Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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.
Welcome back everyone to another episode of hypertrophy past and present and actually, you know what Chris? I haven't told you this I was uploaded our last episode. I looked at where viewers or listeners were located and You guys who are listening are located in over a hundred different countries. So yeah, so whoever you're listening Welcome and thank you for joining us So as always I'll be introducing us to another old-school plan in a moment doing the past
of the podcast and then Chris you'll be introducing us to a new topic later today on the present part of the podcast. there anything you want to jump in and lead with today?
Chris (00:37)
No, I'm good, I'm looking forward to hearing about this strength training program from the past. Is it Reg Park that we've got today?
Jake (00:45)
It is Reg Park. So last week we spoke about Steve Reeves and today we've got Reg Park. So we've got two of the great Mr. Universe's back to back. last week I said that the Steve Reeves plan we were talking about was my personal favorite Silver Era plan. And I made a comment that there was one other that I really liked. And this is one of those. So Reg Park obviously, well I say obviously, but maybe you don't know he.
He published quite a lot of different plans and people will know Reg Moesler for his five by five and we're gonna talk about a variant of that in a moment. But contrary to how the Steve Rees plan looked last week, Reg used less exercise variation and he used multiple sets per exercise. So I personally love that combination of combining kind of what Steve did with what Reg did, but let me introduce you guys to this particular Reg plan and then we can talk about it. So this one.
Like I said, he had a lot of different plans and this was what he called the Mr. Universe Bulk Course. Now bulk is a word like we kind of colloquially use a little bit today and you talk about bulking and that's sort of associated more with kind of like a dirty bulk and just weight gaining. And they used it a little bit like that but there seemed to be a slightly different nuance to the way that they were using it back then. was very, very common. Very commonly when they talk about their bulking routines and their bulking routines tended to be
more like their way to gain. It was kind of like you had someone who needed to gain muscle mass and you would do a bulk routine. And then after you've gained a considerable amount of muscle mass, then you might look at definition or that would call it defining, I think, where you might sort of isolate muscles or whatever to get into like show, not just conditioning, but to, I guess, maximally develop particular muscles. So this bulk course is a little bit more of, guess, what we would call a mass gaining course or program.
So I'll just read through it and then I'll make it come. Actually, I'll tell you guys first kind of the instructions for it and then I'll read through the exercises. So he made it very clear. And actually I want to make a point about this as well. When you look at a lot of these plans, I don't know if you've noticed this so far Chris, but a lot of the time there's a little bit of like almost vagueness in the way that they give instructions. So they talk about reps or they talk about sets and it's kind of like, sort of do something like this.
And they kind of give people a few options. And Reg sort of did this as well. So he would say, never train more than three times a week. And it's like, well, does that mean always train three times a week? Or does it mean maybe you can do two as well? Like it's a little bit vague, but he goes, never do more than three times a week. Okay. And then he kind of talked at ramping up volume. So he would say, perform. So in the first week, I think he actually said, start with one set and the next week go to two sets, but it was sort of a...
Gradually increase over the first couple weeks and then he said for one month you can do three sets per exercise For the next month you're do four sets and then for the next month you're gonna do five sets So that sounds a lot. We're not talking warm-up sets here. We're talking actual work sets so worked up to five sets per exercise and Again, he made these very clear. He you're never gonna do more than five sets Do not do more than five and do not do five sets for more than a month
He said. Now, one other sort of somewhat vague instruction that he gave is with the repetitions, he said, never do more than X. And I'll tell you what that number is for each exercise. But it was a little bit like, you know, do you do a couple less? Do you do a double progression method? I assume he was suggesting you do a double progression method. So the first exercise was a barbell squat. So again, you would do three sets for the first month, four for the second.
five for the third and you do your sets and it would say never do above five repetitions and the instruction was once you can do all of those sets with the five repetitions then you go heavier. Now to me that's suggesting when you go heavier you're probably going to drop the repetitions and you're probably going to drop down and through repetitions or so. So I'm assuming that that's what the indication was there but it was very much don't go above five. So we've got the barbell squat
Now this was supersetted with the breathing pullover and I believe we've talked about the pullover, we've touched on it briefly in the past, we might touch on it again in a moment, but that was for sets of 10. Now typically with that you wouldn't go overly heavy, it was not really like a go to failure type exercise and you would do that immediately after the squat. Then he moved into wide grip bench press and it was very specific, it had to be wide grip and again this was never more than five repetitions.
And in fact, Elseway actually talks about doing this for as few as two repetitions. And then you go into what he, I believe he calls it a power deadlift, which is basically like a rack pull, so a knee-high track pull. And at the top of the lift, you do a shrug with it. And again, this was sets of five, and then we're going above five. And then he, after that, would do a barbell vertical shrug.
Now with this he would recommend doing as many reps as possible with your max deadlift weight. Now here he actually said never go above 20. I've never tried doing vertical shrugs on my max deadlift weight so I don't have a ballpark for how many one is likely to do but he did say don't go above 20 with that one. And then we've got a wide grip bent over barbell row again never going above five.
And finally we have an exercise which I've actually been using a little bit more of in my training groups, which is a barbell cheating curl. And it's quite an interesting exercise if you guys haven't done it. It's basically just a looser form barbell curl, exactly what it sounds like. You use a little bit of hip involvement in it. And he was doing this very heavy. He was also doing this for no more than five repetitions. So very heavy loads. What do you make of all of that?
Chris (06:37)
So there's quite a few things that we can say here. I mean, it's really interesting to look at this program in comparison with the Steve Reeves program that we looked at previously, because we're kind of going from one extreme to the other. You know, we had a program that had an enormous amount of exercise variety and with pretty much, you know, full coverage for every muscle region that you can think of with one or two minor exceptions. And then we look at this and we're like,
wow, this is so different. This is much more minimalist. And I can see some really big holes in this routine. There's a lot not here. mean, straight away, we're very limited on the amount of work. I I know I kind of make this point all the time, but I'm seeing here that we've got a row, which is wide grip. Well, OK, so where's the lat work then?
Jake (07:08)
Hmm.
Hmm
Chris (07:29)
So no narrow grip, no sagittal plane pulling, and I've got no frontal plane pulling. So there's not even a pull up in here. You know, could radically improve this program just by putting a pull up in it. And this is the point I've made multiple times when we've been looking at these routines. Like pull ups are not difficult to set up. You know, this is not an equipment issue really. So it seems to be a huge kind of
failing in my opinion of many of these older routines that I just don't think in terms of that frontal plane pulling which would literally transform this program.
Jake (07:56)
Hmm.
There are some that really emphasised
the frontal plane pull up or pull down. So I'll bring one for you soon just to alleviate some of this anxiety over the lack of lats.
Chris (08:11)
What an anxiety, just noticing
a trend, you know. But here there's no lat training at all, really, unless you put the pullover into the lat category and it's a very kind of limited lat exercise. But yeah, so essentially we've got the pullover is really the only thing that gets close to touching the lat. And obviously the back work is very transverse plane focused. Also, this is a big shift away from the very early programs. I think we started out, did we start out with Sundown?
We did, didn't we?
Jake (08:38)
We started out with the Milo barbell company, which was kind of like the bridge between San now and, yep.
Chris (08:40)
Milo Barber Company. Modelled on, yeah.
But we were modelling on kind of the Sundow heritage. that focus on overhead pressing was really big when we first looked at the early routines. And now it's gone, you know. So like we've got kind of two shrug exercises in here. You know, but we've got virtually, we've got literally no overhead pressing at all. So again, it's kind of.
really interesting to see these changes in the focus of the exercise they're doing. So I think that the lack of the lack of sort of lat work, like a frontal or lateral plane pulling, I mean, you can argue that the pullover does that, but it's so far outside the range of motion where the lats are, you know, got leverage, it doesn't really count in my opinion. And then the lack of overhead pressing again, I think is a really interesting omission. But.
Again, like I mentioned in some of the early routines, there was a lack of deadlift variation when you could again say, look, you know, it's not difficult if you've got a barbell, you can pick it up off the ground. So why haven't we got deadlift variations making a impact in those early programs? And we just didn't see that. And now we see it, you know, and a right pull is a really interesting kind of choice to sort of shift focus and work on different muscle groups. So again, very, very interesting just to see the sort of
diverse choices that are going on here in terms of exercise selection. So I think that would probably be my sort of immediate observations. mean, those are observations, obviously ignoring the stuff that I will say every time, which is obviously we haven't got the equipment, so we can't do, you know, rectus femoris training with knee extensions. We can't do hamstrings training with leg curls because those kind of things didn't necessarily exist. So.
You can't really argue that that's a failing because there's just no real meaningful way to do that, obviously. But yeah, those will be my initial impressions just on the exercise selection side of
Jake (10:27)
What do you make of the pullover? I know you briefly touched on it potentially being a little bit of Latin, but you know obviously not the most ideal exercise. A lot of these guys did include this as part of their squat routine. They would do the squat with a pullover and they did talk about it more from a rib cage chest perspective. Do you have any thoughts on that or do you think this is just something weird they kind of got grandfathered in and people followed it?
