What's up, guys? Welcome back to the TSP Strength podcast. Hi. My name is John Evans. I have helped thousands of athletes jump higher and run faster, and I can help you do the same exact thing.

In this episode, we are gonna be talking about specifically sarcoplasmic reticulum hypertrophy and myofibrillar.

That's some fancy words. You're gonna have to explain that.

Yeah. And we're gonna talk a little bit about general work because it relates to these topics. So before we do that, this is Isaiah Rivera. You guys should know who he is. He has a 50.5 inch vertical and, like, half a million followers on Instagram.

So hopefully, by this point, you're familiar. Anyways, so getting into what those two things are, what actually

Oh, this is my coach. Yeah. And together, we have a training program called THV Strength. You can get at THV Strength dot com. Link in the description or in the bio.

Six months free.

Thanks. That might have been too fast. Go ahead and play that back if you guys missed it. But, Isaiah, how did this conversation come up? What prompted this?

You sent me a screenshot.

So I made a YouTube video the other day. The title of the video was how to write three rules to writing your own jump training program. And one of the comments, which I try to get to all the comments, said he read a book that we recommended and still do recommend. It's called Super Training by Yuri Verkhashansky, our dad. Our grandpa, actually.

Grandpa. Yeah. He's probably the better way to describe it. And one of my subscribers said that as he was reading it, he mentioned that Yuri Verkashansky says that hypertrophy training when compared to training with higher intensity, meaning lower reps, higher weight, the hypertrophy mainly comes from sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.

Intensity is myofibrillar. And Fibrillar.

Yeah. And then training with high intensity is myofibrillar. Yeah. So what do those words mean? What what Yeah.

What does that mean? And I guess, is it true? Because we do a lot of

hypertrophy training, but So there are this is I guess we'll go over, like, the basic of the anatomy of this. Muscles are made of myofibrils. They're made of myosin and actin. And then around them, the muscle cell, and they don't look like, you know, the circular things you saw in your third grade biology book or seventh grade biology book. It doesn't that's not what a muscle cell looks like.

It still has all the components, so it still has a sarcoplasm or a cytoplasm. That's a muscle cytoplasm. It has, you know, the the proteins inside of it. It has a a nucleus. All those things are retained.

They're multinucleated, so they look a little bit different. But this contractile tissue made up of mice and actin, it is covered in that cytoplasm or sarcoplasm. And so the idea, or what Yuri was saying in his book, is if you do really high volume training, lot of reps per set, you're in that 10 to 20 rep range for a given set, you're gonna have more of the sarcoplasm hypertrophy. So the cell, the myo the contractile component isn't getting bigger, but the sarcoplasm is. And the idea behind that is that you're having potentially more metabolic byproducts or adaptation in that sarcoplasm that allows you to do those higher rep ranges.

Like, is the, you know, form fits function. That's what's changing in the form. And then the contractile components aren't changing too much because the tension's not very high. I did quite a bit of research before this podcast and looked at two or three papers. Couple they're mostly reviews because reviews are really, really good for looking at this stuff.

And if you guys have seen Jeff Nipperd's video on this, he actually was one of the people on the paper for this review. He was like the fourth author, I think, or something like that, which means he contributed, but didn't do most of the review. And basically what they found was, or when they did the review, the research is very clear that most of the hypertrophy that happens in a muscle that is from the sarcoplasm is transient, acute, happens briefly, and then essentially drops off within twenty four to forty eight hours. So it's not something that you're gonna see be the driver of longitudinal changes to the cross sectional area of the muscle, meaning the muscle's not getting bigger because the sarcoplasma is getting bigger over time, it's the muscle's getting bigger because the actual contractile tissue is getting bigger, or you're getting more of

them. You know if that's the same thing as having a pump, and if not, what's having a pump?

So having a pump is the fluid moving in acutely into the area, and this happens during the high volume work, and it's a metabolic, like it's because of a metabolic stress. So you're having the adaptations that are taking place and acutely what's happening is the water coming into the tissue and that's what the pump is. The blood is moving to that area for perfusion to get oxygen in and out, oxidative phosphorylation to essentially fuel the muscle. When you have really, really high tension work, your muscles don't turn or how do I say this? Maybe a better way to view this is when you look at low reps, you might say, well, no high tension during low rep activity.

Right? I mean, obviously, if I'm doing the barbell in a curl or a squat, there's almost no tension in the muscle. But that's when you're viewing the muscle in terms of one unit. But it's not one unit. It's made up a bunch of individual fibrils that are turning on and off.

And there's something called the size principle, which basically determines you'll recruit muscles as the force demand requires it. So for example, if you're doing a jump or you're squatting really, really heavy, you're gonna recruit really really big high threshold motor units and you're gonna recruit those muscle fibers because you need them, but they're recruited last typically. If I'm picking up a cup of water, you obviously don't want to recruit your type two fibers because you'll throw the water out of your hand. You'll create a ton of tension. You don't need to do that or want

to You do know, I joke around with with my wife, Christina, about that all the time. I'm really like, you know this about myself. You twitchy? I'm very clumsy and I break things a lot. And then, like, example, I'll close the door and I'll slam it, and then and then Christina will be like, why are you slamming the door?

