the Sylvia era and even people like Reg Park actually used it quite a lot as well. And then we've got a kettlebell swing, standard kind of kettlebell swing like you would see people do nowadays instead of 10 to 20. And finishing off with an exercise that I actually quite like, which was a reverse grip kettlebell curl. But the way that they did this was gracing themselves, supporting themselves with the arm that they're not using against the chair and they kind of bent slightly forwards over the chair and then doing the kettlebell curl up. And they actually talk about letting your hand kind of, I guess, curl over with the kettlebell. So you're not having to, there's not as much, I guess, wrist strain or sort of effort from the wrist trying to curl it up. So as far as an upper brachioradialis exercise, it's quite good.
Chris (12:57)
So it's almost a spider curl in the sense that they've got that inclination forwards of the torso. So again, more emphasis on the brachioradialis.
Jake (13:01)
And that was a set of five to 10 as well. So those are our 12 exercises. As you can see, most of it was five to 10. So you add one repetition until you got to 10, then you'd go heavier and drop back down to five. The lower body exercises were high repetition. So, you know, 12 to 24 with the Hills elevated squat, for example, or 10 to 20 with the straddle squat.
Chris (13:27)
but obviously you're going to destroy furniture if you use a heavier weight. So I mean, it's just physically not possible to do, or you don't have enough weight on the bar. But I mean, I think this is a point you made to me a very long time ago when you first started getting really serious about learning all of these routines and analyzing them. And it was basically that they just simply didn't have the kind of the equipment to be able to do the five to 10 rep ranges with those lower body exercises. So think a lot of people coming to this for the first time would look at it and go, oh, well,
Jake (13:31)
Absolutely, just end up on the floor.
Chris (13:57)
clearly these guys knew something you know they use all light loads and know high repetitions for the lower body we should do that it's like well no they didn't have the technology to do that because it just wasn't well not technology sorry they didn't have the equipment available didn't have huge amounts of barbell plates that they could put on the barbells so now I think that's it's really cool to see those 510 rep ranges because obviously that is what we talk about when we're talking about programming today aiming for those five six seven rep max I think that's a really, really cool observation to see them doing that.
Jake (14:32)
And to further your point with the equipment as well, I mean, how would you even get on your shoulders? You if you're using, doing a set of five with a squat, you have to literally leverage it up, you know, leaning over to the side to get it off the floor. So a lot of it just came out of purely convenience or accessibility. So that's the workout. So Chris, what stands out to you apart from some of those little, you know, bit about availability and weight and stuff like that?
Chris (14:53)
So there's so much to unpack here in terms of exercise selection. I mean, just picking some of the really, really easy stuff straight away. As we've already said, there's a barbell curl here, but there's also a reverse grip curl with a slight torso inclination. So straight away, you can see that they've completely understood that there are two really distinctive ways of training the elbow flexors. You've got the brachioradialis with the reverse grip and a bit of an inclination of torso in that situation. And you've also got the biceps brachii themselves where you're training probably with a supinated grip in that barbell curl at the beginning. So that's again you know they understand that you've got different regions of muscle groups straight away.
I think also you could probably make a case for the same thing happening with the overhead pressing. Again, they're selecting different variations, then they understand that you can't just do one overhead press and nail every single part of the deltoid. It's clear that they know exactly what they're doing on that particular front. I think there's some very clear indications that they are on the road, not necessarily have mastered at this point, but they're on the road to understand that you need some slight variations in the exercise selections that you're doing if you want to absolutely maximise the muscle growth that you're aiming for. And obviously you can see areas where they haven't been able to do that.
I mean you made the point at the very beginning that there's a very limited emphasis on chest training. It's only the pullover really is going to do anything for chest in this particular program. So you can see that that again is falling outside. But is that an aesthetic choice like you were saying? It's not necessarily that they didn't know how to do that. It was just simply that they decided that they didn't want it. And that's a totally valid choice. And when we have our arbitrary ideas about what peak physiques should look like and they have theirs and it's not necessarily going to be the same thing.