Chris (10:52)
Well essentially that, if you're doing a pullover in the way that they would have done I imagine, which is where you're using standard weight like a barbell or an easy bar and basically your peak external moment arm is in the most extended position, the most stretched position of the movement. Okay, now if you're doing it that way it's basically going to be a costal pec.
Jake (11:02)
Yep. Yep.
Chris (11:16)
Exercise with you know some posterior adult There you know to help you So I think that is it's valid to categorize it in that way I don't think I would categorize it as a lot exercise first and foremost I think I'll probably categorize it I've talked around this issue many many times before but it's kind of a mixed bag. You've got lots of stuff going on But I think arguably the costal peck is probably
Jake (11:21)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Chris (11:43)
the kind of the key factor there. So I would agree with them. I would say, you know, yeah, if you're treating that as a chest exercise, that's not wrong. Absolutely. Obviously, it's not going to be going anywhere close to the upper parts of the pec because those are shoulder flexors rather than shoulder extensors.
Jake (11:57)
Well, it's interesting because they talk about it very much as like an expansion exercise. know, the goal here is to make the chest.
And not I don't just mean you know obviously the bench was the main mass builder But it was that very iconic like if you guys look up photos of Reg Park like you'll see just how well developed and enlarged his chest was and They're talking about it from that perspective of literally like it's expanding the ribcage is expanding the chest and it's interesting you're saying it's more kind of lower chest which I guess is Somewhat neglected a lot of the time potentially would have that aesthetic kind of impact
Chris (12:32)
Yeah, and it's again, like you say, aesthetic choices probably play into this. So like we talked at the beginning of this series of podcasts that we did about the aesthetic choices of people from the Sandow kind of heritage, where they were thinking mainly about the overhead pressing, producing that sort of deltoid development and not really wanting chest development at all. And you can see that. I mean, just look at the photos of those guys. You know, you can see that. And as you say, you know, you look perhaps at the photos of this.
Jake (12:52)
Mm. Mm.
Chris (13:01)
group of bodybuilders, you can see that the chest development is very much marked by comparison. Is that the pull over doing that? Is that the bench press doing that? I mean, obviously the bench press again was something that we tended to not see in those early training programs. So there's different things going on. But yeah.
Jake (13:05)
Hmm.
Chris (13:16)
I mean obviously it's designed to be a minimalist program so I don't want to just kind of stand here and poke holes in it and go they don't have this exercise and they don't have that exercise well yeah of course they don't because it's designed to be a minimalist program but for me there's just that couple of things that I really don't understand why they didn't
Jake (13:32)
Yeah, and they do often talk about these bulking type routines, essentially being minimalist. They call them like abbreviated type plans where they are intentionally reducing the amount of exercises for the sake of just gaining as much mass as possible. And then they add these exercises back in, which is probably why they talk about not doing this for more than 12 weeks or however long. I will show you a Reg Park workout in a future episode, which is...
hopefully a little bit more to your liking as far as exercise selection goes. But what I found particularly interesting about this one was...
these are pretty high volume per exercise. So he's going up to five sets per exercise and suggesting that you can do this Monday, Wednesday, Friday, your typical kind of 48 hour sort of part per workout. Now, for you guys who've listened to our content, you probably know that generally speaking, we would say that probably that three sets per 48 hours is kind of the sweet spot for recovery. So how is it that...
in the silver era where, you know, before steroids, people were presumably doing four, five sets and, you know, seem to be getting good results.
Chris (14:41)
Yeah, so I think we've got two observations to make on that point. Firstly is the one where you described in your kind of introductory instructions that he provides. So he's saying you don't do, you know, the five sets for more than one month. So he's already kind of, he's kind of accepting or taking into account, you know, acknowledging is kind of the word I'm going for. He's acknowledging that you can't.
just run this indefinitely, which is kind of indicating that they know that some post-workout fatigue is going to accumulate. So I think we can kind of straight away just point out that there's this recognition that this is not a sustainable state. So I think that's a really good observation from them to say that, you start pushing higher than, you know, three or four sets per muscle group per workout three times a week and you're going to...
run into this fatigue accumulation problem. The second thing is of course that we're dealing here with heavy loads, more or less. So we're kind of working with, you know, sort of three, four, five repetitions per set. and as you said, even going down as low as two in certain cases like the bench press. Now, that's really interesting. the data we've got
is in terms of post workout recovery is really really good for the classic strength training range of about six to ten reps per set. if you want to draw a graph and I've done my own version of this but you can collect all of the data in either untrained or trained people. I've done a chart in strength trained people of all the studies I could find where they measured post workout recovery after doing sets to failure or close to failure with
six to ten repetitions per set and essentially you can graph the amount of volume that you can do and recover in a certain period of time and that's where we get this kind of you know three sets is recoverable within 48 hours five sets is recoverable within 72 hours and so on and so on so that's there's a huge amount of data available for that and it's really well established you can kind of do the analysis yourself if you try and do the same analysis with heavy loads the wheels come off
You just can't do it because what you find and I did this as a table I couldn't do it as a chart because there's just not there's not enough granularity in the data to do it because what you find is that basically pretty much any number of sets of Singles Doubles Triples or even up to you know kind of getting close to five repetitions per set anything you do in that is recoverable within sort of 48 hours. You just you can't really do You know enough sets to really see a significant kind of effect of
Jake (17:01)
Mm-hmm
Chris (17:09)
at the 48 hour point. You can see it 24 hours in higher numbers of sets, but you don't really see it at the 48 hour marker. Not very often anyway. And that's really, really interesting. So basically what we're seeing is this massive difference between the post-workout fatigue created by moderate loads and post-workout fatigue created by heavy loads. Heavy I mean, up to sort of five repetitions per set. Now just to kind of finalize this observation that I'm kind of presenting here.
If we now look at lighter loads, so off the top end of the sort 15 rep max, as you kind of say is the top end of the moderate load rep range between 6 and 15. If you go off the top end of that and you start doing sets with lighter loads, you're going to find that a single set of light loads to failure is going to give you 48, 72 hours worth of tea. It's absolutely nuts. So there's this perception, I think, in the fitness industry as a whole.
Obviously, if you think about it, Finnsinters is a gigantic pyramid where this tiny little triangle at the top that talks about the scientific bits and the majority of the Finnsinters is just people who want to be motivated to exercise and of course that's the majority of this pyramid. But if you look at this majority of the pyramid, most people would just go, well heavy loads take longer to recover because... But the reality is the opposite. So what we see is an incredibly strong trend for
Jake (18:17)
You
Chris (18:36)
being able to do quite high numbers of sets of singles, doubles, triples and not actually see any post workout fatigue at say 24, 48 hours. And you start increasing the rep ranges, you immediately start seeing that post workout fatigue and you get as high as lighter loads and absolutely, you know, the wheels come off. You can't actually do light loads training to failure with single, even with single sets three times a week. just, fatigue is gonna be there every time you come back and that's gonna then create accumulated fatigue problems. So.
We're seeing this very strong like observable trend for rep range to have an enormous impact on post-workout fatigue.
Jake (19:12)
This is really significant. And so I do actually want to go over some of it again, because it will be new to a lot of people, I think, who are listening to this. So you've made that obvious statement there that a lot of people do believe that actually this post-workout fatigue is worse or higher with heavier loads and lower repetitions. And that was a mantra that I heard all the time as an early PT, heavy loads cause CNS fatigue. Like that was just what people said and no one really questioned that. And ultimately what you said there is this
there's very, very high ceiling, if anything, to how many sets you can do of very heavy loads. If you're doing singles, I mean, what, in the table that you put out there, there was a study where they used, what, 20 sets of singles?
Chris (19:52)
Yeah, so just to be clear for people who are struggling to understand that table, when researchers test things like that, you don't obviously expect your subjects to lift their 1 rep max 20 times. I mean, I don't think I've lifted a 1 rep max 20 times in my life. So nobody's going to do that in a single workout. What happens is they do sort of their initial estimated 1 rep max, and then the researchers will reduce the weight slightly.
based on the rest period that they're going to have and what they think the likely one-ret max will be in the next attempt. they kind of drop the weight by, you know, sort of 5 % or so and then you do it again and then you drop the weight by a more and you do it So you end up with these 20 singles and no they're not 21-ret maxes but at the point when the attempt was made it's kind of pretty much the maximum weight that they could lift. Now even with that scenario going on
as you say, you don't really get any post-workout fatigue. And this is a really perfect moment for me to just like add in a quick observation on what fatigue actually is. And I'm not going to run for, you know, kind of 10, 20 minutes here. I just want to make a very quick observation, which is that when we say fatigue in exercise science, what we mean is that there is a temporary period of time in which exercise performance is reduced. And you can see that in the workout itself, like what I've just described.
