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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)
And welcome back to another episode of hypertrophy past and present. Thank you guys for joining us again. If it's your first time joining us and welcome. And today we have as always another topic we're gonna talk about which I'm excited for. think this is gonna be, it's gonna connect into what we spoke about last week a little bit. So if you haven't listened to last week's episode, make sure you do. And we have a plan today to talk about which a lot of the time people ask me what my favorite Silver era plan is.
And if I'm honest, I think this might be it. So I'm excited to jump into this one. There's two, I'll be honest, there's two that I really love. And a lot of the time I actually train by combining both of them. And I'm sure I'll talk about that sometime, but this is one of the definite highlights for me. Chris, welcome. Anything you wanna jump in and say?
Chris (00:47)
No, I'm also excited to talk about this routine, as you say, it links wonderfully with the topic we covered last time because it's an absolute monster of a workout plan. And I think a lot of people might want to split it out over two days, which is what we talked about last time. But yeah, let's let's jump in and describe it, try and get our hands around it, because it's a lot of it's a lot of exercises.
Jake (00:55)
Yeah
It's a big one, you guys might need to sit down and really focus with this one. So it comes from Steve Greaves. I'm sure most of you will have heard of Steve, so obviously early Mr. Universe winner. And this was published in the early 50s. Now, what I like about this, I explained this in our first episode that for me, I feel with everything I've seen, I feel fairly confident that up until about 1954, at least in American bodybuilding, I don't think there was any.
really significant usage of anabolic going on. So anything before that year 1954, I'm pretty confident with, and this was published before 1954. So this to me seems like a good Silver era, pre steroid era plan. And again, take a seat, because it's a big one. the way that Steve, I'll ease you guys into it. The way that he outlined this and he talked about it was he, was a full body and he trained each muscle.
And for each muscle, he did multiple exercises. So he did three different exercises per muscle and he did one set of each exercise. And so he started with his upper body and then he worked down to lower body and he just did one set and he did repetitions of eight to 12. Now I actually think that's quite significant as well, eight to 12, because obviously Steve was competing at the same time as Reg Park was and Reg obviously popularized some of the lower repetition stuff, know, fives for example, he went down to twos with some exercises like bench.
And eight to 12, you might look at that. And even today, when we talk about things like your stimulating reps model, people might think, why would you do eight to 12? Now for me, if I'm doing a full body program like this and you're doing one set, and instead of eight to 10 or 12, it requires a lot less warming up generally than if you're doing a set of five. So.
Chris (02:49)
But the interesting thing is, and this again ties in with what we were talking about last time, is that if you are working in that higher rep range, you're gonna find that you're creating a lot more metabolite accumulation, your lactate's gonna be there, you're gonna find you're depending so much more on your cardiovascular system. So everything we talked about last time in terms of the limitations of putting a full body workout together, if you wanna do a lot of exercises or a lot of sets across the whole body in one session, you are gonna find cardiovascular capacity
Jake (03:02)
Mm.
Chris (03:18)
is the limitation. Well, if you're doing sets of 8 12, you can double that again. I mean, you're going to find it's even more problematic. So again, really, really interesting, you know, connecting these dots here.
Jake (03:20)
Mm.
Mm, yeah. Yeah, and you know, something that lot of these people state, and I think Steve even stated this in this particular workout, is that there was this understanding that some people just did better with lower repetitions and some did better with slightly higher repetitions. And you know, often they're sort of talking that sort of, you know, five to 12 rep kind of range. And I do wonder if it's, you know, what you're saying there, just some people had better cardiovascular sort of fitness and so they were better suited to the higher repetitions potentially.
Anyway, I feel like I'm teasing you guys. So the workout plan had started with the shoulders and he did one set of seated behind the neck barbell press. He went into a standing dumbbell lateral raise and then into a seated dumbbell front raise. So that was it for his shoulder work, one set of each. He then moved into chest. So he did a wide grip barbell bench into an inclined dumbbell press into a decline dumbbell fly.
Then into back where he did set of bent over barbell row with a pronated grip, a bent over one-armed dumbbell row, so like a neutral grip, and then a flat barbell pullover, where he then went into biceps, where he did standing barbell curl, incline curls with dumbbells, and then a seated dumbbell concentration curl. And then triceps, where he did a seated overhead dumbbell triceps extension with a single arm, and then inclined triceps skull crusher.
and then a standing triceps cable pressed down using a bar. And then he did his lower body work. Now I will mention he was resting two minutes between each set and he was resting four minutes between each muscle. So that's an interesting note as well, especially in the context of the cardiovascular demand. So for quads, he did a barbell squat with flat feet. He then did a barbell box squat.
And then he did a hack squat. Now a barbell hack squat. some of you may not be familiar with this where you're kind of standing with, it's almost like a combination of a deadlift squat almost where you've got a barbell behind your back so it's not on your shoulders. So that was his third quad exercise. And then for hams and glutes, he did a stiff leg deadlift, a seated barbell good morning, and then a horizontal back extension. And then for calves, he did a bent knee calf raise.
He explained that he did this on the leg press. So I'm not sure if this was bent knee or if it was straight leg. And then he did a seated calf raise, which would have been bent leg. And then he did a standing calf raise, single leg at a time. And he did finish, again, what I called last week, some of the more fluffy type exercises. finished with two, he did a sit ups, crunches and hanging knee raises for abs. And he did a little neck sort of supersetting thing where he did assisted neck.
sort of push ups and push downs and side to sides. We had a workout partner providing resistance for his neck. So I don't know how long that workout took him. We could crunch some numbers quickly, I'm sure. But what is this? So 24, 26 exercises with the abs in the neck, two minutes between each. So that's what about an hour and 10 if you take the rest periods in the work time and then four minutes between each muscle, eight muscles. So look, that's at least an hour and 45 minutes.
Chris, what do you make of all that?
Chris (06:46)
It's crazy, isn't it? I mean, it's absolutely mad. You know, I think most people today would be, you know, really struggling to make that work. think there's... Let me just run through a couple of quick observations that I made as you were going through, just because they're in my mind at the moment. They may not be in any particularly useful order, but these are the kind of observations I made. Going through from the beginning, he started with shoulders.
And the front raise, the front raise is not actually a adult exercise. It's actually a kind of clavicular pec exercise where the anterior helps. So, you know, again, there's some interesting exercise selection there. And that obviously wasn't, you know, kind of noticed or observed that it wasn't doing what what he thought he was doing on on to the the the pressing is interesting that
Jake (07:30)
Mmm.
Chris (07:39)
they're using a wide grip bench. know, I think that's that's one of those things that I think has sort of fallen out of favor with because powerlifting has tended to use a narrower grip. People have tended to start adopting those type of benching techniques. The reality is that when you move from transverse plane to sagittal plane, it completely changes which part of the pecs are being used. Using a wide grip bench, you're definitely using all three parts of the pack, probably focusing mostly on the middle.
