You remind us all that we are all mentally weak. 31 days of Murph. Psst
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Haha! Small world! 
That’s how I learned what I know about rehab/prehab and all things injury. By getting busted up then doing what ever was needed to fix it.
I’m on the upside of the mend from a severe heart attack(not work related) . Will be on a clear cut tomorrow running the stump grinder. 
We’ll see how that goes. Endurance and heat tolerance have been pretty good thus far, but I’m bringing extra ice and Gatorade.
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Yep, stimulate, don’t annihilate. I find that it’s best to cultivate my inner lazy bastid to keep volume way down.
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I tend to agree, but I doubt 5 to 10 is optimal for everyone, especially if you are advanced
Competitive powerlifters at the top of their sport, regardless of age, do not have to “get real” in the context of the article. That is not the crowd he was addressing and perceptive readers know that.
Scott Abel who was enormous for much of his life and coached IFBB pros, including Lenda Murray, wrote a book about lifting over 50. He obviously wasn’t addressing 50-plus year olds still capable of or interested in 500-plus pound deadlifts.
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Tongue is firmly in cheek as I post it. I am more highlighting against the statement that these are guys in their 20s setting these lifts.
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Yes, and they’re amazing!
Not to steer this completely away, but there are also studies showing no upper limit to volume and hypertrophy scales linearly. I think much of the limitation from some of these studies are the necessarily small samples: you’re not getting n=32 in each group for something like this.
I’m not saying this to doubt the one you’re referencing (I haven’t even read it), just kind of musing in general.
Some people get better results with tons of volume, but they are the exception. No study on training/exercise is going to find what is best for 100% of people, it can show what most people respond best to but there are always outliers.
Which one, Israetel and friends? That was a bad study. The one done by Carvalho that found 5-10 sets to be optimal was actually set up in a realistic fashion, the problem is that each muscle group was only trained once a week and sets were all to failure, but you can’t really quantify effort otherwise so for the purposes of a study it makes sense. But maybe 8 sets per workout stopping 1-2 reps from failure and training each muscle twice a week could be better, you won’t know unless you run a study like that.
The main takeaway from the Barbalho study is that too much volume is counterproductive. Many experts have talked about diminishing returns as you do more volume, like you do double the work but only get 20% more gains, but it’'s worth it because you want the maximum results and are willing to put in the work. This study (actually two, one with men and one with women) showed that in fact you make less progress if you overdo it.
EDIT: the right name is Barbalho
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I honestly don’t know. I’m not familiar enough with any of the studies to speak intelligently. I think Schoenfeld did one with likely 40 weekly sets?
I don’t disagree at all that too much volume is counterproductive, and I also agree that taking every set to failure at least allows them to quantify effort.
Like you say, it’s not feasible to study every single variable.
That’s the same study I was referring to, I believe Israetel helped to fund it and also was defending it against Lyle Mcdonald’s criticisms, which seem very accurate. It was a bad study, and the objective seemed to be to prove a predetermined conclusion. You can read what Lyle Mcdonald had to say, Paul Carter also discussed it in his section in the “driver of hypertrophy” thread.
I think that once you have been training seriously for a while then anything that has you making progress on a regular basis without getting a bunch of overuse injuries is good. If high volume works well for you then that’s great, but if you don’t have the time for that or you end up with stuff like tendinitis then it’s probably better to play the long game.
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Gotcha. I probably need to actually read it, as well as the other study you’re referring to. In any case, I agree with all your conclusions:
I was just saying all studies in this realm are going to have inherent limitations. That doesn’t make them useless, just that you have to take them in context. I think we’re agreeing there.
Speaking of supporting pre-determined conclusions… I like a lot of what Paul has written from his own mind, but I do not consider him in any way an objective reviewer of data nor dissenting opinions - particularly after reading that very thread.
In any case, I appreciate your views on it. I think we have the same practical takeaways, and I’m really not in any position to debate the material because I haven’t even read it! Although, this is the Internet, so perhaps that makes me the unequivocal expert…?
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I agree, but I think he was right about that study.
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I think that the problem is also, what is 5-10 sets? A set to failure is very different than a RPE 8 set, and a set of squats is very different than a set of leg extensions.
So, if it’s 5-10 sets to failure, or technical failure, yeah I agree completely.
I think if I did 10 sets of squats to technical failure I might die.
You could look up the study (Barbalho et al.) to see exactly what they did, but the main takeaway is that less can be more.
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If it’s this study by Barbalho that you mean, it has since been retracted.
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Interesting. Do you have any information on why they retracted it beyond what is said in that link?
Greg Nuckols said on reddit that James Steele, who I believe was part of the study, said this
The original retraction request stated “…an a posteriori analysis of the data and identified inconsistencies that changed their evaluation of the results.” However, for transparency I would like to state that the reason for this retraction was confirmed to me by the senior author of this paper as being the result of a research assistant who was responsible for the transfer of paper records to the spreadsheet having “made much of the data” because he was “too busy to do the job.”
However, I haven’t done any research into it, so I’m just repeated what I’ve read.
Does this apply to both studies? There was one with men and the other with women, same deal and same results.
It’s a shame that assistant had to screw up a good study like that, hopefully more research will be done on this topic.
I think it just applies to this study. If you google “gnuckols reddit” you can find his comments, but I don’t think he says much more than this.