The 3 Mechanisms of Hypertrophy | ETP#59

[Unknown4]: 0:29

what's up friends happy tuesday welcome back to another episode of eat train prosper today is brian and myself and we are going to be discussing the three mechanisms of hypertrophy so hyperv ak muscle building is something we obviously talk about a lot but there are a couple different facets or mechanisms for which you can facilitate it and oftentimes we get maybe pigeon hold in into one methodology i know i personally have myself historically and we just wanted to talk about having an episode talking about the different you know mechanisms what you can learn take away from each and then how you can kind of structure these into your training to completely round out all of the gains that you are trying to make before we jump into this brian what's going on with you

[Unknown3]: 1:13

yeah we're uh we've made it to week two in san diego and everything is gliding along smoothly our nanny has shown up every day we've had time to work out we've had time to have personal time and kind of walk along the beach we've had time to do our work and uh so that's been amazing i mean just i couldn't have imagined being here without that type of reliability and confidence so so it's been great it's honestly been super enjoyable the weather shifted so the first three or four days we were here we were like fifty five and rainy for most of the days are cloudy at least and then uh the last three or four days have been more like mid sixties low seventies and sunny which is really really nice and like short sleeve weather you know to be outside but it's still not warm enough to go in the water and uh and i think bryson is a little disappointed about that he loves you know we waiting into the water and then running out and when it gets wet it basically is like a day ruin because then he's cold as soon as he gets out of the water and and everything falls apart from there so um unfortunately we we do have to come back at some time in the summer and maybe not unfortunately fortunately we will have to come back at some point in the summer and let him experience like true san diego beach but um that's all been good training's going great uh i'm still a mentally torn in how i feel about training in a commercial gym where i don't have exactly what i want when i want type thing but it's less significant of a problem in my brain now than it was five or seven days ago so i'm slowly adapting and you know accepting and i've kind of found my spaces in the gym like okay you know maybe i can't go dual cable lateral rays to te barrow because they're in different rooms but i can go dual cable lateral rays to cable row so you know it's making that sub of like okay a t bar row is meant to be for the rear delt and upper back my elbows are traveling out a little bit i can emulate that same movement pattern with a cable row and that's right next to my dual cable rays so i can kind of rope off this little circuit for myself and do it that way and i found similarly in other parts of my training too that there's just certain pieces that i can do together exactly as i had them planned and then other ones where i can emulate movement patterns and stimulus but the precise exercise selection isn't exactly as uh necessarily i would have had it at home so these are things that like i said as as time goes on i will become more comfortable with had the opportunity yesterday to have laurie christine king and our other business associate laura savino down to train with me yesterday so that was cool i took them to the gym and uh they got to experience like the rooftop like nothing like so clifton outside in the sun type thing so

[Unknown4]: 4:11

very cool

[Unknown3]: 4:12

yeah it was it was rad and i was in fact able to super set my seated leg curl to my one and a half hip extensions and that was the one super

[Unknown4]: 4:19

wow

[Unknown3]: 4:20

set in my whole program that i was like man if i can't do this like it really changes the stimulus that i'm going after because a you can't emulate a hip extension with another hip hinge because it's short overloaded versus an r dl which is lengthed and overloaded and then on top of that i just i wouldn't want to to do rd ls two days in my training i think that that's too much at my level so so i'm really happy that i was able to fit that super set in and everything else has just kind of been figuring it out as i go but um i know you guys are heading out of town tomorrow and so yeah what's going on with that what's up with your updates

[Unknown4]: 5:00

really just tomorrow morning five a m four a m we're hitting the road and got an eighteen hour drive to oklahoma

[Unknown3]: 5:07

she's just

[Unknown4]: 5:07

city where we will spend the night so uh i don't know i i like the road trips i i guess um the change is fun and i just know that like we is probably the only time that i'll be like driving west coast to east coast back you know and then i i just kind of with where where i'm at in my life and and my plans with jenny and stuff like that like we are nearing the end of our like travel life we might have a year and a half left

[Unknown3]: 5:36

yes

[Unknown4]: 5:36

or something like that so i just know like oh like this is probably the last time i'm going to do this type of thing so things have like different intrinsic value in that sort of sort of manner but i'm excited i feel i feel bad saying this because i think it's been largely mitigated by unfortunate air b and b situations but like i'm i'm ready to leave arizona

[Unknown3]: 5:58

it is

[Unknown4]: 6:00

and i like i said i feel like that's that's unfair to i've met like a ton of my clients here i've got to hang out with jeremiah bear which has been fantastic we went to like really cool conferences and i finally got to meet people in person so there's been like a lot of positive but the living we've just had two back to back like crappy living situations and it's really kind of soured the last few months for me so i'm ready to leave right i'm ready to ready to move on which i'm excited for and then kind of what is going to facilitate this conversation so i got a dex scam on friday um and things were interesting let's put it that way uh on the surface i have more body fat which i knew because i've been you know purposely feeding up but also on the surface less muscle mass than i did in november so generally one of those you want to be either higher or lower but when they both go in the opposite direction then you would hope it's kind of a defeating

[Unknown3]: 6:57

yeah

[Unknown4]: 6:57

let's say that but what was really cool is we got a a cool message from someone on instagram which we will kind of talk about that will lead us into really the thoughts and discussion behind this entire podcast but before we jump into that i know there was a couple of things we wanted