Jake (07:50)
Hmm.
Mm.
Chris (08:05)
If you bring it into the narrow grip, you're doing what most people think you're doing when you use an incline press. Most people are using incline press for clavicular pec. I'm like, honestly, you could just use a narrow grip and it would be a lot better and more effective for targeting the region you think you're to be trying to target. So again, it's interesting that they have got that wide grip in there. It's a very telling point.
Jake (08:29)
That was quite a popular exercise at that point as well. lot of, know, ridge park was big and wide grip. Yeah, definitely a popular variation.
Chris (08:31)
Hmm. Hmm.
In terms of the back exercises, again, I repeat myself, but I'm always surprised when I don't see a wide grip pull up or pull down, you know, because here we've got a pronated grip bent over row, which I assume is a relatively wide grip, therefore transverse plane. So actually not a lat exercise at all. But then obviously the narrow bent over one arm row is almost certainly going to be sagittal plane. So that's kind of the sagittal there.
Jake (08:42)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Chris (09:04)
pullover is obviously sagittal plane. So I'm not really seeing frontal plane work. And if you look at the moment arms and the activation data, which incidentally I just did an infographic series on Friday, you can see that the frontal plane is actually a better choice. If you were just gonna pick one plane to work the lats in, you would go frontal plane because they have way better leverage. Both regions, upper and lower, have way better leverage in that plane. And you're gonna get
Jake (09:21)
Hmm.
Chris (09:30)
therefore more involvement of those muscles. If look at the size at all, you've got smaller moment arms in general and the lower lats don't really have any meaningful leverage to speak of. you're kind of seeing the size of the plane is very much an upper lat focused exercise. Frontal is obviously more lower, but you know, you do kind of get a big chunk of both. So I'm always surprised when I don't see a frontal plane exercise in there, you know, because it just feels like they're really leaving
some stimulus on the table.
Jake (10:01)
think if you look at Steve's physique, I don't think you would say his lats were his most developed part, to be fair. It'll be interesting when we do look at some of the bodybuilders who did have more developed lats, what we see them doing.
Chris (10:12)
Hmm, definitely, definitely. I didn't really have a lot to say about the the arms work, except I think I think one of the triceps exercises is listed here as being done supinated. And I just wondered whether that was meaningful because there is there is some activation data suggesting for some unknown reason that supination in.
triceps work does seem to create a little bit of an increased effect. again, you know, maybe it's nothing, maybe it's coincidence, but again, like one of the.
Jake (10:42)
They did commonly do that. did do
the, especially the skull crusher type exercise. I mean, they actually called it, I think they call it a triceps curl instead of a biceps curl.
Chris (10:52)
Okay, because that makes sense then because they're literally just mirroring the exercise, aren't they, in that case?
Jake (10:57)
Yeah,
and so they are doing that with a supernative grip. But that seems to be the more common way that they were performing it.
Chris (11:04)
Because it's one of those things that there's just a little bit of activation data suggesting that there might be a benefit to doing that. I don't have any other information really to sit with that and kind of build a picture. But always when we see things being done by bodybuilders pre-anabolics, then it's kind of like there's a high probability that they were noticing something meaningful.
Jake (11:25)
Mm.
Chris (11:27)
Whereas today you could just say, there's no possibility of noticing whether what you're doing is working. It's just like everything is growing and it's like, well, is that because of the exercise selection or is that just because I've changed something in my stack? So I think those are the kind of interesting coincidences where you kind of say, well, actually, no, it may be meaningful when somebody has chosen that particular exercise.
And then really, it's just interesting to note that now here in this program, in this workout plan, we've got stiff-leg deadlift. So in past podcasts, I've pointed out that there is a lack of deadlift variations in some of the early programs. And I always felt that was strange because it's like it's not difficult to set up a deadlift variation, you know, and even use blocks and other, you know, kind of means of changing the...
the heights and those kind of things. So you've got a lot of flexibility over deadlift variations and it's not an equipment intensive exercise. So it's nice to see that here. But again, you know, there's a back extension, which is also very interesting. you know, one of the issues with deadlift variations is that, you know, you kind of have this necessity for quadriceps activation just to stand up. And so there's that potential for inhibition of the hamstrings and the adductor magnus tends to take over.
So if you've got a back extension, you don't have that. And so you've got that kind of possibility. But the fact that it's horizontal is even more interesting because that's really the first kind of incidence. Well, arguably you can kind of find glute work earlier than this. you know, this from the programs we've talked about, I think this is kind of the first real glute specific exercise that we've we've got. So those are just my random observations from listening to you walk through the program. You know, it's always just fascinating to
Jake (12:53)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Chris (13:04)
trace through from plan to plan, what's changing, what's different, because this is one of the latest, really. This is kind of like the very most advanced latest. I'm not a historian of this like you are. I'm a little bit skeptical that there was no anabolic usage prior to 1954. I think there's definitely a little bit going on, because obviously it did kind of come out in the 40s. But I think, as you say, probably not widespread.
Jake (13:09)
Mm. Yes.
Not only would it not have been widespread, the efficacy, if it were being used, would have been very low. And the doses that you would have needed to get any benefit would have caused severe liver toxicity at that point with what they were using. One thing I'm interested here, a seated barbell good morning. What utility are you seeing in that exercise?
Chris (13:32)
not sufficient to have created a problem.
Okay, that's interesting.
So.
Again, issue with... So obviously the Good Morning is programmed for the hamstrings. Primarily, really. The issue with any of these standing exercises is the problem that I mentioned a moment ago, which is that as soon as you put quadriceps activation into play, the hamstrings start to go, well, maybe we shouldn't be used as the primary hip extensor in this situation because...
we're going to create a knee flexion force and the quadriceps are trying to create a knee extension force and that then is inefficient. That's the whole idea behind this two joint muscle problem. So maybe the seated variation is a way of taking that quadricep activation down a notch. I don't know. You know, that would be one possible scenario or one possible explanation of why that is chosen. It could be, I mean, the other thing that I think overall as a program, I mean, I've already mentioned, I think it's a bit mad in terms of the
just the kind of the workout volume. I certainly would never have done this even, you know, at my fittest, you know, kind of 15, 20 years ago now. But I would probably have to divide this in two. But even though you're talking about doing sets of, you know, eight to 12, so you're kind of limiting how much you're putting on the barbell, I can't really imagine doing all of that upper body workout and then loading the barbell up to do squats. I just can't visualize doing that.
I honestly couldn't do that. I would have to do a leg press or something that didn't involve me, you know, kind of warming up to do a set because even even eight reps, eight to 12 repetitions, I'm to have so much on the bar at that point that it's going to take me 15 minutes to warm up, you know, and I've just done like what looks like a brutal upper body workout before that. So I think it's it's really interesting just to put ourselves in the shoes of these guys and go, this was.
