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-: Now we are gonna transition from the volume of work
to the volume of stimulus.
So recapping, not all work is gonna have the same stimulus
towards a goal. So there's gonna be a difference between
you know, the references that your working in,
the exercises that you're still acting.
There's gonna be a difference between how close to failure
going to. And that's gonna key one for this conversation
is that proximity to failure.
So to illustrate this principle, we're gonna focus on
kind of walking you through
our view or our theorem of mechanical tension.
And you know if you have to learn a stimulus,
mechanical tension is gonna be the ideal stimulus because
it translates really well to understanding
all the other stimulus because if we understand
what's going on from the mechanical tension perspective,
we can understand likely the stress and the tissue
both from energetic perspective as well as the mechanical
and the damage perspective etcetera because this is the kind
of the currency for what's going on within the muscle.
So if we take a review of the effective reps theory,
if you're not familiar with this, I believe Chris Beardsley
has done a bunch of papers on this.
Oh I'm sorry, some review on that.
It's going back and forth between the evidence-based
community. And you know, if you look anecdotally with
what's going on with body building and stuff like that.
Arnold, you know said back in the day, that you know
it's in the last few reps, those are the ones
that count etcetera.
Basically, the summary of the effective reps theory
if you are unfamiliar with it, is that it's the reps
closest to failure seem to be more stimulatory towards
hypertrophy than the reps further away from failure
kind of a general consensus amongst most people
is that, it's about five reps away from failure
or a six RPE or things that you will hear people say
in the literature, podcast, etcetera.
Keep in mind that context is focused on what would be
the stereotypical hypertrophy rep range window.
'Cause it's like what is a five RIR in a set of four
right? It's like, I don't know. Or you know a set of 30.
So when looking at this and investigating this
with you know, some things that support this and we'll
get a little bit more deeper into the research later
is that, it seems to be that you know, most people can
you know, achieve some sort of stimulus hypertrophy
in a variety of rep ranges provided they take those sets
at those rep ranges close to failure right?
So there's a high degree of effort
to the higher RPE to lower RIR
And so if we look at this model here
this curve here would kind of represent the increase
in stimulus as we get closer to failure
with this point kind of representing that theoretical
like five to four RIR, six RPE window
so like five is here, you know
Or should I say, five is here, four is where we really
start to see the climb. And we then we start to see that
you know, maybe plateau afterwards.
That's the working effective reps theory.
So one of the critics of that and some of things
that have been found is that some studies have shown
that there doesn't seem to be that much of a difference
between going close to failure versus all the way
to failure. And some of the working arguments around that
is that as we get closer to failure is that there is
something going on that is essentially causing
in diminishing returns at that point in time.
So one could be, some people will say that it's like
there's an increased fatigue.
But what is that fatigue, right?
Were those extra reps like how were they fatigue?
What is it about them that was making them more fatigue?
But the general consensus is is that,
as we're getting closer to failure,
things that are more disruptive to the tissue
start to climb up really high towards the end
and so are net, as I've quoted here, GAINAGE
starts to drop off. So even though the stimulus is there,
the net hypertrophy response isn't necessarily increasing
as we get into that, you know, like complete failure
or one rep away. Again, this is the effective reps
theory. I'm gonna give you my whole opinion on this
as we kind of get into the failure. So the question is,
should you stop at one to two RIR?
Or an RPE of eight or nine instead of ten?
That I think, you know, you probably gonna still make
good progress doing that. You know, should you completely
avoid failure altogether. Definitely, the thing that I want
you guys to take away from this,
and we just hint on it here really early, is that
the closer you get to failure,
the more volume this equates to.
So, there is the whole context of a lot of stuff that
we're looking at the research is simply that
we're just overdoing volume when we compare
like taking extra sets all the way to failure versus shy.
etcetera. There's a lot of things going on.
Another consideration for that would be
is the stress shifting from a contract out tissue stimulus
to other things, to more of the passive structures
as we get closer to failure. There's a lot of things
going on. A lot of new stuff that's starts to happen there.
You know, we talk about the nervous system, you know,
being able to coordinate those muscle contractions
and those joint positions as we get closer to failure.
And some of the tissue, just isn't as responsive
when we're getting to higher biochemical stress.
