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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 back to another episode of hypertrophy past and present. And as always, we have a new slash I guess old workout plan to talk about with you guys today. So one from the silver era before anabolic infiltrated bodybuilding. And we have a topic that Chris you'll discuss with us in a bit more detail later on. Now, before I jump into the workout plan, is there anything you wanna start us off with or you're happy for me to get started?
Chris (00:27)
I'm happy for you to get started. I'm excited about this one. I think we've got a really good connection between the routine that you've selected and the topic that we're going to be talking about from a physiological point of view.
Jake (00:38)
Hmm. This is a little bit different to the plans we've talked about over the last couple of weeks. So obviously, we've covered two different plans so far. And they we sort of highlighted how they evolved over time, the second plan being about 2530 years later than the first one. Now, what we have today is a plan that was discussed by Clancy Ross. So Clancy was a silver era bodybuilder. He won Mr. America in 1945. And
the plan we're gonna talk about today was part of in the lead up to his Mr. America win. Now, he obviously did follow different plans over time. So I'm not saying this is the only plan that he followed, but there's a couple of really interesting things about this plan. So I think it's definitely worth us discussing because it does stand out a little bit from some of the other plans that we have talked about or we'll talk about. Now, for some of you who've heard of Clancy, you may be aware of him because he's well known for being an advocate for the set system. So the two plans we've discussed so far, they use single sets, they didn't even talk about sets. Well, the York one sort of talked about it in the sense of like adding extra exercises mainly so Clancy, he really was a big advocate for adding in additional sets. Now this was, so this idea of adding sets sort of developed in the 40s in 1940s and then 1950s it became a lot more common. And before we have the commonplace set system, which is your standard, know, two, three sets of however many repetitions, what we had was what was called the split set system. And so the plan that we're talking about today, this was an early version of the set system. And it was what was being referred to as a split set system, which basically means they would repeat the exercise.
within the same workout, but they wouldn't do it as straight sets. They would do it kind of like a circuit. So they would do an exercise, do another exercise, maybe do another one, and then they go back to the first one. And then they do another one, do another one, and then they go back to it again later. So most exercises were being repeated sort of two or three times within the workout. So backdrop, so Clancy, he's come from doing full body, single sets.
and then lead up to before he's missed America when he's now started to implement this split set system. So an example of this split set system worker that he was following was as follows. So it was an upright row, going into an inclined press, going into a lateral raise, and then an alternate curl and press with a dumbbell, which is an interesting exercise, a pullover and a floor press,
a bent over row, a dumbbell curl, a dip, sit up, side bend. And essentially he repeated each of those effectively two more times each. And then he added in squats, leg press and calf raise. And he actually performed those as sets. So the upper body stuff was as a circuit.
but sets were actually being used in the lower body exercises. Now, he followed this for, I'm not sure how long a period of time he says, and then what he found was by the time he was getting to his lower body exercises, he was too fatigued and that was suffering and his legs were a low point for him. He needed to emphasize his legs. So what he ended up doing is actually, and this is in the 40s, so this is really early on for this to happen, and he split out that workout.
And he kept the workout the same, but he split the upper body exercises to the morning and the lower body exercises to later in the day. Now, a couple of interesting things here. So he turned this into an upper lower, but he didn't do the way most people do upper lower today. He didn't do, you upper lower day off, upper lower day off day off. He did upper and lower in the same day. So he's still training Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Now he does talk about in a little lead up to some comps, sometimes he would then go up or lower, up or lower on consecutive days. But he preferred, especially for longer periods of time doing it like this, where you would do up in the morning and lower in the afternoon. And there's one more point I wanna make, which I think is very interesting. And he talks about when his cardiovascular capacity improved, he actually went back to integrating this as a single workout.
So he removed the split and just did it all in one session again. Now there's a lot there, I'm gonna pause. Chris, what are your initial feelings, thoughts about all of this?
Chris (05:09)
there's so much here to talk about, but if I go too deep into this material too quickly, then I'll be basically just jumping straight into the second half of our planned call for today. let me just start from the beginning and just look at some of these exercises. I know that that's not our focus for today, but it's always interesting to just look at some of these exercises. So in terms of the...
exercise selection, I mean obviously you know we've got some differences here from what we talked about previously. We've got a floor press which is essentially a horizontal press, it's kind of like the chest press or bench press that we would have today and so obviously that's slightly different from the aesthetic choices that we've been seeing previously where we didn't really have much chest work, it was all kind of overhead pressing and either pressing work was all sort of focusing on the deltoids. So that's an interesting there. Even so we do still have quite a strong focus
on deltoid development. We've still got upright row in there, we've got lateral raise in there, we've an incline press in there, we've got the curl and press with the There's a lot of shoulder work despite the fact that we've now introduced this slight diversion from the very strong, unique or not unique so much as targeted if you like, focus on the deltoids. We're now just saying, well yeah, we're going to keep all of that, we're going to add in chest work as well.
Jake (06:26)
Yeah.
Chris (06:27)
In terms of back work, I think it's a little bit on the weak side. We've got a pull over and we've got a row. We don't have that sort of wide grip pull up or pull down that I keep looking for whenever I look at these routines. Interestingly, we have got a dip in there, which I don't think we've seen previously. I mean, maybe it would have been in one of the alternate exercises, but it wasn't in the main listing, which is an interesting choice because dips can be really, really effective for that sort of triceps development.
Jake (06:44)
Hmm.
Chris (06:54)
not really it's interesting to see that appearing for the first time. Now, previously I mentioned that when I see a leg raise, it's very interesting because that is rectus femoris from a hip flex point of view. And that kind of starts to help you get over the fact that you don't have a knee extension machine. So we saw that appearing for the first time last time. And now I'm seeing it again here.
Jake (07:14)
don't believe he was doing the leg raise. And then when he split it, that's when he added the leg raise. And I believe he added maybe the leg press there as well. So he did add additional lower body exercises when he was able to split the session up.
Chris (07:26)
So
when he was doing them as a combined session, it was just the squats and the calf raises. when it right and then when he expanded the sessions by doing them in separate times of day or even on sequential days, he's adding those extra exercises. Interesting choice. So I don't see the value so much in duplicating the squat with the leg press. I mean, there might be some differences according to foot position on the plate. I don't know what the equipment would have looked like. But certainly that leg raises a really interesting choice because it shows that knowledge or understanding of regional growth being kind of possible, certainly within the quadriceps group. final comment on exercise selection that I have is just something that we've mentioned multiple times, and it's the absence or the underuse of deadlift variations for the hamstrings, because really, when I look at these kind of programs and when we've looked at these and analyzed these together in the past, it's like, where's the hamstrings work?