So they do the 20 singles and exercise performance drops and you have to reduce the weight in order to be able to do your next single. OK, so we're seeing fatigue happening during the workout. Fatigue is the temporary reduction in exercise performance. It is a measurable outcome. It's not anything physiologically kind of defined, as in we can't say what mechanisms are unless we kind of drill into that and start investigating. But it is the outcome, it is the measurable reduction in strength. If I come back the following day and I measure again,
my strength and it's reduced slightly then I can say that there is fatigue present. Now if I come back the following day and this is the point I want to make, this is the point I want to make, if I come back the following day after that workout, after that 20 singles, which honestly I would be very unhappy about doing, if I did that 20 singles and came back the following day and discovered that actually like many of the subjects in this study there was no reduction in strength at 24 hours, then I am not fatigued.
I'm going say that again. If I've done that 20 singles and I come back the following day and I'm still capable of producing the same amount of force that I was the previous day, I'm not fatigued. Now I might feel miserable. I might ache. I might be in extreme discomfort. I might dread the thought of going near a barbell again.
Jake (22:23)
You
Chris (22:24)
I might feel all kinds of emotions and feelings associated with the workout I did the previous day, including up to hating the people who made me do it. But I'm not fatigued. And this is the thing I really want to emphasize that when exercise scientists use the word fatigue, they're referring to an objective reduction in exercise performance. They're not referring to how you feel. Yes, when we start drilling into mechanisms and we talk about
you know, central nervous system fatigue at the supra-spinal level. Yes, that is absolutely related to, you know, feelings and emotions and those kind of things, and that can create a reduction in strength. But if it doesn't, then technically fatigue is not present. And I think this really is one of those things, again, I say this all the time, and there's so many of these things that I could just do. But if I literally just said that for the rest of my time in the fitness industry, it wouldn't be a waste of time. Because...
Everybody in the fitness industry thinks fatigue is a feeling. It's an emotion. It's a sensation It's this kind of like state that kind of creates problems and nobody really knows what it is And that's why we've got these ridiculous things being said by you know Some people in the fitness industry in our section of the fitness industry the bit that talks about the science and things like that You got people saying well, you know, know fatigue doesn't affect your ability to stimulate adaptions. I'm like, sorry what? You know if you have a reduction in exercise performance and that's caused by reduction
recruitment or mechanical tension, then it has to affect your ability to stimulate adaptions because those are the two things that stimulate the adaption, at least in hypertrophy terms. again, there's just massive confusion about what fatigue actually is. And so really, I just wanted to emphasize that fatigue is the objective reduction in performance. So, yes, if we have a workout comprising 20 singles, starting with one rep max and decreasing downwards as as required to complete the workout and you come back the following day and there's no
reduction in strength present as a result of that previous day's workout, no, we are not fatigued, the subject is not fatigued. And that's the really interesting thing that we're addressing here.
Jake (24:16)
Yeah, there's lots of really good things there. And I think you've touched on probably why this myth has been perpetuated as to what fatigue is, is because people are just simply associated with the feeling. And like you said, you could do those 20 singles, you could come back feeling like, you know, absolutely awful, not wanting to touch a barbell, but you may not be fatigued. And so you could do these 20 singles, not be fatigued by the following day, or certainly by two days, but in that study the following day. And then you, and we're not even talking.
you know, 20 singles of a barbell curl. I mean, we're talking like compound lifts, squats, and yet you could do a single set of 20, 25 repetitions in a leg extension and still be fatigued days later.
Chris (24:56)
Absolutely. And that's the issue because that then requires us to say, well, what's happening then? Why is this happening in this particular way? And so that requires us to then say, what is the underlying physiological state that we need to investigate to understand post-workout fatigue? And ultimately, what it comes back to, and I posted about this very recently, I did a slide deck where I showed people that
post-workout fatigue is not actually primarily happening during the workout. It's actually a process that we undergo in the post-workout period.
Jake (25:30)
in case people have missed it, could you just quickly cover again, so we've said sort of singles, you could do 15, 20 sets and be recovered. And then you said in that graph that you've put together, six to 10 repetitions, and then you said that these high repetitions, 15, 20 plus, they're obviously more fatiguing still. Is there...
Can you just quickly cover that sort of continuum? Where do we see these significant steps up in post-workout fatigue?
Chris (25:59)
Sure, so this is really, really interesting and this is something that is becoming more obvious the more time I think we spend looking at this data. The more we look at these groups of studies and go, okay, what's happening here? So basically, we can start with those three categories, the one to five, six to 15, and then 16 plus. And exactly as you just summarized, we've got very little post-workout fatigue happening in the heavy group.
moderate amount happening in the moderate group and then just silly amounts in the light load group. Also if we drill down within those categories especially when we're looking at the heavy end of the spectrum we can do the same thing again. like the example of the 20 singles there's just no fatigue happening at all in the post-workout period but when you start to get up to even 8 to 10 sets of you know sort of the kind of the
3, 4, 5 repetitions per set, then suddenly it starts to display fatigue at 24 and even 36. And then if you push it up to this, I think there's one of the studies I've got on my list is sort of brushing the 6 rep max mark, then you start to see 48 hours as well maybe, and in certain cases. Interestingly that, no I think that 6 rep actually was only 36 hours, but the interesting thing about that 6 rep max study is that they did have a
much more granular measurement of post-workout fatigue. So they took multiple measurements over the period they measuring, not just at 24, 48, whatever. And that showed a secondary muscle damage effect. So we'll get into that in a minute when we talk about what post-workout fatigue actually looks like. But when you see something like a secondary post-workout fatigue effect, where you get that initial strength loss as a result of the workout, and then you come back for 8, 10, 12 hours later and it's dropped again,
secondary reduction in strength that tells you you've got an inflammatory process going on, which is part of the key kind of post-workout effect. So in answer to your question, what we see not only is differences between heavy, moderate and light loads, but we also see differences within those rep ranges. So it's a sliding scale all the way through. And I think this is really interesting thing, which is that if you're working with,
Jake (28:07)
Yeah.
Chris (28:12)
singles, doubles, triples, which is kind of how Olympic weightlifting is constructed. If you're working in those rep ranges, then they can literally just train every day and bash out a whole bunch of singles and doubles and come back the following day and do it again. And that's why it works, because ultimately those kind of repetition ranges just don't really cause much post-workout fatigue. And if you're managing that kind of other side of the problem, which is, you know, hating the barbell.
not wanting to do that and it hurting and if you've got the resilience to those issues you know for whatever reason maybe you're just constructed in a way that biomechanically means that you can squat perfectly with absolutely no you know kind of discomforting sensations or problems or any other soft tissue issues then fine I mean you can basically do that forever not forever forever but you get the idea as soon as you start to push up towards that top end of that racket and you're doing fours and fives and sixes well that's then a very different category
So I think we do see a difference in the 1 to 3 from the 4 to 6.
Jake (29:09)
make one observation based off that. So in the program we just talked about, the Reg Park one, he actually wrote a, I guess like a secondary program for people who wanted to do weightlifting instead of bodybuilding. And it was very much the same kind of thing, but he made a few exercise substitutions and he added in several additional exercises. So it was actually more volume per muscle, but they were doing triples instead of fives.
And that's interesting what you've just said there, that if you drop down to triples, there's a much higher ceiling, and that actually followed exactly what we saw in that program.
Chris (29:39)
Exactly, you know, think, I mean, we obviously probably would consider Doug Hepburn's programs to be a little bit outside of our focus on this podcast, but you look back at those and you're sort of doing eight sets of two and three. That, think, really is one of those sweet spots where you get an enormous amount of work done, tremendous strength gains, very effective hypertrophy. I personally ran that program for about two years.
I absolutely loved it. I only really kind of struggled with because I was probably at the older end of the spectrum of the kind of people who'd be doing that program. But I only really found it was just occasionally I would get discomfort, maybe hip pain doing squats or something like that. Never really have any issues with fatigue, always making progress. So personally, I really kind of found those programs to be very, effective for what they were trying to do. So, yeah, I think again,
What we've got is not just differences between these categories of rep ranges, but also within the category. And it's actually quite a steep curve, like we've just been saying. The curve going from the singles, doubles, triples up to the fours, fives, and sixes is a very, very big shift.
Jake (30:33)
the nature.
So singles, doubles, triples, eight plus sets, fours and fives in a 48-hour recovery period, fours and fives, what, four or five sets, thereabouts.
Chris (30:53)
I think that's probably right and that would fit perfectly with what Reg Park was doing. I think probably that's true. think a five sets of five is probably toppy. And again, but we have to stop and just remember that that's not five sets of five all the time. That's five sets of probably a bunch of threes, some fours, and the five here and there. And so maybe start out and you get five on your first set, but maybe you do four and then three and then three, what have you.
