(wind whooshing)
-: We're looking at assessing hypertrophy stimulus.
Like I said, this is gonna be where bringing in
your knowledge of what biomarkers
are showing up under systemic, metabolic
and neurologic are going to be the most important.
So get ready to actually go into your memory
and pull up some of that information
because you're gonna be applying that here as well.
So why do we choose a hypertrophy program?
What's the goal, the purpose?
This is gonna dictate it but to less a degree,
because, for the most part, if we're doing hypertrophy,
it's gonna be this middle one:
you're doing it for the gains.
Now, other times you may be doing or focusing
on hypertrophy with a client might be
it's a metabolic deload and a transformation client.
So for them, hypertrophy training
is like a neuro-deload from metabolic training.
So it's a way for you to like focus on more recomp,
focusing on long-term metabolic health
and metabolism by putting on a little bit of muscle mass
in between your periods, where you're focusing
on straight body composition and fat loss.
So you could be using it for those clients as well.
So obviously, there's gonna be a difference
between when we're programing and assessing hypertrophy
for somebody that's maybe doing it for recomp
versus somebody that's doing it
for all out maximum hypertrophy.
A lot of that is just simply gonna be bringing
the volume and the nutrition into an appropriate level
for that client's goal
and then including whatever non-exercise based activity neat
that you would want to facilitate that recomposition.
'Cause we were looking at using hypertrophy
for a recomp person, a lot of times we're trying
to tow that edge between where we're getting
the hypertrophy stimulus,
but we're closer to maintenance level calories
and we may do that with pure nutrition
or we maybe do that by adding a little bit neat.
But obviously, when we are towing that line
and trying to be a more of a maintenance level nutrition,
you have less room for error
in terms of how much volume you can throw somebody at
and when you might actually be underfeeding them
because you're much closer to that
versus when you're shooting for a surplus.
So those are essentially gonna be
the two major differences in goals
is whether or not when you're going for hypertrophy,
you're going for all of hypertrophy.
So we should be in a fairly decent surplus
versus when we're trying to focus on recomp
and we're trying to stay as close to maintenance as possible
and trying to get that more recomposition effect.
So our ideal outcomes, pretty simple,
either body recomposition or gains.
You may get stronger.
You may get more conditioned depending
on where you are in the spectrum
of hypertrophy stimulus.
But you're usually not doing hypertrophy
for those specific goals.
They just happen to be side things
that may come along with this.
The main reason that you're doing this
is either recomp or gains.
Now, this is where, philosophically,
like when we say hypertrophy phase,
it's separate from metabolic or neuro,
and hypertrophy itself is not a stimulus
whereas like metabolic stress is a stimulus,
neurological stress is a stimulus.
Neurological demand creates a response.
So it's the stress and the adaptation
are essentially they share some of the same names.
In hypertrophy, this is not the case.
Hypertrophy is the outcome that we're going for.
So it's the sum of the desired adaptations.
It's not the stimulus or the stress that we're putting in.
So the main stress that we're putting in
is mechanical tension but mechanical tension
while it is a stress, usually,
isn't we'll say a limiter of what we can do.
Usually, the things that are still gonna limit
our performance and our tolerance to volume, et cetera
are going to be the metabolic stress
or the neurological stress.
So when we're in here,
when we're in a hypertrophy phase,
essentially, what we're trying to do,
is stay between metabolic and neurological stress.
We're trying to not go too far
in either of those directions
hence my little picture of a metabolic and a neurobolic,
neurobolic, metabolic and a neurological thing
like playing pong.
And hypertrophy is like that little ball,
trying to stay in the middle there,
not being too metabolic, not being too neurologic
and being able to get a volume of mechanical tension
in there before either the metabolic stress
or the neurological stress becomes the limiter
either from a performance perspective
or from a recovery perspective.
So because we are staying away
from the extremes in terms of rep ranges,
time under tension, loading, et cetera,
we're in the middle,
we're using the middle of monitor rep ranges.