Chris (08:19)
I think we're spoiled for choice these days. We've got some really nice hamstrings curl machines. We've got the ability to do 45 degree back extensions. We've got as many deadlift variations at any height that you might want to use, you know, in any variation that you can think of. And those are all possible to us. When you look at these routines, like even given the lack of equipment, there is still a little bit of a deficit there in that regard. And so you kind of wonder whether it's just the fact that they're not looking at them or they're not thinking about them or it's just not something that's kind of occurred as an important factor. But certainly that would be, I think, the thing that really jumps out to me as an emission is that hamstring.
Jake (08:56)
And he does add deadlifts in later on in a couple of years time, it does appear in his program. So it is interesting it's not here yet.
Chris (08:58)
Right. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That's all I've really got to say about the exercise selection side of things. I think really, you know, the comments regarding the structure of the workouts with it being initially a very, very long workout. Now, actually, let's just pause there for a moment and introduce a question that we didn't talk about before we started the podcast, but I hope that it is relevant, which is that a lot of the questions that I get when I do a weekly Q &A are related to how many sets is it possible to do in a workout. Now, I think we can answer that in the physiological section of today's call, but I think what would be useful now is just to pause and say, what was the perspective of that question in these periods of time that we're describing? You know, how many sets, how many exercises were people doing? Because
You've shared some information about this with me before offline, and I think it's really interesting just to go there for a moment. a lot of the routines I think you mentioned on this podcast before, a lot of the routines early on tended to have sort 10 to 12 exercises in them. It was kind of a numb. Yeah, a number that really comes up again and again and again. But two things I think you've mentioned, one is that sometimes people would do more exercises than that.
Jake (10:07)
About 12 is very common, yeah.
Chris (10:17)
And also when you start to introduce set systems like this, I I'm thinking this is a upper body 10 exercise circuit and that's being done three times. So that's 30 sets in total just from the upper body section. So shall we just like kind of go there for a moment?
Jake (10:26)
Mm, yeah.
Yeah, definitely. So there's a few interesting things when you look at sort of total set numbers in a workout, because even the guys who were doing very high sets like Clancy here with 30 sets in the upper body session, a lot of these guys would often talk about the value in, that would call them limited programs where for a period of time, you would drop all the way back down to often eight to 10 sets in a session.
And they often talked about these being very effective for gaining bulk. So just being very effective for gaining total muscle mass. And for people who maybe had very active jobs who were quite, maybe had lower recovery capacity and things like that. So on the lower end of that, you tend to see that sort of eight to 10 sets of per session. And then on the upper end, and you mentioned that sort of 12 set number, that 12 set number repeatedly comes up as kind of.
how many exercises does it take to do a full body program thoroughly? And that tends to be the number. And then, know, expanding from there, they often talk about essentially doubling that. So a pretty standard number would be about 24 sets in a session. And then they talk about these sort of superheroes, know, you Reg Parks, for example, who, you know, was known to have just insane, you know, work ethic and recoverability and I guess, know, cardiovascular fitness.
And some of these guys, and Steve Reeves, he talks about some of his programs as well, and they tend to be somewhere in the realms of about 30 sets. Now, one more comment I wanna make on that is if you track this over time, once you get to the mid 50s, what you see is a lot of the, what I call fluff, and people get quite offended at me calling it fluff, but I'm talking things like side bends and neck exercises and forearm exercises. A lot of these tend to drop out. And from the sort of mid 50s onwards,
There might be some of them, but there's very few. And so when we see these exercise or these workout plans that are, you know, often 30, 34 sets, they're generally including six, eight sets of quote unquote fluff, abs, bends, whatever. So if I was to subtract that in my mind, I would say we're typically seeing a range of somewhere between sort of 10 to 24 sets up to about 30.
Chris (12:47)
With that top end from maybe 24, 25 up to 30, generally being a lot easier kind of exercises that probably aren't creating an issue. Yeah.
Jake (12:59)
Absolutely, those are usually single joint exercises
Chris (13:01)
Yeah, yeah,
Chris (13:03)
yeah. Because I think this is really interesting because a lot of the questions I get come from the perspective of people who are saying clearly it's impossible to do more than sort of 10, 15 sets, you know. And I think what's really cool about this data set that we're describing is that we're talking about pre-anabolics. We're talking about people who training before the introduction of anabolics into the bodybuilding scene and therefore would have had a relatively
Chris (13:30)
clear unbiased perspective on what their workouts were doing and how recoverable they were. And also, and again, I'm kind of preempting what we're going to talk about shortly. It's really interesting listening to the way that you describe his experience in running these workouts that we were talking about, Clancy Ross, these workouts that he was running, because he's referencing the negative effects of fatigue, you know, and it's just
Chris (13:54)
very very cool to see that in that period of time the negative effects of fatigue were clearly perceptible. And yet post-anabolic suddenly hypertrophy researchers think that fatigue causes hypertrophy. So many of them do. Even today there's reviews and papers and opinions being written and the titles imply that fatigue is causing hypertrophy. And it's like clearly it's not. I mean that's just physiology.
I mean, they make
it so clear these old timers. I mean, they talk about in the lead up to contest, if you are doing longer workouts or you are doing six days a week or whatever, all of them talk about taking a couple of weeks off after the contest. And they say how important it is to take a couple of weeks off. They know that the fatigue is accumulated.
Chris (14:37)
Absolutely. And I think it's just very cool to see these kind of understandings, realizations in that period of time before the contamination of the experience was kind of introduced by a separate stimulus. yeah, anyway, the kind of the the upshot of that is that, you know, we can look at these guys and we can see that, you know, they were doing higher volumes in single sessions than we
Jake (14:47)
You
Chris (15:02)
normally talk about today, we tend to talk still about that kind of 10 to 12 numbers being a reasonable session volume. They were doing a lot more than that and it was working for them. And that's a really interesting kind of observation and I think the answer will become clear as we dive into the physiology to be honest.
