I have a few theories of hypertrophy. I was just running one through my AI and learned that there actually are credible signaling pathways to support my theory.
The theory is, basically, that the body is deciding a particular settling point for muscle mass based on some form of cost optimization. I.e. muscle costs energy/resources to maintain, but they also (presumably) have value in giving us an ability to find and collect sources of sustenance. It’s looking for the ideal balance point, based on a variety of signals.
For beginners, there’s strong evidence that 3-4 sessions per week is optimal (basically, probably every other day). Possibly, this is because it gives your body time to recover and build stronger between sessions.
So when we look at people who have maxed out their strength and can’t seem to advance, and ask the question of whether they need to add more days if they want to be able to continue advancing, you’re also talking about sacrificing that healing and regrowth period.
Under my theory, the answer would be that you need to hit some threshold of activity during off-days to tell your body that the muscle serves some purpose - so the homeostatic settling point isn’t in conflict with your target max - while staying light enough that you’re not impacting the healing phase.
In essence, in terms of pushing growth, you still want to target 3-4 days per week of pursuing progressive overload, and not more.
Only theoretical, of course, but interesting.
I’m nowhere near buff enough (and liable to never be) to take any personal value from the idea, or test it out, but I’ll throw it out there for any biology PHDs that want to run a study, one day.
It’s suggesting that you would want to target 20-30% of your 1rm, with frequencies through the off-days sufficient to keep those myostatin inhibitors, etc. active.
I would be skeptical that they got all the messaging right, but correct, the basic concept of “active recovery” giving better gains (this is true for aerobic activity too) than “passive recovery” (true rest) is pretty well established.
For example:
Although most expert advice does push for one day a week of real rest.
It takes time and effort to build muscle and the body makes an effort to keep it.
The beginner could likely work out every day as long as they rotate body parts so that there are several days between the most fatiguing exercises. They are not even close to their potential and, if younger, are not lifting enough weight to require lifting less than every other day. Older lifters may require more recovery time.
The experienced lifter is close to their potential. They are lifting far more weight and this requires longer recovery. Weightlifters tend to concentrate on muscle. This is unsurprising, but it is the central and peripheral nervous systems that most require recovery through proper rest, sleep and nutrition. To get strong you need strong tendons, ligaments, joints and fascia. If you have strong muscles but weak shoulder ligaments or biceps tendons, your risk of injury becomes higher.
Myostatin inhibitors are reportedly taken by Silicon Valley types as peptide stacks by people who do not know much biology. Your body knows more about avoiding injury than you could articulate (haha!) and lifters should listen to it. Anabolic steroids are a poor decision for similar reasons, they make your heart muscle big along with the skeletal muscles, and your body is better off growing slowly so that the heart and connective tissue can appropriately handle bigger loads.
Sixteen years ago, at age 66, López García first tried running a mile. He’d recently retired after spending his entire working life as a car mechanic in Toledo, Spain. In all those years, he’d never trained as an athlete or exercised much at all. He couldn’t finish that first mile. He could barely start it.
Now, at age 82, López García is the world record holder in the 80-to-84 age group for the 50-kilometer (31-mile) ultramarathon. In 2024, he also won the world marathon championship for his age group, with a time of 3:39:10, setting a European record in the process.
His outsize success caught the attention of a group of European scientists who study aging. They invited López García to their lab for extensive testing. Their findings, published in January in Frontiers in Physiology, are, at once, revealing and “inspiring,” said Julian Alcazar, an exercise scientist at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain…
The researchers found that López García has the highest aerobic fitness recorded in an octogenarian, matching that of healthy 20-to-30-year-old men. His muscles also absorb and use oxygen unusually well. But in other ways, his biology, biomechanics and training seem relatively ordinary.Ask The Post AIDive deeper
Taken as a whole, López García’s physiology and performance in his 80s may help upend some common assumptions about what’s possible and normal as we age, the researchers concluded, including whether it’s ever too late for the rest of us to tackle that first mile…
No doubt that the scheme will give excellent results. OTOH a different perspective for those of us who don’t want to be arsed to count so much, brought to us by the same mindset that reminds us that zone training for aerobic exercise doesn’t require knowing your HRmax or heart rate at all: rating of perceived exertion (RPE) is all you need and may even be better. Same may be true for lifting as well … For lifting a practical version is repetitions in reserve (RIR), not worrying about what your 1 rep max is or what percent of it your are at. Just lift until you feel you only have a rep or so left. The idea is that you then custom fit to where you happen to be that specific day. Fancy pants way to say it: “autoregulation.”