This was a mission. This was seriously hard work. And like your quick arithmetic earlier, it's like over an hour and a half of relatively short rest periods. think the cardiovascular capacity of these guys was doing very, very high. And they must have got to this point over a period of years, I think, or at least had a history of other physical activity that permitted them to do this. So I don't think it's.
Jake (15:53)
you
Chris (16:07)
Again, I think this is a really nice continuance from what we talked about last time, which is that cardiovascular capacity really does limit how much your full body sessions can be. But again, even with that in mind, loading barbells up to do lower body work after an entire upper body workout is challenging mentally, I think.
Jake (16:26)
So what I love about this plan personally is what it seems to me like he's doing is trying to pick as many exercises or I guess maybe as few exercises as are needed for that muscle to really stimulate as much of that muscle as possible, right? And...
I think with what we have available to us today with machines and with cables, we could do that using a lot more, you know, single joint exercises. We could do it with a lot less need to load barbells. We could do it, you know, a lot more conveniently. We could select exercises that are using less load. And so again, you know, less warming up. It'll just be easy to set it up. So I think there's that potential to modify it. And then the second thing I think is,
some of the, like he's obviously had a system he was following, you three exercises per muscle. Okay, it's neat, I get that. But I do think if we look at it, there's some exercises that aren't necessarily needed. You know, we look at the calf stuff and there's two exercises there that are doing very similar things. You know, we look at, you know, arguably even the quads, they're all squat patterns, you know, arguably there's a bit of overlap there. So I think for me looking at it, we could probably condense it down largely to
maybe two exercises per muscle using machines, using cables. And that to me seems like a feasible plan that people who have a decent cardiovascular fitness could follow today.
Chris (17:49)
absolutely. And that's a great point. You know, I think this idea of, you know, instead of saying, let's do three sets of...
You know, one exercise, you know, do sort of one set of three exercises or two sets of two exercises or whatever. You know, I think those those are really interesting kind of concepts. And again, your two points that you made, I totally agree with me. If you were to go through this and replace, you know, everything that you can with a machine exercise and so on, I've got this such to play in a row. I've got, you know, wide grip where I can do on the same machine and I've got a lot pull down right next to it, you know, and I've got, you know,
sort of a chest fly that I can immediately switch around and then do a reverse, know, back neck, a rear delt fly on that same machine. You know, I think, again, suddenly you're changing the situation completely. So yeah, I agree. I mean, I think the machine access changes everything in terms of the difficulty of sort of setting things up and a big chunk of the cardiovascular as well. You know, as I say, with the leg press versus the squat.
And then, as you say, there's so much redundancy in here. the calf is a great example. It's like, what are you doing? mean, like, why do you need two totally different, you know, sort of calf raise exercises with an extended knee? Or even two with a bent knee? Well, that's it, exactly. That's the point. It's like, because I've got my system working with three of three of three, it's like, I have to do that. So, well, not really. But yeah, I think if you were to sort of...
Jake (19:05)
I don't think he got to that point and he's like, well, obviously I'm doing this for every other muscle. just need to pick.
Yep.
Chris (19:18)
really condenses down to say 16 exercises instead of 24, move everything across the machines and now you're doing a single set on 16 exercises, then yeah, absolutely that is definitely doable. I mean, as you pointed out when we talking before, if you start thinking about that in terms of like, could you do five exercises for three sets each? Well, for me, that's toppy. That's absolutely my top end. But yeah, you could.
Jake (19:44)
you
Chris (19:48)
And so, yeah, you can do 15 exercise, 16 exercise for one set each. That starts to make a lot more sense. It's a really cool way of, as you say, having that sort of exercise variety that makes sure you've got all of the muscle, not just, you know, the bits that are necessary for the joint actions that you're training in the exercise that you've selected.
Jake (20:06)
Yeah,
yeah. And what you said there, that's basically exactly how I use this type of plan that I did myself is I do about 15, 16 exercises, one set of each. And I tend to condense it down to essentially two exercises per muscle, but I tend to have...
One of those exercises often will also train another muscle. So you tend to still get that two to three sets per muscle anyway. And obviously like we spoke about last week, another alternative would actually just be splitting this up. And you could just take the workout as is and say, okay, I'm gonna do half of it in the morning, I'm gonna do half of it in the afternoon. And if you aren't familiar with that, we did do a whole podcast episode, episode two on that. So go back and listen to that.
Now, I don't know if you want to segue into this, but one thing I do want to note here, obviously these are single sets and there is a difference, because people talk about single set systems a lot online. It's gotten a lot of attention lately and there's a lot of criticism around single sets and people saying, single sets are no idea as effective as multiple sets and people shouldn't be doing single sets or whatever. And I think that there's this sort of, I guess, overlooking of
there's single sets per muscle, but then there's single sets per exercise. And a system like this is using single sets per exercise, but he's not doing single sets per muscle, is he? He's doing three sets per muscle. And so a lot of that criticism where people say don't do single sets, or single sets are less effective than multi sets, well, obviously we're talking about per muscle. And that just doesn't feel like a fair criticism against a workout plan like this. So just wanted to differentiate that.
because that's a rhetoric that we're seeing a lot online at the
Chris (21:40)
Yeah, and even so, even though, you know, even though it's true that multiple sets will produce more growth than single sets, the incremental difference is not proportional to the number of sets. I you don't you don't get double the hypertrophy by doing two sets compared to one set. I mean, it's absolutely nowhere near that. I mean, it's probably something like another sort of 40 percent on top of what you've done.
and the second set's probably about 40 % as stimulating as the first. Or maybe depending on the dose response model you want to use, but it's certainly not kind of saying, I'll do two sets, therefore I've got twice the hypertrophy, it's nowhere near that. And it carries on getting worse, and by the time you're up to three, four, five, or certainly four, five, six sets, mean the increments are so tiny that you're kind of just saying, well, I'm creating all of this post-workout fatigue, which is gonna cause me problems in my recovery.
and also affect other workouts that I might want to do later in the week. you know, I think there's that misunderstanding of how much stimulus we can get, or how much extra stimulus we can get from those multiple set protocols.
Jake (22:49)
Now, is there anything else you wanna comment on on this program or should we move on and jump into our next topic?
Chris (22:54)
I think we can segue naturally actually from the last point that you made, which is this idea of having multiple exercises for a muscle group. one of the questions I see a lot is, is it better to do, just to kind of phrase the question in a common way, mean, this is kind of just the way that it's often phrased, would it be better to do,
one exercise and then do three sets of that exercise, or would it be better to do three separate exercises for more or less the same muscle group and do one set on each of those exercises? So it's like one set each of three exercises or one exercise for three sets. Now, basically, what we have to start with is the understanding that hypertrophy and also atrophy are muscle fiber specific. Now, if I literally just said that
and nothing else for the rest of my time in the fitness industry. It would be worth it because it's the single thing that everybody else gets wrong. I'm not everybody else, but like, you know, the vast majority of the fitness industry talk about training muscles and you can't do that. There's no such thing as training a muscle. You can only train muscle fibers. You train some of the muscle fibers in a muscle and the other muscle fibers if they're not trained, they just won't even know that it happened. So it's very, very important and people really, really struggle with this, not just
you know, like as a concept, like some people will literally outright reject it and go, no, we think that if you're training one part of the muscle, the other part magically gets a stimulus, my physiology just doesn't work like that. But even with people who don't reject it out of hand, you still people you still see people programming as if it's not.