Jake (15:20)
I think we should just jump straight in because I think it follows on from this conversation perfectly.
Chris (15:22)
Let's do it.
Absolutely. So essentially what I'd like to do then, when we talk about the physiological side of things, is to explain why all of those observations are mirrored exactly by physiological reality. So if we are doing a full body workout three times a week, what we're going to see is that the problem arises, as people tell me repeatedly in my Instagram questions.
The problem arises because you're going to end up doing a lot of exercises and potentially a lot of sets in a single workout is actually what we've just been saying. So you're faced with the possibility or the challenge of doing sort of 15, 20 sets in a workout and you're going, no, no, no, that's not something that I feel, you know, equal to doing. Now, the issue there is that as we've talked about in the context of exercise order, as I've talked about and written about in the context of exercise order,
The issue is that over the course of a workout, you are building supraspinal central nervous system fatigue. Now, how does that happen? It doesn't happen the way people think it does. It actually happens because of the sensations that are occurring in your body as a result of the metabolic activities that you're engaging in. Now, there's a number of routes to get you there, but basically the three main ones are if you have cardiovascular activity, as in you start to get out of breath, then you are going to feel that as a perception, a sensation in your lungs.
And that's going to add to your feeling of discomfort and bring you closer to your maximum tolerable perception of effort, which is what determines how much effort you can ultimately produce in a set. Now, if some of that effort availability is being used to tolerate that discomforting cardiovascular sensation, you can't use that to create motor unit recruitment. So you end up with your recruitment levels dropping despite you hitting maximal efforts. Some of that effort is going towards the toleration of that cardiovascular sensation. That's the main one.
Second one is that if you have burning sensations in the muscles from metabolites, that's going to do exactly the same thing. And the third one is that as you produce lactate and it goes around the body, it starts to produce an inflammatory response. And that, again, does the same thing. It starts to make you feel tired and fatigued and basically not really wanting to be in the gym doing the thing that you're doing. Now, those three things all are tied to your cardiovascular fitness. So if your cardiovascular fitness is
weak, then what you're going to find is that very quickly as you go through set after set after set, all of those sensations start to build quite rapidly and make you feel very uncomfortable and not wanting to continue. If your cardiovascular fitness is much higher than that, what you're going to find is you're able to then do a lot more and continue to exercise, you know, doing more and more sets and accumulate a larger session volume. So ultimately, I think one of the interesting things is that
people who have that high level of cardiovascular fitness, and I don't think it's a stretch to argue that people in 1940 would have had a higher level of cardiovascular fitness than the average person today. You know, if you kind of see that, that gap and say, well, okay, well, why was it that Clancy Ross could do 20, 30 sets and actually make that work for him in a single session and I can't? Well, maybe it's that his physical activity levels across the day were a lot higher than yours, or maybe his history of, you know, kind of sort of aerobic.
Jake (18:10)
Mmm. Yeah.
Yeah.
Chris (18:31)
exercise or whatever it may be, just physical activity in general.
Jake (18:33)
Most of these guys
were in the military at some point around this time as well.
Chris (18:36)
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
I think ultimately there's this sort of, no, I don't think that aerobic exercise directly produces hypertrophy. I think that's a silly idea. But I do think that having a high level of cardiovascular fitness will support us doing higher session volumes in the context of these full body routines where you're trying to do everything in one session.
So there is that interesting kind of interplay there between that that sort of cardiovascular side and the muscular side. Now, one final comment on this is that you've got one cardiovascular system, but you've actually got a whole load of muscles going on, available to you to be used in the exercise at the same time. And the bigger that muscle mass is relative to your cardiovascular system, the more of a problem we're going to have with cardiovascular limitations. So this is why I say to people
If you've got issues with cardiovascular kind of recovery between sets, you need to shrink the amount of muscle mass you're using in exercise. Doing squats and deadlifts and bench presses and, you know, kind of pull downs is probably going to be more challenging than doing the single joint stuff. So the same thing applies if you start to increase muscle mass overall. So anabolic is a really interesting one, because if you start to get really huge amounts of muscle mass and be able to move seriously large amounts of weight.
you're going to be pushing your cardiovascular system really, really hard as a result of just having that high level of muscle mass. And that's a problem we actually see in some of the athletes in strength and power sports, when they can move incredible amounts of weight really fast, know, kind of like track and field athletes. Then you're in a situation like, well, they're going to have a cardiovascular burden over the course of that training session, which is absolutely just crazy. It doesn't look like it's going to be crazy, but it actually is. So.
Chris (20:20)
You've got these really interesting kind of dynamics going on between the cardiovascular system being what it is and then all this muscle mass around the edges of it, kind of making use of that energy requirement and then you have that interplay between the two things. So basically, to summarize, what we're saying is that the challenge in the context of a full body program is that ability to recover cardiovascularly and if the cardiovascular system is not up to the challenge, then you're find that the ability to do 20, 30 sets is definitely curtail.
Jake (20:51)
One thing I find really interesting with that is this limitation is specific to full body. Because once we divide the body into whether it's upper lower push pull legs, whatever else it might be, suddenly we run into a whole new limitation, which is just per muscle volume, which is going to be driven by damage, calcium ion accumulation, etc. So the limitations or even the, I guess, capacity or potential the ceiling for full body is actually quite unique in that regard.
Chris (21:19)
Yeah, it's definitely a different kind of set of problems. So if we now jump to say, well, OK, let's look at doing upper lower and sequential days. So like the Clancy Ross program was going, upper lower repeated. So a lot of people ask me this question. It's like, I've got this full body routine that's going, you know, sort of three days a week. Could I, instead of doing that full body routine three days a week, literally just cut each workout in half and do upper lower on six days a week and just go to the gym every single day, six days a week?
take one day off and would that basically be the same thing? No it wouldn't. So what happens is that your post-workout fatigue is exclusively related to the damage processes, the calcium ion related processes which cause their own inflammation response which causes supospinal fatigue through totally different, it's the same overall framework mechanism but it's coming from a different place. So supospinal fatigue in a workout is coming from essentially the cardiovascular system.
