Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy
physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com77 points by Luc 6 hours ago
77 points by Luc 6 hours ago
> Healthy, recreationally active but untrained young males
Yeah this is why. Anything you do as an untrained person is going to get you newbie gains. It's just really easy to improve initially. Doesn't mean it'll work after the first 6 months
exactly. when you're new, virtually any type of lifting you do is going to create sufficient stimulus to trigger maximum muscle growth, because you're going from 0 to 1. unfortunately, since the only people that researchers can usually convince to participate in their studies are untrained, this has led to an enormous amount of junk studies where they try to extrapolate the results to people who are not untrained.
this wasn't a study of absolute growth (sure - newbie gains), but rather the difference between high and low load programming within individuals.
I thought it was already well understood/researched that it's not the weights that matter, but effectively taking your sets to muscular failure. While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights" there is practical aspects to this - you don't wand to spend hours at the gym, and doing heavy weights at 5-7 reps is sufficient as long as you are close or at muscular failure.
There are a few issues with taking every set to failure, the most important being that it will substantially increase your risk of injury. It sounds great until you consider compounds like the deadlift that can ruin your back if your form is bad, and by definition, going to failure means your form will be imperfect at some point. There are lots of macho powerlifters out there with permanently ruined spines who will probably die earlier than they would have otherwise, due to mobility degradation.
Particularly as you get older you become more injury prone and your recovery time slows down. This necessitates being cautious about how quickly you increase weight and how often you go to failure.
The better goal to target is increasing volume, where volume is defined as Sets x Reps x Weight. The literature doesn't conclusively establish that any one of these is "more important" than the others for hypertrophy. The only real caveat when you follow this rule is that at a certain extreme of low weight / high reps (like 50 reps) you wouldn't actually be doing resistance training anymore, it'd be cardio.
2 reps in reserve is fine and far less painful, but you need to go to actual failure often enough to know where failure is on each set. I’m nerdy enough to suggest rolling a 20 sided die for each set, and on a 1 take it to failure it’s not that complicated and keeps your predictions honest.
As I understand it taking a set near failure works reasonably anywhere between 5 to 30 reps, but 30 well controlled reps with good form * 3+ sets for each muscle group gets really boring.
>While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights"
The caveat is that you need anaerobic training. Low enough weight and it’s cardio, you don’t get giant legs by walking to failure for example.
Has anyone really ever walked to failure on a regular basis? I typically have to stop because of blisters not muscle failure. (The furthest I've done is 12 miles with +10% weight.)
I backpack often (usually 8-13% bodyweight in my pack) and during long summer days I can comfortably push well into the 30 mile per day range if there isn't too much vert to slow my pace down. My feet get sore, brain gets tired, and I run out of daylight well before any sort of muscle failure in my legs. If you aren't used to walking from sunrise to sunset doing so would build muscle, but your time would be better spent on a progressive overload leg routine in a gym.
I used to persistent hunt to failure, ended up with bulky calves and tibialis.
Where were you doing this? Were you ever successful? How did you do it, like what were your tactics? So many questions!
I’ve never heard about modern people doing serious persistence hunting, except for a stunt that I read about years ago. I think it was organized by like Outside or some running publication that got pro marathoners to try and they failed because they didn’t know anything about hunting
Well understood, but not widely known. The myths and superstitions around anything health related are frustratingly durable.
The weight does matter. You will never get bigger if you don't add weight to the bar, and you will never get bigger if you only train at 1% of your 1 rep max, no matter the number of reps. Producing a training stimulus requires placing the muscle under sufficient tension (enough weight) enough times to be at or near failure.
Fifty is excessive but you’re better-served doing 12-20 reps more than fewer, heavier reps if you’re pushing hypertrophy and already well-trained.
Brad Schoenfeld Has been on this body of work for a long time, and he is "Mr. Hypertrophy" in the field. So yes
What about the old gym adage "training to failure is failing to train" - is there any physiological basis for this, or is it mental, or just a myth?
That’s a Pl/Oly mindset rather than a BB/hypertrophy mindset. Totally valid advice in the right context.
Long story short, failed reps get much more risky and problematic as the weight you’re lifting approaches your 1RM.
