(upbeat electric guitar music)
-: So if we look at the rep and load range
for mechanical stimulus, if we're using that logic of the
N1 mechanical tension theorem is we're again gonna
come down to this window where there's gonna be a say
ideal volume and stimulus but in this case,
since we're talking about basically an individual set,
and trying to achieve stimulatory reps within that set,
or just a mechanical tension stimulus within that set,
we're gonna see, okay, it's a rep range now at the bottom,
okay, and the mechanical stimulus that I can get is up here.
If we're essentially going too low reps,
the obstacle usually is is that you can get tension
very early but because you cannot continue
that activity long enough, you don't get a high volume
of stimulus because you just can't put ten---
put that mechanical tension stimulus into enough fibers,
so you're not gonna get a lot, it's not gonna be
the optimal way to train for hypertrophy
to do super low reps, okay?
Same thing for super high reps, okay, it's too light,
because of the, you know, the motor unit cycling
and whatnot and just the sheer amount of volume
and biochemical stress that you'll have to do,
it's also not going to be efficient,
at that point in time, you're likely going to get more
maybe, you know, metabolic adaptations
than you are hypertrophy adaptations,
because the metabolic stress is likely gonna supersede
the mechanical stress at that point
which is one of the reasons that I don't like you know,
mix matching a whole bunch of rep ranges like too much,
and train that we prefer to do phases where we're gonna
focus on out here and then we're gonna focus on over here
and then we're gonna focus on over here for variety
of different adaptations depending on the person,
their goal, et cetera.
So, if we look at this chart, it should remind you
of something that we saw at the beginning
of the course, right?
It should remind you of something.
And that is, it's the same principle
that we're talking about with the volume.
So the same thing that we're looking at for volume of work
is that we're trying to find this optimal window
and in this case, it's a more macro level look of this,
'cause we're looking at the stimulus of that entirety
of volume of work whereas here is we're looking at this
as they will, how much stimulus did I get out of that set?
You're gonna see that these are essentially you're gonna
follow, the same kind of principle is that there's this
target window that I'm trying to go for and essentially,
if I hit this enough times appropriately, it's gonna put me
right here, right, 'cause what's gonna happen is this like,
okay, I'm gonna use a rep range, and I'm gonna use
appropriate loading within that rep range and then really,
all I got to do is figure out the amount of you know,
sets that I'm gonna do it for and that's gonna put me
right in here for that optimal range of stimulus.
So it's the same principles that we've been talking about
in terms of getting a stimulus with volume,
in terms of getting a stimulus with mechanical tension.
We're trying to get to the middle of that bell curve
and that bell curve, again, is maybe going to move
but in this case, what I would say is is that, you know,
what will happen is, is that this thing can kind of move
in both directions, in terms of left and right,
because what can happen is, as a person gets
to a certain point, they may need to actually get stronger,
or get just get better at recruiting more motor units
simultaneously, to maintain efficiency here.
So, what I would tend to say is that, if I could,
I didn't draw this, but if I could,
is that what might happen as say, somebody become
say they're training a lot of high reps, right,
all the time, is what may happen is is that for them
to continue to get benefit out of that they may need
to go back and focus on the other neurological goal
of being able to recruit more muscle fibers at once.
So you may see like this thing start to like warp,
or shift or whatnot but it's, again, always gonna
kind of be a target window.
Hopefully, I didn't confuse anybody by my
warping lines thing, you know, but just like a
just look at as simple as this right is that you're going
to need to push the boundaries of this window
to make sure that you maintain proficiency
and being able to get the internal contractile portion
on that tension done, meaning that you're gonna have to,
you're gonna have to train heavier sometimes,
so that you get better at recruiting
more muscle fibers simultaneously and then you're gonna
have to train closer to fatigue, to be able to get better
at you know, reaching out to greater motor unit pools
under biochemical fatigue, et cetera
so, there's almost a intramuscular neurological skill set
that probably affects your capacity
to produce mechanical stimulus and that's why
if you train and what
you tend to plateau, in one style of training,
one particular rep range or system or whatever,
and then what you will find is you will find new stimulus,
and another area, right and so there's also probably,
you know, it's one of those things where,
when we're looking at something like hypertrophy,
technically our performance adaptations
may get in the way of us continuing
to stimulate that hypertrophy.
So, sorry, each,
now let's look at extending the example that we looked at
from the fiber perspective and I wanna take a macro view
of that, because this happens on like,
where we have like multiple muscles that have similar
activities, it happens there as well.
So here we're looking at elbow flexors.