We're using the middle amount of sets, et cetera,
like all of that stuff is in the middle,
the thing that is going to push the stress
is gonna be the volume at which we do it.
So in terms of all the stimuli,
hypertrophy is the one where volume
is a major currency advantage over, say,
intensity or effort.
So with metabolic, how metabolic something is
is really dependent on deep you're pushing those sets,
or how much fatigue you're building up,
whereas strength, intensity-based stuff,
it's really about those maximum loads.
And hypertrophy is not maximum loads
or maximum time under tension density, et cetera.
It's really just about accumulating volume of tension.
It doesn't mean that we don't train to failure
that a certain amount of effort is need to be there.
It's just that when we look at what is accumulating
the stimulus, it's gonna lead to adaptation,
volume becomes a very important,
because I can't more mechano-tension something,
like mechanical tension, like we're getting it.
The amount we get is related
to how fatigue and loading and stuff
but you can only accumulate so much in a set.
You can't just keep going and get more
because the performance drops down.
You can't like 1RM, like more mechanical tension.
You can only get so much in a rep,
so much in a set, et cetera.
So likely, when we're looking at this volume
is gonna be very, very important for determining
the amount of stimulus that you get.
And it's by using that volume
that we're either going to end up with an excessive amount
of metabolic or neurological stress or systemic stress.
So when we're looking at volume,
we can look at all the nuances of volume
but the basic principle here is you need to focus
on volume as proximity to failure and set volume.
So a higher number of sets, but not very close to failure
maybe the same volume as a fewer amount of sets
all the way to failure or close to failure.
And what's going to be realistic for most people
and give you the most efficient outcome
is finding that sweet spot between how many sets you do
and how hard, or how close to failure those sets are.
And throughout a program,
you can progress in either of those directions.
And this is where we're gonna try
and give you some advice on maybe which one of these
has room or which one you may be overdoing.
Because too little of either and you under-stimulate.
Too much of either, and you're going to exceed recovery.
If you have an imbalance
between either how much failure you're doing
and how much set volume you do,
you'll see inconsistent progress.
This is supposed to save results but a you guys here know,
if you follow me, I throw typos out there
like nobody's business.
So this says you will also get assaults.
So there you go, guys, do not mess up the balance
between failure and volume or you will be assaulted,
maybe by a client, but you'll get inconsistent results.
And you'll get inconsistent assessment markers.
So you'll see biomarkers that are fitting
under a variety of categories instead.
So you wanna find that sweet spot
between the number of sets you're doing
and how hard those sets are.
That's gonna be your most efficient application of volume,
because essentially if you're unbalanced,
you end up needing more volume than you should,
doesn't matter which mechanism you use.
You end up needing more than what's most efficient.
And if we're using more volume than what's efficient,
we're going to be pushing into,
past recovery or using up our recovery more.
So results will be less.
Progressions will be weird.
And, of course, you're gonna get assaulted as well.
So our key performance markers to watch
when we're looking at hypertrophy phases,
and this is gonna be pretty much across the board
from lower rep, main, like, oops, functional hypertrophy,
like high mechanical, mechano-transduction,
focus versus as we get closer to the sarcoplasmic,
this is all gonna fit in those windows,
but it's just to varying degrees.
So we're looking at increased performance,
within a tension stimulus rep range.
So for most people, we're looking at maybe six to 12,
for some person, it might be four to 10.
For another person, it might be eight to 15-ish.
This is where that end of marker comes in.
But wherever the efficient rep ranges is
is for them accumulating tension.
We're looking at performances that are specific
to those rep ranges.
So if we're doing a neuro phase,
we might see that somebody improves their lower rep
or their one rep max more than they do their 12 rep max.
And if we're focusing on metabolic stuff,
they might improve their 15, 20-rep max really easy
but won't improve their six rep max very much.
So does the specificity of the rep range
that we're focusing on, that we're looking
to see performance.
And we can also look at increased reps
that stay within that range.
So going from being able to do it
for eight reps to 10 reps, that's ideal.
