Got it, I was under the impression that anything over 60% 1rm can give you a stimulus for growth from some things Mike Israetel has said but I may be misunderstanding him.
Actually you can create the stimulus for growth using as little as 30% of a 1RM so long as the load is taken to muscular failure.
I don’t think you’re misunderstanding him but I could be wrong. Mike has his own system for hypertrophy. It’s just that we disagree on certain principles about the most effective way to achieve growth. And science doesn’t support the “volume” theory about it…or let’s be clear, volume is only effective up to a point. Then it offers up no benefit. And I don’t believe in trying to find your maximal amount of recoverable volume either. Because I don’t think there’s any way to know that. I will show that in an article coming out where this study more or less proves you can still be recovering from a high amount of volume, and making gains, but that the gains are far less optimal than with less volume.
Progressive Overload and Frequency.
Paul, where do you see exercise variation/variability play into the equation? Rather, how much of a factor is it in making a muscle grow? When you said
On one hand, I know the answer is probably ‘nil’, but then again, it seems that, in principle, when a muscle hasn’t performed a certain exercise or exercise variation in a while, the DOMS that one feels afterwards is the product of what you described earlier, i.e. ‘for a muscle to grow larger it has to remodel itself as a means of protection against future trauma’… So let’s say I haven’t done RDLs in months and hit it with a heavy 5x5 during the week and cannot bend over for a few days due to the DOMS: is the muscle growing larger (with, say, sleep/nutrition being optimal for the sake of argument)?
Or maybe my hypothesis is completely wrong.
Muscle soreness isn’t indicative that growth is going to happen. Neither is muscle damage, if you actually drill down into the science (it’s hypothesized that muscle damage is a part of the equation).
When there is soreness with a new movement, or one that hasn’t been done in a while, it’s due to having poor intramuscular efficiency with that movement, so the motor units aren’t firing in a highly synchronous and collective way. But if you’ve been training long enough you’ll notice that it only takes 2-3 sessions max before that stops (the soreness) and that the movement starts to feel natural or efficient again.
I’m big on movement rotation but I’ve also been training for 30 years. So it’s a preference thing really. When I was younger I didn’t rotate movements very often, and sometimes not for years really. Because I wanted to get really strong on just a few lifts that I really liked. If you’re not pushing up against your genetic ceiling then you probably don’t need to worry about rotating a whole bunch of different movements in. Find 8 movements that offer up a high degree of stability, muscular output without a ton of neural taxation and blast those for a long time.
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My opinion would be progressive overload is the main driver. However, if sufficient volume isn’t there then you’re not training optimally if muscle growth is your main goal. Determining what volume to go with is difficult to assess as there are so many conflicting studies out there.
I have been using Mike’s style of programming for the better part of a year now and overall it’s worked very well (I did overestimate my MRV for a period and wound up running myself into the ground a bit) because it allows for a solid way to manage these variables. I might be misunderstanding him but I don’t think he expects there to be an actual MRV number but simply an estimation and that this MRV estimation changes over time (drops as a lifter gets stronger).
I’m looking forward to your article.
2 Squats
2 Hinges
2 Pulls
2 Presses
Pound away until you need to do something different. I’m big on this as well!
This is incorrect. There’s been a TON of studies done looking at the relationship of volume and growth, and it’s widely accepted that something between the ranges of around 10-20 sets per muscle in a training week is going to be the range.
Volume is only a factor up to a point. 3 sets tend to be better than 1 set, but who is really hitting a muscle with 1 set in a whole week? No one that’s serious.
At the same point, anyone who is doing 20 sets for legs in a training week probably isn’t training very hard, or is a recovery outlier. I poured over more than a dozen studies in the last few months that looked at the volume to growth relationship and if you really break them down, you’ll see that about 10-12 sets per week seems to be the optimal dose. Then I followed that up by talking to about a dozen smart and well developed lifters, and all of their “work sets” added up to just about that amount. On average it was about 8-10 true work sets a week for a muscle group.
Two of your movements there have a ton of neural taxation.
Would you group isolation work in with those total sets as well?
So
Squat 4 sets
Leg press 3 sets
Leg extension 3 sets equaling 10 total?
Or is this strictly multijoint movements only?
Yes single joint movements count.
Volume is a tricky thing to quantify, as are true work sets. Lots of people do 5 sets of 10, but they ramp up in weight, and though the sets on the way up might be hard, the top set might be the only true all-out balls to the wall set. So people might say “I did 5 sets of 10”, when they only did 1 set of 10, as far as true work is concerned.
^ YUP! Those “4 sets” preceding that are just warm ups. This is why I tell people “you aren’t doing 20 sets for legs”. Not REAL sets.
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Great points. Even in the John Meadows’ programs, which I consider relatively high volume, there are only a handful of sets on any given day where you feel like you’re going to die.
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These are the ones I’ve been doing for the past 5 months:
Back squat
Conventional DL
Bench
Military press
Chins
Dips
Bb/machine/Cable rows
Incline db press
Bb curl
Apart from minor stuff like abs and face pull or lateral raises every once in a while, I’ve been on 5/3/1 for 5 months and these are all the movements I’ve been doing, with the first 4 being the main lifts and the rest being assistance. I’m not pushing the progression as hard on the curls and maybe db presses as on the other lifts, so you can argue I’m really working on 7 movements.
I’m making pretty good progress, and I don’t plan on changing the movements anytime soon.
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How would you decide what counted as a real set?
Well anything with 4 reps left in the tank is a warm up. Regardless of movement.
A “real set” has to be determined by the lifter. But I’ll stand by my comment that a set with 4+ reps in it is doing ZERO for growth (and I have a study to back that up, as well).
For movements that are highly neural taxing 1-2 reps left in the tank are ideal, i.e. squats, deadlifts, etc.
For everything else? You should be pushing to the point where you either fail and can’t do another rep, or you know you would fail if you tried another rep. That’s real work.
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Lateral Raises to failure, meaning you can’t lift your arms more than a few inches off your sides because you continued doing partials after losing full ROM, are so fucking painful. It might sound weird, but they’re one of the hardest exercises for me to really push to failure on.
Also, doggcrapp is a great example of the “real sets” concept. Whether or not DC training is as effective as it’s fans CLAIM it is, I think it’s clearly one effective method, and it only has you doing 1 triple rest-pause set per exercise. The deads and squats are straight sets not taken to failure, but everything else is just 1 set. If you needed a ton of work sets, DC training would never have worked for anyone.
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DC has pushed out more mass monsters than any other training modality I can think of. Real talk.
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Would you count bench and OHP? I try to avoid going to failure with them.