Bolding mine.
Overall, both subjective and objective autoregulation methods are effective for enhancing maximal strength when following a resistance-training protocol. It is speculated that this may be because both subjective and objective autoregulation methods could account for daily fluctuations in fitness, fatigue, and readiness of the athlete. An RIR-based RPE protocol seems to have small beneficial effects over a percent-based resistance protocol in the back squat, front squat, and bench press for increasing 1-RM.
Honestly, better? I’m not sure. The effect measure is not huge. And there is some risk of … well … laziness creeping in when real people do it.
But the basic simplicity of just being aware of how hard you’re working by effort is enough has great appeal!
Heart rate is not as useful an indicator of effort as RPE. But this has nothing to do with counting, which is easy. The 5-5-10-15 method is based on fairly established science regarding muscle hypertrophy. RIR, unlike RPE, is not better. It is not even easier, since the counting is very approximate but estimating RIR is more so.
A better way to self-regulate is to not go near or test your 1RM maximum often, because this causes more harm than good. If most of your work is in the 60-90% range it is easy to handle inevitable fluctuations in strength, and allows quicker recovery than approaching failure.
Of course, people differ, and there are many ways to make a salad. The argument for “meathead logic” over formal studies is that you can try it and see that it works, and that the benefit is substantial. That said, lifter-scientists like Schoenfeld, Thibaudeau, Contreras and other T-Nation alumni have in recent years done much to increase our understanding of muscle and have the gym experience to be make their work broadly applicable.
FWIW, for me RIR works, and is simple easy peasy. Of course it is what I have been doing forever without ever knowing I could call it autoregulation or even rep in reserve. I was too lazy to test my 1RM, and in early days didn’t know about calculators that could estimate it from how much you could do five reps with!
Oh through the years I had brief times when my ego settled into seeing how I could bench. But doing things by numbers was never sustainable for me. And I have always been more interested in running, cycling, or new skills accomplished, as my goal settings, than being bigger or hitting new strength numbers.
Still, no offense to the “lifter-scientists”, but I put most of them a camp not far off from the current longevity bros - they are selling. They gotta convince people that there is a special sauce and it is what is in the jar they have.
But to the degree there may be marginally more gains with method A over B … don’t care. I don’t need to max out. I set my goals decades ago and so far I am track for hitting them. Still it minimally pleases me to see that what seems like common sense to me has data behind as being at least as good!
I prefer my cardio activities too! And it doesn’t need to be either or. A small investment in strength training, doesn’t have to be weights, adds lots to healthspan and function. The gain from just a little added in is HUGE. There are many options that may be not at all boring. Some of skill based ones might appeal! Gymnastics based plans using mostly body weight, steel mace and/or club work outs, so on.
@storajwalker and others of us who prefer to spend more exercise time doing cardio -
Linked previously we discussed how just a few sets per muscle group per week are highly effective for strength and hypertrophy increases, no need to spend hours a week lifting on those counts.
But I really want to emphasize how much resistance training is akin to a little tin added to copper (strength trading being the tin, to cardio as the copper) creating the alloy bronze, much more durable than either is alone. Just a little tin.
Apologies if any of these have been shared before.
A dose-response meta-analysis of 4 studies suggested a nonlinear relationship between resistance training and the risk of all-cause mortality. A maximum risk reduction of 27% was observed at around 60 minutes per week of resistance training (RR=0.74; 95% CI=0.64, 0.86). Mortality risk reductions diminished at higher volumes.