Superspin or fatigue post-workout is coming from the muscle damage So what happens is if you do your upper lower workout Sorry upper workout on one day and then come back and do the lower workout the following day What your upper workout did in terms of muscle damage is now going to be the primary driver of your Superspinal central nervous system fatigue the following day and of course that's going to reduce recruitment on that second day doing that lower body workout now
The interesting thing is that the two drivers are very, very different. So somebody could have a really huge cardiovascular capacity and be able to bash through 20, 30 sets in a workout, but they might be really, really susceptible to muscle damage. I mean, that actually describes a track and field athlete really, really accurately. So you could have a person who's very, very cardiovascularly fit, but muscle damage is very, very kind of difficult for them to recover from. They will be much better off doing that upper
Chris (23:06)
lower, sorry, that full body program and do the whole thing in one day, take the next day off and then do the whole thing again on the, you know, the Wednesday or the Friday or whatever it is in the week that they're doing. In contrast, somebody who's the opposite way around, who perhaps has much more resistance to the muscle damage problem but doesn't have that cardiovascular fitness, they probably would find that actually splitting it up a lower and going, well, okay, you know, I'm not going to be able to do a whole full body workout in one go, I'm just going to split it down into a chunk and then come back the following day and do a smaller amount, then that would be, sorry, of the lower body, because it's either both of them and then smaller, then that actually then works for them because the bigger challenge is actually the cardiovascular side of it, not the muscle damage side of it. So it's really, really interesting to see. It basically depends on what fatigue mechanism you're trying to withstand. And because they are so different, one is cardiovascular and one is ultimately calcium-ion related, you actually have two separate challenges to meet. And one of them you might find you can meet much more successfully than the other.
Now, did you want to jump in there?
Jake (24:05)
I was just gonna say it's interesting that we're effectively talking about the same type of fatigue, but different ways of getting there. And so it's interesting that you can have like you've pointed out there, two very different types of people who are gonna benefit from one or the other. And ultimately the outcome can be the same. Like if they go into the wrong style or training for them, they're gonna end up with that same negative outcome.
I don't know if you're gonna touch on this later, but I'm sure there's people listening to this thinking, well, how do I know which one of those I am? How do I sort of differentiate? Is that something we can talk about?
Chris (24:35)
So it's actually very easy to monitor your own cardiovascular system.
You know, you can literally do it by how it feels and you can do it with a heart rate monitor. So anybody can do a full body workout and can strap a heart rate monitor on the wrist and they can just watch what their heart rate is doing over time. And if they really want to get into it, you can get a plot for the whole session. You can, you know, download it into Excel. You can do all kinds of things and study what your heart rate is doing over a period of time. Basically.
If your heart rate is going up during your set and then it's going back down and it's going back down to your kind of normal walking around level or slightly above before you then do your next set then and that's just repeated a pattern across your entire workout that's a pretty strong sign that your cardiovascular system is totally handling what you're throwing at it. If your cardiovascular system is drifting up your heart rate is drifting up over the session and by the end of it it's you know not really going down very much between sets then that's a
the opposite situation. That's telling you that you're really not handling the workload that you're throwing at your cardiovascular system and it's basically just kind of sort of you're in this adverse state when you get to the end of the workout. Now is that perfect? No, because that's really just measuring the cardiovascular activity section and we've talked about three separate components, we've talked about metabolites, we've talked about the inflammation, so it's not doing everything. But it's a really good
sort of starting point to get you to understand whether or not you are in that category of people who perhaps might find long sessions with high volume session volumes to be an issue.
Jake (26:06)
you
There's a couple of things I think that are interesting about that as well in that you can actually, the way you lay out the program can influence this quite a lot. So if you're doing some of these more cardiovascular demanding exercises earlier on, that's gonna have more of a negative impact. So for me, I know I program most of my leg work at the end, especially if I'm gonna squat, I'll usually put that towards the end, back extensions I'll put towards the end, just because I feel they gas me so much. And so a lot of people, I don't know if you saw these comments, but a lot of people
last week, when we looked at one of the training plans that actually started with bicep curls, a lot of people like, why would you do bicep curls? That doesn't make any sense. But if you think about it in this regard, we're doing 12 to 24 exercises, maybe it makes a lot of sense to start with bicep curls and leave some of heavy stuff towards the end.
Chris (26:54)
And I think there's strategic decisions you can make in a variety of contexts. For example, one of my preferred techniques is to alternate between cardiovascularly demanding exercises and cardiovascularly non demanding exercises. So I'll bounce between like the kind of the leg press or, you know, sort of for me, pulling exercises really just cook me. So like a wide grip pull down, you know, or row, that tends to be sort of my because that's just
been my strength for so long, I tend to be able to move a lot of weight relative to the other exercises that I do. And so ultimately that tends to be a problem. So I tend to alternate and I'll go sort of like leg press and then I'll do maybe something much less demanding, as you say, biceps curls or something like that. And then I'll go to a pull, a big sort of pull down or something. And then again, I'll go to triceps exercise or something like that. And it kind of just that alternation gives me the ability just to...
Jake (27:47)
Hmm.
Chris (27:49)
get a complete recovery. Is it perfect? No, but it starts you moving in the direction of managing your session as a whole session rather than just kind of throwing exercises in any order whatsoever. So I think there's a couple of things. I think, yeah, the movement, nobody wants to go and do the most cardiovascular demanding exercise first like squats and then find that the rest of the session is completely written off.
Equally, if that's happening, I would kind look at the squat and go, is that really necessary? You know, is there an alternative that will get you the same answer? I really love single leg leg presses for that reason, because I can absolutely get everything I need and not get cardiovascularly cooked for the rest of the session. You know, I think there's strategic decisions that you can have to make or would be benefiting would benefit from making in order to to sort of
Chris (28:38)
resolve some of these session issues.
Jake (28:40)
This is where I programming is so fun because it becomes, I always call it sort of the art of programming here where you start thinking about, and I understand there's physiological underpinnings,
And it's not always so obvious on paper kind of why you're making some of those decisions. So for me, one thing I like to do in context of what you just said, is a lot of the time the squatting exercise, I'll program that as clusters, and I will put them at the start, but there'll be clusters of two repetitions. So there's very little cardiovascular demand. Whereas if I were to do, instead of six or eight or 10 or whatever squat, I'd probably put that usually second last in my workout.
you know, another thing that you can that we haven't even talked about here is the duration of the workouts, you know, lot of these these old school workouts that were lasting hours, you know, that were lasting two plus hours. And people look at that and they immediately think that's such a negative thing. I know they're used to be this idea of know, cortisol elevating with longer sessions and all this kind of stigma. And people there's
There seems to be this mentality online at the moment where if a session's longer than 45 to 60 minutes, you're doing something wrong. But it's like, well, hold up, if you actually have 75 minutes, 90 minutes to dedicate to a full body session, it might actually make it more effective based on what you're talking about here.