Jake (16:47)
At this point, a bench didn't exist yet. I Hackenschmidt sort of invented some variation of a bench. So this Hackenschmidt being a bronze zero lifter, and that sort of hadn't expanded too far just yet. And it was only going to be in the coming decades that suddenly people would start using the bench press and actually competing in it. So it seems to be at that point when people started competing in it and trying to set new records, we start to see more chess development actually emphasized.
Chris (17:15)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you can also see that exercise selection in the sense that there is a shrug and there's also a row variation as a tendency in today's kind of
So era for people to drop shrugs and say let's just do rows and that's going to do all of my trapezius development. I don't think it does. I I answered this question actually on my Instagram questions yesterday. People were saying do I need to do a shrug variation if I'm already doing a row? I'm like well just go to the row machine that you're doing and look at the weight that you're using and then do a calcow shrug with that same exercise. Just do a calcow shrug with that same piece of equipment. And what you'll notice is that the weight that you're using in the Kelso Struck variation of that exact same row is way higher than what you're doing in the row and that's showing you that if you are doing the row the limiting factor is not your trapezius. The limiting factor is some other muscle that you're therefore limiting the development the trapezius can get in that rowing exercise. So I think it's really cool to see that again they've understood that subtlety. as I say you know I wouldn't say that this program is perfect from an exercise selection point of view it's absolutely not.
But there are very clear indications that they have understood stuff by trial and error that we've had to do by analysis of moment arms. And why have we had to do it by analysis of moment arms? We've had to do it by analysis of moment arms because people can literally just train with whatever exercises they want and take anabolic and everything will grow. And it's like, well, so you're not going to know which exercises work. So the silliest thing we can do is ask somebody who's taking anabolic which exercises to do. It's just not going to give you an answer that's meaningful.
Chris (18:54)
because everything is growing. So how are going to know what works? They're just not. So you go back to these guys and you start to see that because of the absence of antibiotics, they've had a very, very much clearer perspective on what works for the precise purpose of growing a specific muscle because they weren't doing the right exercise. It wasn't going to grow the muscle that they're interested in. So I think it's really cool to see that. Yes, we've got, as you were saying at the beginning, we've got evidence to show that, you know, they understood this concept of exercise variation for specific muscle areas and they were making very good progress down that road but clearly also you can see some of the deficits. mean the other deficit that I would say is really obvious in this program is obviously the latissimus dorsi. I mean straight away when you sent me this by message a few days ago I straight away went back to you and said there's no chest training and there's no lower lat. You know so with the the row you're getting that upper lat sort of development but you're probably not getting the lower lat development which you would need from a frontal plane exercise.
And that would be quite difficult for them to do, think, with that sort free weight situation, you know. Unless they put a pull-up bar in place, they're not really going to be to do that.
Jake (20:02)
That's a really good point you made about the anabolic because obviously it does change a few other variables. I'm sure we'll talk about it at some point in future episodes, but just to emphasize how it actually changes exercise selection. Not changes, but it takes away your intuition in discovering exactly what exercise works for what particular muscle region. And that's something that I think we'll see that a lot of these guys nailed so well is actually refining particularly which exercise would work for a particular muscle region. And yeah, obviously that's why, because there was no other stimulus or no other mechanism for growth. So to wrap this up, I'd like to hear maybe one sort of thing that stood out to you that you think these guys nailed and one thing that you think was definitely a shortcoming at this point.
Chris (20:51)
So I think I will stick with what I said earlier, which is that I think they nailed the ability to see the effects of specific exercises on specific muscle regions. I think that fundamental observation they had absolutely understood. It's like, if I do this exercise, this part of the muscle group is going to grow in this particular way. If I want it to look a certain way, I need to do this particular exercise. I think you can see that knowledge is there in this program. Now, they haven't done it for every single muscle group, definitely not. And it's by no means perfect. I can see ways of tweaking this very slightly to make it better, but that would require equipment that they didn't have access to. So I think within the boundaries of what they were working with, they've done an amazing job in are in that particular observation. So that would be my fundamental observation regarding the thing that you said is really, really good. Shortcomings wise is really difficult to pull shortcomings out that aren't just constraints that they're working within.