But if we're already towards the top of that range,
we're not looking to progress in repetitions
out of what we would qualify as the tension specific
or tension stimulus rep range for that individual.
And then increased volume tolerance,
I put a couple asterisks on here.
This is another performance marker to watch
but significantly less in terms of performance
than the load or rep increase.
And that's because when it comes to tolerance to volume,
it could be over-training, under-feeding,
lots of different things going on there.
So when we look at volume tolerance,
essentially we have to take into account
did I improve performance of the earlier stuff
and where's my food at or whatnot.
So the reason I have all the asterisk here
is if they are losing that volume tolerance,
I'll cover this again later,
but it's likely more gonna be from a nutritional
or under-recovery thing that is the cause of that.
So that's a better marker for the nutrition side
even though it is a performance marker.
And so that would be sets and proximity to failure
would be the two things we'd be looking at.
So for example, say you hit failure earlier,
loss reps, that's an issue.
Say you took a set to failure
and you're supposed to,
like last week you did two sets to failure
and then this week you also did two sets to failure
but your second set to failure,
there was a big drop-off in performance.
That's where that proximity to failure thing would come in.
And then you would look at the same thing as sets
were just I would consider those sets
that are further away from failure,
I would look at them a little bit differently
because basically once you hit that failure button
in a workout, it changes the stress on the body.
Like everybody knows that.
If you're staying away from maximum failure,
your performance tends to decline
and then maybe you hit a certain volume
and then you peak.
But like for a lot of people,
once they take a set all the way to failure,
that's gonna change their performance,
maybe not just for that exercise
but maybe for the whole rest of the workout.
And so you need to evaluate those conditions
a little bit differently
and take them under the appropriate context.
So our biomarkers, this is where, hypertrophy,
being in the middle, becomes the sum of everything else.
So basically, everything from the metabolic
and neurological phases, that includes systemic, by the way,
as part of that metabolic category,
everything is on the board,
absolutely everything is on the board
because, essentially, you put enough volume
and enough effort in, you can stress any system.
You just do enough stuff.
And hypertrophy is the currency of just
we're trying to put in volume to drive stimulus.
So by doing that, we can literally stress anything,
anything, everything is on the board.
Now the whole benefit of understanding
how we periodize at M1 is that by bringing up
all these other systems, we're less likely
to stress out the metabolic and the neurological system
when we do hypertrophy so our volume tolerance
should be much better.
So, basically, what I'm telling you is the better you get
at programming and periodizing,
the easier it becomes to assess hypertrophy.
The crappier you are at programming and periodizing,
the much harder it is to assess hypertrophy
because you may not have people
that are adapted metabolically and neurologically
way past where you are with this hypertrophy stimulus,
they might be too similar that you're constantly running
into walls of metabolic limiters or neurological limiters.
So, because it's everything, what I'm gonna say
is paying closer attention to sleep
can be very helpful because sleep is,
it's pretty much across the board.
And since we're focusing on hypertrophy,
we're focusing on that.
Sleep and that aspect of recovery
is very correlative with our ability
to recover and adapt to hypertrophy training.
So paying attention to sleep
may be the most beneficial biomarker here
because you know it directly applies to recovery.
It's not that everything else is important.
It's nothing, growth (indistinct) gut health
and things like that are still not important to recovery.
It's just like, man, sleep is one of those things
where you can consistently measure it.
And it's directly correlated
to the recovery that you need for volume.
Because, essentially, more volume means your body
needs more sleep.
So if you're not sleeping good
then you're not gonna be tolerating volume for very long.
So in terms of a direct correlation to tolerance to volume,
sleep is probably the strongest correlating biomarker
you have there.
HRV and heart rate are gonna become less correlative
especially short-term,
simply because the volume of work you're doing,
different body parts and the fact
that you're in a calorie surplus
and all these things is really,
you're gonna see a lot of inconsistencies across leg day
versus arm day, and different things like that,
whether you go up in sets versus intensity
and whether you're having re-feeds
and all the things that we do in calorie surpluses,
you're gonna need to really focus on longer term trends,
if you're gonna use those markers for hypertrophy
'cause they just don't correlate as well.