And that's the really interesting thing, because what you're seeing there is that their mental model, which maybe they don't even know what it is, but their mental model of how hyperarchy works is not the model that they would derive if they worked through the physiology step by step. And ultimately, that's the only difference between what I'm doing and what a lot of other people are doing is that I'm trying to start with the physiology and say, if this physiology is true, which we think it is, then what does that mean for programming implications? You know, I'm not just kind of...
you know, kind of programming the way I want to and then trying to make that fit with physiology that we know. So ultimately, you know, if we accept that hypertrophy and atrophy are both fiber specific, then we look at different exercises and we've got this principle of neuromechanical matching which tells us that the brain or the central nervous system to be more accurate actually sends central motor command to the places that are going to be most efficient for doing the movement.
Jake (24:57)
Yeah.
Chris (25:18)
And so what you find is that different regions within a muscle, if a muscle has large segmented regions especially, like for example the lats, great example, as I said, posted on this on Friday. So if you've got a muscle which has very clear regions, you can easily see that there are differences in leverage, which is what the principle of new mechanical matching uses to decide where to send activation. And you've got therefore differences in activation.
And so when we look at literature and we see differences in leverage and also differences in activation that match those differences in leverage, what I mean by that is if you look at the leverages for the lats, for example, you'll see that the upper lat, the thoracic lat, has really good leverage for sagittal plane pulling, narrow grip rows, narrow grip pull downs. It doesn't have quite so good leverage at all for frontal plane wide grip pull downs, which is what I was talking about earlier. Now in contrast, the lumbar, middle or middle to lower lat,
is the opposite. It has very much poorer leverage in the sagittal plane. It has great leverage in the frontal plane. So then we look at activation data, we see exactly the same thing happening. We see that the upper region of the lats, the thoracic area, to be more activated in the sagittal plane pulling, whereas the lower region tends to be more activated, or middle and lower, tends to be more activated in that frontal plane. So you can see the two things are matching up. Now what does that mean? What it means is that the central nervous system is choosing
the areas that have the best leverage and therefore can produce the highest joint torques for the lowest levels of muscle activation in order to accomplish the movement. So what happens is you end up with a region being maximally activated. For example, if I do a wide grip pull down, the lower part, middle and lower part of the lat is going to be maximally activated. The upper part will therefore be kind of delayed. If you're going up Hennebren's size principle, it'll be pushed higher and higher and higher up the...
the rankings will go, well, we don't want that area to be activated. So we'll kind of kick in later. And Heneman's size principle basically sits inside of neuromicrobial commashing. Some people really struggle with the way that those two things work together. All you have to do is to say, the brain has a number of options or the central nervous system has a number of options available to it to do a movement. So you can say, well, OK, what it does is it chooses to start sending activation to the regions that have the best leverage first.
And then what's going happen is Heneman's size principle is followed inside that region. No problem. And then what it does, OK, well, now we've started to get to the point where that region is starting to max out, we start using some of the other region. And that's the point where things start to break down for people, because they'll go, OK, well, why doesn't the brain just carry on activating all of the upper region after it's activated all the lower region in that wide grip pull down? So I'm doing a wide grip pull down. My lower region of the lats has the best leverage, so the best highest activation. And so.
the central nervous system starts turn activation to that area. And then when it's done with that, why doesn't the central nervous system carry on and activate all of the upper region as well? Because it has some leverage, so why doesn't it use all of that? And that's the bit that catches people out, I think, when they start to think about how neuromechanical matching works, how exercise works, because they don't realize that the brain actually has a limit on how much central motor command it can create because of the maximum tolerable perception of effort.
So if we're doing a movement, then we're going to have what's called a voluntary activation deficit. We can't actually activate the entirety of the muscle. won't let us do that because it's too painful. The brain has a limit on how much central motor command it can generate because it has a perception of effort that is generated every time we create a central motor command. And so there's a deficit. Where does that deficit happen in a wide grip pull down? Well, it happens in the upper region, which is the area that has the worst average. So if you have a muscle with a voluntary activation deficit,
and every muscle bigger than the elbow flexor complex does, then what's going to happen is the area has the worst leverage out of the options that you've got available will be the bit that actually has the biggest deficit and you don't activate those fibers. So I realized that was a very long explanation. But what that means in practice is that if you are doing an exercise and one area of the muscle or one of the muscles involved has great leverage and another has poor leverage,
Jake (29:11)
Hehehehe
Chris (29:22)
then the muscle that has the poorer leverage or the region of the muscle has the poorer leverage will not have all of its muscle fibers activated. That's just how this works. That means that because those fibers are not activated, they are not trained because hypertrophy and atrophy are both muscle fiber specific. So ultimately, that means that the area that you're doing that particular exercise that has that weak leverage is not being trained by that particular exercise. So we are going to find that exercises have
So if I look at the wide grip pull down versus the narrow grip row again, if we have those two exercises and we compare them, there's going to be a group of muscle fibers that are used in both exercises, and there's going to be a group of muscle fibers that are unique to the wide grip pull down, and there's going to be a group of muscle fibers that are unique to the sagittal plane narrow grip row or narrow grip pull down. And that is just how this model is working.
Jake (30:08)
There's a lot you covered there. So I just want to highlight a couple of those things and maybe simplify them in case we've missed anyone. So you've explained there basically how...
how our brain central nervous system is ultimately going to decide which muscle to use, right, and it's based on these leverages. And this is essentially the principle of neuro-mechanical matching. Now, what you said towards the end there, so you said that any muscle that's larger than the elbow flexes, there's going to be a natural deficit there where we can't activate the entirety of that muscle. I think that's a really key thing because that's happening essentially, the same thing that's causing that to happen is why we're seeing this deficit in particular muscles and muscle
in particular exercises, right? So what you've said in that statement is we simply don't produce enough central motor command to actually fully activate a muscle most of the time, right?
Chris (30:57)
Exactly,
and I think that this comes back to another problem that a lot of people have in this space, which is that they think that muscular failure is reached when essentially every single muscle fiber has been activated, and that's just not true. There are voluntary activation deficits. Even in maximal effort, voluntary, maximal voluntary isometric contractions, maximal efforts, we still see a deficit of activation compared to what could be achieved theoretically.
Jake (31:11)
Mm.