So obviously the biggest shortcomings that you could throw at it straight away is like, where's this exercise for that muscle group? Where's this exercise for that muscle group? So what are you going to do? I I think, you know, the fact that they haven't quite figured out that if you do pull ups with a wide grip, you can get lower lat development. I think that probably is the one exercise thing that I would look at and go, come on, guys, it's not difficult to set up a pull up bar. That's not challenging. OK, so that would probably be the one area. But like, that's not a constraints issue. That's just the lack of imagination at that point.
So that would be my one exercise, probably criticism that is definitely, definitely do. I could find others if I sat down and like really, really sort of thought about it, but that's the one that really jumps out at me. And again, floor presses, as you said, with Hank and Schmidt and obviously then moving to a bench, you could do some, but again, is that an aesthetic choice or is that actually just a shortcoming? I don't think that's really difficult. Sorry, I don't think that's a very easy question to answer. It's quite difficult.
And again, it's like with lower body stuff, doing all the high rep stuff, you know, is that really necessary? And you kind of like, then you're into constraints of, know, like we haven't got a squat rack, you haven't got this, you haven't got that. Yeah, but there are deadlift variations you could have done with heavier weights. So again, it's like, well, is just the barbell long enough? Can you not put enough plates on? It's like, what are your constraints? I don't know. I'm not a historian of that particular area. I don't know what the real limitations were. So it's hard to say where does the imagination fail and where is the actual equipment not letting you do the
Chris (23:15)
thing that you want to do. So again I think honestly shortcomings wise it's very very difficult to and especially if this program is being done you know single sets three times a week which I'm guessing it probably was then you know it's just a tremendous tremendous program really for working within the limitations of the time. think honestly I would say that the limitation I would go for is that they could have made better use of barbell deadlift variations.
Chris (23:44)
because honestly, you can do a lot with that. We've been talking about that recently. How many different variations can you create? I blocks aren't difficult to make. You could have block deadlifts at different heights. You could do all kinds of different stuff there. So that probably would be my sort of shortcoming that I'd probably go for is that they probably didn't make enough use of deadlift variations. It's more of a squat focus. But again, is that an aesthetic choice? I don't know want to do or maybe they did deadlift variations and they couldn't see a repeatable pattern of where muscle growth was happening. One of the interesting things about deadlifts is that everybody I think kind of responds to them in slightly different ways because everyone's got a different weak point area. Some people you know maybe their ductum magnus blows up, some people it's their glutes, some people it's their back and so on. That isn't a reliable stimulus for these guys so I think a lot of the time it's very difficult to identify strengths and weaknesses from a programme if you don't fully understand exactly the context and limitations and which obviously you've explained a lot to the limitations but and perspectives and again you've explained some of those but there's so many things we don't necessarily know about what they saw and what they did I don't like sort of necessarily jumping to conclusions and saying they did this therefore it was wrong so well yeah but what did they know that I don't know
I'm just endlessly curious about this kind of thing. It's like, what am I not seeing here? And is that a choice or was it a mistake? So I'm trying not to dodge the question.
I'm trying not to dodge the question but you know it's like I don't have that degree of hubris necessary to look at something like this and say well I don't know sorry I'm not having the hubris to say you know I know everything that there is to know and therefore when I see something I don't like it's wrong it's like well actually I'm curious I'm like well what's right about it what can I learn about this what did they know what are they seeing I'm not seeing so I'm trying not to dodge the question so if I'm put on the spot I'll say yeah okay no I've said what I think the advantages are shortcomings I say definitely pull-up bars for lower lats and probably blocks for deadlift variations. That would probably be my two shortcomings in terms of the exercise. I love everything else about it.