And then I'm like

Type two fiber athlete.

Like, Type two fiber athlete. I I'm either off or on.

It's just

what I'm saying.

Yeah. And that's I mean, that's more or less how it works. When you're doing something like a single, you know, on a on a squad or a clean, and the reason why we do them is because you're getting crazy high neural activity, firing off all of those frequencies at crazy rates to the muscles and recruiting as many fibers as fast as possible. You're getting your you're trying to get your slow twitch fibers to act like fast twitch fibers and your fast twitch fibers to act like faster fast twitch fibers. That's why we do high intent activity.

That's why we do heavy backspots and things like that. So, then the question comes, well why can low intensity, high rep activity cause hypertrophy? Because there's not a lot of mechanical tension. But the reason why is because of the size principle. We cycle through the muscle fibers as we need them.

So as you fatigue, let's say you did 60 reps of bicep curls, or 30 reps of bicep curls, you're gonna start by recruiting those slow twitch fibers first. Right? Those small slow twitch fibers, the ones that are the most fatigue resistant. And then as those fatigue, other motor units, you're gonna get higher neural drive, essentially your brain, to start recruiting the type two fibers to start recruiting those higher threshold motor units and then recruiting those bigger myofibrils. So then, you fatigue the little ones, the bigger ones have to step in to pick up the slack because now the little ones aren't recruiting force anymore.

So even though you're at the bar, each, like the amount of force that that big, strong muscle myofibril, and remember there's thousands and thousands of these, you know, you're not gonna recruit all of them at the end range, but the closer you get to failure, the more you're fatiguing all of the tissues. So this is why going to failure is so important when you want to induce hypertrophy, because as you get more fatigued, you're going to recruit all of the motor units inside of that muscle to be able to get hypertrophy across the entire tissue. So for example, if you're doing a ton of leg extensions, you're getting closer to failure, you're going to have, at the localized tissue level, the tiny myofibrils, the big ones are gonna be recruited at the end. It's not like a tiny myofibril can, one tiny little strand can lift the bar or your body weight or whatever else, right? So as you fatigue all the other ones, you're gonna be forced to recruit those at the tail end of that individual set.

So then the question becomes, well why do okay, so we know it's all myofibril hypertrophy. We know that both really, really heavy work and not heavy work can recruit these big motor units. You know, at some point, you're gonna start recruiting them. So why only do what like, does it even matter what you do? And the answer to that is yes.

Because when you do the really, really intense set of five squats at 85% or something like that, you're gonna be

You're snap some shit up. Yeah. So You're you're You're snap city.

Yeah. So you will well, yeah, you could do that. But it's also that you're you're getting more of those high threshold murder units recruited immediately. So it's a way more effective use of your time and you don't have the detrimental effects of doing that high rep work, which is that you're going to get, at some point, central fatigue. You're going to get peripheral fatigue at the tissue.

You're not really working on your nervous system as much anymore. You're actually training a lot of the slow twitch fibers and the fast twitch fibers to get a shift towards those type two A fibers or whatever else. And even if your only goal was hypertrophy, it's gonna be a lot more effective for you to use that mid range 75 to 85% for hypertrophy close to failure because you're gonna get a lot of reps under tension. So as you fatigue, at the beginning you're recruiting your high threshold motor units, at the end you're recruiting your high threshold motor units, and all the little ones the entire time, So the total time under tension of all that local tissue is way higher than it would be if you did something like 30 reps or whatever else. You might not even recruit those really, really big ones because you're gonna get metabolic fatigue to set in and you're gonna put the bar down because, you know, it burns or whatever else.

So when you get to those grindy reps, that's a sign that you're recruiting, you know, the the high threshold motor units because, again, you have to. So that's the benefit of doing that 70 to 85% range. And then the question might be, well, if mechanical tension is, you know, ultimately the thing you want, why not just do a ton of singles? And the reason why is because you can't. You can't do 20 singles at 100%.

You're not going to be able to do that. You could do something like an EMOM at 80% or 85% and really, really move it and that would be a benefit of it. Or you could do drop sets where you go 100% and you do a few sets, and we've done this in the past, at 75 to 80% and you would start to see hypertrophy set in because your total time under tension of that local tissue, really high tensions, is very high. You're getting a lot of tension for a lot of time. You're getting meaningful reps at And that's really what will drive up that myofibrillar hypertrophy.

So, then the question becomes, why do anything in the lower rep ranges? Right? And that's a fair question. Right? Why do the general work?

Why do things like, you know, bicep curls or windmills or V ups or any of that stuff. Right? One big purpose is that

your Did you mean what do you mean? You said lower rep range.

Sorry. Higher rep range, lower weight, the general work. Why do any of that? The reason why you would do that stuff is because you're training to train. Your tissue tolerance is going to go up.

So that you don't go to Snap City with the higher intensity.

