I am going for 405 this week (can’t count it yet, and it’s not 500 lbs), but my arms are still small. At the same time, I don’t think changing things up drastically would get me much bigger arms.
I’ve heard they make oils you inject into the muscles for guys like us.
im sure for regular people they are considered huge…
yes, i dont think doing 10 types of curls and extensions would give you extra 2 inches.
yes and you also can inject gear into arms… i was thinking abt this but someone on this forum said that triceps injections were too painfull to train with so i dropped the idea.
I used to pin delts. I have some build up that makes the middle head pop a bit. When I got my vaccine the nurse was concerned about it. I just said, maybe an injury. She couldn’t push the needle in all the way. So I think it is scar tissue from those injections.
I think we can also debate the equation, but let’s take it at face value.
I think we can still argue against the heaviest compounds with #maths because that load is now spread so significantly.
The 50 lbs preacher curl is all in your biceps peak, which lets say is 6 square inches (obviously mine is a square meter on the internet, but we get the point and I need the math to work out).
The 500 lbs deadlift is spread over the entire human body; Google tells me the average surface area of our hypothetical human is 2800 square inches.
So, the biceps peak gets 8.33 psi with the curl, but we only get .18 psi anywhere with the deadlift.
Obviously it’s not quite that simple, because we need to talk prime movers and contractions, but I do think that’s step one where the “heaviest” argument can fall apart.
Lol this just made my day…thank you.
When we looked at compound exercises that we wanted improve strength, it was to find find the sticking point or muscle group that failed first. We then went about working the muscle that failed first.
Conversely, the compound exercise when it nears failure is doing so because a muscle is being overloaded, not all of them. That muscle is experiencing the greatest progressive overload.
This is going to sound simplistic, but since the article wants to boast about the dip, there are a number of different hand positions on the barbell bench press. IMO, it is far superior to either the dip or DB bench press. One workout wide grip, then one narrow grip, and then one somewhere in between.
Not to mention playing with tempo, pauses, range of motion, degree of incline. I hear many guys say they never feel traditional bench press in their chest and I’ll often challenge them to try 5 sec negative reps (a true 5 sec), spoto press, or 1 1/4 pulse reps.
Fixed to say “surface area”!
Are we talking surface area or linear length of muscle fiber? 
Just busting your chops. I agree that while total weight lifted is significantly heavier for the deadlift, but that ROM and individual muscle contribution is rather small.
Also I find what @RT_Nomad said to be quite interesting. When a weakness is detected in things like deadlifts, we do accessory work to strengthen that muscle. Ironically, the muscle causing the failure is also getting the most stimulation during that exercise because it is individually at RPE10.
Personally, I’ve noticed some chest development last year from mainly doing barbell bench. I focus on pushing with my chest and don’t use a wide powerlifter grip. Dips bother my right shoulder, so I don’t do them.
To cut the deadlift some slack, most people perform them in a way to maximize their leverages and lift the most weight possible… and usually just for like 1 top set of 1 - 5 reps. I bet someone who does deadlifts for reps and focuses on squeezing their lats and upper back on top would get a lot more muscle stimulation out of them. John Meadows has a great video on how to do Rack Pulls this way, and I believe he actually squeezes his lats at the start of the lift too. This’ll definitely reduce the weight you can use, though.
Having Elhers-Danlos, I do nearly all my exercises in a manner similar to this. It’s almost like turning everything into an isolation lift haha. To be fair, I haven’t tried this on full deadlifts or rack pulls yet, only on DB RDLs. But this John Meadows “squeezing approach” on DB RDLs gives me DOMS on my rear delts that rows and rear delt flys never came close to. Just an anecdote.
Agree, but I’ll try and leave my reductionist counterarguments unmentioned.
@Andrewgen_Receptors are you actually asking “will bigger muscles always lead to more strength or a greater strength potential?”
My answer would be “no” and “probably”
I believe he’s looking the other direction: a stronger muscle is a bigger muscle. In my opinion, anyway, that’s a more nuanced point.
Does this go back to a Paul Carter point about getting stronger in the 6-12 rep ranges will make you bigger where as the 1-5 won’t do much for size? (Obviously overall volume comes in to play as well).
For me focussing on BB bench helped develop some size quite recently. I think that’s because it’s easier to progress on BB rather than DB but does that in itself make it a better exercise or not?
Conversely I find it easier to progress with DBs rather than BB because the BB hurts my shoulders, whereas the DBs allow a freer plane of movement so are shoulder-friendly.
I think I can lift pretty much the same weight for both.
Another factor not yet mentioned is the hormonal release that different lifts and their corresponding weights trigger. @TrainForPain made a great point about focused muscle stimulation causing the most localized muscular growth. Conversely, I’m firmly convinced (and studies also demonstrate) that heavy compound lifts, particularly explosive moments and/or those incorporating spinal compression, cause greater testosterone and growth hormone production than isolation exercises.
Anecdotally, I couldn’t do lower body lifts for a half decade, so I did upper body lifts three or four days each week. Despite lots of super body lifting, a mere couple months after returning to leg workouts my arms had grown and I was stronger at upper body lifts.
I think the article’s list is a good reference point, as it demonstrates a key principle. Merging it with @hankthetank89’s list, we arrive at compound lifts of each major type of movement that have the capacity to be heavily loaded as the best general muscle builders, particularly when augmented with focused isolation exercises. Kinda sounds like a sport I’ve read about, something about bodies and building them…
Better for what goal? And for what person? The real answer is “it depends”.
This is important, too. I use a phrase a lot in my real-life job that all the data in the world can’t argue with a surgeon’s personal experience. If this is what happened, then it’s real.
Not exactly what I was getting at, but there is a good bit of data to back up the ineffectiveness of training in the 1-5 rep range (concerning hypertrophy). Still, I think PC had a slightly misconstrued interpretation of the data in the article I believe you’re talking about. Training different rep-ranges, as high as 20 to as low as 2-3, has been proven to be most effective. this is why I like Rest-Pause, as I will execute say 17 reps, then 8 or 9 reps, then 4 or 5 reps - all within a short enough period to get the ‘pump’ benefit from working higher rep-ranges.