Jake (25:55)
It's interesting that this is literally the first mass-produced plan. I look at this and it, you similar to what you said there, I'm like, you know what, there's obviously things that could be better in terms of at least what our goals would be today. But I look at it and I'm like, this is genuinely better than the vast majority of stuff I would see online. And we've had a hundred years on top of this. And it's just, it's amazing where these guys started. And to see where they end up in the next 25, 30 years is really interesting. So we're gonna cover some of that obviously in future episodes. A component of most of these plans that is similar that you guys will see in future episodes is almost all of them were full body. There's very few exceptions. There might be a couple here and there, but almost all of them are full body. And they were almost all, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, they tended to take the weekends off. They tended to take Sunday off, which I think was more of like a religious thing. Sometimes they
They did say that you could train every other day if you wanted, but generally it was Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And it was very clear that even though some people were playing with some other splits, full body was by far the preferred split that was used right up until the end of the silver era. Now, we're gonna cover a lot about full body in future episodes, because it was obviously such an important element to these guys. But we're gonna talk a little bit more about one particular aspect of full body today.
Chris (27:14)
Yes, so basically if we kind of go back to the name of the podcast, Hypertube Past and Present, we've just done the past bit and now we're going to talk about the present bit. So what we want to do for this second half of the podcast is just address a small area within the full body versus other training splits debate in the context of training frequency and say, you know, what is it or what is one of the things that makes full body so much better than many of the other options, especially a really kind of low frequency bro split type options. So the focus we want to take today is to say
Why does the dose response of hypertrophy to workout training volume make a higher frequency better than a lower frequency? That's basically the question we want to wrestle with. So a lot of people when they look at the training frequency at the moment, they're talking about atrophy rates and of course, you're going to see less atrophy when you're training more frequently, but that's not what we want to talk about today. We want to talk about today's literally just the stimulus side, not the atrophy side.
So essentially, just to give some context, and again, this is me doing kind of the history of physiology rather than you doing the history of bodybuilding, but basically, history of physiology, basically in recent history, we've seen two very important meta-analyses come out in the last kind of seven or eight years or so. There was a meta-analysis by Brad Schoenfeldt and the more recent one by Pelland. Those two meta-analyses both have done a very clear demonstration of the fact that the dose response hypertrophy to workout training volume is nonlinear. What that means is that there is a diminishing returns effect of each extra set that you do in a workout. So if I do one set that gives me a particular stimulus of hypertrophy in that muscle that I've just trained. I then do a secondary set I do not double the hypertrophy stimulus. Both of these meta-analyses show that. So essentially I do a third and I get even less, fourth I get even less and it diminishes and diminishes and diminishes.
And this is an incredibly important observation because what it means is that what we want to do is have as many of those first sets per week as possible. So you're going to see what people say in the industry which is that if you do the same number of sets per week it doesn't matter how you organize and you get the same hypertrophy. That's absolutely physiologically impossible if you have a nonlinear dose response of hypertrophy to training void.
Jake (29:33)
So what you're saying there, so literally the only way it would be possible if volume equated throughout the end of the week had the same effect regardless of whatever frequency you use would be if there was no diminishing returns. So if the second set stimulated as much growth as the first set.
Chris (29:46)
Yeah, can't have these two things mathematically in the same model. If you're looking at a non-linear dose response relationship, if your second, third, fourth, fifth sets of an exercise or a muscle group are giving you smaller stimulus than the earlier ones, the first ones or the second ones, then you cannot have a situation where...
The same number of sets per week is giving you the same amount of hypertrophy regardless of where you allocate them. can't do nine sets of biceps curls on Monday and expect to get the same results as three sets of biceps curls on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It's absolute mathematical impossibility to have that result. ⁓
Jake (30:23)
And so technically speaking, magnitude doesn't even particularly matter. So you mentioned the Schoenfeld and the Pelland meta, and you're saying they both had slightly different numbers, right? So the Schoenfeld, roughly each additional set was about half as stimulating as the set before it. And Pelland saying that actually it was, in the data was a little bit more stimulating than that. But even if it was 5 % less stimulating, that still is gonna tell you that actually high frequency is better.