Chris (29:52)
Yeah, absolutely. think that it's really the cardiovascular system that we're keeping an eye on. And I think that's, you know, some people, I mean, I've told this story many, many times in my mentorship program that I've done. But when I first started working as a personal trainer, I was lucky enough to work with a very wide range of different groups of people in the area that I was living in, in the country that I was living in at that time, which...
seems to vary quite a lot these days, but the place I was living in had a lot of endurance cyclists. And so I actually got to do some strength training work with endurance cyclists with incredible cardiovascular systems. at the time I was exclusively working, well wasn't exclusively working, I was kind of focusing more on the powerlifting side and I was interested in that for me. And so it was fascinating watching what my recovery between sets of squats was like and what theirs was.
So I would do a set of squats with relatively low repetitions and I would be absolutely gassed for like three to four minutes. And this is at the same time as I was also doing endurance cycling. mean, my cardiovascular system was not bad. It just wasn't in their league. They would do the same kind of set and they would look at me afterwards within like 30 seconds, like, we're gonna do the next one then. I'm like, that's just incredible. I can't get my head around just the massive difference in recovery times cardiovascularly, even though I'm capable of riding.
You know sort of 50 hundred miles these guys could just do that probably in half the time. They're just incredible athletes And it was translating to this insane recovery Between sets of squats, so I think cardiovascularly it's really really Easy to get that information We just look at what cardiovascular recovery is doing post set of strength training and monitor that and see whether it needs changing Yeah, and endurance athletes can be able to just bash through the workout that you're doing
Probably in half the time and it's totally fine that they do that because when like there's this idea a few years back that we should all leave three minutes between sets of exercises and my a that's definitely wrong because I needed seven between some of my sets of squats when I spout lifting But equally like your average kind of endurance cyclist might not even need that
Jake (31:43)
you
Chris (32:02)
And it's not going to be the same for different exercises that use different amounts of muscle mass and it basically just comes back to is Superspinal fatigue you know kind of gone away because the sensation has gone away and this comes back to the point that you Mentioned earlier, which is that it's the same fatigue mechanism and the reason it's the same fatigue mechanism whenever we talk about Superspinal fatigue it's always the same fatigue mechanism because it's literally just is there a sensation and is that sensation bringing you closer to your maximum tolerable perception of effort if so that's Superspinal CNFT
How does that sensation get caused? Well, that's where it varies. It can vary, it can be the cardiovascular activity, can be the metabolite burning sensation, it can be inflammation, all of those in a workout, or it can be muscle damage causing inflammation post-workout, and that's a completely different route that gets you to exactly the same place. The reason it's the same place is because it's just a sensation. So ultimately, supraspinal CNS fatigue is one of those really interesting things that is a very, very clearly defined model in the context of Marquora's psychobiological model of fatigue.
but you can get there through different routes. And you can actually get there through a whole lot of other routes as well. I mean, if you're in pain or, you know, discomfort for any other reason. I mean, we talked about, you know, kind of like if the exercise is really unstable or if that's high coordination demand, that actually gets you to the same place because your brain is doing a effort perception related to the balancing or the coordination issue. Or if you're in pain for another reason, that's going to do the same thing. So ultimately, it's all the same mechanism of fatigue. It's just the routes to get there.
Jake (33:24)
of this is a tangent a little bit, but at one of the gyms that I go to, they've got a very good pendulum squat, but the floor is uneven. And they've got these like foam pads underneath the legs or whatever trying to make it a bit more even, but it's not. And if you load it up heavily, you get this kind of wobbling kind of thing that's happening. And, you know, I'm in a pendulum squat. I'm obviously stable. Like there's, it's not a hard move movement for me to coordinate, but my output in that, that, you know, wobbly pendulum is so much lower than in
and normal pendulum, so I tend not to use it.
Chris (33:53)
Yeah, your
brain is thinking about the wobble.
Jake (33:57)
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, you can't ignore it. You're conscious of it. So the flip side, you've talked about the muscle damage getting you to this endpoint. Is there a way that someone can identify how prone they are to that?
Chris (34:09)
That's difficult. So the way that I would always suggest monitoring for things like post-workout central nervous system fatigue is to measure something like, so there's two ways of doing it really. Either you could do a test whereby you do the upper lower on sequential days and then separately do the upper lower and leave a day between them.
And that basically is just like my plateaus model where I say if you're concerned that you might not be recovering just leave one extra day of rest and see if your performance suddenly jumps upwards. It's the same kind of idea. basically we're talking about doing sequential day workouts and then on separate occasion we just split them up and see how big the difference is going to be. Sure, go for it.
Jake (34:47)
Can I just spell that out for people because I
have a feeling some people will overlook this. So obviously, let's say you're normally doing upper lower, upper lower. Let's just say that's your normal workout plan and you are progressing and maybe you're at a point where you're able to progress maybe one repetition every second session on average. So what you're saying there is give yourself that extra rest day between those sessions. And if you continue to progress by...
you know, that half repetition, one repetition, that's the normal progression for you, right? So you're saying obviously that fatigue wasn't really affecting you. Whereas if you now progress by two repetitions instead, obviously there was an impact there and a fatigue. Because we always need to consider well, what is your current rate of progression anyway, right? So you know, I hear this a lot from people, you know, I'm still progressing or whatever. It's like, okay, but compared to what you were doing, how does it actually look?
Chris (35:35)
Yeah, I mean, ultimately it's exactly the same thing that you would do if you were concerned about. mean, we talked about within session analysis by using heart rate monitors, for example, or cardiovascular system. You could actually do the same thing. You can just move exercises from one end of the workout to the other and see if exercise order is causing you an issue. So if you think that you're not recovering across a session, but you don't have the technology to look at heart rate monitors or you just don't feel comfortable with doing that, totally fine. Literally just reverse the order of your workout and see what happens. you've got a.
Jake (36:05)
And it's important
to note with that as well that that works predominantly for full body sessions. It's not gonna work if you're training that muscle elsewhere.