Exactly. You don't go to Snap City when you start to move up the intensity. And then it also allows you to have more reserves for adaptation. So your total work capacity goes up as a whole. You start to adapt to that volume even if it is on that lower motor unit side.

But then when you take that stuff out, you can use that biological residue that you have left over to adapt to the really, really intense stuff. And this is why later in the year, we start shifting from general to specific work, and lower intensity to higher intensity work. And the general stuff gets really general, and really, really easy, and the hard stuff gets really, really hard. The easy stuff gets easy, the hard stuff gets really hard. Because you have to spend most of your physiological reserves adapting to that stuff and not wasting it on the general work.

And so in gen prep, really, really early on, you might say, Well, okay, why not just all the time do that? Because you have to cycle through those things and build up that reserve to a certain point. So it doesn't matter that much in gen your goal is not to be jumping high in gen prep. Your goal is training to train. That's what you're doing at the beginning of the cycle.

And we have a more fluid approach to that, so it shifts progressively over time. It's not like all general or all specific or, you know, it's a sliding scale. It's not like blocks shifting all the way into the end of the year. And so we're using that, the running, the extensive tempo, all of that stuff to make you better at recovering, to build your tissues capacity, and to address a lot of the small tissue that you might not get from just squatting. Right?

We're gonna do light side squats. We're gonna do upright rows. We're gonna do bicep curls, things that we're not really doing most of the year. And then the other benefit is that you will be better prepared for the following day because you didn't fatigue those high threshold motor units. You're at a really low intensity, you're doing maybe twenty or thirty seconds, you might only get 12 reps, or maybe you're only doing 10 reps of each one.

You're getting reasonable recovery between. You're also getting the adaptations to the cardiorespiratory system in a more specific way. That's really the benefit of doing the general work and not just going out and running. Because you go out and run, now you're just recruiting type two fibers all the time. You're getting yeah, you're gonna get capitalization, you're gonna get more mitochondrial density, whatever else.

That stuff's good for recovering, even for the high intensity work. There's still benefits to doing that cardiorespiratory work. So when we do it in the form of resistance training at really low intensities, we're not gonna get the downside of all the neural, negative neural adaptations that you get from just going out on a slow run for twenty or thirty minutes or whatever else. I mean, in reality it's probably not gonna make that much of a difference. If you're running at like, kind of lactate threshold or something, that would be bad.

That would be like the interference effect. You might have a lot of metabolic byproducts build up and it might actually fatigue you more for the following day of training. But what we do is, it's like going through the motions. You come in, do some core work, might get a little bit of a burn. That's a sign you're getting those adaptations to the capillaries, to the mitochondria.

You're getting maybe a little bit of hypertrophy because you're adding more sets per week. You're still training the system and we're gonna pull that stuff out later when we want to get really specific and we want to be really explosive and we want to be really, really strong. So, there's a ton of benefits to doing all that stuff that I think a lot of people probably brush under the rug and and think that it really doesn't have a purpose, but it's there early for a reason in high volumes. And it comes out late for a reason, because we're getting more specific. We need the specific stuff to get better.

So yeah, that's really my soliloquy on it. I did quite a bit of research beforehand to make sure that I explained this more adequately than I usually do, because usually I just say it's training to train you to increase work capacity. But that's physiologically why you do it, and hopefully the why motivates you to do the what, which is your general days. Anything else I missed?

General days and the

And the hard cycles. Yeah. And the general cycles. Yeah. They they matter.

So I I would I just wanna add, like, anecdotally for me, I get way better when I do the general work, like, really high rep stuff early on and then move into intensity. Some of the worst I have ever felt is when I don't do that. So, like, let's say I a period like I just did where I got hurt for three weeks, if I were to go from that to high intensity, so sets of three, four power work, max effort jump sessions, that's like guaranteed way of getting hurt. So if you haven't trained for a while, should you probably be doing something with like a lot of volume, at least in the, I would say like the six to eight rep range.

Yeah. Even myself, this first mesocycle returning. Like tissue tolerance is such an important thing. And I think if you can't handle, the general work and stuff like that, that's a surefire sign you're definitely not going to be able to handle the intense work. If you can't handle going out and doing extensive tempo, or you can't handle doing the quasi asymmetric circuit or the core work or whatever else, then you're definitely not ready to do the high force stuff.

And your tissue tolerance is a lot lower. If I can handle a full training load, training intense Monday and Wednesday, jumping on Friday, and then doing my general days in between, I've got five days of time and retention across the entire body.

You're not caring about the jump day performance either. It's like, it's essentially looking at it as get the reps in.

Yeah. Big time. So, yeah. That's the video, guys. If you're interested in getting that general work in your training, click the link in the description or the pinned comment, which I won't forget to do, cause Isaiah said he'll shock me with a shock collar if I do, which is our new punishment.

Yeah. We'll see you guys next time.

And if you're a THP athlete Wow. Hopefully, this is motivating you to do the general days and not your own upper body workouts. Stuff Even though we leave it as an option. Everybody quits when they start doing the general days, so they're hard.