[Unknown3]: 7:12

is is

[Unknown4]: 7:13

to talk about so let's see those

[Unknown3]: 7:14

yeah we just had two kind of quick asides that one was on my brain and uh and one you just read in my story so we'll uh we'll talk about what's on my brain real quick um someone on one of my q amp a boxes last week asked me just a simple question of you know do you do your first set to one to two rr for eight to twelve reps and your second set to zero to one rar for eight to twelve reps and i was like you know scratching my head being like man thats like really a simplified way of looking at things and that's not really actually the way i do things so what it did is it forced me to kind of think about hey how do i actually do things and then in doing so and thinking about how i do things it made me realize that the way i do things is very dependent upon what movement it is whether it's a lengthened mid range overload movement or whether it's a shortened overload movement and that the manner in which i institute my work sets proximity to failure rep ranges things like that as well as how i might progress those movements week to week also changes so i thought that just the fact that i realized this and was able to put it into like a cute little box on my story q amp a i thought would be provide some valuable context potentially for you guys too as you think about movements and how you might institute or progress them and i think it also kind of relates to our conversation today about mechanical tension and the different mechanisms of hypertrophy so when we have our length and overload movements which every session every episode i have to say this just in case people didn't listen to the prior one length and overload movements are the ones that are hardest in the stretched position so you can think of your rd ls your back squats um bench presses things like that where you won't actually fail the movement at the top because the top is actually more of like a resting place the top of the ado the top the squat the top of the bench press you don't have tension on the muscle you're essentially resting alternatively short overload movements are hardest at the top so you can think about movements like a leg extension a cable crossover a cable bicep curl a pull down a row something like that right so when we have these short overload movements we know we know for sure that a these cause a lot less muscle damage when one of the mechanisms of hypertrophy and they also uh are less stimulated per per dose right so one set of a cable spider curl would be less of a dose than one set of like an inclined dumbbell curl or a face away cable curl or something like that that takes the bicep through a stretched position so even looking at these unlike a grand scale let's just break them down into like we have these big like so called compound movements we'll call them the ad l and the squat these ones i don't ever take past failure because there's so much to gain being further from failure so the way that i might start a block of training with these big compound lengthened overload movements is something like four reps from failure because even if you're doing two or three sets at four ups from failure you're getting a pretty good stimulus then each week from there it might go down to like three reps from failure then two eps from failure than one rep from failure and then i might have a couple weeks in a row where i'm hitting zero to one reps from failure but there's really no i don't really do like reverse drop sets or any sort of you know rest pause sets like i couldn't even imagine doing a rest pause set on like a pendulum or something like that where you're like all right i'm going to get out of the machine for fifteen seconds and then i'm gonna get back in and like what are you gonna get like one more rap two more reps or something like that

[Unknown4]: 10:56

i did have that in my last block and then one of my friends came inin with me ryan he's a he's a powerlifter and he was able to load that pendulum with a lot he was able to load it more than anyone else i'd ever seen it and we did a cluster set on it and he said it ruined him for like four five days

[Unknown3]: 11:11

right right so we don't do that we don't do like

[Unknown4]: 11:13

but yeah

[Unknown3]: 11:13

past failure techniques on these big compound movements however when you look at the smaller like short overloaded movements and' say smaller but man a lap pull down and a barbell row these are both like what would be considered compound movements they work multiple joints but i would still say because of the fact that they overload short you just don't think of them in the same way or to be quite as damaging especially a pull down like i feel like the barbell row has that stretch at the bottom so even though your lats specifically aren't under loaded at the bottom of a barbell row that's maybe a bad example because you are being kind of pulled apart by this weight so maybe like a cable row or a lap pull down or better examples here but essentially on those movements i have no problem even starting a block of training at close to failure

[Unknown4]: 11:56

that's right

[Unknown3]: 12:01

like usually i'll start one to two rr one ri r or something like that and then the progression from there is you know i'm gonna add weight and or reps until i can't so that might be you know three weeks four weeks something like that but as soon as i can no longer feasibly add reps or wait week to week then i'm looking to progress the stimulus with those movements in some way where you know it's going to be like some partial reps added or maybe more partial reps or a reverse drops out or a rest pause or something like that because i can do we we as a people can do these types of movements and incur significantly less damage and fatigue than we would from those like more squat lengthened rd le type type movement so when i actually responded to this person and put this on my story i was able to break it down into this pretty little box where i'm like okay lengthened overload like big compound movements they go something like three to four rr in week one and then they just progress week to week regardless of what happens with the ri rs and every week i'm going to add something until i can't and then i'll hit failure for a few weeks and that's the way it goes um obviously in an r dl you have to be a little more um careful than you do with a pendulum i think just by the nature of the fact that you know you're unbrainwash versus a pendulum but somewhere in that range of starting three to four rr and then progressing week to week and then when i talked about the short overload movements it literally went start at about one rr and then progressively add weight reps and slash intensity techniques week to week to increase the stimulus and then eventually you end up at this point where you can go refer to our last episode on de loads and discuss kind of how we handle things in those situations and progress forward from there so so i just thought that was interesting you know and as you go through your own training and think about things like all movements don't have to start at three to four rr and then progress and end it failure there are there are ways in which you can get more out of certain movements without having to overly fatigue yourself in doing so and then there are certainly movements that you should probably be more cautious and careful with so for what that's worth hopefully you guys gain something from that