Chris (36:11)
No, it doesn't work if you're tri- yeah, obviously. Yeah, sorry, that is a very good point.
Jake (36:14)
I think a better way to actually state that is you should move your last single joint exercise to first in the session or vice versa.
Chris (36:26)
Yeah, I mean, there's this you can kind of look at you can eyeball the session yourself and see what you think is doable. I mean, if you if you're kind of fairly biceps dominant in a pulling exercise, then that can create issues and conversely triceps and and pressing. think ultimately you just have a look at your session and see what you think is doable. Hamstrings are a really good one. So if you're like for me, I just can't. I'm an old man. I literally just do hamstrings curls. I do seated hamstrings curls. That is my hamstrings exercise. Nothing else in my workout is touching my hamstrings.
Chris (36:55)
I can put that first, I can put that last, and I get the same number of reps every time. So that is, I think, probably the easiest one if you're kind of in that kind of old man territory like I am, which probably none of my lessons are. But get the idea. The point is that you're looking for an exercise, as you've rightly pointed out, that is unaffected by the rest of your session from a local muscularity point of view. You're looking for one that's uniquely affected by the supraspinal.
Chris (37:22)
mechanisms. Move that from the beginning to the end and you'll see whether your session is creating issues straight away, I think.
So moving to the of the aspect or one aspect of the routine that you shared with us earlier, which I think is really interesting, is this idea, well, if we have identified that maybe we are more susceptible to muscle damage than we would like to be, and therefore it's creating an impact for us doing a repeated upper lower six days a week, we don't want to do that. But equally, we're looking at the list of exercises and we're going, I really don't want to do.
you know, kind of 30 sets in one session and that's what you want to do for your coverage of the body parts you're training. Then you can split that across either halves of a day and you can do your basically your full body routine and just cut it in half like Clancy Ross did and say I'm going to do upper in the morning and I'm going to do lower in the afternoon. Now this is a really interesting thing because ultimately how long you leave between the upper workout and the lower workout
determines whether you're falling into the category of it being a within session CNS fatigue problem or a post session CNS fatigue problem. The reason for that is because muscle damage doesn't actually happen in the workout, it happens after the workout. This is one of those, kind of like one day I should really write a list of all the things about fatigue that hypertrophy researchers do not understand. And I think this will be pretty high on the list.
Every time you talk to a hypertrophy researcher about muscle damage, they think it happens in the workout. They're like, oh well, know, the tearing force is like what tearing force is? You know, they think it happens in the workout itself and therefore they're like, oh well, you know, all this muscle damage is present immediately post workout and that then gets repaired. I'm like, this hasn't even happened yet. You know, like there's an idea going around at the moment, the muscle damage repair happens before hypertrophy. I'm like, that's categorically false and physiologically impossible because the damage you're describing hasn't happened.
Jake (39:10)
What damage? Yeah, that's interesting.
Chris (39:11)
What damage? There's no
damage to actually repair yet. So, oh no, no, it's all happened in the first 24 hours. No, it hasn't happened by that point. It's happening over the course of the back half of that day. So, you're starting to get damage happening maybe sort of in the first few hours post workout, but the inflammation response is really going to be the major driver of that damage and it's going to be the back end of that day. So, yeah, the start of the second 24 hour period, the second day post workout, that's when all your damage repair is really happening.
repairing the myofibrils, the areas. Again, when people look at non-exercise muscle injury like contusions and things like that, go, no, this behaves completely differently from exercise induced damage because when we look at the myops rates, they go down in that first day. We're like, That's because that's when the damage is really happening. You only get the myops elevation when you're repairing the structures. Replacing, actually, is a better word because it's not repairing, it's replacing. Replacing the structures that you've cleared away.
and the clearing away is happening in that first day. That's why MIOPs goes down because you're not actually doing any repair or replacement. It happens all in the second day. Actually, it's identical to what happens during exercise induced muscle injuries. It's just that your hypertrophy stimulus is happening in that first day while your muscle damage is not doing that. And you've got these kind of things moving in opposite directions. So you don't see that deficit to MIOPs in the first day when you've got non-exercise muscle injury.
sorry, when you've got exercise induced muscle damage because you've also got hypertrophy happening at the same time. When you've got non-exercise induced muscle injury, you do see it because obviously you've got hypertrophy happening simultaneously. Anyway, so as I saying, fatigue is obviously going to start happening. The muscle damage processes are going to start happening in that post-workout period. So if you do a upper session, if you do an upper workout in the morning and you leave a couple of hours.
then when you come back to do your lower session, you're kind of still in the same session as far as CNFT is concerned. Your physiology is determining that as basically the same workout with a really long rest period. know, so, but if you were to then push it a bit further and you get into the point where your inflammatory responses are starting to rise to create that muscle damage that we need to do to clear away all of the protease induced damage.
Jake (41:10)
Yeah.
Chris (41:22)
then what you're going to see is that you're now in the true post-workout period and you're now subject to post-workout CNFT. So really what it comes down to is how long is that rest period between the morning session and the afternoon session? If you put them really far apart, like if somebody says, well, I work a professional job, I need to be doing my workout in the morning and then I need to come back in the evening. I'm like, that's basically second day from a physiological point of view.
because you're into that territory now where muscle damage is creating your supraspinal CNST. So honestly, you'd be better if you, if that's your limitation, which it will be for most of my listeners, I imagine, if that's your limitation, then don't do same day, do sequential days, do upper, lower on sequential days and do if that's really what you want to do. If you really need to those sessions out, split them on sequential days and do upper, lower repeatedly, you know, six days or if you want to do this whole kind of every other day idea that's been kind of going around for full body.
Fine, I'm not going to go there. But if you're kind of maybe somebody who's able to work flexible hours, you have control over your own schedule, now that situation you could potentially do an upper body workout and then you could maybe just couple of have lunch and then have your coffee, do a bit of work and then do the next one.
Or you could do what you've described to me as a really interesting approach, which is do your upper body workout and then just walk down the road, go to the supermarket, come back and do the other half, which I think is fantastic. I mean, obviously you have complete control over your own schedule, so you can do whatever you want to do. But well, I didn't want to disclose things that you told me about. mean, I don't know if you want people to know that you drink juice. I like respect people's privacy when they tell me things.