It's not actually spending the whole time doing fives. You've got maybe just one or two weeks here and there where you've got fives.
Jake (31:26)
And then sixes, sevens, eights, where's the ballpark?
Chris (31:29)
I think we're pushing
into the moderate load spectrum there. I think you're starting to get to the zone where realistically, where I would be always trying to keep three sets as my target. I think ultimately we have to remember that across, and this is something we were talking about before we started this podcast actually on a completely separate topic, which I won't raise here because it's an entirely different kind of problem.
when we use statistical significance to identify the presence of a particular phenomenon, we've got to bear in mind that we're using that in the context of our measurement accuracy levels. So we're only going to find stuff if it's really, really obvious. So I think when we're talking about post-workout fatigue, we have to remember that when we are using statistical significance to identify the presence of something, that's when it's
really screamingly obviously there. That kind of tells you if you just kind of extrapolate logically without getting emotionally attached to how statistical significance works, if you just extrapolate logically that implies that we're probably missing the presence of post-workout fatigue in a lot of other situations. I'm not trying to kind of, know, a lot of people say that I over estimate how important fatigue is. I absolutely don't. But.
I'm just kind of pointing out here that there will be scenarios where we can say, statistically, there's no fatigue there. I bet there is, though. I bet there is some. I bet there's a tail end of some there. So realistically, yes, you know, if you're doing three sets of, say, five, six, seven, you're probably going to find that there's a lot less likelihood of post-workout fatigue being present in comparison with somebody who's doing the top end of that range, eight, nine, and ten.
higher than that or whatever. Absolutely. But I would still probably say that my limit is probably three sets. Realistic kind of sensible limit is probably three sets for that zone. So, yeah, I think you probably go to five sets when you're going below five all the time. I think if you're going above five, like I tend to train above five a lot because it's just convenient to do so. But, you know, I think if you're doing that, I think I would still sit with the three sets in the same way that because it technically is a moderate load at that point.
Jake (33:36)
And when do you think you would have to drop down to two sets?
Chris (33:39)
So the chances are, I've never thought about that question, the chances are that if you're training all the time in the rep range between 10 and 15 and you're pushing the higher end of that spectrum, then I would imagine that you're probably going to need to ameliorate your three set standard that I would say is a moderate low standard. If you're always training that 10 to 15 rep max range.
I would say probably want to be on two instead of three sets. I just don't understand why you would train in that rep range when you can probably just as easily train in the six to ten. Maybe there are certain practical situations where people just go, I'm so strong and this exercise is the only one I've got. OK, fine. OK, well, you know, I understand that. know, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Jake (34:18)
think practicality is a good argument there. I
do use that prep range for some exercises and it's almost always practicality.
Chris (34:24)
For that reason, exactly.
You but you're like eight feet tall, so I mean. So, I mean, that's the advantage of being a small guy. So, I think, yeah, in 10 to 15, I would say, if they're in that range, then I'd probably drop from three times. Two, above 15, obviously, it's just not gonna work. You're not gonna be able to train three times a week with any number of sets per workout if you're in the above 15.
Jake (34:46)
think that was really interesting. Hopefully people have enjoyed that. I derailed you wanted to talk about fatigue mechanisms, so I'll let you go now.
Chris (34:53)
Sure, so people are going to be really sick of me talking by the end of this podcast. So basically, I just wanted to take five, 10 minutes to walk through exactly what is happening in the post workout period and why these rep ranges produce the effects that they do. So essentially, very quickly as a preamble, there is a kind of...
Again, in the fitness industry as a whole there's a perception that post-workout fatigue is produced by muscle damage and muscle damage is caused by muscle fibers tearing themselves apart during exercise. Neither of those two statements are really true. So basically post-workout fatigue is a collection of four or five separate mechanisms and they all trace back to biochemical processes that occur during a workout in relation to calcium ion accumulation.
So the reason we talk about calcium ions is because when you activate a muscle fibre, if you activate it electrically from the central nervous system, then what happens is the electrical signal travels along the cell membrane, goes down inside the transverse tubule and triggers the release of calcium ions into the fibre. So you're basically converting electrical signals into chemical signals to make the fibre do the cross-bridge formations that produce force. So it's kind of like a communication process. The issue is the calcium ions...
when they enter the muscle fiber, they don't just tell the actins and myosins to bind with each other to produce force. They also trigger a whole bunch of other processes which create fatigue. And so I kind of call these calcium ion-related fatigue mechanisms. Now, during the exercise, what you're going to have is a couple of calcium ion-related fatigue mechanisms, one of which is called excitation contraction coupling failure, which is where the communication process breaks down. So you kind of, you fragment the
triadic junction and the electrical signal arriving no longer produces a kind of a signal internally to produce cross-produce. And that's a little tiny damage mechanism essentially. I we call it excitation contraction coupling failure because it's a failure of the excitation contraction coupling process but the reality is it's damaged to a little protein that holds the junction in place so we get this tiny damage mechanism. You can also get a little damage mechanism on the surface of the cell membrane that's produced by when the
mitochondria are dealing with calcium ions, they will produce reactive oxygen species which trigger the release of a protease which damages the cell membrane and that then prevents electrical signals from transversing the muscle cell membrane. Now interestingly, very quickly, a lot of the time when we see reductions in electromyography readings it could be because of this cell membrane excitability reduction. So we've got to be careful when we kind of try to deduce what's happening from a sort of
central nervous system point of view into what's happening on the muscular point of view because you can get reductions in EMG signals because of this activation failure locally rather than centrally. So anyway, so you've got these mechanisms happening during the workout which are creating a reduction in muscle fiber force. Again when you hit the post-workout period the calcium accumulation has triggered the release of proteases which start damaging the myofibrils and that's when you start to see what we would call as muscle damage happen.
but that's happening in the post-workout period, that's not happening during exercise. When that protease damage starts to kind of settle down, you then have an inflammatory process which clears away all of that damage, creating essentially even more damage in the sense that you've got to think of this inflammatory process as a clearing away process. I like to call it a Pac-Man process because the of the macrophages come in and just eat stuff. But basically it's a clearing away process. You're clearing away all the process and then after that's happened, you're then going to start building new myofibrils.
This is essentially the heart of the problem that I've been battling with some people on social media recently where they've been trying to tell me that damage gets repaired before hypertrophy can happen. I'm like, well, we know that hypertrophy happens in day one after a single set exercise because my ops comes down to baseline after like 29, 30 hours. But we also know that damages, any damage that's happening is getting.
basically occurring in that first 12 to 24 hours. So damage repair can't actually happen before hypertrophy is being processed because the damage hasn't even happened at the point where the hypertrophy is already done. Or at least not all of it. So what happens is you've got this two-phase process. Calpains, proteases causing damage to myofibrils, followed by separately, secondarily, this inflammatory process. So what I've just done there very, very quickly is describe
three key post-workout fatigue mechanisms all deriving from calcium ion accumulation. Firstly, you've got excitation contraction coupling failure. Secondly, you've got damage to the cell membrane, preventing conductability of the action potentials. And thirdly, you've got the myoflip of the damage. So, very, very briefly, what's happening here is that the cell membrane excitability reduction and the excitation contraction coupling failure are switching the muscle fibre off internally.
they're stopping you from actually creating cross bridges completely. The fiber just won't do anything, it won't produce a mechanical tension at all if you've created either of those two fatigue mechanisms.
Jake (39:47)
What's the timeline? When do those fatigue mechanisms?
Chris (39:50)
So excitation contraction coupling failure is happening inside of a workout. So if you do a set to failure with, and we'll get into rep ranges in a moment, but if you do a set to failure with a sort of a rep range that's kind of above five, six, seven-ish, you're going to have some excitation contraction coupling failure happening then. If you do a bunch of sets in that situation, you're going to start to see some ring damage as well. So it's slightly delayed in comparison. You're not going to see any damage. That's fiber specific.
Jake (40:16)
And that's muscle specific, obviously.
Chris (40:19)
muscle fibre specific because we're talking about individual fibres experiencing that issue. ⁓
Jake (40:23)
But if you're doing full
body and you take a set of failure with 10 repetitions and then you go to another muscle, then, yeah.
Chris (40:28)
totally irrelevant yeah yeah exactly
and then thirdly the third of the three mechanisms I've described is this muscle myofibrilla damage and of course that you know you could still be activating a fiber at that point but you don't have as many fibra myofibrils that week because you damage some of them and the protease basically causes damage but then the inflammation just clears it away completely it takes the myofibril out
We talk about repair and I've mentioned this a whole bunch of times, but we talk about repair, but it's not really repair, it's replacement. you can't really think of the repair processes like you might, for example, if you've got a shelf that you need to repair in the house, you kind of look at it and you tinker about it and you fix the thing that's missing. That's not how repair processes work inside muscle fibers.