[Unknown4]: 14:22

i think so it's it kind of goes it's great for this particular episode because we're breaking down different parts of like lifting weights for hypertrophy and it's we've talked about this on the podcast before it's interesting because generally like lifting weights from a macro is like this very physical effort based you know thing but then in order to get like really really good at it you you need to bring in the like intellectual side of things and understanding different parts of the sciences and then like wondering oh man this one day crushes me but like why does it crush me it's like well maybe you're just doing a ton of length and overload stuff and then there's you know intensity techniques on top of it and it's like there's just so much muscle damage by changing things a little bit maybe replacing one of those with like not a lengthened overload like it can be much more you could increase your training frequency without really reducing your volume and different things like that like these different variables come into play that change how how things end up your outcomes with them

[Unknown3]: 15:26

yeah for sure i actually think this is a good explanation of that i i had a quad day that i did um last saturday and i was sore literally for five days like to the point that i had to to go out of order with my program and i moved a chest and back workout ahead of my next quad workout because they were still sore and i have these two different quads and they're very different because one day is two sets of leg extensions two sets of pendulum and two sets of cissy squats and that day destroys me that's the one that ruined me for five days because when you look at those movements the leg extension isn't you necessarily length and overloaded but the the pendulum and the cr and then on my other quad day which is hack squat and leg extensions with a pause at the top it's generally two to three sets of each so it's similar volume overall but with the leg extension being paused at the top instead of you know kind of gradual ascent but no pause at the top the amount of load i could use with the pause at the top was like twenty percentage less than the other one and the fact

[Unknown4]: 16:32

exactly

[Unknown3]: 16:33

that i did the leg extension second after the hack swap versus doing like ascension first probably incurred a ton of fatigue going into the pendulum so you can look at these rationalizations or these kind of um things that you just mentioned and and you can kind of see why one leg day is is a beat down and the other one doesn't really produce a ton of soreness for me but both can be stimulated

[Unknown4]: 16:56

yep i the exact same thing with my current one i know i've talked to you about this and i just i did the third one on saturday of this iteration and my quads are i wake up demolished and it's only five

[Unknown3]: 17:07

yeah yeah

[Unknown4]: 17:08

sets i do two sets on the pendulum i do one set on the cb squat press and then i do two sets of rear foot elevated front foot wedge ah split squats i think it's a split squats to be

[Unknown3]: 17:21

yep

[Unknown4]: 17:21

completely honest so moving forward i'm only going to do one set on those and i'll literally only have four working sets on that

[Unknown3]: 17:27

yeah

[Unknown4]: 17:27

quad day and i am so incredibly sore it is outrageous i've it's really really silly to me but it's one of those things like when you know what you're looking to when you when you know the stimulus you're looking to target and you have spent time listening to podcasts like this going through educations and things like that like you're able to be so much more

[Unknown3]: 17:47

it is

[Unknown4]: 17:48

precise and it's really really wild to me at least

[Unknown3]: 17:52

yeah well those are certainly all length and overload movements that you're doing as well so maybe

[Unknown4]: 17:55

exactly

[Unknown3]: 17:56

if you get less sore from doing one set of split squats you can then maybe add in an additional set of cx cx squat press and now you have five sets but you have five sets again but one less of the most damaging one being the split squat and then this also feeds super well into the other kind of a side that we wanted to take before the main discussion where i reposted a a post from jordan lips and uh it basically said would my form range of motion tempo and control improve if i lowered the weight and what you kind of stated was it's difficult to find a balance between all these considerations while still working hard enough to facilitate an adaptation and i actually think that like what you just said about that leg day that you have and like the way that you're doing the the front foot reo wedged elevated split squat thing like if anything like you're an example of this quote working in in my mind because i in the past have been of that mindset of you know the amount of weight you're using is really important as long as your movement looks the same but i see you train a lot like even some of the stuff like when you do rear del rows and i saw you doing these at n one you were using like forty pound dumbbells or fifties or something and you said they were really hard i was using like eighty fives so like why do i need double the amount of weights you and same thing on the split squat right like i was doing the split squats at the end one a practical with hundreds in each hand and i bet you were using like forties or fifties but you're looking to get more out of that right is that right forties or fifties

[Unknown4]: 19:44

thirties

[Unknown3]: 19:44

thirties so either way a third

[Unknown4]: 19:45

and that's what i've been doing them with yeah

[Unknown3]: 19:47

a third of what i i use right so so you're literally an example of this quote in effect like you are using less weight but you're making some sort of internal connection with the muscle you're using maybe more range of motion than you would prior maybe you're recruiting less auxiliary like assistance musculature than you would if you were using heavier weights maybe you're getting less sore in your glutes than you would if you're using heavy weights because it's bigger muscle it helps you kind of compensate and use more weight in your split squat so i think that that's all really relevant and important contexts there what do you think