Jake (42:54)
You forgot the juice, that's an important part. That's a very Sylvia era part.
Very aware of that, very aware. No, I do, I've, cause I mix some stuff in with my juice and I've been getting a lot of questions about exactly how I make my juice mix. So it is definitely a hot topic. Yeah, so I want to jump back for a moment because you said if, and actually an interesting point is Clancy does actually say that that sort of upper morning and then low in the afternoon.
that the limitation there is gonna be someone's schedule and that if you don't have control over your schedule, it's not going to work. So while he doesn't specifically say how many hours he's leaving between it, it is obviously that point that he's making. So I'm assuming he's probably not leaving 12 hours between it based on that statement, but I'm not sure. So you said that if it is 12 hours, you can only do 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. or whatever.
you've insinuated that it will be better to actually give yourself that full 24 hours then instead of just that 12 hours. So presumably, but yeah.
Chris (43:57)
Absolutely, because you're now
inside that period of time where the muscle damage is happening very rapidly. You've got a full on calpain damage process happening. You've also got the inflammation kicking off, creating a problem. And that's going to then lead to the supraspinal CNST you're trying to avoid. So I think, yeah, if somebody say, well, look, no, I have to do seven and seven. That's the only period of time, times of the day that will work for me. Well, then just don't just do seven every day. Pick one.
morning or evening and just go every day. And don't do that, don't feel that you have to do them same day because it's not actually going to benefit you. The benefit comes if you can keep those two workouts much closer together, know, several hours apart. I'm not comfortable giving super kind of sort of definitive numbers. You know, I think if you're around the three or four hour mark, probably okay. Pushing it much further than that, I think you're going to start to find that you're starting to get into territory where that super spinal fatigue is developing.
Jake (44:52)
Now, I wanna ask what feels like a very obvious question, but I want it to be maybe laid out. So obviously an upper lower split repeated for four sessions in total throughout the week is a very common split. It's one that I use with some of my clients is one that, you know, it's probably the most common after full body would be my guess. Now, the limitation with...
upper, lower, upper, lower, upper, lower, six sessions per week. As you've pointed out, the limitation is the post-workout CNS fatigue, which is driven by the muscle damage. Now, muscle damage is obviously muscle specific. So the more volume that that muscle is doing in a session, the more damage it's going to experience, right? So if we're splitting sessions across six sessions instead of four, then logically,
logically, upper lower, upper lower, upper lower, six sessions must be having less post-workout CNS fatigue than the four sessions will, because in the four upper lower, upper lower, two of those sessions are still followed by previously done session the day before.
Chris (45:50)
Exactly, this is one of the biggest problems that we rarely talk about with traditional upper lower splits done with four workouts per week. Say for example, the classic Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. The biggest problem with that is that when people look at those, go, well, you know, I can recover from Monday to Thursday doing say five, four or five sets per muscle group per workout. And that's totally true on a muscle level. But if you do a bunch of
like sort of upper body workout, upper body exercises on Monday and you do four or five sets of those, you are toast as far as superspinal fatigue is concerned on Tuesday because that muscle damage that you're now carrying around with you is going to create a superspinal fatigue problem on that Tuesday for your lower body workout. And the same thing is going to happen on Thursday and Friday. So really, it's kind of like your Monday and your Thursday workouts are OK.
But you know a lot I mean again Monday's probably definitely okay, but Thursday is kind of borderline because if you don't five sets on Tuesday There's not really a chance you're going to be recovered by Thursday, so Really your Monday workout is the only one that gets away completely free of any post-workout CNS fatigue so
Yeah, it does look like six days a week up and lower with less session volume would be better than doing that over four sessions. But, you know, it is it is a difficult thing to really be precise about, because, as I say.
We can get a relatively good picture of what post-workout recovery looks like on a muscle by muscle basis because you literally just measure the fatigue. Fatigue is the observable external reduction in exercise performance. So you literally just measure strength. That's really easy to do. There's tons of data about that. We've got a really nice dose response profile for session volume. Sorry, muscle session volume versus post-workout fatigue recovery time. What we don't have is the same graph for super spinal CNS fatigue.
Now it looks like it tracks it relatively closely, so I don't want to make this out to be like, well, we don't know. We have a reasonable idea. It's just we don't have the same perfect dose response graph that we do for post-workout fatigue recovery, if that makes sense.
So, yes, does look like splitting your entire week's worth of upper lower over six days would be better than doing it over four days. It does look like that. But again, I'm just kind of introducing an element of caution there to say, look, we've got really great data on how post-workout fatigue relates to muscle training volume for a particular workout. Yes, we've got that really clear. I've done the graph. People have, you know, seen it before.
Jake (48:00)
Yeah.
Chris (48:24)
We don't have the same level of confidence regarding how super spinal CNSD works. I think it works the same way, I'd expect it to work the same way, it does look like it works the same way, but I just don't have that data.
Jake (48:34)
Either way, there's not an argument for how upper lower done four times per week could be superior to done six times per week if you were splitting the volume.
Chris (48:44)
Well, exactly, exactly, exactly. So what we're saying is that if you're doing that smaller amount of muscle volume across six days rather than four days, then you are going to end up with less interference between sequential days.
Jake (48:44)
equating the volume.
Yeah, it's really, yeah, I think it's an interesting point because people don't, people, my perspective on it is people often think about, know, six sessions a week, but they're not thinking about actually dividing those four sessions worth of volume across the six sessions. And like you've just said there, well, if we do do that, then obviously there's gonna be less of an impact there on.
Chris (49:14)
I mean, strictly what we're doing
is dividing our full body three times a week across six sessions. So it's kind of a little bit different because you are starting from a different numerical point because you start with your three full bodies rather than your two upper lower split routines. yeah, I mean, I could see where you might end up in the same. It'd be interesting just to do that and see whether it ends up in the same numbers. I don't think it'd be miles apart, but I think it probably would be a little bit different.
Jake (49:19)
So where does that leave us? So if someone's wanting to, if someone's, guess, getting into this and asking, well, what should I do? Should I be doing full body and doing my 15, 20 exercises or sets in one workout and doing that every other day or doing that Monday, Wednesday, Friday? Or should I be doing my up in the morning and lower in the evening? Or should I do up, lower, up, lower, four or six times a week? Do we have, I know you've talked about how you can test kind of, you know.
which might be more suited to you? Is that sort of the starting point? Is there any other things you think people should be thinking about or considering?