So the same thing would happen, you know,
if you're sitting here doing some bicep curls,
I don't want to call them bicep curls,
but they're just curls, arm curls,
but what we'd see is if we'll, we got three elbow flexors
that can contribute to that, we got the brachioradialis,
the biceps and the brachialis,
the biceps are technically two so I could have drawn
four lines on here if I wanted to.
But the same thing happens is is that one of those is gonna
reach fatigue sooner, and it's gonna put that burden
on the other two to a greater capacity.
And so at that point in time, the tendon-to-tendon tension
is going to go up for that and then shortly after,
the fiber tension is going to go up for that.
So in a way, you know, this is one of those things
where like being able to target you know, exercises
that you know, are more specific, are gonna make sure
that your nervous system tries to recruit the thing
that you wanted to as much as possible so that it gets
the highest volume of stimulus throughout the sets.
Okay, so, if you can't hear,
my dog is snoring on the floor, hopefully the mic
is doing a really good job here, I'll just break my heart
to kick her out.
There's your random tension in the course, okay,
so, with this, we can understand that
we wanna be as specific
as possible with our exercises, our intent,
but also just understand that like, man, as we go closer
to failure, you're gonna hit everything around
that joint more.
That's just the reality of it so you will get
more overlapping stimulus and stress on different tissues
as you get closer to failure so, if so for instance like
if you look at something like an Olympic lift where
you need to be very, like your motor pattern needs
to be very efficient, you would never want to train
those lifts to the point where this started to happen
'cause then all of a sudden, now the movement
is gonna become different.
So those guys take a ton of rest so that they can repeat
the exact same activity with the exact
same motor recruitment et cetera and just master that, okay.
And we technically like some time when we look at
hypertrophy, a lot of times we're thinking the opposite
of those performance goals is like, man, if we wanna
make sure we stimulate the all three of these,
we may have to take that those sets deep,
otherwise what may happen is is that maybe one
of the reasons that I just don't grow a particular thing
or whatever is is that right now, based off my execution,
my training history or whatever it is like I just don't
get there unless I go deep enough.
So that's something to keep in the back of your mind
is that these same principles of motor unit recycling,
and this like, you know, this recruitment
to resistance ratio, it applies to the synergistic
muscle groups as well.
So it would apply to all of the quads,
it would apply to all of the knee flexors,
so the calf and all the hamstring muscles, et cetera,
all the hip extensors.
So, you know, this is also like you look at something like
like if you're training hams and glutes or whatever,
is understanding that like when you take a hip hinge
to greater degree of failure, you're gonna get,
even if you're trying to make a glute dominant,
you're gonna get more hamstrings closer to failure
so that's gonna carry over into volume.
Same thing for if you're doing leg curls,
the closer to failure, the more it's you're gonna use
the calves and the hamstrings as much as possible
and that's where you know understanding hitting
the degree of failure which we're gonna get into
in the next module here you know, can be really valuable
for people that are really trying to fine tune a physique
is understanding you know, when some of the stuff overlaps,
how to be better at isolating stuff.
So it's there's more than just the biomechanics
to some of these things, because and even when we get
into the trainability courses also understanding the,
when we look at all the metabolic stress
and the biochemical stresses, et cetera,
is the closer we get to failure, just all the systems
tend to be getting taxed and that may be part of why we do
see this is that especially in a lot of these studies,
if they've been measuring compound exercises like squats
or whatever, is is like man, you're starting to fatigue
just way more tissues and so like, it may just be that like,
man, we just only have the resources so when we're measuring
hypertrophy and x, y, z, maybe if it was
whole body hypertrophy, it would be different.
Just so many things to consider so just one more reason to,
you know, not jump the gun, in terms of what
that research says.
So, and then this is just showing that the weight equation
here would apply as well, if we're doing heavy higher loads,
versus lower loads, if we look at the macro level,
higher intensity loads, it's, you're just gonna demand
more muscle groups working at the beginning,
so all three of the elbow flexors are gonna be working
hard at the beginning and you're gonna reach task failure
of elbow flexion earlier and a heavier load
than a lighter load which means you will have stimulated
these guys earlier, but you will maybe not have taken them
to the same degree of fatigue.
So, how much volume of stimulus did each one get?
You know, that's where, you know, we don't necessarily
know for sure which one is gonna be the most
and there's the closer the rep ranges and loads get,
you know, the more similar they become, but likely,
you know, this is since like, okay, I get to them earlier,
but I can dig 'em as deep, it's likely why we see
that we can tolerate and tend to benefit from
more sets here, less sets here, okay.
When we look at general principles, we tend to be you know,
we do heavier loads, we do more sets,
we do lighter loads, we do fewer sets,
especially when we're talking about taking both of them
to the same degrees of failure, right.