Doesn't mean you can't use them but I would not invest
a ton of energy into them
unless I'm looking at long-term trends.
GI markers may be more food volume related.
So if we're talking about working in a calorie surplus,
sometimes it's like, okay,
this person's having digestive issues
and it may be something that you need
to work on the nutrition side
but it might actually just be like okay,
maybe they need to have simpler carbohydrates
or more processed foods or more dense,
calorie dense foods, et cetera, maybe,
because if you throw somebody in this
and they just start eating like eight more tons of broccoli
on top of that, 'cause they think like,
well, they're just gonna increase everything
and it's not more calories, et cetera,
at a certain point when we're pushing food up,
you have to start pushing away things
that are just extra work for the GI tract,
even though they may be, quote-unquote, healthy foods
in the sense of when you reach a certain amount of volume,
those healthy foods actually maybe may become obstacles
to digestion and an extra stress on the system.
And then you're that guy that's got
the horrible, horrible gas on his surplus,
when, in reality, it's like, well,
maybe if he was just like eating pancakes
he wouldn't be farting and he would be fuller
and more comfortable and he wouldn't have to change
his pants after leg press.
So with the GI stuff, because you have to look
at things differently when you're really focused
on driving a surplus of food.
In reality, biomarkers should be relatively low
in a surplus because essentially,
when we're focusing on hypertrophy,
like max hypertrophy, we're trying to find how much food
can I give somebody so that they can be growing,
but not getting too fat, too fast.
That's essentially where I wanna go.
Now, if you're throwing food at somebody
and they're gaining zero body fat,
you're either nailing it 100% on the dot
or you're missing out on progress.
So usually the place to be is slightly on that side
of where we wanna see weight going up
and we wanna see, we don't wanna see body fat moving up fast
but we know that if body fat doesn't move at all,
there's a chance that we're on the other side
of that equation and we could be making
a little bit more progress
if we're just giving a few more calories.
So what you wanna be on is that place
where you're gaining body fat very slowly.
And so that when you periodize out,
for a week or two or whatever,
it's very easy to bring that back down
and then jump back into your gain train.
The most common cause of high biomarkers
is a low food to high volume ratio.
So when you're doing a hypertrophy phase,
if you're focusing on a surplus like max hypertrophy,
you shouldn't be having a bunch of problems.
This is where life should be good,
this is why people do the forever bulk brah,
because it's awesome, like you get to train hard
and eat a lot of food.
It's the best phase ever.
And then like, to be honest, it sucks the least
like things aren't too heavy and sets don't talk too much
because they're too long.
It's like the awesome place to be.
This is the most enjoyable stimulus
in terms of like, man, I just get to put in effort
and eat a ton of food?
That's awesome, that's why everybody likes
to be here as well.
It's so awesome to be like, yeah,
I'm just gonna focus on the gains for a while.
And then you maybe you get a little fluffy,
but it's like, but there's so much fun
to focus on the gains.
That whole training, like a calorie deficit thing,
doing all this, total body and urgh, yuck,
this is the place to be, biceps and pancakes.
But you should have low biomarkers there.
This is why if you're doing a recomp phase,
and you're using hypertrophy stimulus,
all of a sudden, you have to be much,
much more diligent because that food to volume ratio
becomes very, very important
because you don't have any buffers at that point in time.
The closer you're trying to stay at lean gains or recomp,
the less room for error.
So if you're a little under-feeding,
they get a little bit more stress in their life,
all of a sudden their activity goes up a little bit,
all of a sudden you switch over onto the other side
and pretty soon you could start seeing
some regressive recovery.
So you're gonna overshoot volume two ways,
either by too much failure or too much set volume.
So if you're overshooting your training
by too much failure, doing too many sets,
too close to failure, too many sets to failure
or some combination thereof,
you're gonna see more of the neurological biomarkers
'cause the digger we're deepening into failure,
the more CNS fatigue that we're gonna get,
because we're just pushing to a greater degree of failure,
which brings on more compensation,
is more challenging for the nervous system,
tends to lead to more inflammation,
if we're getting more compensation,
we're getting more joint and connective tissue soreness,
et cetera.
