Trainining - Hypertrophy B Practical

The main idea of this information is that tension is crucial for muscle training and hypertrophy. The goal is to increase muscle size by increasing sarcomeres and tension. Higher intensity exercises do not always lead to increased muscle size due to compensatory actions. Research has shown that metabolic stress and hypoxic environments can also lead to muscle growth. It is important to consider exercise selection, sets and reps, time under tension, and intensity to achieve the desired outcome. The range of intensity for optimal tension is 30% to 85%. The time of tension and rep scheme also play a role in muscle growth. Overall, the focus should be on creating tension in the muscle group to achieve hypertrophy. So let's go back to what we just talked about in our principles. The idea that tension is the most important thing we need to really consider when it comes down to training and getting hypertrophy, right? The goal of the actual input is to get increased cross-sectional muscle area or increased longitudinal sarcomere density. If I can get more sarcomeres in a condensed area or if I can get more sarcomeres along the length of that muscle fiber, generally speaking, I'm going to have increased performance or increased statics or whatever it is I'm looking for. But tension is the point, right? That in a sense is what we're building this whole entire structure around. And I think as we start to break down the practical aspect of this, I think it's important to look at what garners the most tension, what is the actual, I guess, best input to get that tension from an exercise selection standpoint, a sets and reps standpoint, a time under tension standpoint, or even an intensity standpoint to get that outcome. It's a pretty powerful thing to think about. Now, in regards to what's going to get the most tension from an intensity standpoint, you'll see anywhere from 70% to 85% of a one rep max, right? There's actually a really cool graphic on the module on this one of that 50% to 75%. I think that number, and we can talk about this from a mean versus median perspective, right? Mean being the average, median being the midpoint. And now the whole spectrum has changed considering it was 70% to 85% for a very long time, which created this, I guess we talked about with this, the principles, this almost myopic focus on sarcoplasmic is bad and myofibril is good, and the best way to get myofibril is to constantly utilize heavier intensity. But the problem with heavier intensity, especially combined with compound multijoint movements is this idea of compensatory action, right? That the squats, the deadlifts, the benches, the pull-ups, these things at this intensity pushed to threshold have a higher probability of utilizing support and mechanical advantage based strategies like shifting the lever arm or the center of mass, trying to recruit other muscle groups through other joint actions, essentially just saying that if we're trying to increase the size of a muscle cell and we're distributing tension all around the actual body to accomplish a certain output of standing up on a deadlift or a squat or locking out on a bench or getting your chin above the bar on a pull-up, well, at one or so point, be focused and you're working at specific intensities and you're just basically manipulating the center of mass to accomplish the lift, it's no wonder that you're actually not creating increased cross-sectional muscle area in a muscle or this other idea of increasing sarcomeres along the length. And ever since the research about metabolic stress and hypoxic environments through blood flow restriction or CAT-2-type protocols, you know, the whole spectrum has changed, right? This idea that we can create not just sarcoplasmic hypertrophy from higher volume, higher duration, lower intensity sets, as low as 30 percent, that we can actually increase the size of a muscle through increasing sarcomeres and increasing just muscle cell myogenesis in the actual cell, like we see sarcomeres increase with very, very low-intensity work just simply from recruiting. And it goes back to this idea of if we're isolating a stress, whether it's direct tension through intensity or direct tension through almost duration, through metabolic stress or muscular damage, then we can start to associate this idea that the range or the median may still stay the same, you know, that like 75 percent, but the truth is the mean stretches out a whole other way, right? So 85 percent for 5 to 6 reps now is spread out to 30 percent for 20 to 30 reps. And we see this mean go from 70 to 85 percent now down to 50 to 75 percent, which was shown by the research by Frenchy in 2017. And as we start to look at this, it's like, all right, like intensity is, I think we just need to get off this complete locked-in thought that higher intensity is going to garner a more functional output, you know, we just simply have to restructure or reframe our train of thought. We need to value all intensity spectrums and all densities, and still, if it's accomplishing tension in a muscle group, it's going to create some sort of outcome that we want. And that's powerful. You know, one of the things that Zatyarsky talked about in Science in Practice, muscle fiber that was recruited but not fatigued was not trained, right? So if we are utilizing compound, multi-joint, closed kinetic chain movements in a free-weight environment, but we're using a bunch of compensatory action to accomplish