Yes minutes per week is hard to translate with weightlifting as you can be doing supersets or circuits with little rest or resting several minutes between. But that’s how they measured and bottom line was more than a very modest amount of resistance training did not gain more mortality benefit, may have lost some.
Among participants without type 2 diabetes, 1-59 and 60-149 min/week of long-term weight training were associated with 14% (HR 0.86; 95% CI 0.82-0.89) and 8% (HR 0.92; 95% CI 0.85-0.99) lower mortality versus no weight training, respectively, after adjustment for aerobic activity. However, ≥150 min/week of weight training was not significantly associated with mortality (HR 1.05; 95% CI 0.91-1.20; overall P trend = 0.94; P quadratic < 0.001). Meeting the recommended aerobic physical activity guideline (≥150 min/week) and performing any weight training were associated with 20-34% lower mortality. Among participants with type 2 diabetes, a moderate level of pre-diagnosis weight training was associated with lower mortality, whereas post-diagnosis weight training showed no association. Performing both weight training and aerobic activity before and after diagnosis was associated with lower mortality.
Again less than an hour a week maximizing health benefits and adding lots to the lots of aerobic exercise benefits base. Maybe losing benefits with much more.
American Heart Association current guidelines pushing for inclusion of resistance training just twice a week highlighting that
Approximately 30 to 60 minutes per week of RT is associated with the maximum risk reduction for all-cause mortality and incident CVD.
Combination training (the alloy analogy) really does seem best for healthspan considerations, and while further albeit lessening benefits accrue beyond 150 minutes per week of aerobic exercise, maximum (mortality anyway) benefits appear to hit under 60 minutes per week on the resistance side. (Better just resistance than nothing though! But as discussed in this thread just a bit above, heart rate elevation and breathing hard with resistance exercise is not the same impact as the same with aerobic exercise.)
I don’t have cites available for it, but my belief is also that resistance training added to aerobic helps reduce injury risk during aerobic activities. And most training programs for aerobic sports, advise a touch of resistance training as a means of improving performance in the sport.
Kettlebells, dumbbells, barbells, steel mace, clubs, gymnastic inspired, body weight variations, “functional programming” with sandbags or whatever … all good, @outlierrn , and no need, or IMHO any benefit to trying to max out being our very swolest or strongest, just a bit of whatever we hopefully can have fun doing just a little of, added to what you enjoy more.
All this talk of optimization is interesting, but not very actionable for those of us who hate to exercise and mostly want to know how little can i do and still retain useful function.
I’m all about healthspan. Being able to lift big bags of catfood and garden sand comfortably. Not falling. Not hurting myself. Being able to open that jar. Carrying furniture when needed. Shoveling snow (and hurling it over the retaining wall, sadly, i can’t just push it out of the way.)
This is why i lift weights, but I’d like to do as little as possible, because it’s boring and uncomfortable and takes time away from stuff i like doing.
The above your post post is then for you. A dab will do ya. Less than 30 minutes even twice a week complete body push pull compound most efficient mixing up higher volume lower volume plyometrics and all planes. And do aerobic too.
It clearly seems better for most people to combine cardio and strength training. Training only the main powerlifting lifts will not greatly decrease one’s VO2 max, which is associated with more successful aging. Strength training wisely for an hour a week is dramatically better than not doing any and will preserve more muscle function.
I doubt these studies are great. Few longevity studies are. Many people do combine cardio and strength training. The amount of time spent training can fluctuate widely; mine does, depending on my schedule. Last month, I went to the gym and lifted 300,000 pounds on the Viking Press. This meant loading 300 pounds and doing 10 reps every minute (about 15 seconds each time) for 5 minutes, taking a break, and repeating this 20 times. Though this took over 2 hours, the time spent lifting was under 30 minutes since much more time was spent resting. So how do you measure time? These studies may also be confounded by steroid use which has a negative impact on heart health.