Exactly this. When I was in my best shape my deadlift and squat were in/on the way to 2.5-3x my body weight. You don’t want to fail that without a lot of help and safeties.
Note for the uninitiated: That figure is not even impressive or competitive with competition lifters. This is just “guy who put in the time and work” numbers.
not an expert, 2 years of serious lifting, but this is probably a good adage for the average person from my current understanding
training to failure puts you at higher risk of injury and there are diminishing returns as you approach your 1 rep max and/or failure
hypertrophy can happen with more reps or more weight
strength gains are usually just focused on progressive overload
though, of course, hypertrophy will happen either way and contributes to increased strength, but this seems to be further confirmation that you can gain muscle size either way
It's definitely way more nuanced than that. You have to approach exhaustion to get the body to eventually build strength. But you need to carefully time your rests/deloads and handle plateaus with more volume.
Where could I find more information on proper set timing?
Honestly from a personal training/lifting coach. When I could spend serious time in the gym there’s a lot to just having someone with expertise for 30 minutes to give perspective. You can do a lot of it over video today as well.
In general YouTube is a good resource. There are a lot of respected coaches that also produce content.
I’ve never heard that, it’s usually the opposite- people do strip sets and the like to reach failure
How about making muscles fail by stretching them under load?
Depending on what you mean by "fail" and "stretching", that sounds a lot like eccentric training [0] (a.k.a. "negatives"). It's effective but notorious for causing delayed onset muscle soreness.
I trained myself to do pull-ups using this method, repeatedly lowering myself in a controlled motion from the top position while I was too weak to actually pull myself up.
Sounds like a great way to injure yourself, also would only work for eccentric motion
To me it doesn't sound much different than "taking your sets to muscular failure".
Not all muscles resist extension, some do the opposite and contract.
i don't understand what this means. the stretch feeling is an involuntary muscle contraction that is happening to resist extension on the opposite side.
> Loads for each set were adjusted to ensure that volitional fatigue was reached within 8–12 and 20–25 repetitions for the HL and LL limbs, respectively
I would argue both categories of the study are about low reps. I don't see how the body would tell the difference between 12 and 25 reps. If you said between 5 and 500, like it has to meaningfully take much longer, otherwise why would doing something so similar have any meaningful difference?
The way I think about it is that nature mostly reacts to order of magnitude changes. 12 to 25 is the same thing.
Like why not make a study to see if its more nutritious to eat dinner in 15 or 20 minutes?
This is spoken like you've never done any reps at all?
There's not much difference in hitting max at 12 and at 25, from anecdotal experience. The study corroborated that as well, even though with small n.
I feel like I would definitely notice if I went from 12 to 25 reps on any exercise I do. Although typically I max out at 8 before adding more weight.
> I feel like I would definitely notice if I went from 12 to 25 reps on any exercise I do.
To be clear, the implication is that 12 and 25 have different weights so they tire you the same amount. Do you think it would be a very strongly felt difference in that situation? What would the difference feel like?
If I read this correctly the gist is that it does not matter if you use heavy weights with few reps (common body builder wisdom) or lighter weights with more reps. As long as you always exercise to complete muscle fatigue you'll get the maximum for your genetics (which itself varies a lot).
There's no way this works in practice. A lot of heavy lifting (maximums) is about neurology and mind-body training. You cannot develop the ability to deadlift 405lbs by spending 2 hours using a cable crossover machine every day. Picking up something that weighs 2x more than you do requires your brain to send an extremely strong, synchronized signal. This is something that takes a lot of practice to develop. You have to consistently push your maximum voluntary effort in order to expand this capacity.
There is a minimum weight you must use to create a training stimulus, but yes, you can increase your 1RM with higher-rep sets (again, to a limit, they can't be sets of 100, the weight is too light).
To increase your 1RM at the most optimal pace, yes you need to specifically train the movement so that you can benefit from improved technique and neurological adaptation. But if I do tricep, pec, and front delt isolation exercises at higher reps, to failure, and see significant hypertrophy in these muscles, my bench press will be stronger, other things constant.
Right, but this post is about hypertrophy (big muscles). Not about heavy lifts.