That's gonna give us more loss of range of motion,
very similar to what we see
with some of the over-training things in the other phase.
We're gonna see more loss of early workout performance
and loss of peak strength performance.
So your top set or your top loading is likely to fall off
if we're doing too many sets to failure.
And your sleep problem is likely going
to be disrupted sleep more often than not.
Now, if we're overshooting by set volume, okay,
and I hope you guys are appreciating the memes here,
you're gonna see more metabolic biomarkers
because we're not digging as deep into a failure
so we're gonna be able to do more sets,
but simply, once we start focusing on volume,
more sets is more metabolically taxing,
we're depleting more glycogen,
we're putting more systemic stress in the body
by just simply the amount of volume of tissue
that we're working over the course of those sessions.
You will get a little less soreness of this
than you will if by going the failure route
but you'll see loss of late workout performance,
loss of volume tolerance
and you'll tend to feel tired despite normal sleep.
So the main sleep disturbance of this
is that you don't feel like you're getting enough sleep.
You feel like you need more sleep than normal.
Now keep in mind, if you're shifting
from a metabolic phase and then you come
into a higher volume hypertrophy phase,
you might anticipate that somebody's sleep need
is gonna go up.
So because you're increasing volume
and you're focusing on now an accumulation adaptation
of adding tissue, their body may want more sleep.
So initially, during the transition,
you might expect that like, okay,
we're gonna try and get another 30 minutes
or an hour of sleep during this period of time,
if that's feasible.
However, if they are getting that extra
and they're still feeling tired
or as you're progressing throughout the program,
they're getting progressively more tired
on the same amount of sleep then we know
either we needed to bring sleep up
or we're overshooting volume.
Now I'm gonna look at under-recovery.
Again, this is very simple or similar to the biomarkers,
is that everything is on the table.
But same advice, start with sleep and food in this instance.
So basically, the two things that you need
to recover from hypertrophy are sleep and calories.
That's what you need.
So if you just focus on those two things
and you have your basics recovered
in terms of micronutrients
and you're meeting the minimums on your macros,
that will solve like 90% of your issues
of under-recovering is just doing whatever it takes
to get enough good quality sleep and food.
Now, with the food, comes the ability
to digest and assimilate.
So it's like everything else is still important.
But you can fix a lot of problems
by throwing nutrition at it
as somebody who's got a healthy gut
when it comes to recovery,
especially guys with good genetics or whatnot,
you may be drastically underestimating
how much hypertrophy stimulus they can drive
because you haven't figured out how much food
they can eat and digest.
And that actually becomes limiters.
Guys that are like, people that are natural bodybuilders
and when I say natural bodybuilders,
I don't mean natural bodybuilding, the sport.
I mean like there are people
that they put on muscle real easily.
A lot of times the limiting factor
for how much muscle they can produce
is not how hard they train,
how much volume they can train with,
how often they can train, it is literally
their sleep and food.
It's like, man, because they're just so sensitive
to the stimulus, the limitation is how much nutrients
and how much recovery can I get in here,
how much can my nervous system recover,
that's where the sleep really comes in
so that I can do this again.
And then how much food can I get to fuel
that adaptation process that I stimulated,
those end up actually becoming the bottlenecks
to how huge and freaky some of these people can get,
especially up to a certain point.
And that's why you look at the pro bodybuilding scene,
aside from all the drugs and lifestyle issues
and stuff like that, a lot of them really struggle
with digestive stuff.
And that's because they've been literally running
at the red line of their digestive system
to support their hypertrophy
because I mean, that's the bottleneck.
So they're just constantly hammering their digestive system.
And that's where learning to be very efficient
with your calories and your food
can be very helpful during hypertrophy phases
'cause like if we can get calories,
I mean, when you're focusing on a surplus,
I don't wanna say that there isn't bad calories
but there isn't such a thing as like too dense of a calorie
when you need it this way.