[Unknown4]: 20:28

it is and what's really really cool is you added a new wrinkle to it which i wasn't really thinking about when i read it and there's like when you are using like more the word that comes to mind is technical movements you want to make sure that you are performing them for the intended musculature something like a split squat you know you can always kind of shift your knee drive back a little bit make it more sorry gluten dominant right where you're going to have better levers you can move a lot more weight but then i know like historically that next day my ass is on fire and sore and not my quads uh so i i think it's really like the the sweet spot is understanding why you want to use things certain things and then kind of like the bigger discussion of what i originally thought is there's kind of like this pendulum between like okay you're young you're in college you you know in high school you're ego lifting because like that's the only thing you know right pretty much and we've all we've all been there then the other side of it is like you're so focused on like your form your tempo control all of these things that you're not actually loading the muscle or working hard

[Unknown3]: 21:38

and

[Unknown4]: 21:39

enough to facilitate an adaptation like at the end of the day in order for that muscle to grow there needs to be a sufficient stimulus for an adaptation to occur so like i can do perfect form these incredibly beautiful you know dumbbell curls with a twelve pound dumbbell but at the end of the day it's not going to be enough stimulus for my my body to send that signal like hey these twelve pound dumbbells are damaging we

[Unknown3]: 22:06

yes

[Unknown4]: 22:07

need to facilitate an adaptation and at the end of the day like it's important to understand that part as well and this is something that the post from jordan just kind of like like kicked off like like things i've seen in my mind that are becoming really prevalent now of like instagram posts where people are like you know don't do workouts like this do them like this

[Unknown3]: 22:27

f

[Unknown4]: 22:27

and then it's like them going super slow doing like this perfect row with no load and then it's helpful from like seeing the perfect way to do it but i feel like it can again swing that pendulum and then you see people who are like doing these things there's not enough load to facilitate an adaptation so you can have the most perfect form in the

[Unknown3]: 22:46

this is

[Unknown4]: 22:47

world but you still need a sufficient amount of load to target sorry to facilitate an adaptation to occur so it's finding that balance of like my form is good i'm not and this is why it's great to video yourself and stuff my form is good my tempo matches my intended tempo i feel control but now i'm trying really hard in actually putting or driving a stimulus through the intended musculature

[Unknown3]: 23:14

yeah it's it's very gray um

[Unknown4]: 23:18

it is

[Unknown3]: 23:19

because like ultimately if you're trying as hard as you can to do a row and you fail to get the dumbbell into whatever the range of motion is that you established as your desired range of motion then in theory you're working hard enough to create that adaptation so this is where i think it's confusing because something like a row or a lateral rays are both very very impacted by even the subtlest use of momentum so man like if you're doing it i can do like a strict a super strict dumbbell row and make it look pristine you know with a hundred or one hundred ten something like that and i couldn't row a hundred and forty pounds but maybe there would be some momentum in there a little bit of body english maybe every rep doesn't look exactly like the prior rep right so now we're having like the two sides of the spectrum well i guess the one side of the spectrum is the one forty and then the other side of the spectrum would be like if i wasn't using a hundred pounds and i was using like sixty and so my form was just as good as it was at one hundred but i was like arbitrarily just using less weight for no reason and then as a result of using less weight for no reason i never actually reached a point where you know i was approaching failure type thing so it's finding that balance between like weight not being too light that it's not getting you there or the way being too heavy that you're getting there but you're having to compensate with other musculature so there's like that sweet spot of load in the middle where these different facets are optimized and you can take the muscle close to failure but you don't feel like you're losing any of the control tempo range of motion in these other different avenues

[Unknown4]: 25:09

yeah yeah the the rows are really good example especially like a barbell row right because where you can load it up heavy enough where now it's taxing on your

[Unknown3]: 25:18

it

[Unknown4]: 25:18

posterior chain right and then you have to account for that into one you're getting less i don't say maybe you are maybe you aren't getting less tension through through the las which you actually want to train but you're increasing lot on like your glutes

[Unknown3]: 25:30

is

[Unknown4]: 25:30

hamstrings and that might impact your you know glut hamster day if depending on how your how your things are structured so it's it is gray it definitely is and i but what i was getting at is just i wanted to put that out there that it is

[Unknown3]: 25:44

yes

[Unknown4]: 25:44

gray and just as long as you're understanding that you want to be somewhere in the middle not on either

[Unknown3]: 25:49

hm

[Unknown4]: 25:49

end is kind of what i wanted to get at

[Unknown3]: 25:51

what about just real quick the the idea cause this is the first thing that popped into my head when you put this in the document is like like you and i have both experienced with like r d ls and sniff flag and deadlift where you know we could add fifty eighty pounds to the bar and it would actually look from the outside it would look the same it would look as if there's no sacrifice in range of motion or control or any of that stuff and yet you can feel it in your body internally like you know that when you drop fifty or eighty pounds off that thing that even though it looks the same as it did heavier that you're getting more out of that at the lower load so like that's just kind of where my head went for when i first read that

[Unknown4]: 26:34

yeah it it's hard because to me uh the and this is purely conjecture here theoretical i feel like that would be the appropriate approach that being said i can't a hundred percent say certain

[Unknown3]: 26:51

and

[Unknown4]: 26:51

late of like how that translates to hypertrophy at the end of it i just can't confidently say in either way but it feels it

[Unknown3]: 26:57

right right no i agree fully yeah

[Unknown4]: 27:00

feels better it feels safer it feels more targeted i just don't know if that feeling has you know how much weight that actually carries in a science