Well one thing can lead into the other over time. If you can lift 405 once, 315 for reps becomes pedestrian and 225 becomes boring. Lifting that much weight will turn you into a monster faster than if you had not pushed for that capacity. I've seen people who can treat a 225lb barbell as if it's unloaded and 100% of them look like dragon ball Z characters.
Body mechanics, leverage, and neuro-muscular connection definitely come into play. I could deadlift 430lbs for reps at my peak, and I while I was no string bean, I also didn't look all that muscular compared to the other lifters at my gym. I have ridiculously long arms relative to my height and relatively shorter legs, which gives me an advantage for deadlift. I had monstrous-looking guys watch me lift and then ask me what stack I was on. They didn't believe me when I said I was natural.
Can we replicate the process of reaching muscle fatigue/failure to spur muscle growth without the strength training or anabolic steroids? Think GLP-1RAs but for this specific biological pathway.
https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/lilly-terminate-obesity-t...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
Steroid use has been shown to increase muscle in untrained males by around 25-30% I believe, without adding any exercise. That doesn't accomplish too much. If you want any worthwhile results, you will still have to train, although the steroids produce significantly more results for the same investment.
My understanding is that anabolic steroid are somehow close to what you're thinking about? It's just that as anything taking a simple shortcut , it comes with unwanted effects
The reason no one has found a better way is because hypertrophy is because it’s well understood and there’s no “better” solution. mTOR is the primary hormone pathway.thy increase the adaptation ceiling by increasing RBC, reducing protein breakdown, etc. Thereby reducing rest needed, so mTOR is heavily unregulated.
This is one of the view places where “if we could we would” is the correct answer. There is so much money in the space of anabolic cheating, the clandestine scientists would’ve already developed it.
> heavy weights with few reps (common body builder wisdom)
It is strength training (not body builder) wisdom to use heavy weights with few reps. Hypertrophy (i.e. body builder) programmes usually call for 8-12 reps, which implies relatively low weights.
is "8-12" not "few" for you?
Relatively speaking, no. Strength training (as opposed to hypertrophy) calls for fewer reps, around 5 per set.
Many people advise spending about a year doing more sets of fewer (~5) reps to build strength, and then switch to fewer sets of more reps (8-12) when you want to build muscle mass.
Point being, the idea of doing lighter weights until failure is already kind of there in body building wisdom.
3-5 reps per set for powerlifting training. Competition lifts are a single rep.
It’s worth noting that muscle is not all the same. If you’re just into bodybuilding then sure, proximity to failure is what matters. For athletics though, there still seems to be a big impact in the rep range you work in.
This. Muscles can be optimized for volume/endurance or power, or some balance between them. Taking legs as an example: Powerlifters obviously go for pure power, whereas runners need a bit of power but mostly endurance, whereas cyclists need more power than runners but more endurance than powerlifters.
All of these benefit from weight training, but depending on the sport, the programming will be very different.
I think I know where they're coming from as I used to have a similar wrong model. I thought strength = more muscle cells and endurance = just better heart/lungs to deliver oxygen and clear waste like CO2 and lactic acid.
Turns out muscle fibers mostly grow bigger rather than more numerous, and there are different fiber types (slow-twitch vs fast-twitch) that adapt based on how you train. So for the same muscle, an Ironman runner and a guy doing heavy low-rep squats will develop different fiber characteristics: you can't fully max out both.
I'm simplifying, but learning this changed a lot about how I understand exercise at the biological level.
It is actually common bodybuilder wisdom to go for the lighter version.
Stereotyping, weightlifters who go for max numbers do 1 set of a million pounds and rest three hours between exercises, while bodybuilders do thirty exercises a day for 8 series of 15 reps each.
Unless I’m missing something, this has already been known, though the hypertrophic benefits start to reduce beyond 30 reps.
You can do the goofiest workout you can possibly imagine as a young untrained male and put on muscle. You will do so at roughly max rate regardless of what you do as long as it’s vaguely productive. This isn’t useful research ngl.
For beginner lifters that might be true initially, but eventually weight will matter.