Chris (30:49)
Yeah, it absolutely doesn't matter. Mathematically, if you have a nonlinear dose response such that you've got diminishing returns, if the diminishing returns curve is steep or if it's shallow, it doesn't matter, you still end up in the same place. So you can put the Pellin data into a model, you can put the Schoenfeld data into a model, and you can get the same qualitative answer. It's still going to tell you that the higher frequency is better than the lower frequency. It might tell you that the difference is smaller or larger depending on which of those two meta-analyses
you use as data. I think the numbers I tend to work with are that the Schoenfeld is six sets to double the hypertrophy produced by one, but I think that the Pelland you actually get quadruple hypertrophy with six sets rather than double hypertrophy. So it's quite a big difference between the two. So, but again, when you look at the difference, and this is a conversation for another day, but when you look at the difference in the studies that have gone into those two meta-analyses,
what you see obviously is that Pellan being so much more recent to being done just last year. It has all of the last kind of few years of studies and if you look at those studies they've all got insane volumes in some of those and so you get some really extreme volumes in those those programs and of course that magnifies the likelihood of muscle swelling confounding the results. So you end up with a sort of an excessive amount of muscle size I think growth I'm not going to call it hypertrophy because it's probably not but you end up with this kind of confounding factor. And I think maybe the answer probably is going to be somewhere between the two matter analyses. But it doesn't really matter because the point we're making here is that irrespective of the actual numbers, the absolute numbers, the qualitative answer is that if you have a nonlinear diminishing returns effect, you're absolutely going to find a higher frequency is better than a lower.
Jake (32:37)
Yeah, I mean, that's actually interesting because what you're saying there is regardless of basically any other variable that we wanna look at in terms of atrophy, in terms of how long the protecting period lasts for after someone's done a training session, regardless of any of that, full body still has to be, well, I say full body, but a high training frequency has to be better than a lower training frequency purely based on the fact that there's diminishing returns with the volume unless the second set was as effective as the first and the fifth was as effective as the first and the 10th was as effective as the first, which I don't think anyone is really gonna argue, then.
Chris (33:10)
It's interesting that you say that. think anybody with exposure to the physiology is not going to argue that. I think because if somebody accepts that the stimulus that we are producing, fibroids, is governed by two factors, it's governed by the number of fibres that you're training, which is essentially motor unit accruement governing muscle activation. When I say muscle activation, I mean the number of activated muscle fibres. So you've got a high level of recruitment, you can activate a lot of muscle fibres and by activating the fibre, you can apply mechanical loading stimulus to each of those fibers and because hypertrophy is muscle fiber specific
that shows you how muscle growth is working on the whole muscle level. So we are looking for a high level of recruitment and we're looking for a high level of single fibre tension. Now we know that fatigue mechanisms that develop over the course of a workout will reduce both of those things. I mean this is not contentious, this is just very simple fatigue physiology. Simple fatigue physiology, those words should never be used in conjunction with each other. So it's just basic fatigue physiology. So we see reduction in recruitment over course of the set, see a reduction in mechanical tension to a certain degree over the course of the set. So we're naturally expecting a reduction in the stimulus from set to set to set to set. And even if people don't want to look at physiology, they can just look at their own motivation levels and their levels of effort that they bring to each set. I most people understand instinctively that they can't bring the same level of intensity to set five as they could to set one. One of my favorite kind of just moving practically just for a moment, one of my favorite experiments is to just show people if they're doing a normal three set protocol and they're just going into the gym and doing three sets and they're just like yeah you know I can do this number of reps on my first second and third set and I am training to fade it. I'm like okay just as a test give yourself a day or so you know kind of wash out and then go back and do that workout again but just do a single set and I almost guarantee that you'll get an extra rep on that first set when you know you don't have two more sets coming. So these are really cool kind of things that you can just do to not really into the physiology there's some interesting ways that you can just test this for yourself. anyway...
Jake (35:15)
I think definitely if someone does that, they'll definitely get more reps out. I know for me, when I started doing this probably two years ago now, I did a long stint where I was just doing single sets and it was mind boggling to me how many more repetitions. And like for me, I used to always take every set to failure. And so it's not like I was holding back in those first sets when I was doing multiple sets. Suddenly I started doing single sets. I'm getting like two to four repetitions more out per set than what I'm used to.