Literally had people drink maple syrup
and stuff like that when that is what's needed.
Maybe Adam wants to tell you that story
when we finish the lecture here,
but literally had people come into camp or whatnot
when we're doing like two-day training,
we're focusing on all this stuff,
I mean actually drinking syrup out of the bottle,
can't necessarily do that.
In most normal humans, especially those
that aren't super metabolically-healthy
or don't have a bunch of muscle tissue,
but in some people, they need to run on rocket fuel.
That's just how their body performs.
You can be like me and be like, screw those people.
That's not fair.
But if you get to coach those people, it's awesome to see.
It's an amazing experience to really see
what certain biological forms on this planet are capable
of things that just others aren't and it is cool to see.
So the last thing that you wanna do
is be working with one of those people
and you're under-feeding them,
you're giving them that like flex fuel corn crap
that comes out of the pump instead of jet fuel
which is what their body needs.
Okay. Moving on.
So because performance increases are more recovery-based
than adaptation-based, performance markers
will be more sensitive to poor recovery
or inadequate nutrition.
So when we're looking at that, essentially what you wanna do
from the performance aspect
is you basically wanna take a food first approach.
And that means you look at weight and body comp
and stuff like that and just literally compliance
with the diet, digestion
because maybe somebody's eating the same food
but their digestion's getting worse.
We can assume that also the digestion's getting worse,
maybe we're getting fewer calories
and fewer nutrients out of that food that,
so it comes back to food
but we maybe need a new strategy
for how we're increasing the food and calories.
It needs to, we need to choose different sources,
more dense choices, whatever it may be.
But look at any decrease or lack of increase in performance,
look at a fuel problem first and eliminate that
as the issue before you start adjusting the training,
because this is a very food-driven performance system.
You can be in a calorie deficit
and you can hit a PR in a 1RM.
So every powerlifter has probably dieted and do a show
and hit a PR.
That's possible.
You can be in a deficit and you can do
really long endurance activities and whatnot
if you have a lot of those adaptations.
Your performance won't be great but you'll recover there
or you'll perform there, still.
In the hypertrophy rep range,
your performance will be very, very food-dependent
because you need this combination of glycogen
and the ability to fuel volume at the same time
as being able to produce intensity.
And that requires a certain amount of sustenance,
if you will.
The performance markers are gonna be very varied and diverse
if you're under-recovering.
So you should be, if things are moving right,
you should be seeing similar, consistent types
of progression and performance as the weeks go by.
But if you're seeing lackluster performance,
and it tends to jump all over the place,
it's like, well, we gained some reps here
and then we gained some load here,
and it just seems like I don't really know
how we're gonna progress,
then that's a chance that, all right,
we might be slightly under-recovering.
So essentially, the only improvement I'm seeing
is the lowest threshold improvement at that time
whereas we should be able to see consistent improvements
in a more linear fashion,
if we are adequately recovering.
Mental and physical energy outside of training
will suffer quite a bit because of the volume.
So volume is stressful, systemically, neurologically
et cetera, takes a lot of energy.
And so what you will see
is that when you're doing too much volume
and you're under-recovering from that,
is that you just start going into potato mode more often,
just lack of motivation.
Crashes and cravings are really gonna be important
to look for.
So a lot of times people will start,
they'll go from like, oh,
who's doing a cup of coffee in the morning
to now needing more, et cetera.
And a lot of cravings when people are under-recovering
from volume perspective.
So volume, initially, when you're under-recovering,
you will be really hungry.
But if you under-recover for too long
to the point where you're getting a lot of nervous stress,
you could actually start to lose your appetite.
So you need to catch that stuff early
or what could happen is you could have somebody
actually get stressed to the point
where now the nervous system
is affecting the digestive system
which affects your ability to get out of that state.
Because the thing that they need is a bunch of food
and they're not digesting very well
and their appetite is very low
because we've pushed their stress levels way too high
by being way too high volume
and under-recovering for too long.
(wind whooshing)