[Unknown3]: 27:10

yeah i mean it's just it's just weird cause like even like for the same amount of

[Unknown4]: 27:11

perspective

[Unknown3]: 27:13

reps right like you did two hundred seventy five on your stiff legged de lifts that we talked about last week and you were shaky

[Unknown4]: 27:19

hm

[Unknown3]: 27:19

coming up on the last rap like you had that hitch thing like your hamstrings were kind of like firing awkwardly and you barely made this rap at two hundred seventy five for ten or whatever it was but i bet if you put three fifteen or three hundred thirty five on the bar you could also do ten reps and so it's like it's like are you faking that you're actually slowing down and that you're not actually able to make that rap like is it just like your body like in your mind you're like well this should be hard now so yeah like it's just i'm gonna slow this down like you know what i mean like it's just this weird ambiguous

[Unknown4]: 27:53

i know what you mean i and i think it's there might be like what's the word compromises that are kind of invisible to an external eye where the movement looks the same but from the person doing the movement those compromises are perceivable so like i could bend my knees ever so slightly i could add more

[Unknown3]: 28:11

it is

[Unknown4]: 28:16

rounding in my back which might not be perceptible to someone standing over there really or a video but i know that i'm using more back and glue and less hamstring because that's how i did already else using more back and glue and less hamstring because that's how i did already else

[Unknown3]: 28:23

yep yep yep

[Unknown4]: 28:27

for a very long time like i remember back in the cf pb days we would do sets of for a very long time like i remember back in the cf pb days we would do sets of six and eight of rds with like three hundred fifty on the bar six and eight of rds with like three hundred fifty on the bar

[Unknown3]: 28:34

yeah yeah

[Unknown4]: 28:36

but it it was very different than i do them now but from someone watching from a video it may not seem that different but from like a person performing it like i i know the difference i know that feeling back then would be a lot more like spinal erects and that's probably why our spinal erector were monstrous as opposed to like how i did them last week

[Unknown3]: 28:58

right

[Unknown4]: 28:59

which was much more limited by hamstrings

[Unknown3]: 29:01

yep no fy i agree with that you wanna jump into this dex business

[Unknown4]: 29:06

yeah let's actually talk about the the episode now so i i said i a dea right last week and on the surface right i was up body fat and i was down lean body mass but i was down it said four point four pounds so sufficient enough to me where i was like oh wow this is something has changed and just to kind of reiterate i did make a full instagram post on it where i um put a lot of details but whenever i get dex is i try and produce as many variables as i personally can control i take them all fasted i always try and schedule them about nine to ten in the morning which is generally when like when the first ones are available um and i'll just have water and stuff in the morning so try and reduce variables so there was someone that was at the end one practical with me val she's um she's she's a lifter competitor i f p b super super cool and she added her thought why potentially it may seem like my muscle uh mass went down and she said you haven't lost muscle but you can tell that they're not as full when comparing the two photos you've lost fullness due to muscle glycogen you were doing more metabolic work when i got the first exa and on the first picture which increases the sarcoplasmic fluid in the in the muscle fibers and this time i'm doing more strength work which increase or which creates a different kind of stimulus so this was really really cool because it is true like my volume is lower now but i'm doing heavier loads and taking things much closer to failure like i said i only had five reps on my leg day but they were

[Unknown3]: 30:43

five sets

[Unknown4]: 30:43

all very very hard sets oh yes five sets yeah not five reps but back in like the the fall of the previous year i might do i would do like four sets of one exercise you know what i mean and then i would do like three or four so that really was like oh this is really interesting and i wanted to talk about it and this was like this is a great idea for a podcast so what we're going to do is kind of cover the three mechanisms for hypertrophy and then also i figured what would be really good brian to start with is just kind of the two

[Unknown3]: 31:15

yes

[Unknown4]: 31:15

types of hypertrophy which really was was related to valerie's comment on my post

[Unknown3]: 31:21

yeah yeah totally so what val was essentially saying is that by you you losing fluid essentially within your muscles she's talking about sarcoplasmic hypertrophy so this is essentially the accumulation of fluid or muscle glycogen it's kind of what happens to your muscles when you get a pump in the gym except that in certain circumstances and styles of training your body kind of retains this pieces of the pump not the full pump cause that would be kind of wild if you just walked around like full chess pump all day long but um but

[Unknown4]: 31:58

the everlasting pump

[Unknown3]: 31:59

yeah i don't even know if it would be like it would kind of decrease some of the excitement of getting one if you just had one all the time you know um but uh

[Unknown4]: 32:06

yeah

[Unknown3]: 32:09

but but either way so so your body can actually retain some of that pump in the form of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy and this is actually a relatively new finding in the scientific literature i mean maybe even in the last like two three years is kind of when a lot of this stuff came out in cody hawn and brandon roberts and i've heard um other people talking about this as well but when you train in a manner conducive to sarcoplasmic hyper which is often higher volumes and a style that is more based in metabolic stress which we'll get into in a second um then then you do kind of have more muscle but it's like this weird ambiguous muscle where like if you took like a week off of training you don't lose real muscle you lose sarcoplasmic muscle which is just fluids but it's like still considered muscle like like when you go get a