a lift, like a hingy squat or a squatty deadlift, or just lifting that thorax or arching the back on a bench, are we really stressing the fibers of the quad, the hamstring, the pecs or the lats? You know, are we really aligning tension? Are we pulling the insertion away from the origin and then pulling the insertion back towards the origin throughout the movement, right? That's essentially a contraction, right? So what we're eccentrically loading is pulling the insertion away from the origin, right? We are creating length along that muscle fiber, and that action responds to a isometric transition to a shortening or a pulling the insertion towards the, or pulling the insertion towards the origin, right? And if that action is directly responsible for creating the outcome that we want, of increasing the cell size or the muscular area for the longitudinal outcome. And then on the other end is we do that, whether it's an intensity of 30% or 85%, or we do that for a set of five to six, or we do that for a set of 20 to 30. And we're creating this fatigue effect of that muscle fiber, because the goal is to try to create hypertrophy. And who cares? Honestly, who cares? Who cares? It's going to increase muscle size, right? And we talked about that in the principles, that you can look through any single research of improved performance. It's still going to have something in the notes of increased cross-sectional muscle area was largely a part of why anyone was able to produce more force, produce more velocity, go longer duration. But whatever the outcome, whether it's work or force or velocity or power, there's going to be some sort of small attribution or contribution from increasing the cross-sectional muscle area, right? We have more sarcomeres to accomplish the task. And that just comes from directly stressing a certain muscle fiber. But in reality, too, we talk about this in the structural balance module is a large part of these movements that we're selecting is to create essentially a balance between pushing and pulling movements, but a balance between pushing and pulling muscular groups to create optimal length, tension, and force velocity curves on either side of the joint. That if we have a relatively overpowered or over-force generating thing or too much muscle mass or cross-sectional area in one aspect of the muscle versus the other, and that leads to length-tension relationships, that leads to issues of patella tendinopathies like tendinitis or tendinosis, maybe even arthritis over time. And then you look at it from, did I really actually create stress optimally along either side of the joint? And I think objectively, we can say from reverse engineering that one of the most important things post-operatively is improve a amount of strength on both the anterior and posterior aspect of the muscle when seeing both joint actions of flexion-extension, quad and hamstring function, or let's say that the bicep and tricep function, or looking at from the internal external rotators, all these things, right? We can say from a concept of a hinge pattern's more external rotation bias and a squat pattern's more internal rotation bias, squat pattern's going to be inhale bias, a deadlift's going to be more exhale bias, all these things are going to just basically come down to, in order to create a true appraisal of whether that hypertrophy was effective or not, we need to have some sort of diagnostic to prove that what we're trying to accomplish did actually accomplish what we set out to do. Now in regards to intensity, we'll just say it, 30% to 85% is going to be the zone, which is really why, but the other end, looking at it, in terms of stressing the muscle fiber and looking through it from the concept of intensity is going to be really important, the other variable would be looking at time of retention. One of the funny things about this idea of time of retention and just this, I don't know, this premature association with this is a very fluid and loose science that if you go under 20 seconds, you're going to work power or relative strength, if you go 20 to 40, get more of that myofibril or functional hypertrophy, if you're going to go 40 to 70, you're going to look at it from the concept of this hypertrophy or this increasing the sarcoplasmic, and then you go muscular endurance, anything past 70 seconds. And you look at it from the concept of like, well, it's all reps, right? If you just do eight reps, you should always create hypertrophy. Yeah, you can do eight reps at a high velocity and take under eight seconds to accomplish a set. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's enough tension, right? And the faster the movement, the heavier the movement, the more the compensatory action is likely to happen, right? Anything that crosses this threshold of force and velocity that we get past threshold and we're using multiple joints simultaneously, there's going to be a higher probability of losing the ability to create tension within a muscle group. So we could argue that six to eight, or eight to 10, or 10 to 12 reps is the ideal rep scheme for increasing muscle. But I would come back and say, is that a good enough control on the intervention to say that was effective or not, right, that you could have wildly different times under tension based off of the individual, comparatively speaking to, I put a control, like I know a set took 40 seconds because I did eight reps with a 3L10 tempo, or I'm sorry, a 4L10 tempo, and that took