Chris (31:22)
or through testing. So we know that that deficit exists. Now, why does that deficit exist? Well, it exists because we don't reach failure when every single muscle survivor is activated. We reach failure when we reach our maximum tolerable perception of effort. It's the effort perception that stops us going any higher. And so again, it's one of these areas where it's important to appreciate all of the key areas of physiology because they all impact on each other. And this is a really, really good example.
Jake (31:31)
Mm.
Yeah,
yeah, yeah. So theoretically, if there was a way that someone, that one could continue to increase central motor command, then you have an exercise like the lap pull down, frontal plane lap pull down. So you're saying in that situation.
we could actually, if the motor command was not the limitation, okay, you could actually maximally activate both up and lower lats or up and middle lats and that would sort of, that would be it. That would be the exercise to do everything for the whole lats, but we're never gonna get to that point because we had this limitation in available central motor command.
Chris (32:19)
Exactly, and the larger the muscle, the harder it is, or the larger the muscle mass involved in the exercise is probably a more accurate way of describing it. So if you're doing an exercise and the central nervous system recognises that you have all of these possibilities, and there's a lot of possibilities, and a lot of muscle mass could be involved, now you're gonna have a bigger deficit. So ultimately, the more muscle mass that can be involved, the more of a deficit you're going to have. again, that then ties into the exercise selection choices that we might sort of go.
through where we sort of maybe have to make compromises with exercises that have more muscle mass like presses and know pulls and you know kind of squats and deadlifts compared with single joint stuff but basically yeah if you've got a lot of muscle mass being used or potentially could be used because it all has leverage then you're gonna have a bigger deficit
Jake (33:05)
So the fact that someone can get, so you say you have a bi-lateral exercise and you perform it unilaterally and you know that you can perform more than 50 % of that load unilaterally because there's more central motor command going to less muscle mass. The fact that we know that that happens, that effectively settles the debate on the lats, on whether you can maximally activate a muscle or whatever. That tells us, because that happens, tells us that there's always gonna be a limitation there,
Chris (33:33)
Well, exactly. mean, it's not just the bilateral force deficit. mean, the bilateral force deficit, I think, the very best proof of this. And it's one of those wonderful things that people can literally just do in their own gym at home or in a facility to prove to themselves. You know, we talked about this many times, you know, over the years, you can do a, you know, sort of a bilateral exercise and then put, you know, if you're doing using two dumbbells, you put one down and generally you're going to get another rep with the remaining limb that you're still using.
There's a lot of examples like that, but bilateral force deficit is great. Maximal voluntary contractions also show deficits, and those deficits increase with increasing muscle size. So if you look at elbow flexors, the deficit's really tiny, a couple of percent. Look at quads and glutes, you're looking at sort of 15, 20 percent deficit, which is enormous. You can actually do a, look at, a series of studies that have been done that also make this point in a slightly different way, which is that
Essentially, if you're doing a fixed duration of exercise, high intensity exercise, then you'll reach task failure at a certain point. Now, the amount of peripheral fatigue that you can generate at that point of task failure is a really good proxy for how high your recruitment was when you reached task failure, because if your recruitment is really high, using a lot of fast-reach fibres, generating a lot of metabolites, you're going to see a lot of peripheral fatigue. So you can literally...
and I've actually sketched this out across the studies, there's three or four studies that have been done and they've compared things like, you know, single limb versus two limb or multi-joint versus, you know, single joint or upper body exercise versus lower body. And you just see that they've got different amounts of exercise, sorry, different amounts of muscle mass in each of the two exercise conditions. And you can just literally draw a straight line across the entire set of studies which shows you that the more muscle mass you've got,
the less peripheral fatigue you're going to see at muscular failure. So when you get to the really kind of single joint, single limb upper body exercise, then you generate absolutely crazy amounts of metabolite related fatigue in the muscle at task failure. So it's not just about, you know, look, we've got the bilateral force deficit, therefore we're going to extrapolate from that. No, no, no, no, we're not doing that. We're saying that you've got it in maximal voluntary contractions and it scales with muscle mass in those situations and voluntary actuation deficits recorded with
interpolated twitch, you've got the same thing happening in bio-lateral force deficit, and you've got the same thing happening again in the fatigue literature where you start to track peripheral fatigue at task failure with different amounts of muscle mass in the exercise. So I'm kind of trying to belabor the point a little bit here to sort of show that this is not extrapolation from a single point in literature.
This is a collection of multiple different investigations with totally different methodologies that all get to the same answer.
Jake (36:18)
So if we go back to the plan that I introduced at the start of this episode where Steve was doing, was, he split into eight muscles and he was doing three exercises, one set of each. And the alternative to that would be say eight muscles, so one exercise of each and doing three sets of that one exercise. So if the question was, well, which is gonna produce better results? So which is gonna be better for building?
I guess the highest potential of muscle mass, okay? Not necessarily quickest, whatever, but in a high sort of total potential. Then.
based off what you're saying there, then obviously having multiple exercises at one set each, you said that there's gonna be some muscle fibers in each of those exercises where there's gonna be overlap. And so they're gonna be getting a stimulus in each of those exercises potentially. And then there's gonna be some fibers where they're gonna get a stimulus in potentially one of those exercises and not in the other two. So how would that play out in...
in practical terms. Like if we have a bodybuilder who's doing this, are you gonna see notable difference? Like what outcome would we see by having some fibers that are getting a stimulus in one of these exercises and not in the others compared to doing multiple sets of one exercise? What's that even mean?
Chris (37:27)
So essentially, if we were to do a full body program and just pick one exercise for a muscle, like we said earlier, if I was going to be forced to choose a single lat exercise, it would be a wide grip pull down or wide grip pull up. If you literally just do that for two or three sets every time you do your sort of training sessions, then obviously the rate of growth will be, I would say,
pretty much as fast as you can possibly make it in the muscle fibers that being trained. So you get very rapid growth in those muscle fibers. But it's almost impossible, if not impossible, to train every single muscle fiber in the thoracic region using a wide grip pull down or pull up. So basically it's like you're just ignoring those muscle fibers forever. They just never get touched. And so what happens is you get a very rapid rate of growth, but you don't really
Jake (38:08)
Mm. Mm.