The analogy in this situation would be you would take the old shelf down remove it throw it away and put a new one in place That's it's a replacement process not a repair process really so That's our three key post-workout fatigue mechanisms that are happening inside the muscle fiber They're all going to be basically triggered initially by the calcium on accumulation now You can have like you mentioned earlier central nervous system fatigue the reason that happens is because the inflammation that is
creating this second wave of damage, I mentioned that earlier, the second wave of damage creates a secondary loss in strength. That inflammation gets into the bloodstream, creates a sensation in the brain, produces supraspinal CNS fatigue. Now that is going to be whole body because it's the brain level phenomenon. So what we've got here is three localized fatigue mechanisms which are fiber specific and a whole body CNS fatigue mechanism which is going to affect everything. Now that is only going to kick in when the inflammation kicks in which is going to be, you know, six to 12 hours post workout.
Finally, if you really want completeness, can also say, well, if I've got post-workout fatigue locally in a muscle, I'm also going to have a coordination disruption. Now, that's something for the athletes to worry about. That's not something for the bodybuilders to think about. So we've got these four mechanisms plus one if you want to think about it from an athletic perspective. Right. So that's the super quick version of post-workout fatigue in a nutshell. The reason I'm explaining this now from a repetition range point of view is that
different rep ranges are going to create different amounts of calcium ion accumulation in the fibers. So if you literally just do a couple of repetitions, you're not giving the muscle fibers enough time to accumulate calcium ions. It's literally that simple. So if I do singles, triples, then there's almost no calcium ion accumulation because I haven't actually activated the muscle fibers for long enough to allow calcium ions to accumulate. If I start doing higher repetitions and you start to accumulate more and more calcium ions because you're activating muscle fibers for a longer period of time.
That's it. So if you look across the entire rep range that we've described today, you go from single all the way up to 20, 30 repetitions per set. All you're doing is changing the amount of time you're spending activating the ossofibre and exposing it to calcium ions and allowing those calcium ions to accumulate. So if I do low repetitions, I don't allow that to happen. And if I do high repetitions, I do allow that to happen. So rep range is one of the key factors that determines how much post-workout fatigue mechanism you're going to generate.
And as I've described earlier, all of them bottleneck through this calcium ion accumulation problem. So essentially, I think one of the biggest misconceptions in the frameworks that people use when they think about post-workout fatigue is they think, well, I might have this mechanism, or I might have some CNFT, or I might have this and what so ever. It doesn't work like that. Every single post-workout fatigue mechanism comes through calcium ion accumulation. So it's package deal. You get all of them, or you don't get any of them.
Jake (43:49)
Mmm.
Chris (43:53)
So it's like you get the excitation contraction coupling failure and if you've got that because you've accumulated calcium ions you must also have to some degree some cell memory damage. And if you've got that you must also have some myoflurability damage because you've created some proteases in response to the calcium accumulation. It's all connected.
Jake (44:12)
Are there ways of training that would cause
more, like you couldn't sort of cause more of one particular type compared to another, because it's all driven just by code? Yeah.
Chris (44:18)
No, not at all, because it all bottlenecks through the same original
phenomenon. It's actually, although when people listen to me talk about this stuff, they go, wow, that's really complicated. I'm like, yeah, but just stick with it for two minutes. Because when you get to the end of the explanation, what you realize is it actually is really simple because it all coalesces into a single problem, which is if you are creating a lot of calcium on accumulation during the workout, then you're going to create a lot of post-workout fatigue. All of the mechanisms. It's a package deal.
Jake (44:47)
So a set of 20 being more fatiguing or causing fatigue to last longer than a set of 10, is that because there's more muscle fibers that are experiencing these excessive amounts of calcium ion accumulation then?
Chris (45:00)
It's not that there's more muscle fibers, because if you train to failure, then you're probably seeing a very similar number of fibers being activated. It's the duration to which they're being activated.
Jake (45:10)
But presumably, training to fail is going to cause the muscle fibers of the highest threshold motor units to be active for a similar duration. So is it that there's other fibers that active for longer and that's what's...
Chris (45:22)
Exactly, exactly. you're
basically you're continuing to the point where because the easiest way to think about it is the other way around so if you start with Where your fatigue levels have to be at the end of the set in order to fail that kind of helps so if you're imagining right you've got a Sort of a 15 rep max and you think you've got a calculation that allows you to establish that's approximately 70 % of your one rep max
In other words, you've got to reduce your strength by 30 % to get to the point where that 70 % of Ulmer at max is now impossible for you to lift. That's the process that you kind of got to go through. like, of that 30%, obviously there's going to be a chunk of central nervous system fatigue associated with the exercise that you've just done. There's going to be some metabolite-related fatigue, and there's going to be some of this calcium-ion-related fatigue. Essentially what we're saying is that because of that...
larger percentage because if I just do like a 5 rep max which is 90 % then I've only got to drop strength by 10 % a big chunk of that is metabolites a little bit of CNS fatigue and I'm done there's almost no calcium unrelated fatigue at all but if I push onwards and try and do 10 rep maxes and 15 rep maxes and now I've got a 70 % and I've got to find that extra 20 % of reduction in strength a big chunk of that's going to come from calcium unrelated fatigue and the reason for that is because if you look at the individual fatigue mechanisms during a set
CNS fatigue, metabolite-related fatigue, and calcium-related fatigue, the metabolite-related fatigue is fastest. So if you're only doing a couple of reps, you get it all from metabolite-related fatigue. If you're doing a few more reps, you're to get some from CNS fatigue as well. And if you do some more, going to get, and it sort of just works like that in the sense that the fewer repetitions you do, the more you're going to get from metabolite-related fatigue and the less you're going to get from calcium-related
Jake (47:03)
I hope people follow that because what you're saying is you can get to failure through different repetitions and what's getting into failure is ultimately different types of fatigue. ⁓
Chris (47:11)
The fatigue mechanisms
vary depending on how long you're exercising for. if you were to just literally measure everything from one rep max through to a marathon run, can literally just see the change in fatigue mechanisms as you go through that sequence. it's exactly the opposite way around from what most people think, literally the opposite. So if I look at the one rep max, what's the thing that causes me to experience fatigue in one rep max? It's metabolites, it's nothing else.
If I start to do doubles and singles, sorry, doubles and triples as well as my singles, then I'm going to start to see a bit of CNS fatigue creeping in there, just a little bit. Start to do more repetitions and you're going to start to see some calcium amyloid fatigue creeping in there as well. If you push things right the way up through the rep range and you get all the way through the top end of the light loads and out the other side to the point where you've now no longer got any vascular occlusion happening, so now you can't accumulate metabolites and you don't have metabolite fatigue.
Now what happens very interestingly is that the number of reps you can achieve suddenly skyrockets for a given percentage on max skyrockets. You can now do low loads more repetitions and that then starts to change the thing completely. And ultimately it pushes all of the fatigue now across to the central nervous system because ultimately you can always kind of just do one more repetition if you put your mind to it. And then you end up in this scenario where pretty much 50 to 70 percent of your
actual fatigue you're experiencing is supraspinal in nature. when we look at fatigue across the entire range of human activities, there's almost no CNS fatigue in a heavy load one rep max, and there's pretty much exclusively CNS fatigue at the upper end of the spectrum.
Jake (48:48)
So you could basically have like a bar, like a 100 % bar and whether you're one, five, 10, 20, you could have, know, X percent is coming from this fatigue, X percent is coming from metabolites, calcium iron. That would be, yeah, so failure is not failure. You know, like obviously what's leading to that.
Chris (48:52)
Yeah, you can. That's exactly what you can do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can. Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly.
Well, failure
is failure is always the same thing. And this is again an argument I get into with people because they're like, well, muscular failure is when the muscle can't produce enough force. And I'm yes and no. Yes and no. mean, technically from the outside, it's going to look like that. But the reason you hit failure is because you reach the maximum tolerable perception effort. You can see this happening like this very famous endurance runners, ultra endurance runners who can run for days and days and days and days.
Jake (49:12)
You
Chris (49:28)
And that basically, when you put one against the other, it's literally just a mind game. It's like who can psych the other one out? Because ultimately, you can always do one more step. There's nothing really stopping you doing more one step if you're motivated enough. If you increase the tolerable section of effort, if you suffer pain to a greater extent, then you'll just be able to do that extra step. And so it becomes this really crazy situation where people can push themselves to absolutely insane limits.
Now, you don't see that as visibly at the other end of the spectrum, but it's still there. It's just the the magnitude of effect is much smaller. Many, many, many orders of magnitude smaller, but it's still there. So ultimately, we're always hitting muscular failure, task failure because of the maximum tolerable perception of effort. It's just much less visible at the high intensity end of the spectrum.
Jake (50:16)
the consequence I guess from a post-workout perspective is quite different. Now you've given us timelines as to when these start to occur, but you haven't really touched on how do they differ in how long they persist for in terms of excitation, contraction, cupping failure, or myofascial repair or replacement. What's the difference in length?