[Unknown4]: 33:08

it's inside the muscle

[Unknown3]: 33:08

deck it's inside the muscle so it it's muscle it's just not in size and strength of your individual muscle fiber sarks so that is the type of hypertrophy that you get like if somebody were power lifting style training where you're just doing sets of like one to five and you never get a pump you would essentially have like almost zero sarcoplasmic hypertrophy and you would have a ton of um i actually just mentioned sarcomeres which i actually now that i say it it's it seems like it would fit into sarcoplasmic but i thought it was part of myofibrils i'll have to i'll have to look into that because the sarks are actually like the streams of the muscle fibers i believe but either way so so essentially those are the two types myo fibrillation sarcoplasmic and vowel was mostly saying that you lost sarcoplasmic hypertalk fibers right anything to add to that

[Unknown4]: 34:21

yeah it was i was racking my brain right because i was like you know i i know there's there's different influences of of what goes into you know muscle s and i it's like technically but i don't want to say technically because it's inside the muscle like we just talked about and people were like well what about you know glycogen maybe you were eating more carbs and i was like i was eating double the amount of carbs after than i was before so if anything i would kind of you know sandbag this most recent dea but that was the same it was like that and it's i was ga like monster pumps and stuff back then but now it's i i mean i still am getting them on mostly lower body days as opposed to upper body but it's from that the

[Unknown3]: 35:03

go

[Unknown4]: 35:03

the training stimulus is really different and it was like a light bulb went off and granite she is kind of reinforcing like wishful thinking on my

[Unknown3]: 35:12

yeah

[Unknown4]: 35:13

end like oh you know no air and you didn't lose any muscle like it was just it was just the a temporary representation or a temporary like maximal representation of the muscle you do have right so it's kind of confirming my bias here which obviously just makes me feel better about myself but it is rooted in a very

[Unknown3]: 35:33

is it

[Unknown4]: 35:34

realistic scenario which i thought was just really interesting that she picked up on that

[Unknown3]: 35:38

i wonder if four point four pounds or whatever of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy if the delta between your old sarcoplasmic hypertrophy and your current state of sarcoplasmic hyper tree could be four point four pounds like i don't know enough about it like if anyone on here listening potentially knows how much glycogen can you hold in your muscles and

[Unknown4]: 35:59

oh yeah i know that it's man i wanna say it's around it's either i think it's three hundred grams to four hundred grams of muscle glycogen right in obviously if you're a smaller person you're a larger person that's muscle glycogen but for every gram of glycogen your body's gonna pull approximately three grams of water it's a two point seven i believe precisely but

[Unknown3]: 36:21

three grams of water right

[Unknown4]: 36:25

then you basically multiply that by four or sorry three right so let's say it's four hundred grams of glycogen you multiply that by three now you're getting twelve hundred total grams a pound is like four hundred fifty grams let's call it four hundred for simple so we're talking like three to four pounds basically of muscle glycogen and fluid you can manipulate just from the glycogen and directly accompanying water with that glycogen

[Unknown3]: 36:52

right but is that actually going into like is that is that considered sarcoplasmic hypertrophy versus just being like is that is that is that in my mind i'm thinking of that as the layer of fluid that's outside of the muscle between the muscle and the fat but i think sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is the fluid inside the muscle which would be different than what you're talking about

[Unknown4]: 37:15

yeah it's not it's not something i feel confident speaking with conviction on i know like what i was just speaking about or are like your acute shifts of like a loading before a competition or something like that but

[Unknown3]: 37:25

right but that that's more dependent on carb intake versus style of

[Unknown4]: 37:29

yes

[Unknown3]: 37:29

training type thing right

[Unknown4]: 37:31

exactly yeah yep

[Unknown3]: 37:31

so i'm trying to go more on the side of like style of training so so you were training with higher volumes you were getting more pumps these types of things so there's more intracellular fluid in the muscle belly the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy versus potentially the way you're training now where you're not really getting pumps you're working closer to failure you're doing lower volumes things like that um so like what i just don't know the difference like i i think you know where i'm trying to go with that but it's like

[Unknown4]: 37:58

i know exactly yeah i don't know either

[Unknown3]: 37:58

i don't know what the delta is between like like right now even you wouldn't say that you have zero sarcoplasmic hypertrophy you would say you have some levels of sarcoplasm hyper that's less than what you had before potentially so anyway

[Unknown4]: 38:11

yeah

[Unknown3]: 38:11

that's all interesting i'm not super well read on that research so i'm not going to try and go talk myself into a hole here but but i find that interesting and

[Unknown4]: 38:19

yeah

[Unknown3]: 38:20

and thought provoking so then

[Unknown4]: 38:22

it's super interesting and thought provoking you

[Unknown3]: 38:24

yeah so then we can kind of jump into the three mechanisms of hypertrophy and it's interesting because when you talk about the two different types of hypertrophy the myofibrils the sarcoplasmic i actually think they correlate