And I was just like, what is happening? Am I recording this wrong? What the heck is happening here? And it must just be that motivation aspect,
Chris (35:53)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, it all comes back to Mark Kora and the Psychobiological Model of T, but again, we can jump into that in a subsequent episode. So what we're saying then is that basically we've got a clear understanding that we're going to get a higher sort of stimulus from the earlier sets in the workout. And that means that we want more of those earlier sets, you know, per week. But how many can we fit in? Well, it really comes down to how long the stimulus period is lasting. you know most of time, and this is a very complex area that again deserves its own podcast, but broadly speaking it's probably somewhere between 24 and 48 hours creating the hypertrophy that you just stimulated.
So that fits perfectly with what we're seeing in these full body routines where people are training the muscle three times a week. And so you've got this kind of 48 hour window, you go back in and you do the same thing again, and you're maximizing again across the week. Okay, this is why...
People have been asking me recently on social media, you well, could you train every other day? Well, like you said earlier, yeah, absolutely. Will it make a big difference? Well, over a long enough period of time it will, yeah. But people have lives to live you don't necessarily want to be organizing your entire world around the gym. That's not necessarily something that's going to work out well in the long term for everybody. So I think it's just a really nice kind of coincidence between the data that we're seeing in the physiology and the data that we're gathering from these older routines. Training the muscle three times a week fits with the stimulus period. It fits with this nonlinear dose response. It's maximizing the hypertrophy in the context of this model.
Jake (37:31)
There's two points I wanna follow up there, just in case people haven't followed it. So that you've talked about first sets and you've talked about each additional set being less stimulating. Now that's in the context of the same exercise. So yes, each, you could argue that the latest sets in a workout are gonna be less stimulating as well as earlier sets, potentially. But when we're talking about this sort of diminishing returns is nonlinear response to volume. This conversation is always about additional sets in the same exercise. I see people get that confused a little bit online. Okay.
Chris (38:00)
same muscle group. I think because when we're about hypertrophy we're talking about muscle fibres and so if you're training a muscle with say two different exercises and there's a big overlap between those two exercises then I think fundamentally we are doing the same thing from this diminishing returns effect point of view. Yes there'll be some fibres that don't experience that because there's always going to be different fibres used in different exercises and again that's something we can talk about later but yeah, I think it's probably better to think about it in terms of muscle and groups rather than exercises.
If we want to think about training frequency, we've been talking about it in the context of full body training. OK, so that's like comparing full body with a different kind of split. But actually, when you talk about it physiologically, we're talking about it from a muscle point of view. we seeing this need to train specific muscles three times a week. But if you do a different exercise, you're not necessarily going to train exactly the same muscle fibers in each of those situations. like the real strength of those early bodybuilding programs like the one we talked about today is that they use exactly the same routine three times a week. So you're literally training exactly the same muscle fibers three times a week. If you now start changing exercises, now you can do this, let me give two examples here. If you were to do this with a, like somebody would say, I'm going to do a squat on Monday, I'm going to do a knee extension on Wednesday and I'm going to do, you know, I don't know, a leg press on Friday. And so I'm training the quadriceps up three days a week that's fine that's the same thing as doing a full body program.
No it's not because your knee extension is training the rectus femoris and the other two exercises are not. So you're actually now only training the rectus femoris once a week and so now what you've done is you've created a program which has a weakness in it because that program is actually having a training frequency of once per week for that particular part of the quadriceps and the other two exercises are you know kind of not training that. So that's one example. Another example might be to train, I don't know maybe you've got an exercise that is a very close grip bench press. That's going to give you an enormous amount of clavicular pec not going to give you any costal pec stimulus at all because the costal pec is a shoulder extensor not a shoulder flexor. So it's like well I'm doing a bench press, I'm doing a bench press therefore my whole pec is being stimulated. Well no it's not because I can literally look at the moment arms and show you that the costal pec is doing the opposite thing from what you're doing so it can't possibly be activated.