Chris (50:37)
So, excitation contraction coupling failure seems to have a fairly tight boundary around it. I mean, I'm sure there are studies showing that it runs longer or shorter, but generally speaking, if we measure excitation contraction coupling failure after a workout, it usually sticks around for, say, somewhere between two and four days. Two at the obviously...
end of the spectrum where we're dealing with normal strength training and you're to push it up to maybe four days if you do a little bit of eccentric overload in there. The damage to the cell membrane is contentious. It really depends on what data you look at. If you look at data which has measured just the cell membrane excitability directly, it tends to go away quite quickly within probably about six hours. So it maybe isn't a post-workout mechanism that we need to worry about too much.
other data in direct data suggests that you could have sort of quite a permeable sand membrane for a couple of days post workout so in that case it might fall in the same category as excitation contraction coupling failure. It doesn't really matter because the two are doing the same thing so whether it's excitation contraction coupling failure or both excitation contraction coupling failure and sand membrane damage loss of sarcolemma excitability doesn't really matter because they're doing the same thing they're both switching off the fibre you can't
load of fibre that you can't switch on. Again, just let me emphasise this a moment when people say, you worry too much about post-workout fatigue. No, I'm not worrying about post-workout fatigue. I'm worrying about being able to stimulate the fibre and I can't stimulate the fibre if it can't switch it on. Post-workout muscle damage through the calpain process, the protease process followed by the inflammatory process, those are really interesting concepts because they literally expand and contract according to the
magnitude to expose it to calcium ions. If you expose the muscle fibers to a very small amount of calcium ions you're going to have a tiny amount of muscle damage it's going to get cleared out within a day or two. You can push that process to silly extents so obviously this is not done in human studies but you can do it in animal studies and you can see three or four weeks worth of muscle damage. It takes that long to fix the problem. Generally doesn't take longer than that because what we have again a little bit of a terminology issue but
Exercise scientists differentiate between muscle fibre repair and muscle fibre regeneration. Technically, again, the fitness industry doesn't do this, but exercise science does. Exercise science will say muscle fibre repair is when you keep the existing muscle fibre and you just replace bits of it to tar dam. It's like the example I gave of the shelf. You take the shelf essentially down and you put a new shelf up. That's the repair process as it stands. Regeneration is where you would...
like keeping the same analogy, you would knock the whole house down and build a new house. So regeneration is where basically the old fiber goes necrotic inside the cell membrane, completely dies, you clear it all away, it's absolutely completely gone apart from the cell membrane and you completely build a new muscle fiber inside the old space and that is regeneration. complete and utter rebuilding of a fiber from the ground up and the only thing you keep is the cell membrane. That's regeneration. Now...
Jake (53:34)
and the house comes back smaller in that scenario.
Chris (53:37)
Well, that's an interesting question. mean, I don't actually know and I don't think anybody's really done any work to establish what that would look like. You end up with a new muscle fiber inside the old cell membrane. How many myofibrils you end up with, I could not say. But you end up with a new cell membrane. Sorry, a new fiber inside the old cell membrane. The reason I mention this is because regeneration tends to take about four or five weeks to happen.
So in that scenario we would say that we're highly unlikely to see repair processes push past that number of weeks because if the fiber detects that the amount of damage is so catastrophic that it's going to take four or five weeks to do all of the repairing then why bother? You know, makes no sense. Just regenerate the fiber and start again. So and interestingly
I was looking at this yesterday because I was a little bit aggravated by people saying that muscle damage doesn't happen in trained lifters. I actually went and found a whole bunch of data showing regenerating muscle fibers inside power lifters. So biopsies were taken of very high level power lifters and you can actually see regenerating muscle fibers inside their muscles. Now that's really interesting because basically that says you can get catastrophic level damage on a fiber by fiber basis.
in people who have high levels of voluntary activation who are very well strength trained, large amounts of muscle mass and perhaps their muscle fibers at the top end of their motina pool were being accessed, but they're very fast twitched, very vulnerable to these calcium ion related fatigue mechanisms, you can get essentially regenerating fibers in those situations. So totally and utterly invalidates this idea that trained people don't get muscle damage. I don't know where this idea comes from, but I see it all.
Jake (55:10)
Now I've got a couple of questions and I want to stick with the fatigue before I ask you more application based question. But in terms of, so you sort of when the fatigue mechanism start, how long they're likely to last for, and that they're kind of all being driven by the same thing, by calcium ion accumulation. So we've sort of talked about different rep ranges influencing that.
Do we want to touch on anything else that's influencing that as well?
Chris (55:37)
I think it's worth mentioning, just so that we've got to reference here. So basically, there are kind of five things. And I've done a bunch of articles on my FAQ to list these out. They're all available if people want to look into it in more detail. essentially, rep range is just one of those five. So obviously, proximity to failure is going to work more or less the same way as rep range. So if you start.
leaving reps in reserve, then you're gonna dial things back a little bit. Now the interesting thing here is that if you recall a moment ago, we were talking about how the different fatigue mechanisms have different appearances in time over the course of a strength training set. So if I do doubles or singles or even triples, basically because metabolite-related fatigue is so much faster in its appearance than the other fatigue mechanisms, I just end up with metabolite-related fatigue happening and nothing else.
The same thing kind of happens if you start taking reps in reserve. So because calcium iron load fatigue is back-ended in the set, I can really miss a lot of it by just leaving a rep or two reserve. And I've pointed out to people that if they're doing moderate loads and they leave two reps in reserve, they can pretty much avoid the majority, if not all of that calcium iron load fatigue. If you're doing heavy loads, you probably only need to leave one rep in reserve. So...
I really, really like the kind of sort of five rep max with one rep in reserve, something like that, doing four reps with a five rep max, think is a brilliant, brilliant sweet spot. Really, really does mitigate a lot of that problem. So proximity failures, the first one I would look at. Volume, of course, obviously you do a whole string of sets, you can end up with more exposure of the muscle fibers to calcium ions because you're activating them for a longer period of time. So those are the kind of like the three that I would say are
duration driven. So essentially volume, proximity to failure and rep range, all you're saying here is how long are you activating these muscle fibers for? That's really all we're saying.
The other two are caused by a different phenomenon. They're caused by stretch. So essentially you've got the resistance profile or how you're conducting the exercise such that, you know, are you activating the muscle fibers in a stretched position or not, basically. If you are, then you're to have the opening of stretch activated line channels. That's going to cause accumulation of calcium ions through a different mechanism. And you basically just got to turbocharge the problem that you've got. So I like to say to people, imagine doing something like
I don't know, couple of sets of heavy hip thrusts versus one set of high rep squats. They're just completely and utterly different animals when it comes to post workout fatigue because you've got this kind of heavy load situation with your hip thrust where you've got a contracted position exercise. You're not going to get a lot of post workout fatigue from that. Your high rep set of squats, stretch position, high repetitions. Again, you could modify that further and say,
you know, I leave a rep and reserve on the hip thrusts and I train to failure on the squats. It's literally the perfect kind of combination to see the difference in post workout fatigue. So stretch, really big deal. And then, of course, just finalizing this. If you start messing around with the eccentric phase, either making it really long in duration or overloading it by using extra weight, you're going to end up with a lot more post workout fatigue as well, because again, you're exposing a lot more fibers to stretch or exposing those fibers to stretch and for a longer duration of time. So that's the five
basic features. That's essentially the only things that are going to drive post-workout fatigue from a point of view of this set of calcium-ion-relator mechanisms.
Jake (58:54)
So if you're doing a short composition exercise, you think potentially you could do actually an extra set than what you would be doing with another exercise.
Chris (58:59)
Well, that's it. mean,
that's, you know, historically, you know, we've talked about this idea of volumizing those kind of exercises. So, you know, if somebody would say to me, look, I want to do more volume than be like, OK, we'll pick pick exercises. Yeah, exactly. Pick exercises that have those contracted positions. And if you look at the leverage curves, you can generally find something that would work. Not always. I mean, you can't do that with a gastroc. It's not going to happen.
Jake (59:12)
easy to the exercises.
Chris (59:26)
But you can do it with many muscles. You can find a range of motion or a position or what have you that will advantage that muscle, but still keep it close to the contract.
Jake (59:35)
So you've mentioned, you know, people often say, who cares if you're fatigued, it's not going to make that.
So the difference, you know, fatigue may even help as far as hypertrophy, all kinds of misconceptions. from an actual kind of outcome base, I know it's hard to quantify some of this, but if you were to say, we've got, if fatigue is being a measurable reduction, temporary reduction in performance, we've got someone who is in this post-workout fatigue period, where there is, you know, a couple percent reduction in their performance capacity. What is actually happening that's going to negatively impact hypertrophy? Just so people are all clear
this matters.