[Unknown4]: 38:38

see

[Unknown3]: 38:38

relatively well to two of the different two of the three mechanisms for hypertrophy so we have mechanical tension which is essentially just the tension placed on your muscle so the way that i would think about this is like when you do a rep of an exercise there's a stretched shortening cycle where there is an eccentric portion of the rep where the muscle is lengthened and then there's the concentric portion of the wrap where the muscle is shortened that essentially can be looked at as if you had a rubber band and you were just kind of stretching it and letting it go and stretching it and letting it go and the muscle is almost what's a good analogy here it's like it's achieving um a callis a small callis a very very small calais every time that you stretch and shorten and stretch and shorten it's like the muscle gets more dense maybe that's the better way of saying it maybe cis is the wrong word but it gets it gets more dense with each stretch and shorten and stretch and shorten and over the course of time this tension being placed on the muscle grows the muscle and that's essentially mechanical tension so any time that you lift weights you're actually receiving mechanical tension so even as you're doing metabolic stress which is our second form of muscle hypertrophy even in doing metabolic stress which primarily causes sarcoplasmic hypertrophy you're still getting mechanical tension through that so so in no way can you ever avoid mechanical tension like literally the act of getting out of your chair and standing up is creating mechanical tension not a whole lot of it but some of it so when we talk about metabolic stress we have to understand that mechanical tension is born into metabolic stress but then it's kind of taking it a little bit further because you can have mechanical tension without metabolic stress by doing sets of singles or doubles or triples or whatever you just can mostly avoid metabolic stress within the muscle um but as you do higher reps and as you do things like super sets as you do things like drop sets intensity techniques extended sets as well as movements that are primarily overloaded in the short position you' will incur a lot more metabolic stress and you can just think of metabolic stress essentially as that feeling of burning in your muscle so a lot of people say like oh man the lactic acid in my muscles is killing me right now like it burns so bad that literally is just metabolic stress like it's just different chemicals being shuttled in your muscles and cutting off oxygen supply causing stress metabolic stress um so those are kind of the two primary ones and then the third one is muscle damage and i think damage is really interesting because maybe up to a couple years ago the idea was that in science circles was more like you kind of want to mitigate muscle damage and now i think it's kind of shifting where the understanding is that muscle damage is just a result of mechanical tension and metabolic stress i think that you could break that down a little bit further and say that muscle damage is going to be more prominent in a lengthened overload movement so these things that we're obsessed with that we talked about all the time because they promote more hypertrophy and you know they're gonna help your muscles grow faster these are the movements that also cause you the most damage they make you the most sore and things like that so if we're going to sit here and say that length and overload movements are the primary way to induce hy hypertrophy as quickly as possible or maximally or compared to a short overload movement or something like that then we also have to accept along the same lines that muscle damage is in some a good thing because of the length and overload movements that we're in love with are the things primarily causing muscle damage it's not that you don't get any damage in metabolic stress because you certainly do but you're going to have to do a lot more of those movements in the metabolic stress range to probably incur the type of muscle damage that you might incur from doing more mechanical tension based lengthened movements you go

[Unknown4]: 42:54

yeah yeah i was like i don't know if you're just taking a pause because you were spitting fire right there and i was like i don't want to stop this is brian's

[Unknown3]: 43:00

yeah no and then i ran out of things to say man it was i was like i should have

[Unknown4]: 43:02

crushing it right now okay

[Unknown3]: 43:04

given you like alright what you got on that

[Unknown4]: 43:07

yeah you just gotta stop talking um so i mean yeah this was this was super super cool because what i briefly alluded to in the introduction of the episode is historically you know when left to my own devices let's say that when i'm am programming myself i just done a lot of the metabolic stress style training i obviously there was some muscle damage when i would do like rd ls and that sort of thing but i would generally program higher reps more you know metabolite pump work just because i historically always just gravitated towards more volume and i was like hey i'm

[Unknown3]: 43:42

yeah

[Unknown4]: 43:42

decently jacked i'm still getting bigger and looking better like why if it's don't if it's not broken like kind of why fix it type of thing but really it was just some shortsightedness in my education around these things and it's been really really interesting and and fun now as i've you know had more conversations with people like brian as i've gone through the n one stuff just to really broaden my horizons and now i think look man i've really beat this metabolic stress horse you know for for years like what more do i stand to gain by really prioritizing more time in you know muscle damage style uh training blocks more mechanical tension based blocks and like where can i really now explore these and try and create the most rounded year of training is my pursuit of maximal hypertrophy and i think it's really really important just to have these types of conversations because like we are at i i personally feel like we are at an all time high of like interest in gym and hypertrophy and and this is from from me being here and right now we're living in in temp arizona which is where arizona state is the gym is packed with college students like getting after it right i went to the gym like jenny was going yes so i went on friday night i'm god it's friday fda finally the jim's gonna be empty it's friday night i shit you not eight p m friday night this gym is packed with college students and i was like oh wow like there's a shift in um like culture kind of thing right you wouldn't catch aaron striker dead in a gym on friday night in college like no way

[Unknown3]: 45:23

yeah

[Unknown4]: 45:23

in hell um and with this i just see a lot of people i i feel like it's you your influence are different when you're younger and stuff but a lot of people are doing really stupid and i feel like unfortunately even though we have so much more research in the realm of literally there's research make people their entire livelihood is just on researching ways to to improve hypertrophy stuff we still have so much of just like pr not pragmatic what's see dogmatic not in the knowledge or maybe i should call information that think that people get kind of like sucked into and i really just want you know help other people earlier along and their journey to understand and learn these things like i was thirty two thirty three years old training for sixteen seventeen years before i started to understand these things and i just think it's really really cool and want to be able to just help people understand this and learn it earlier on and help them make more gains better gains in a shorter period of time with maybe some some lesser mistakes really