Chris (38:16)
maximize your muscular potential. That's how I would describe that. In contrast, if you were to do, say, a wide grip pull up, and I'm just going to follow Steve Reeves' format and use three different exercises. I'm not saying this is the right three. So if you do a wide grip pull up or pull down, and then a grip row, and then a pull over, kind of more or less what he has with a bit of a change there. So you were to kind of focus on the lats, and you do three separate exercises. What would happen is that you would get
The same rate of growth for the muscle fibers, the tar.
continuous across three exercises, is however, whatever percent, know, 60, 70 percent, whatever. So you're getting that same rate. So it's not going to be like the same as doing three sets of, you know, lap pull-downs, but it's going to be approaching that point. But then what's happened is you've now got three sets of that stimulus. You've also now got one set stimulus on the muscle fibers that are not continuous across the three. So essentially what you've then done is you've got your kind of sort of you
70 or 80 percent sort of Continuous fibers which are going to get that same sort of rate of growth But then on top of that you've now got a slower rate of growth with one set per session which is actually still perfectly valid and It's going to be giving you a higher maximum muscular potential. So it's a really really Different scenario that we're describing so what I would expect is that it would it would basically lift the ceiling I mean, I'm not sure how much difference you would see in terms of rate of growth
Jake (39:35)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (39:43)
across the whole lat. I mean, it might be sort of similar-ish, but you are definitively raising the ceiling on how high you can go in terms of your muscular potential if you use a wider variety of exercises. I mean, it's just basic neuromechanical matching observations. know, and I think I kind of I did make the point earlier, but let me just make it again because I think it's super important. If we have an exercise which is training, for example, like the wide grip pulldown is training predominantly the lower lat and some of the muscle fibers in the
upper lat there will be fibers that are not activated in the upper lat and you can't train those you can't grow them they're just ignoring the stimulus and this then has really huge problematic implications for programs that don't have a higher frequency so if we're looking at a full body split like we're talking about then actually you know you could either do it the way that Steve did it with three exercises in one session or if you wanted to you could do what we've talked about before which is full body
AB split where you have workout A and then maybe say Monday, Wednesday, Friday you have workout A and then workout B on Wednesday and then you go back to workout A on Friday. The following week you start with workout B on the Monday so and then A on Wednesday and B on Friday so you have A, B, A and then the following week B, A, B and you're just alternating between workouts. In that scenario essentially you kind of end up with a sort of some muscle fibers get a stimulus say for example you're alternating wide grip pulldowns and narrow grip rows. A workout is wide grip.
pull down, b workout is narrowed around. You're doing that instead of what we've been talking about. In that scenario, you would have a sort of three times a week stimulus for the 70 % fibers that are continuous between the two regions. And you'd have a one and a half times a week stimulus for the fibers that were not continuous. So it's exactly the same concept. You can make that work. What you can't make work is if you now have only two upper sessions a week. So if you're doing an upper lower split and you're doing two upper body workouts a week.
Jake (41:17)
Mm-hmm.
you
Chris (41:30)
you can't now have those two separate exercises on different days and make it work. What's going to happen is that you're only now training your continuous muscle fibers that are the same and activated in the two different exercises. So like I was saying, maybe 70, 80 percent, you train those in the the wide grip pull down. The same fibers get trained in an aggregate row. Anything on top of that that's trained uniquely in the two exercises just atrophies from one week to the next, because you're literally just doing one workout a week for those fibers.
And unless you're pushing five sets plus, which is toppy, even in upper lower context, you're not going to be able to make those fibres grow from week to week. And I think ultimately that's that's where this exercise selection problem is being felt as a pain point in the industry at the moment. You know, we're making this observation about how neuro-mechanical matching works, how muscle fibres are activated, how hypertrophy is muscle fibre specific. And we're pointing out that means you can't do A, B formats.
Jake (41:59)
Yep.
Yeah.
Chris (42:28)
in upper lower splits. The only format that works for upper lower splits is AA. You have to do the same exercise as both times. You can't do a different exercise in different sessions. It literally cannot possibly work physiologically. know, maintenance literature shows us that you have to do more than three or four sets, so probably five sets for that set of muscle fibers once a week. So if your exercise is not training, you know, the same muscle fibers as your other chosen exercise, which you can't possibly do,
Jake (42:28)
Yep.
Yes. Yep.
Yes.
Chris (42:56)
then you're going to have some fibers that you're training and then just letting, kind of atrophy, which seems like a tremendous waste of time and energy.
Jake (43:04)
This is really important. want to just repeat some of this because I think if people can take this away, I think it'll change the way people program completely. And it's something that I see and mistake people make all the time. So we're talking, there's two splits you've brought up that you've talked about full body AB, and you've talked about upper lower done four times per week. And I love full body AB. So in fact, let's even take a step back for a moment. The alternative to that would be full body ABC. And so by that, we just made a different workout plan
plan each day, right? I personally think full body ABC makes no sense. I struggle to see a time where that is a worthwhile split to use. I do not use it unless I say this, if you understand biomechanics well enough and you understand your mechanical matching well enough, you could select exercises that are gonna have similar enough overlap where if you just wanted variety for the sake of variety,
Chris (43:56)
So basically you'd just be kind of changing the machine or changing the kind of implement that you're using but fundamentally the biomechanics behind that is the same thing it just looks different on on a picture yeah.
Jake (44:02)
It's the same exercise basically, yep. It looks different on paper and I use that
technique with clients because it does, some people find it more motivating, right? So some people might be listening to this and be like, how old am I? I've seen your plan and I've seen you do this. Well, if you look at the exercise selection, that's what I'm doing.
Chris (44:18)
kind of like yeah it's
a dumbbell curl or it's a barbell curl it's like it's the same thing.
Jake (44:23)
Exactly, exactly. So you've mentioned AB and so the benefit with this AB split is roughly what once every five days or so the exercise is getting trained. So
This is the bit I wanna go slow with. So every five days is significantly different to every seven days. So if we're doing an upper lower, four sessions per week, you've got an upper body one day, you've got an upper body two day, and they have different exercises on those two days, obviously it's seven days before that exercise is being trained again. For people listening being like, hold up, why is AB so much better than an upper lower?
Why is five days and seven days, why are we saying that that's so important?
Chris (45:05)
So basically, if you're doing a single set of an exercise, so like we're still sticking with this Steve Reeves idea of doing one set per exercise and doing a couple of different exercises for a muscle group, then you have unique fibers that are only getting a single set of stimulus. Basically, if you're doing AB, sorry, yeah, AB in the context of full body training, so you're doing ABA and then BAB, then basically you're training on Monday.
And then you've got Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. So, yeah, four days or five days. So it's four days if you're Monday to Friday. It's five days if you're Wednesday to Monday. So alternating that's going to happen. If you've got four days, then you are going to arrive at your next session with some hypertrophy net of the atrophy from the one set that you did. So you get from Monday to Friday and you've got some hypertrophy in hand. If you go Wednesday to Monday, you actually kind of end up on maintenance exactly at that day.
So essentially what happens is you can literally just about make progress with that over time. It's the literal bare minimum I think that you can do to make work. Now, I really, having said that, I really love that program. Like you say, full body AB is fantastic for somebody who's already developed a large chunk of muscle mass, doesn't really have a lot of capacity to move forward, but wants to maintain, you know, absolutely everything, absolutely everything, because the coverage you get with full body AB is insane.