The group that did lower reps with higher weight, had the better one rep max at the end of the study, but they didn’t measure if the higher rep group had greater endurance. Which seems a bit odd, considering their conclusion is both groups grew the same amount of muscle which fine but if the muscle is adapted for something different in each group, you would want to capture that.
I know it's practically de rigeur to jump into the comments and immediately complain about methodology for any study that makes it to the front page, and I want to emphasize I don't distrust their findings, but I would like to see an equivalent study go out longer than 10 weeks. When I've been taking weightlifting seriously I feel like I don't even start to notice hypertrophy until 8-10 weeks. I feel like 6 months is the actual period where results would matter, to me, but I assume "subject compliance" is pretty difficult to get for such a timeframe, if you're really watching dietary intake and ensuring subjects go to failure (which, to its credit, this study did).
This is par for the course with exercise science. It's mostly fake. No blinding, small sample sizes, researchers with agenda, low duration, low funding etc. The good news is that doing almost anything works.
It does matter. It's the only objective way to measure progress. A study doesn't negate that.
I don't think so? If last week I could do 50 reps @ 5 lbs, and this week I can do 50 at 6 lbs (or 60 at 5lbs), then that's measurable objective progress
isnt the 1RM the measure of progress?
If that's what you're training for, sure. If you just want to be strong, you can achieve that and avoid the highest injury risk by sticking with 5 reps or so.
I.e.
No pain, no gain.
If it's _painful_ you are doing it wrong
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bx3gkHJehRCYZAF3r/pain-is-no...
If it's not painfull you are not exerting enough effort at least that's the case in the gym. People who are refreshed and more energetic after going to the gym are the same people who won't improve beyond intermediate levels. The ones who let go of the any set at the first feelings of unease and never take a set close to failure.
It's actually fascinating how an ancient proverb could line up with modern science so perfectly.
It certainly does not need to be painful. I think most people will make a distinction between the burn of acidosis, or what you call unease, and actual pain indicating damage is occurring.
But yes, if you never train close to failure you will not grow, not past beginner gains, unless you take steroids.
This is really terrible advice that just discourages people.
You absolutely can get significant improvements without (much) pain. DOMS during the initial stages is going to be the most uncomfortable part. Once you're past it, you don't need to push yourself to a breaking point, just to the point of mild exhaustion.
This will provide you enough resistance to gain muscle mass and improve the bone density to healthy levels.
Yeah, "no pain no gain" is probably the worst advice I've ever received. It encourages sedentary people to go hard for a week and then quit, which is the exact opposite of what works: starting with consistent easy sessions and adding progressive overload.
Dynomight has a good blog post about this[0], but applied to running rather than resistance training.
[0] https://dynomight.net/2021/01/25/how-to-run-without-all-the-...
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tldr appears to be that if you work to fatigue it doesn't matter if you fatigue out with high weights vs low weights
I agree with this, but for those newbies be careful at what you define as "failure".
I've f.up my MCL by not listening to my body and I have the stability of a typical 85 year old while I try and 'heal'. It takes longer as you get older (you're probably not 20 year old) and stupid stuff can really take you out.
There is certainly a difference in a slow twitch vs fast twitch muscle adaptation though
When training for muscle size atleast, but not strength. Presumably there are increased injury risks overall when lifting heavy (based on a brief search).
fairly new to lifting myself (2+ years taking it seriously) but this thing seems to jive with what I've read across different areas
bodybuilders can build muscle size with high reps and lower weight or lower reps and high weight as long as they do it close to failure with only a few reps in reserve (rir)
powerlifters, or those focusing on strength, usually go for high weight and lower reps because they might be training for a competition that focuses on 1 rep max and/or the body can really only handle so many reps when pushing it at 80-90% of 1 rep max
neither is inherently better but a matter of what goals you have in mind, plus, hypertrophy contributes to overall strength, too
> Twenty healthy young male participants completed thrice-weekly resistance exercise sessions for 10 weeks.
Not sure how much can be concluded from this.
Wait, why are we figuring this out only now?
A paper doesn't necessarily mean the information is new, but that there is now some/more evidence to support it.
True, but this kind of information is so basic it almost fits in the "world is round" category.