[Unknown3]: 46:27

yeah what would be the uh the main thing on the front of your mind that you would change if you looked back at like if you if you know if you look at these college kids what's one piece of advice that you could give to them right now that you think would help change their journey along the way

[Unknown4]: 46:46

the only thing that comes to mind is n nutrition and sleep but that's outside the bounds of this conversation but

[Unknown3]: 46:51

yeah

[Unknown4]: 46:51

if we're talking about things that are gonna move the

[Unknown3]: 46:53

yeah

[Unknown4]: 46:53

needle like that that's what it is but with the bounds of this conversation it's i would say understanding the simple basics between lengthened

[Unknown3]: 47:04

and

[Unknown4]: 47:04

overload and shortened overload stuff and if you're doing like because people actually let me back up and take that back sorry i spoke too soon understanding like pairing not training movements training like exercise or sorry training um movement patterns and muscles not like exercises because people will be like oh it's legs so i'm gonna do the hack squat and then i'm going to back squat and then i'm going to smith machine squat and i'm like well basically just doing the same movement

[Unknown3]: 47:39

yeah yeah

[Unknown4]: 47:39

pattern with three different exercises you know what i mean and it's and it's like you're not gonna get what you could get out of the smith machine squat because you just did a back swat in the hack squat before so really just understanding kind of like what you said earlier in the episode we're like hey i'm training you know at at a commercial gym now i can't go from i can't remember what you said to like the one super set to you know the rear delt row which is in the other movement but i know i can set the cable here low on the ground i know that that shortened rear delt position i want to find i can mimic that with this machine that's right next to me so just understanding what muscle group you are trying to to target or which fibers of what what lat or sorry what division fibers you are do you want to create a stimulus out of you can manipulate your environment do you have immediately available to recreate that with a little bit of

[Unknown3]: 48:33

mm

[Unknown4]: 48:36

creativity and and knowledge

[Unknown3]: 48:38

yeah i think avoiding overlapping movement patterns it would be a huge one for sure um that is good and also the the idea like you use legs as the example of like you know we're training legs today so like you know you have it's eight different movements and seven of them are quad movements and then there's like some like curls in there or something but you get the same thing with with back training like people literally are like i'm training back today and you're like uh okay what part you know cause it's like when i cas said this but he goes like you know when when people talk about training the the chess they don't say i'm training front today it's like well what is what is front like front is like

[Unknown4]: 49:17

is f

[Unknown3]: 49:18

like everything you know so

[Unknown4]: 49:19

yeah

[Unknown3]: 49:19

so yeah there's so many different regions of the back and so when you're saying i'm training back like the amount of times that you've seen people with like a seven exercise back sequence and it's like three rows where the elbow position is the exact same and the pole position is the exact same and you're just like mm okay so that's a good one i i also do think that where you were going with that first one is good too because like even if you don't even know the name

[Unknown4]: 49:43

yeah

[Unknown3]: 49:43

of like you know this is a lengthened overload movement and this is a short overload movement like just understanding that some movements fail at a position where you're uh at more risk and other movements fail at a position where there is no risk and being able to utilize that to train at different intensities and just the the the the plethora of different um knowledge that that you can garner and implement into your training when you understand that these movements kind of stimulate your body a little bit differently that can then send you down further paths and open up you know other warm holes for you to go down so um you know it's great for the most part that people are just in the gym lifting weights and that the general idea and the culture is improving but like also when i meet people now that are teenagers are like early twenty seconds college kids that are lifting and i talk to them about you know who do they follow where do they get their information and stuff like that it's still usually a lot of those big names like steve cook michael hern like it's a lot of these people with like millions of followers in the hypertrophy game but i'm getting more and more people that tell me that jeff nipper is one of their top like two or three that they follow and these people have no like evidence based like they don't follow helms or like ist or sheen feld or anything but they know jeff nip and and that's pretty cool because jeff is doing a great job of distilling down a lot of that science into understandable digestible ways for people to to implement their training and so i think through following jeff you'll at least be introduced to the idea of length and and short overload movements and the three mechanisms for hypertrophy and stuff like that so we will see these people as they continue to go through the space like some of them will drop off and they'll probably stop training after college and they'll become like husbands and dads and you know working men and stuff like that working women but others will have that kind of passion ignited and they'll take it further and further and further and those are those are probably the ones that we're the most interested in talking to as they continue that journey

[Unknown4]: 52:09

one hundred percent yes i think that's a fantastic way to to wrap up this episode is there anything else you wanna add brian

[Unknown3]: 52:16

no man that feels pretty good

[Unknown4]: 52:19

perfect so this in my opinion right it's a little early to say maybe one of my favorite episodes we've done i feel like it's been there like the application is super super high it's something that you know i don't think a lot of people understand at a sufficient level and it's just by scratching the surface on a lot of this stuff can really in influence the decisions you make your in your own training how you approach it and how you can kind of understand why certain training days may be more damaging you have more dom than others and just really really cool uh conversation all around so thank you for sharing your wisdom with me and the listeners as always brian we will talk to you guys next week