You just literally do everything you want to do. And there's just no demand on the system at all, because you've got your variety like a Steve Reeve type program, but you've split it out over two totally different workouts. So you can bring things back to a handful of exercises like eight or nine exercises, single sets, and you're actually really well covered. So, yeah, basically what we're saying is that full body AB is going to allow you to either be on maintenance.
between sessions or actually growth between sessions, which is the point. If you push that further than five days, it starts to get to a very difficult point where you start to lose that growth stimulus that you've previously established. And so you end up at the next session without the hypertrophy that you've actually achieved. So ultimately pushing further than five days, five days is kind of where you're to maintenance with one set, pushing further than five days, you end up
in a scenario where you're losing everything that you've made unless, as I say, you're doing five sets. Four or five sets, you're going to find that you can do that. But that is toppy volumes, really. And if you're trying to do variety of exercises, you're not going to be to do five sets.
Jake (47:38)
And it's just so inefficient. if you sit down and, you're obviously you've talked about how it can be hard to fit all these exercises in, right? We've talked about 24 exercises in Steve's plan. Maybe someone's doing 18. Exactly. Like if you think about it, cause I, my starting point with everyone is I say, start by thinking about all the exercises you need, right?
Chris (47:47)
24 exercises, 5 sets each.
Jake (47:58)
and then work out what split you're gonna use. If you only need 10 exercises to adequately train, whatever you wanna train, you can do that all in one session. Do full body AAA. ⁓
Chris (48:07)
I think you should repeat that
for people because honestly, this is a key element of the programming section of the mentorship course that I've been doing for years, which is you start with the contents of the program. You do not start with the split. You start with the contents of the program. you decide what... So like I often teach athletic programming. I say decide what the athlete is going to need in terms of the exercises and the stimuli.
Jake (48:23)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Chris (48:34)
You've decided what those things need to be. Having decided what those things need to be now arrange them in a split that works. If you start with a split like so many people ask me questions on Instagram, they starting their programming journey with I want to do this split. I'm like, well, you've just now constrained the options that you've got available to you. And you may find that your choices of exercise selection don't fit the split that you've already identified.
start with the contents and then split it up. I mean, that's kind of what split means, isn't it? It's like, what are you splitting if you haven't got something to split up? How are you even splitting it? You're splitting nothing. It doesn't exist. terminology tells you what the answer is before you even start. You can't split something up that isn't there. You know, so you start with the contents. know, so important point. You start with the things that you want to do and then you split them
Jake (49:24)
Exactly, exactly. And then, I forget where I was going with that point, but what I do wanna say with that is, yeah, start with all the exercises you decide you need, then decide whether that's too many to do in one session or not. If it's too many, do A, B, however you wanna do that, do up, low, in the morning, evening, whatever. And then what I would say is if...
If that session has more cardiovascular capacity, you feel like you've got more time or whatever in that session, you can add another set, right? You can do a second set, a third set, whatever. So that ultimately I think is a foundation of how someone should be starting. And that's what I wanted to say in terms of efficiency. So if you've got the, let's say 15 exercises you wanna do.
you can get that stimulus like you said, as long as an exercise is being trained by one set every four to five days, we're gonna see enough over time that you're gonna build. But suddenly you do this once a week, you now need a jam realistically, probably five sets into that. So if you're now looking at your weekly volume, just in terms of work, you need to get done to get.
anywhere to move forwards, you now need to use a hell of a lot more work just to grow muscle than if you just use a different split where you're actually using that exercise every four to five days instead. It just, like for me, when I run out of plans, I just can't justify doing that. Because I'm wasting so many sets just to make up for my mistake of not doing that exercise a couple days earlier. It just doesn't make sense.
Chris (50:46)
No, it doesn't doesn't make any sense at all. And I think, you know, it's it's so cool that we have this this documentation of how Soviet era bodybuilders were doing this. You know, they they identified this problem. They fixed this problem. They didn't have the confusing confounding effect of anabolic making it almost impossible to tell whether what they were doing was working or not. And and so they came to the same conclusions, you know, and I just
Every time we talk about this stuff, it's such a great reminder that the physiology which allows us to derive essentially the same answers is so continuous with what these guys were doing. You the only reason that the fitness industry is running around with ideas that are completely opposing to this is because of anabolic. Anabolic came in and now suddenly nobody knows how to train anymore because
you've got a stimulus which creates probably, you know, at least as much growth as a beginner would get and probably substantially more than the advanced trainer can get from strength training. So it just completely obliterates any ability to perceive what's happening. But, you know, if we return to physiology, we get a model that tells us how training should work. And then you kind of end up in this exact same place as these guys got to through trial and error. It's just such an amazing
know, kind of confluence of observations.
Jake (52:07)
I want to make one more point about the splits and then I'll stop going on about it. But I do think this is such an important point for people to get. And in terms of the upper lower, I think this, I still use upper lower splits, but I think people often think to themselves, an upper lower will be a better split for someone who's advanced because it allows you to...
isolate just upper body or lower body on a particular workout. And so people think you can get more variety by doing that because you're not having to dilute that session amongst you know, the full body. And to go back to what you've been saying, it doesn't allow you to do that. If anything, well, what it is, it's less, it's it's more limiting than doing a full body. Because if you are doing upper lower, upper lower, which to me, I think is a good intermediate plan.
but not a good advance plan because it means you're limited by how many exercises you can still do on, well, on one of those sessions, because ultimately you need to repeat it again. You don't get the benefit of having two unique sessions. So it's no different really to doing full body AB or you're getting less benefit than if you're doing full body AB, because you don't get to say, well, I'm gonna do eight exercises for my upper one.
and I'm gonna do eight exercises for my upper two and I get 16 exercises across the week, you don't get that benefit, because you get a whole week between them. So you're actually better off if you're on advanced lift and you need more variety, you're way better off doing something like a full body A-B split than trying to make it work with an upper lower four times per week.
Chris (53:34)
Exactly. And we have to remember that the maintenance literature is all done in...
you know, sort of people with only sort of three to six months of training experience. It's not done with people with years of kind of muscle mass. And the interesting thing is if you look at the physiological underpinnings of that, atrophy as it occurs is nonlinear. It happens faster the more muscle mass you have. So the bigger a muscle fiber is, the faster it will start shrinking when you do it, when you cease to load it regularly. We've got loads of data like that and I'll do a
a kind of a Friday post on that soon. I've got an amazing series of graphs showing the kind of sort of non-linear graphs with most rapid atrophy occurring immediately after the end of a stimulus period. So we know that the more muscle mass somebody has, the more muscle fibre, the larger the muscle fibres that they have, the faster the atrophy is going to happen. So you're going to find that the advanced lifter, if you think about the net stimulus across a week being atrophy,
deducted from the hypertrophy. Obviously everybody knows that the advanced lifter is going to be increasing muscle fibre size by tiny, tiny, tiny percentages, you know, almost insignificantly in, you know, sort of that nature. But the atrophy is going be greater. So you've got a situation where we know physiologically that the advanced person is going to be getting less hypertrophy with each workout and greater atrophy between workouts. So
You know, thing is this perception that people believe, I don't know why, maybe just again, the confusion effect of anabolic that, you know, people who have achieved a larger muscle size can somehow preserve that without training physiologically. The opposite is probably the case, almost certainly the case, because hypertrophy is definitely going to be less. I don't think anybody disagrees on that particular point, but actually is going to be faster. And if you don't think that's going to faster because you haven't looked at the data, then, OK, it's going to be the same, you know, but ultimately
Jake (55:17)
Hmm.