So it's not being trained so you're not actually so if you've got your narrow grip bench press on one day and you see That's my chest exercise for that day. I'm gonna do a fly on another day and a wide grip bench on the other day It's like well, yeah the fly and the and the wide grip bench are gonna give you the whole peck stimulus not a problem But that that narrow grip bench isn't doing that
So again, it's like, now you've dropped down to two times a week for the lower part of your pack and you're not actually then training that three times a week. I think these kinds of situations, these kinds of analysis are really useful because I think a lot of people just go, oh, well, I'm putting this exercise in for that muscle and this exercise into this muscle. And it's like, oh, well, as long as I've got all the muscles covered, I'm good. What you're going to find if you do that is that if you drop down to two times a week for a particular region, it's just going to grow slower. OK, no problem. I have no problem with that. I don't think in terms of people, I need to be jacked by the summer.
It's like no, it's like you think in longer terms than that. It's like you've got this year to make something happen. But if you were to drop down to once a week, you'd probably find that that wasn't now going to work at all. And the muscle would just kind of be washing out and not growing over time. The net hypertrophy wouldn't really be meaningful. So I think it's not just about saying, you know, training frequency is going to be better. was thinking three times is going to better than two times. It's also about saying, well, look at your exercise selection and are you actually training every single kind of reading of a muscle multiple times per week, at least two, if not three. Compromises are going to get made. You might not find that you can do everything three times, but it has to be two times. I that's where you're going with the point that you're making.
Jake (42:06)
Well, if remember what the other point I was gonna make was, but to follow up on that one, something I often tell people is if you don't know exercise selection well and you don't know biomechanics well, I actually think you're better off programming the same exercises each workout. And that's what we see the Sylvia area guys doing that workout example I gave today. That's what they did the same exercise, the same workout each time. And unless you actually...
Chris (42:25)
It's amazing to see just how much humility those guys had despite their obviously huge success, expertise, knowledge, training, time, effort and yet they managed to maintain that humility of saying well if I don't know exactly what I'm doing I'm going to try and limit the risks of it not working. Whereas as you were pointing out before we start the podcast today you get kind of social media today you get somebody with 31 followers telling you that you don't understand the mechanisms of hypertrophy is just a very, very silly kind of comparison.
Jake (42:58)
Yeah, and yet people are scared of doing the same workout on repeat. And I get that sometimes people might get a little bit bored. I get that, if that's your motivation, okay. But in terms of it not being flash enough, or it showing that you're not advanced enough or whatever, I actually think you're gonna get better results most of the time if you do just do that same workout on repeat, unless you actually know exercise selection and biomechanics well enough to know exactly what region of a muscle is actually being trained in a particular exercise. And most people, to be fair, don't know exercise selection that.
Well, unless like unless you do, I think just stick to the same exercise. Now the second point was, the second point I was going to make is we've kind of glossed over this and I don't expect you to go into a lot of detail here, but just I wanted to touch on it.
Chris (43:32)
I think that's a really good point.
Jake (43:41)
We're talking about full body either every other day or Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And someone listening to what you said so far about diminishing returns and first sets, et cetera, they might listen to it and be like, well, hold up, why don't I just do it every single day? And I know you made the point of that stimulus window is about 24 to 48 hours. It's a little bit of murkiness, I guess, in that. But do you want to just elaborate on that just briefly, just so people understand why they wouldn't just do it every single day?
Chris (44:05)
Sure, so basically when a muscle fibre is stimulated to grow, it's going to upregulate the rate at which it makes new proteins. And we call that the rate of either muscle protein synthesis or the rate of myofibrilla protein synthesis. So we're making new proteins at a faster rate. So essentially we were making them at a baseline rate, sort of in and out, sort being matched, and now we're making them at a faster rate, so we're adding new stuff into the muscle fibre. Okay.
Now that rate of protein synthesis has a couple of characteristics that we need to be aware of. So firstly, it tends to go up relatively quickly in the first sort of 12 hours and start coming down again and it's definitely coming down a lot by the end of that first 24 hour period but it does probably then spill over into that second 24 hour period and we're not really sure exactly what it's doing there because most of the measurement efforts of researchers are focused on that first day.