It is possible to get strong without gaining much weight and size. Or this can be emphasized. The body has three known systems to sense nutrients: insulin, mTOR and AMPK. Old studies found mice live longer if they take in fewer but adequate calories. There does seem to be a negative relationship between size and longevity. However, this can likely be managed. I believe these studies are confounding excessive hypertrophy with strength training duration.
That said, I like this Kokkinos study I have quoted before looking at 750,000 US veterans, a diverse group, from age 30 to 95 and treadmill MET scores. The fitter, the better and the results are easy to believe.
I get that there will be such a knee jerk doubt when the conclusions are not what you think they should be. But looking at the actual studies? They are pretty good. Here’s the full article link for one of them.
Prospective study and huge. “31,140 men without type 2 diabetes and 2,588 with type 2 diabetes from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (1992–2018).” Not body builders. Not competing powerlifters. Health professionals some of whom lift for more than an hour and a half a week. Which frankly is roughly what I do (two or three times a week for 45 to 60 minutes a session) which give me pause.
Biological plausibility.
Some biologic evidence suggests that a high level of weight training may cause arterial stiffness and thickening and consequently increase the risk of CVD (27,28). Previous studies reported that the attenuation of mortality benefit with a high level of weight training was more pronounced for CVD outcomes than for others, such as type 2 diabetes and cancer (5). For cause-specific mortality, we also found a stronger J shape with a more steeply increased slope for CVD mortality compared with other causes of death. However, it is unlikely that CVD mortality primarily explains the observed J-shaped association for all-cause mortality because we continued to see a similar pattern after excluding deaths resulting from CVD from total deaths.
Of course not perfect. The article itself points out potential reasons for the findings, including your point that there could be unaccounted confounders like steroid use or harms of too much of protein enriched diets:
All existing studies (including ours) have relied on self-reported questionnaires, which are prone to measurement error. Duration and intensity of weight training can be variable, and measurement error is likely to be larger at higher levels. If the duration and intensity of weight training were overreported at the higher levels, the magnitude of the association at the higher levels of weight training may have been underestimated, resulting in a nonlinear inverse association between weight training and mortality. Two studies, including ours (9), used repeated measures of weight training to reduce measurement error and better capture long-term activity behavior, but a J-shaped association between weight training and mortality remained. Additionally, the limited distribution of weight training in most study populations compromised the ability to accurately estimate the association at higher levels. Fewer than 5% of study participants performed 150 min/week, and low statistical power hampers precise estimation. Moreover, it is possible that participants with a high level of weight training may include the use of anabolic agents and/or protein-enriched dietary modifications, which may be associated with higher mortality.
That said, the same J shape is seen in women who may be at less risk of anabolic steroid abuse:
And speaking of women - to @puzzlegal’s question of how much she needs to do to gain the benefit? Women apparently get more benefit with less:
In dose-dependent analyses, men derived the greatest mortality benefit from engaging in 3 sessions/wk of muscle strengthening PA with a 14% lower hazard in all-cause mortality; women derived equivalent or greater benefit by engaging in only a single muscle strengthening PA per week (Figure 2). For women compared with men engaging in 3 sessions/wk of muscle strengthening PA, there was ∼2-fold greater relative reduction in all-cause mortality.
I am easily willing to believe you can strength train too much, and lose much of the benefit - much of which comes from adequate recovery including time, sleep, nutrition and many other things. I just doubt the threshold is as low as 150 minutes per week unless this time only includes when weights are actually being lifted. The rest time taken by five different people lifting weights in the gym varies enormously (the guy who talks for 55 minutes per hour versus the heavy lifter who lifts for 20 minutes and knows changing weights and waiting for machines takes time too). . I do believe cardio and VO2 max or METs are much better indicators of fitness than mere weight lifted.
Good studies, of course, do more than give a plausible result. The magnitude of effect, if large, may increase confidence in the study. It should be reproducible among disparate populations - does it make sense women have twice the effect? Dose-dependent relationships are good, as are experimental data and consistency. Self reported data is pretty problematic (making many studies on diet close to garbage quality) even if alternatives are hard. Many people do not know what they ate last week, or did in the gym a month ago.