exactly 40 seconds. And the goal was, all right, whatever it is I was trying to get out of eight reps has another control in there, but I knew it took 40 seconds. So I can say, hey, the time under tension was regulated, and we can say that led to an increase in muscle mass or not, but I don't see that level of control in there. Now it comes back again to are those 40 seconds of quality time under tension, right, is it just too low of an intensity or is it too high of an intensity to create the adaptation that we want? So intensity still matters quite a bit here, right? And then that other idea of, at a certain point, certain muscle fiber types like fast twitch-oriented athletes or slow twitch athletes, they're going to recruit different muscle groups at different levels, but they're also fatigued at different rates, right? So if I look at a fast twitch athlete, yeah, they're probably going to fatigue a lot faster because they have a lot less of the fatigue-resistant fibers as well as they don't have the mechanisms, the buffering capacity to handle that. They just go through lactate dehydrogenase pathways and producing lactate, which is going to produce excess hydrogens within the cellular environment, a lot of phosphates, and all of a sudden, that person can't sustain the output. They go through size principle rapidly, and then all of a sudden that they can't sustain that, they're going to be more prone to either using compensatory action to finish the job or they're just going to burn out quicker and overtrain faster, right? And that goes into not only total volume per set or total time under tension per set, so intraset time under tension, as well as total amount of sets and total time under tension per workout, and that goes into this idea of total sets relative to actual reps. That goes in this idea of density. That goes in this idea of the amount of tonnage that we're accruing is the same. It's just spread out and organized differently, right? So if I do five sets of eight with a 4-0-1-0 tempo, that's going to be 40 reps with five seconds per rep times eight, so that means we have 40 seconds per set times eight. Compare that to let's say that I do eight sets of five with a 4-0-1-0 tempo, it's going to be the same tonnage, might be able to utilize a higher intensity for the eight sets of five, which we should, versus the five sets of eight, but the other idea is, like I have a fast-twitch athlete, my theory is they can't handle eight reps. I have a slow-twitch athlete, my theory is they won't recruit as much high-threshold motor units with five reps, and I want to test, and I tested that by looking at potentially a muscle-fiber assessment of maybe I look at a velocity-based output at a certain intensity, so at 85%, they can still move the bar above .5 meters per second, okay, that person's pretty fast-twitch, or maybe I do a ratio of their 1RM is this, and at 85%, they can hit more than five reps, they're going to be predominantly intermediate or slow-twitch, and then, okay, well, if that person is more slow-twitch, or let's say I look at it from a neurotyping, and I look at it from this person's got a very intense behavior, they're hard-working, they're type A, they're going to be more of a fire type or dopamine type, maybe I need more sets, less reps, whatever the rationale is of why I'm using more sets and less reps or less reps and more sets is this idea of, like, all right, well, are they getting to the outcome, yes or no? And the more controls I have on that, and the more I can sit there and say that I know the time of retention was the same, I know that the way we got the time of retention was different based off of organizing sets and reps and subsequently intensity, and then I can start to assess, and I can start to individualize, and I can start to look at this from a more objective and more rational way, but just going off of a hunch and saying, well, it's no point of testing or retesting, and you look at that from a body composition perspective, if you have ultrasound, you can look at cross-sectional muscle area, if you have something like near-infrared spectrometry, you can look at the deoxygenation of an actual muscle group during an exercise, you can see all this stuff now, relatively easy, you don't need to do a muscle biopsy, you can see this stuff pretty quickly, pretty in real time, it's pretty cool, there's no reason why we can't assess this, but on the other note, okay, let's say that the person is fast-twitch and they're better compensators, or let's say the person's slow-twitch and they just, they can't handle certain intensities, what could be relatively speaking to the exercise? That could be simply saying that certain exercises, high-threshold or low-threshold activities are simply hard, that's why it goes into why so many bodybuilders are such advocates of machine-based exercise, because they feel the muscle group that they're trying to work in a much more tangible way, but the other idea is you can isolate the stress and really see the tensile strength or the tensile capability of that muscle group, right, so if I'm trying to create increased upper arm cross-sectional muscle area, so bi's and tri's, and I'm doing a barbell curl where the person is just leaning back and manipulating their body, are they creating tension adequately in their bicep? Or they're doing a tricep push-down, or let's say they're doing a close-grip bench and they're arching their back and bouncing the bar, are they really creating