Chris (1:00:10)
So if we're talking about post-workout fatigue, which is today's kind of focus, then we're only talking about these sort four or five post-workout fatigue mechanisms. So we've got cell membrane damage, excitation contraction, coupling failure, myoflipular damage, the CNS fatigue caused by the inflammatory process, and then as I said, the fifth one is coordination disruption if you're an athlete and you need to worry about that. So ignoring the athletic one, we've got these four mechanisms.
Excitation contraction coupling failure and the cell membrane damage literally switch off the muscle fibre. So you can activate it and nothing will happen internally. So you're not getting cross-bridge formations, which means you're not getting mechanical tension, which means you're not going to able to stimulate that fibre to grow. So if those mechanisms are present and you come back and train the muscle again, the fibres that are experiencing those deep mechanisms will just ignore you. Literally, they just don't even know that you're training because they're not being activated.
Myofibrilla damage is a little bit of gray area because if it's present then you're reducing the number of myofibrils to reduce the number of cross bridges, you're reducing the amount of tension. So that's not actually switching the fibre off, it's just kind of reducing the amount of force production. Now if you want to get really granular you can say well there's other damage as well and that's interfering with force transmission again, it's just the same thing. It just reduces the tension of
The annoying one is the CNS fatigue because that's created by the inflammatory response and it's triggered by the brain perceiving the presence of that information. Now the reason that's annoying is because it doesn't just affect the fibres that you've damaged. It affects the whole body. if you've done, this is ultimately the issue with bro splits. So if you go in the gym and you smash a muscle to bits with your bro split training program,
and you come back the following day and you train a different muscle group, that inflammation that you've created in that previous day's workout is going to hamper your ability to hit high levels of recruitment in a completely different muscle the following day. And that's the annoying one because that's the one everyone ignores when they're put in programs.
Jake (1:02:04)
And that's effectively, it's almost falling to the same categories of first two types of fatigue you're talking about because it's meaning you're not actually activating those muscle fibers.
Chris (1:02:12)
It works the same way from the muscles perspective in the sense that the two calcium-mimolativity mechanisms we mentioned, they switch the fibres off that are affected by that fatigue mechanism. The superspinal fatigue effect does that same thing, but it does it to every muscle in the body the same way.
Jake (1:02:29)
So you can smash
your calves and next thing you go to your biceps and there's going to be reduction in the amount of muscle fibers you're actually able to.
Chris (1:02:33)
I wouldn't pick those two
muscles as an example really because those are ones that have I mean calves are not going to get that easily damaged and biceps have got such a high volatil activation anyway. That would be a much better example. Yeah, if you do an arm day and then you come back the following day and try and train another muscle group you're not going to get the same level of recruitment that you would do if you'd had a day off the day before. you know, and again this is like very, very obvious mechanistic
Jake (1:02:41)
Maybe we go the other way, maybe we say bye, sip, then come back the next day and do your calves.
You
Chris (1:03:01)
logic that we're using. We're not, you know, sort of just making stuff up. We're looking and saying, what is the stimulus for this adaption? Well, it has to be activating the fibre and mechanically loading it. That's not contentious. That's not contentious.
Jake (1:03:13)
Yeah, yeah.
So you said hypertrophy. I think you said this last week. you know, would remember one thing, it's hypertrophies muscle fiber specific. And so in this situation, you're saying you're literally switching off the fiber. Like it cannot experience this mechanical tension. It cannot experience a stimulus of growth. Now, is there any way of quantifying, like, are we talking?
Chris (1:03:18)
Thanks.
Correct.
Jake (1:03:35)
one fiber, I'll be talking, like how do we, how can you possibly get your head around what kind of practical impact that might have?
Chris (1:03:42)
So, generally speaking, you can extrapolate from the fact that muscle fibers produce very similar forces if they're of the same cross-sectional area. So muscle fiber type, a lot people think that fiber type affects force production, it doesn't really that much. So, you can have a slow twitch fiber of a certain diameter and a fast twitch fiber of the same diameter and they'll produce very similar forces. 5-10 % difference.
Now, shortening velocity is a different animal, that's massively different, again, athletic problem, not a bodybuilding problem. So, that being said, if you have a post-workout fatigue reduction and you can measure that as a percentage change, then you can get a handle on how much of your muscle mass is being affected by fatigue mechanisms. Because, ultimately, the fatigue mechanisms start at the most fast-reaching end of the spectrum and they work their way down. Because...
The more fast-rich fiber is, the less capable it is of handling calcium ions because of the mitochondrial content. So if you have a lot of mitochondria in a muscle fiber, it will just deal with calcium ions and not let them accumulate. If you don't have as much mitochondria, it won't let you do that, and you'll end up with accumulated calcium ions very quickly. So you can basically just say, well, this is my muscle, and I'm dividing it into like 100 % worth of fibers.
If I come back the following day and I've reduced strength by 30, 40, 50 % mean generally speaking, post-workout fatigue doesn't get much more than 50 % You can get worse than that but that is specific populations of people that have a lot of fast-reach fibres You get back the following day and maybe you've dropped strength by 30 % which is a lot That basically tells you that you've kind of lost access to about 30 % of the muscle more or less Now whether that's happened due to calcium amyelid fatigue locally or due to metabolite, sorry
due to supospinal fatigue, due to the inflammation response is difficult to ascertain. But if I mean you can kind of do it by maybe looking at non-local fatigue is a really, really nice one. If you say do like a really horrible knee extension workout with only one leg and you come back the following day and you measure fatigue in both legs and you've got like a 30 % drop in strength in one leg and a 10 % drop in strength in the other leg, that tells you you've got like, you know, 10 % of
like a third of your post-workout fatigue is supra-spinal and the other two-thirds is local more or less. So I think that's one way you could do that but basically you're kind of saying that if you've got a 30 % strength drop then 30 % of your muscle fibers are not really playing ball with you the following day.
Jake (1:06:16)
Because I often hear people say, oh, know, some of these fatigue studies, there's only a, you know, 4%, 5 % drop in performance. And it's like, well, what you've just said there is that's still going to be very significant if your goal is to maximise hypertrophy.
Chris (1:06:28)
If
you're an advanced lifter who's only really capable of growing the muscle fibers at the top end of the motor unit pool, that could be your 4 % that you're trying to train. I so, you know, I think again, it's about saying what is actually happening. you know, I've rambled on a lot today, so I don't want to ramble on too much more. But it just occurs to me that a lot of the time when I...
Jake (1:06:37)
He
Chris (1:06:50)
have disagreements with people on social media, they can't actually tell me how this stuff, they think this stuff works. So I'm like, this is how my model works. I'm working through this logically. Here's the beginning, here's the end, and this is the reasons why I think it. And then the other person will be like, I disagree with you. like, okay, well, how do you think it works then? Crickets. And he's like, well, no, come on. mean, like, if you're putting yourself out there and you're trying to, you know, take part in this discussion, at least tell me what you think is happening. And I don't get an answer.
I'm well, you know, I'm open to talking about this stuff, but I need to hear an opposing position because I'm not going to throw my position out the window just because you don't like it if you can't give me something better. You know, so I think that's ultimately why I'm always coming from. It's like, let's create a model. Let's work it through logically and let's figure out what we think is going on. And if there's bits wrong with it, let's try and fix that. But what I'm not going to do is throw the whole thing out the window just because somebody else doesn't like it, which is happening more and more recently.
So we'll give me an alternative then.
Jake (1:07:45)
So this stuff is significant. Like if your goal is to maximize growth, this really matters. And you can find, like you've published, you've put out tables and stuff showing this stuff so people can see at what point are these fatigue mechanisms in place and how big are these reductions. Like you can find this information relatively easily. So the last question I've got here is we've talked about singles, doubles, triples, even fours. You can do many sets of these things.
Chris (1:07:46)
It is. It is.
Jake (1:08:10)
these are still stimulating hypertrophy. Like people who are aware of your model, they know that, well, ultimately those last five repetitions, give or take the failure should all be maximally stimulating. They should all contribute to hypertrophy. If you're doing doubles, you're doing triples, you're stimulating hypertrophy. Does this mean we can just all go train with 10 sets of two and stimulate more growth than your conventional sets of eight, two, three sets of eight to 12 kind of training program.
Chris (1:08:38)
So physiologically, yes. Practically, it's not going to be very much fun. So, you know, I think ultimately there are reasons why people don't do it. You know, there are people out there who can absolutely do it biomechanically suited to it. But I think generally speaking, it's not a lot of fun to train like that. I think the sweet spot, as I say, is in that kind of four to six rep zone.
You know, I think that's probably the place where the weight is not creating other problems, but at the same time is also not creating a lot of post workout fatigue. I think we've just got to, you know, sort of look at the traditional moderate load rep range, traditional, traditional. Obviously we're looking at Ridge Park here and he's working with three to five. And Sandow, obviously they're probably lifting a lot heavier. But the issue is.