So, there is the possibility that where your starting
to stress other tissues there.
And I want to make sure to have this point right,
so, is that, when we look at what's happening
at that failure point, if we don't understand
the exercise, we don't understand, well say, the stress
or fatigue that's being imposed on that tissue,
and to kind of give you guys bonus material
if you haven't taken our training courses like for
program design course,
if we're looking at an exercise that's say loads the length
of position as we're getting closer to that failure point
the mechanical stress on the passive tissue and the stuff
like that, the mechanical damage may be the thing
that really spikes up versus an exercise that maybe doesn't
go to a full stretch, maybe it's hard on this position,
the biochemical stress may be greater at that given point
right? And so there's gonna be a difference between
what stress and what fatigue will be put on there.
And then, how much going to failure would actually impact
you? Because there are certain exercises that if you
take them all the way to failure don't seem to affect
recovery that much and then, other exercises where when you
do take them to failure, they tend to beat you up quite
a bit. So with this whole effective reps theory,
the main principle is that the reps closest to failure
are more stimulatory. What is more up for debate
and there's a lot of new ones,
new ones debates that we have about is
how close to failure do you need to be?
And I'm perfectly fine saying that if you want to train
one to two rep shy a failure and you know, that kind of like
you know eight to 12 range or whatever,
you want to train it in RPE of eight or nine
instead of a flat out 10 etcetera.
You're probably not gonna lose, you know, all of your gains.
You're probably gonna make significant progress. But,
I do think that there's going to be some value
to going to failure, complete failure, at certain points
and what not. And we will talk about that a little bit more.
This section we're focusing more on qualifying failure
but one thing with this curve that I want to keep in mind
is that, this stress here, is there may be
some non-contractile
fiber stimulus that we get in here in some cases.
Whether those that be biochemical adaptations,
whether those be hypertrophy of those passive tissues
like more adaptions to the tighten or to the tendon
or you know, like those type of things.
We have to look at, like okay, we're just talking about
measuring just hypertrophy and we're only looking at
measuring either just like the overall volume of the cell
or looking at measuring, you know, marcus
whatever, how they are doing,
are the things that may be there is certain things
that get stimulated by pushing to that point
that are valuable. And then there's also the component of,
we talk about how different exercises are gonna bring on
different stresses, there's also simply the skill set of
do you have the ability, as you start to get to this point,
where you're one to two reps away from failure,
you're at that RPE eight or nine.
Do you have the ability to keep working with that muscle?
Or do you start using a lot of compensatory muscle tissues
or lot of synergistic things? Like is there breakdown in
technique and stuff. That's a big factor there too.
How much of this is exceeding one point to failure
which what we'd call may be like a technical failure,
form based failure etcetera. Or we're actually doing,
we're passed the capacity of our target tissue
but we're able to carry out the task of another rep or two
using other things. And so that's where, you know,
an exercise like a squat is gonna be very different
than a exercise like a leg extension because of how much
you have to be able to compensate and manipulate
the movement pattern of a squat versus of a machine
where you're locked in and you're in a situation where you
nothing else other than the quads can really contribute
to that knee extension.
So those are just some things to consider when
you're looking at the effective reps theory.
The next thing that we'll go through is just the arguments
against low intensity effort. Is that, if we're not
working hard enough, we're essentially below the threshold
where we're getting to inefficient use of volume.
So if we are doing a lot of work that is below, kind of like
this steeping climb in the middle of this effective reps
curve, essentially we have to do an obscene amount of volume
to be able to get a stimulus.
So the volume to stimulus ratio, or if you wanna call that
or whatever you want to do, is
It's just an inefficient way to train.
So it's gonna be time consuming. Now, keep in mind
that we're talking about stimulus of hypertrophy,
so there may be instances when your goal is body composition
that may be some of these like less stimulus, less stressful
base volume of work may have a play.
Again, principle's not rules, so just take that
into consideration that when we're looking at this
from effective rep theory for hypertrophy and mechanical
tension, that's where this kind of graph applies.
When we're talking about your body compositions,
we can talk about some other goals, okay? But we'll stick
with this right now because that's essentially what
effective reps has been studied for.
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