Chris (50:07)
So I think it's a journey. So you test something, you start with something and then you move forwards on the basis of what you've learned. I mean, I this sounds radical because I think people want the answers before they even start these days. And I just just try something that is sensible and see what happens. So I would always, always, always just start with a traditional three day a week full body program. Now, if you find having started that that
you are losing repetitions towards the end of your workout. You're noticing a cardiovascular set of sensations. You feel like your final exercise of the workout or losing repetitions. Maybe you then test that by the hamstring curl exercise example I gave earlier, moving that from one end of the workout to the other, seeing what happens again, assuming you're not doing any other hamstrings exercises in that that routine. And you notice that, yes, you are losing repetition. So what we've got here, two steps first start
Second, you know, notice maybe that that cardiovascular system is an issue for you. Now, at this point, what you could do, having noticed those things, what you could do is either you could say, well, I'm going to make an adjustment to my training program. I'm going to split the routine or you could make it. And actually, that's not a binary choice, to be honest. But let me just go down that route first.
So you could decide to make an adjustment. You could say, well, I'm going to split this out across two workouts in the day. Now, if you have a flexible schedule and you can do that and you can take a short break and then come back and do the other half or a couple of hour break and do the other half, perfect. No problem at all. Or you can move it to the following day. Again, not a problem. Now, the reason I just caught myself and said this is not a binary choice is that the other thing you could be doing is fixing your cardiovascular fitness. Now, that's
You could just do that and you could just stick with the same full body program three days a week and simultaneously start working on your cardiovascular fitness and the problem will gradually go away. Or you could make the fix. And I don't think it's a fix fix. I think it's just like an adjustment. You could make the adjustment and you could split your workout into two halves and either do that second half a couple of hours later or on the second day at the same time as you're working on your cardiovascular fitness.
And then in the future, when your cardiovascular fitness is sufficient, you could come back and just go back to doing single workouts three days a week. So I think there's a number of things here and it's like the exact route you take is going to depend on your schedule and your circumstances and what you like to do. I don't want to be in the gym six days a week. I want to be in the gym three days a week. That's because it's how my schedule works and how my
preferences work and I'm not going to start training six days a week even if my session volume feels like it was getting out of hand I'm just not going to do that. So everybody's having their own preferences. So I think what I'm suggesting is that people just start with three day a week full body and then look at the problem and go what do I think the problem is? Most of the time if you're having a problem with three day a week with session volumes being too long it's going to be a cardiovascular fitness problem. I mean that's really all it can be. You can fix that with cardiovascular training. You can
Jake (52:55)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Chris (53:09)
Fix it, adjust it, get around the problem to a certain degree by moving half the session later in the day, as long as it's not too far away, or moving it to the following day and doing upper, lower repeatedly six days a week, or even, as I say, every other day if you want to go down that route. So I think there is a relatively straightforward algorithm, if you like, to moving forward with these questions. What the answer is not...
Jake (53:16)
Hmm.
entry point, yeah.
Hmm.
Chris (53:37)
is asking influencers online what you should do. That's not the answer. So don't blow up my Instagram messages saying, I think I should do this. No, no, no, don't ask me what you should do. It's like.
Jake (53:46)
Yeah, or can I do this? Do I have your permission to do this? Yeah. And the best
we can do, best you can do, best I can do is give people like what you've done today is hear the, yeah, and how you can assess it for yourself. Yeah. Now, the risk of maybe doing what we just told, what we said we wouldn't do, I do wanna give a practical example of how I actually do this and.
Chris (53:54)
explain how it works. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
you
Jake (54:08)
I actually I intend to do full body sessions. That's that's my goal always. And if and this is a point you haven't necessarily brought up it say I've got points in life where maybe stress levels are higher, maybe I'm working longer hours, maybe there's things that are contributing to my, my I guess perception of effort, then what I'll do in that full body session is I will then split it. And so my intentions always you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, full body or every other day full body, I might get in the session and I might know I just don't have the motivation here.
to actually do my normal full body session, which is usually about 15 sets or so. And so I'll just call it and I'll just do half of it. I'll come back the next day, like we've talked about, do the other half, and then I'll go back to my full body. So I'll take a day off the next day. And I'll go back full body day off full body day off. So for me over, you know, a week or two weeks or whatever, I'm generally always getting that sort of three times, you know, frequency per week, but it might be over four sessions.
just because for whatever reason that day, you know, hasn't permitted me to do that full body session.
Chris (55:07)
Yeah, I mean, that's a perfect example of auto regulation. And I think that's definitely something that is important to bear in mind. So we're always watching what's happening, we're being observant and we're reacting to the information that we're gathering. But at the same time, we have a clear understanding of what the physiology is doing in the background. So physiology doesn't care about our life circumstances, it just does its thing.
So we've got to be aware that physiology is doing its thing. We are observing and reacting and adjusting our plans according to what the physiology is telling us, but also according to our circumstances dictate. And we just do the best we can under the circumstances. But as I say, you know, we know how to turn this into a reasonable starting point, which is three days a week for body, which is what you just described. And then we just move forwards from there according to our.
Jake (55:59)
think we've given people a lot to think about. I think we're probably gonna get a lot of questions on these sort of topics and questions we've brought up. Is there anything else you wanna conclude with or should we leave people there?
Chris (56:09)
I think that's good for today. think we've covered the important issues and obviously whatever questions we get we can use that to move forward and do a podcast on in the future.
Jake (56:19)
And like we said, know, the goal here is to...
give people I guess an understanding of the foundational principles that will guide your decision making, you know, we don't want to necessarily lock people into a box and say, well, it needs to look like this, you must work out this exact way and whatever else like obviously there's nuance here. And there's not so much nuance that it's like, well, you know, you're different to this person to this person, we all have different physiology, know the underlying physiology is the same. But there's going to be some degree of, you know, variance depending on that individual. So hopefully there's stuff there for you guys to consider and assess.
and actually analyze how you work and what works, you know, specifically for you, understanding that that might even change over time as well as you become more experienced or just stages in life or, you hey, maybe you've got a family and kids you've done at the same time to spend or whatever it might be. But our hope as always is that this conversation is helpful for you guys in moving forward. So we hope you join us for another episode and we'll be back next week.