We've kind of got ourselves into this zone where we tend to use moderate loads and I think we just need to correct downwards a notch. I'm not going to be the one who goes out there and tells people to lift with singles, doubles and triples. I don't think it makes sense practically. But I do think working at the lower end of the moderate load rep range, you know, if we say that's 6 to 15, I think working at the lower end of that, 6 and 7, is really going to make a big difference to a lot of people. It's going be a lot easier to recover from the workouts they're doing.
I like working in the 4-6 zone, I think it's a really nice sweet spot. think just moving down from 6-4 is a huge, huge shift in post-workout fatigue. But again, not everyone's going to tolerate that, not everyone's going to want to do that. I think it's going to come down to that balance between what people feel comfortable doing and safe and not getting soft tissue discomfort.
but the same time managing that post workout fatigue. And everyone's going to have an individual sweet spot, you know, I think for that. But generally I would say if you've got a moderate load range of 6 to 15 and you start moving from the top end of that down to the bottom end of that, I think that will make a big difference to people post workout fatigue. And I don't think that's too heavy for the majority of situations.
Jake (1:10:40)
Couple of thoughts I have on it. I'm interested to hear if you think anything differently about this. So I do program low repetition sets for my hypertrophy clients. And again, at the start of this podcast, I said I love that combination of Steve and Reg's program. And one of my favorite ways to train is actually to alternate those two. So I do one day of single set work, and that'll usually be in that sort of eight to 10 repetition range, sometimes even higher because again, based on, you know,
weight availability of a machine or whatever, I'll just use a stack and just do AMRAP or whatever, but I'm doing single sets. And then on the alternate day, I tend to do sort of like a three by five or four to five, whatever. And what I find with that is obviously your ability to use as many exercise variations in that second heavier workout, that's gonna be limited because need multi sets, it's gonna be a very long workout.
But obviously, you know if you're using more compound lifts if you're training at home or whatever That's going to be a very effective workout now when I am programming this stuff for clients a couple of points I make so firstly if we are using say sub five repetitions We don't need to be using if you're doing doubles or triples You don't need to be using a two three repetition max like you can be using a five rep max So, you know a lot of the criticism here is all if I'm doing doubles triples. It's so so heavy I need to load it so much. Well, no, you need to load it the same as you would load a set of
So from a loading perspective it's not any more difficult.
Chris (1:12:01)
Exactly, because ultimately a 5 rep max is going to be stimulating on the first rep, so you can absolutely just do a bunch of 5 rep maxes as singles or doubles. And I think that's probably the most elegant way of addressing the problem.
Jake (1:12:17)
So then the other thing is that obviously allows you to volumize like you're talking about before. So if you did have a priority muscle, a priority lift or whatever, you could do five, six, seven, eight sets, whatever with that five rep max, but you're doing doubles and triples and you can effectively get more stimulating volume in that workout than you would otherwise.
Again, a limitation here, if people listen to me say that well and think, well, I'm gonna go do that for every exercise, well, you can only do it for so many exercises, otherwise you'll be doing 60 sets in a workout, right? So time is gonna be a limitation, but either you could pick four, five, six exercises and do that within a single session and then have your longer session, 20 different exercises, whatever, in the other day, or.
and what I often program is one or two exercises in a session where we do this and then we do all our other exercises as single sets. So that's why I'm using it and then the other thing I'm using it for is exercises where I...
Say something like a squat, a hack squat, a pendulum squat. If I simply, or something that's easily damageable, very, very sort of cardiovascular demanding as well. Like if I'm doing a pendulum squat and I'm doing a set of 10, that is just gonna kind of ruin that session for me. Like I'm gonna need to wait 10 minutes before that's not gonna be affecting my next set. So for me, I would prefer to load that pendulum squat super heavy, do a five rep max, do doubles with it. I get my three, four sets.
out of doubles and that's going to take much less of a toll and impact regress my workout a hell of a lot less if I'm doing one or two sets of ten.
Chris (1:13:45)
totally. You know, think no, yeah, absolutely. I think there's there's a lot of creative ways to kind of work with this information. It definitely starts to go off the top end of what I'm kind of focused on. So it's like I could listen to you talk about this stuff and I'm like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And like my brain is just wandering thinking about calcium. It's just like I think again, it's.
Jake (1:13:57)
Mm.
You
You
Chris (1:14:09)
I'm always interested, I'm always kind of curious to see how this model gets implemented. And it's really cool to see the different solutions that you come up with and other people come up with. But it's really not something that I think I'm ever going to really try and do. It's just not my wheelhouse. It's kind of difficult to explain to people that I'm just, I'm trying to solve the problem of the physiology and people try and put me in their box.
Jake (1:14:28)
I know I've been talking to you about this for years.
Chris (1:14:38)
I get this in my Instagram questions actually. I do an Instagram questions every Saturday and a lot of the questions I get or many of the questions I get tend to assume that well I feel like they're putting me in a box with other people that they recognize doing some of the things and they go well you're like this person or you're like this person. I'm like well I'm really not because pretty much every person you want on our list is selling a training.
you know, and pretty much everybody is trying to get you to train in a particular way that they think is right. I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to teach you a physiological model that explains how all of this stuff works. So I'm not in that box. I'm in a different box. You know, and yes, I can interact with people that are doing those things, and I do enjoy doing that. But ultimately, their creativity is around the program design side of things. My creativity is trying to figure out how this stuff works on a physiological level. So, you know,
I'm always going to just kind of be a little bit behind the curve when it comes to program design, that kind of thing. I'm just it doesn't light me up the way that it lights up.
Jake (1:15:32)
You
I think it's helpful nonetheless to come to you and be like, does this make sense physiologically? we're not, you know, I'm not saying exactly, exactly. And I'm not saying that what I've just suggested are the only ways to do things. You know, obviously, like you've said, the model can be applied in ways we haven't discussed. And that's sort of out there for people to think about and creatively engage with and utilize. So at no point are we trying to put a limitation on and say it has to be used in this way.
Chris (1:15:42)
That's what I'm here for. That's what I'm here for.
Exactly.
Exactly, exactly. And I think a lot of people are surprised when they send me a program or a workout and they you know, they go, you know, is this going to work? I'm like, yeah, probably. And I think they expect me to go, no, you should not do it like this. You should do it like this way that I have said is the only possible way you can do it. Because they see other people doing that because everyone's got their own little pet programs that they want to kind of advance. I'm like, well, no, I think it would solve the problem.
you can have better and worse kind of solutions and you can have more creative and less creative solutions but ultimately from my perspective I can tell you physiologically what's going on and then whether there might be ways you could change it in a given direction to make it better but ultimately I'm not going to be standing there going no you must program like this or you must program like that. I will say to people that if their program has a very low frequency
of training each muscle that they're losing out by doing that and that's a choice that I wouldn't make but I'll equally be able to tell them whether I think the Net Hypertree over the week is going to exist or not based on the data we've got. Anyway, we're kind of a long way away from the purpose of this podcast at this point.
Jake (1:17:09)
We are, are. But hopefully people find it helpful and interesting. And the final point I want to make on that is why I find this conversation so helpful. Because again, like you said, it's not something that lights you up, but I still force you to talk about this stuff with me all the time. Because I remember talking to someone once and they were in Muso and they said, if someone asked me to write a song, I'd be like,
Chris (1:17:21)
You
Jake (1:17:29)
Where the hell do I start? What kind of song? But if they say, I want a song about this or like this in this time signature or whatever, and they give them some guideline, they're like, man, I've got so many ideas. And that's how this works for me when I think about programming. It's like, actually having these conversations with you over time has just expanded the possibilities. And it's like, wow, there's so many creative ways to use this model, take it, apply it.
shape it and come up with new ways of doing training that make sense as opposed to just not even knowing where to start.
Chris (1:18:03)
I think that's a really nice way of putting it and I hope that, and I would be very happy if people were to do that. I I think, you know, that the model is not designed to be constrictive, it's designed to be a facilitator. You know, as you say, it's designed to facilitate saying, look, anything that you do that fulfills these criteria will work, you know, and that hopefully is liberating rather than being constricting. I think a lot of people, I I get this criticism, people say,
Chris just says you've got to train in this way, otherwise it won't work. I literally see that being said all the time. And I've never said anything like that at all. You're not listening to what I'm saying. I'm saying this is how the physiology works. If you can't figure out a way of training programming within that framework, then I'm sorry, that's not my problem. That's a lack of imagination, because I think the problem is actually, the framework is actually really clear.
Jake (1:18:37)
You
Imagination, yeah.
Chris (1:18:55)
But anyway, that's a complaint. I'm just complaining at this point, so stop me talking and let's do some...
Jake (1:18:59)
Okay, we're done. We're
done. Thank you guys for tuning in, sticking with us for our rambling. Hopefully you enjoyed the episode and hopefully join us again for another.