the outcome that we want? That's a pretty tough thing to really come to grips with, versus I get them on a Scott curl and I say we're going to do eight reps of the 4-0-1-0 tempo until you can't no more, and then all of a sudden you go, okay, like that person's having a hard time with this exercise, they could curl 60 kilos, but now they can barely curl 20 kilos, like that's crazy, oh, they're just better compensators, they're better at taking tension off the muscle group and completing the lift than the other person, experience makes us worse, and I think that manifests out into more global, bigger ROI movements like squats, deadlifts, pull-ups, and bench, is this idea that squat is the quote-unquote king of exercises, but the reality is it's basically facilitating this movement of the knee of first flexion and extension, so we're putting length on the quadricep and that quadricep is shortening, so we're trying to create adaptation in the anterior chain here, versus a hinge pattern, we'll say a RDL or stiff-legged deadlift, and we're first lengthening the hamstring and then shortening the hamstring to stress around the hip, and that's really the bottom line here, right, that we're trying to stress the both anterior and posterior aspect of that knee and that hip, and we're utilizing certain exercises to create length and then shortening, and if that person has a lot of compensatory action and taking tension off that muscle group by pushing their butt back or bending at the knees on the corresponding exercise, they're going to lose that tensile force into that muscle group, and then they're going to detrain a cross-sectional area, and that might be better served to go, okay, maybe I need to utilize something like a prone leg curl or a seated leg extension and say, I just want to see what their capabilities are, right, like put the stress test on them, like if a person can squat 405 for eight and then all of a sudden you get them on a leg extension, they can barely do a hundred pounds for eight with tempo through full range of motion with strict beginning and end range, I think that's telling you something, right, if they are cramping, if they are going through stuff, and we see it all the time, if you're doing PAILs and RAILs or you're doing passive range lift-offs or anything where it's like more of this overcoming isometric at length or even a lengthening isometric yielding, you see these folks cramp or find some way to get out of that position because they can't hold it, they don't have the tensile strength, they're limited in what they can do. To me, that is very telling of there is an inherent gap with compound multi-joint movements with something like hypertrophy, and I think that creates a functional need to look at things like machines to facilitate the outcome that we generally want to accomplish. All right, so let's recap this. Intensities, it's not just 70-85% anymore, it's going to be 30-85% based off of how we can create that desired outcome. And we look at it now, the mean is a lot more important, right, this idea that 30-85% is going to garner some sort of outcome, as long as we're creating stress in certain muscle fibers, so we've got to reach threshold. The other aspect is time under tension, relatively speaking to reps, is probably a better way to put a control on the system, right? If I'm testing a high-set, low-rep or a low-set, high-rep protocol based off of fast-twitch versus slow-twitch type muscle fiber, that's my theory, I need to test it and I need to have controls on it. If I have very loose regulation on how long a set did or how much density the person was during a session, and having very little understanding of what reps were actually taking to tensile force max, right, the technical failure component of creating tension within a muscle group, then the other end, I'm not really going to know. I'm kind of just going to go, well, they checked all the boxes and didn't increase any cross-sectional muscle area in the quad, relatively speaking, the hamstring and the pec, relatively speaking, to the lat, I don't really know. And then the final aspect, it's compound multi-joint movements are really good from global adaptations, but not very good for localized adaptations. And that's kind of the point of the exercise. And if we look at it from the context of if I really want to make the outcome, I need to, one, look at what is the actual outcome, and then, two, find the best tools to reach that outcome. And that could come down from intensity, time under tension, or reps. And you could look at it also, too, from this concept of maybe I really need to evaluate compound multi-joint, closed kinetic chain, free weight movements versus isolated machine, open kinetic chain movements. Just saying. All right, hope this one really resonates, guys. This one's a really, I just love talking to PerchV. I think it's a very, very, really awesome thing. And I highly recommend, too, the resources from Brad Schoenfeld, as well as Deb Brignull. Rick Castlin's got a lot of really good stuff, as well. Ben Pokulski, I go all the way back to guys like Mike Mentzer and Arthur Jones, Alan Kandarda, and there's a lot of great resources on hypertrophy. And it's just, it's too well, it's too limited by strength conditioning coaches to get outside of that, I guess, that dogma of what is, like, good training. And I think that in itself is a great opportunity for you to get an edge. All right, hope this helps, and see you guys in a case study.