Chris (55:25)
you're going to find that the balance is different. So all we would expect is that the more well trained you are, the more frequency is going to play a role. You know, so, yes, I just want to reinforce what you said a moment ago, which is that upper lower is a horrible split for an advanced person. It really is. The only reason that, you know, recent bodybuilders have kind of managed to get away with that is the is the pharmaceutical support.
I think that anybody who's trying to do this without that is going to need to use a full body. And as I say, eventually gravitate towards full body AB because that's what gives you the maximum possible variety. We're still maintaining that stimulus across the week.
Jake (56:05)
unless you're someone like Steve who can do your 24 exercises in...
Chris (56:07)
Unless you're Steve Reaves and you can do a billion
exercises in one session, know, training for two hours and it's a little like you're not even breathing hard when you're taking two minutes rest between sets of squats. Yeah, okay. You know.
Jake (56:16)
You
I started playing with full body, no not full body, with upper lower, so upper lower six times per week.
Chris (56:24)
six times a week,
basically splitting the full body out into two days.
Jake (56:28)
Yeah, and I started writing out some of those plans and it was like a sigh of relief because every time I have to write an upper lower plan, I just feel so, I'm locked in. Yeah. And when I started doing this, I was like, oh my God, I can do upper one. I can do an upper two. Like it was just like, oh my God, this works now, but it didn't work otherwise. Yeah, yeah.
Chris (56:37)
constrained, yes, yes, yes.
But you're basically just writing a Steve Reuss program and splitting it in half. mean, that's really...
Jake (56:53)
Now we covered a lot in this. I just wanna do like a little TLDR. If you got to the end, you're like, well, maybe you skipped to this point, I don't know. But there's a few key points I think we covered. And ultimately, you have to think about some of these points as well. ultimately we did talk about, are you gonna get more bang for your buck out of doing three sets of one exercise, one set of three exercises? And what you've established there is that, well, for all the muscle fibers that are active across those,
three different exercises, you're still getting that same multiple set stimulus for those muscle fibers. But because everything is happening at a muscle fiber level, whether it's hypertrophy or atrophy, then what he's saying is in that in the extra variance, some of those fibers are getting that single set that they wouldn't be getting otherwise. Yeah. And then a point that I think maybe you alluded to, or maybe you did mention it was
Based on that, that also means that there are going to be muscle fibers that can hypertrophy while other fibers are atrophying in the same muscle.
And I don't know if people necessarily grasp that. We're saying yes, actually the same muscle, the lats can be hypertrophying while other fibers are atrophying. The total size can be going up. We're not saying that your lats as a whole are getting smaller, but there are some fibers where, especially if you're not using more exercise variation, where those fibers will be getting smaller.
Chris (58:14)
Yeah, ultimately that's what happens during detraining. So, you know, if we if we sort of do a strength training program and then we go on holiday for two weeks and we don't train more on holiday, we start to see, you know, atrophy occurring. But we're not atrophying the muscle fibers that we use to walk along the beach. You know, so I use, you know, I've said this a hundred times and I think it sort of sails over most people's heads, but
The mechanical tension that must fire was generate that triggers them to grow is determined by the force velocity relationship So if you stroll along the beach enjoying the weather or sunshine rather Then your muscle fibers are moving very slowly at least the most fibers that are activated and they're producing high forces high mechanical tension that stimulates them to Essentially, they're not going to grow because they've already maxed out their growth capacity, but they're going to stay the same size if on the other hand
you were to instead of going on holiday you'd have an unfortunate accident and end up with your leg in a cast then the whole limb would shrink why would that happen? it because none of the fibers are now activated so the difference between immobilization induced atrophy and detraining induced atrophy is just the difference in the number of fibers you know so atrophy is fiber specific, same way hypertrophy is fiber specific so ultimately you know
This translates perfectly to what saying about exercise selection. It's like whichever fibers you're activating and loading are going to grow, whichever ones you're not, are not going to grow. In fact, if you persist in not loading them, so like maybe you go from a highly varied exercise program with lots of different exercises in and everything was growing and then you suddenly shrink down and just do squat bench deadlift for three months, you're going to see that muscle fibers that were used in those previous exercises that you're not now using. mean, again, we
go into details on this in a separate podcast, but you're going to see a lot of localized atrophy because of us. I was that you no longer training. So it's just such an important point. And I think there's a there's just this, I think, belief at the moment in some parts of the fitness industry that, you know, a row and a pull down and pull over, they're all training the same muscle fibers. So you just choose whichever one you want and interchange them. And it doesn't really matter. And nothing could be further from the truth. You know, I think there's basically
totally different motor units are going to be prioritised for different activities based on the efficiency requirement and the new mechanical matching principle is what largely determines that for us.
Jake (1:00:32)
Everything happening at a muscle fiber level, think ultimately that's one of the key takeaways here. And the question is always, you know, what, to what magnitude, to what degree is that? But ultimately, whether we're talking about exercise variation, or we're talking about volume, we're talking about atrophy, or we're talking about any of this stuff, everyone needs to start from the place of we're talking about muscle fibers, but not talking about whole muscle.
Chris (1:00:53)
Exactly. As I said, I wasn't being entirely flippant when I said I could literally repeat that for the rest of my time in the fitness industry. It wouldn't be a waste of time because I sure you know, it will be two years down the road and I shall still be saying the same thing. I'll be saying that model that, you know, is being proposed by XYZ or these groups can't possibly work because hypertrophy and atrophy are muscle fiber specific and it'll be the same mistake every single time. It'll be the same mistake, you know, because for some reason, whatever has happened.
Jake (1:01:16)
Yes.
Chris (1:01:19)
People now just think in terms of, training a muscle. No you're not. That's not how it works. That's not how the body works.
Jake (1:01:24)
Yep, yep.
Frequency, muscle fiber specific as well.
Chris (1:01:27)
and therefore frequency
becomes fiber specific as well because everything is fiber specific.
Jake (1:01:31)
Any other TLDR points you've got for us or? Well, thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us. Hopefully you've got some nuggets of wisdom and gold out of this one, especially for you guys who write programs. There's a fair bit of application.
Chris (1:01:32)
I have no more wisdom to share, I'm definitely done for the day. Yeah, let's call it.
Jake (1:01:49)
So hopefully you guys go and use some of that. And we'd love to hear how you go with it as well. So if you do apply some of this stuff, I love hearing, getting messages from you guys being like, I started doing this and I noticed this or I grew better than whatever. And we'd love to hear that feedback. So please do that. Please like and subscribe and review and all the good stuff on our podcast. And we hope you'll join us next week for another episode.