RIR, Rep Ranges and Muscle Growth?

This is mostly Mike Israetel/Renaissance Periodization stuff that hasn’t actually been proven - only hypothesized.

As much as they tout this drivel, go ahead and watch the videos of them training their bodybuilding competitors, and compare that to what they’re telling people to do… they always train their competitors to failure but preach to keep reps in reserve. Hmm.

Even if their model worked for those on the advanced spectrum of muscul development (it doesn’t), it would only work insofar as fatigue management from the perspective that you can perform more work… and the fatigue management side of that had been debated significantly, still without a real answer. So the only way this would work, isnt even proven (in practice or theory).

This whole theory is based on a flawed dataset, where they assume the stimulus you get from rep 8/10 is equal in stimulus to rep 10/10 (10 being failure). In reality, your failure rep has a significantly higher stimulus than any rep that precedes it. There is a meta regression to support that.

The bro science in me says "if there’s increasing stimulus per rep all the way to failure, going beyond failure is likely even more stimulating.

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