And that's why, just going back to this guy again,
is is that I think that
there are there's a bigger effective reps window
for this guy, sorry for these lighter sets,
and a smaller effective reps window here
but maybe this is a higher magnitude, lower magnitude,
maybe it balances out.
That tends to be most how most people are interpreting
the research is like, well, as long as you got a failure,
it doesn't really matter.
I would say we've seen different observations in that.
And definitely, what I would say is that at an,
at any moment in time, somebody is likely
gonna benefit from one portion
of that spectrum more than the other, whether it be
on the low, middle or high end of the rep
and load range game.
So let's recap here really quick.
Why did we just go through all of that?
If we only monitored volume of work, okay,
it may not correlate to achieving our goal of the reason
that we're doing the work in the first place.
So we wanna make sure that if we are gonna do the work,
that we are getting to the point where that work
is contributing to the stimulus.
So it's going to be important that we track
how close to failure we are getting.
Volume of stimulus in our example,
the mechanical tension theorem based is gonna be, you know,
based off a relative effort with and trying to be
within that window of I'm working, I'm doing these sets
hard enough, doing hard enough sets that I'm making
use of the volume that I'm doing, working outside
of those variables, the two ends, right, you know,
or two or lesser effort, so it doesn't,
so if you're not doing, not enough effort,
not enough volume, either of those, you're gonna get to
a poor stimulus to work ratio.
So we so if you're not doing if you're not working
hard enough, your work isn't contributing to stimulus,
the stimulus is really low bad ratio.
If you're doing too much volume, your work is really high,
your stimulus is not necessarily gonna be
proportionately high and again, then we have a poor
stimulus to work ratio.
So we want as much stimulus as possible
for the work that we are doing, okay?
There may be a point of diminishing returns,
going completely to failure or too close to failure
or going too close to failure for too much of the workout.
A lot of the research is compared all the sets to failure
versus all the sets below and when we get into looking at
applying failure to some of those spreadsheets and whatnot,
I'll kind of show you guys how we apply it
but it's not really what you see in terms
of the research conditions right now
so that's one of the problems that I have is that
a lot of the studies right now just simply aren't measured,
I mean, Craig says is challenging, but right now
they're not reflecting the actual way that we program,
especially here at N1.
So we have to kind of extrapolate what we can
and utilize a lot of our observations
and use a lot of it,
utilize a lot of mechanistic data to kind of
give some insights into why maybe why we're seeing
the observations that we're seeing, and then how we could,
you know, measure those and progress those, okay.
So unfortunately, there's just a lot of conflicting
applied research on the topic of training to failure
and that's, you got, a lot of the studies are either newbies
or untrained subjects, you got they done of course,
a wide variety of exercises, you know,
a lot of them may be done with volume, that's just
it didn't matter, because there was enough stimulus
in both groups, et cetera.
And they, ultimately, they just weren't comparing
the conditions the way that we would probably
compare them in training and so it's really hard
to take some of that stuff and make hard conclusions
about what's going on at the gym
and at the end of the day, you know, hopefully
if you had the principles, you understand that even if
the research came out and said, well, on average,
this is the thing is that you're working with individuals
and you know, when we're working with individuals,
the most important thing is that have the principles
to be able to adjust based off of that individual
and their progress and whatnot and that's why it's important
to have the tangible stuff because 100 pounds is 100 pounds,
10 reps is 10 reps, it's very easy to, you know,
measure progress and regression from those,
it's pretty straightforward and so if we can,
we have those things, we have those tangible things
that we're looking at and then we have the, you know,
the subjective stuff that we're gonna look at with RPE
and stuff like that, it's very easy for us to then
start manipulating that stuff according
to the individuality of the person
that we're working with, right,
'cause their individuality is gonna dictate a lot of how
we apply these principles of stimulus and failure,
'cause some people are gonna need to work closer to failure,
some people are gonna need to work more volume
and vice versa.
And some people are gonna need to work more on both,
some people are gonna respond better to one side of that,
you know, volume to stimulus, like thing where it's like,
okay, this person needs less sets, but higher intensities,
this person needs a little bit lower intensity's high,
this person needs right in the middle
and that stuff that you're gonna learn from an individual
and then stuff that you're gonna adjust through
periodization, if you're training them properly
and paying attention to how they are responding
to the training as well.
So, the next section that we will be getting into
is actually dissecting and qualifying failure
so now that you kind of see the mechanism
and understand little, we'll dig into the actual application
of qualifying this on the gym floor or in qualifying these
sets and reps and looking at how we can then input
that into our practical kind of equation of what the hell
is this volume and how do we progressively overload it.
♪ Ah ah ♪
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