The other feature we need to be aware of is that the maximum rate of that muscle protein synthesis is definitely limited. So you have machinery inside the muscle fiber to make you new proteins and they can churn out new proteins at a certain rate but they can't do it faster than that maximum rate. So if you're producing a whole load of new proteins because you just stimulate the muscle to increase in size, the hypertrophy adaption, and then you come along with a new signal because you now do a secondary workout later in the same day maybe or early the following day, then the muscle fiber's going to turn around and look at you and go, what do want me to do? I'm already churning out proteins as fast as I possibly can there's nowhere I can go to make proteins faster than I'm already doing. So you're wasting that secondary stimulus. It's like you're telling it to do something it's already doing. So I say the murkiness is that we don't really know what's happening in that second day. Is there an opportunity to train on that second day? It's entirely possible, but we just don't really know what that would be. Would it be half as effective? Would it be a third as effective? It's not going to be exactly 100 % as effective as waiting that extra day.
I think that It's very, very, very difficult to say at the moment exactly what that would look like. There's definitely some elevation in my fibula proteins in those rates on that second day. It's just how high it is I really don't know. I mean, obviously we see people like Olympic weightlifters and a lot of strongmen kind of competitors and other athletes training much, much more frequently. They do train every single day. And you can kind of see ways that it might work. But ultimately, I think there's probably a much safer way of proceeding. And this is without talking about fatigue of course. A much safer way proceeding is probably just to leave it at that full 48 hours and then you know with relative confidence that we've got all of that process from the previous workout has been completed and we're just kind of now starting a new process and everything is going to be kind of in line with what we're expecting.
So it's not cut and dry, it's not black and white, it's absolutely a grey area what that exact stimulus period looks like. But what I'm saying is that the 48 hour window is the safer one to go for and again this is without talking about management of fatigue at all. So again that's something we'd have to leave out.
I just want to emphasise again, for anybody who's got this far, just emphasise again that what we're saying is that a higher frequency of training a muscle is going to be better than a lower frequency of training a muscle because of the non-linear dose response of hypertrophy to training volume sense that first sets count more than second sets, second sets count more than third sets and so on and so on and so on. you don't need to argue about atrophy to make the case for a high frequency being better than low frequency. That means three times is better than two times, two times is better than one time.
So we don't need to have a conversation about atrophy to make that case. Atrophy is another reason why higher frequency is going to be better than lower frequency, but we don't need to argue about atrophy in order to make the case that higher frequency is better than a lower frequency. So it's like, I think there's a lot of people now starting to get very upset about atrophy rates. And what I'm just saying here is that we don't need to have that conversation. If you don't like the idea, for whatever emotional reason, that atrophy is happening between workers you don't need to think about it. Just look at the dose response, just look at the diminishing returns and it will immediately make it clear to you that training three times a week is going to be better than two times, training two times is going be better than one don't actually need to even go there to make that case. So I think that's just something I wanted to emphasize because I think that's really the take-home from this particular episode. know that nonlinear dose response is the key to really understanding why a high frequency is better than a low frequency even without thinking about it.
Jake (48:46)
And for any of guys listening to Chris talk about atrophy and who are maybe questioning, well, what does it even mean by that? We will, I'm sure, go into that in another episode. But as you said, in this context, it's not even relevant. We don't even need to have that conversation because we know purely based on the volume studies that we know that high frequency is still gonna be better. And like you said, as many first sets outside of that stimulus period in a week are gonna be better.
And that's very much the kind of model we see from a lot of these guys prehistoric era where they give it that 48 hours and then they do another first set.
Chris (49:14)
Exactly and it's just going to be a recurring theme hopefully of these podcasts that we do where we talk through some of the routines of these guys that were training 100 years ago. We look at the physiology that we can see today and we see this amazing coincidence between the two things. So that's why I'm really excited about this project. I think it's going be a fantastic experience. We hope to run for many episodes into the future. So let's keep our fingers crossed and hope that it works out well.
Jake (49:43)
Thank you guys for joining us in this journey back in time today and connecting in with modern physiology and what the modern data is telling us. So we'll be back next week with a new training plan another pre steroid era training plan and some new muscle physiology for you all.