I’ve decided to continue this blog as a journal of my exploits for no one to read except me. Since I last posted I’ve done the usual scrapping and restarting of ideas on how to train when I took another look at an old friend: HST. I’ve collected a plethora of training books over the years in a Dropbox folder, but for whatever reason, I put the HST books in a Box folder instead. I found them quite by accident as I was uploading photos of home inspections I’d done to email the link to the company.
I went back and read the book and the FAQ (the book isn’t actually by the HST “creator” Bryan Haycock, but by some dude based on Bryan’s work). Bryan never did get around to writing the HST book, but his site remains up. The forum is on life support, with only a few recent posts.
I was surprised to see how much of Bryan’s interpretations of the existing research on hypertrophy which form the basis for HST are still intact. I consider Menno Henselmans to be on the cutting edge of evidence based hypertrophy specific research, and I’ll be damned if most of what is in HST matches what Menno has been preaching. Menno is an online trainer who is now busy doing seminars and running a course for trainers. He doesn’t have a “program” per se, but individualised training programs for his clients. But the ideas he talks about in interviews line up with most of Bryan’s from HST, which is reasonable considering they’re both working from the same research. I also re-read the S&C Research compilation on Hypertrophy research and sure enough, it lines up with Bryan as well. This HST thing may be exactly what I’m looking for.
My understanding now of the training I’ve been doing for years is that the repeated bout effect stopped my hypertrophy way back in the day, when I was still doing magazine routines. I started strength training in 2007 and ever since, I’ve been doing programs oriented toward improving performance, rather than oriented on hypertrophy. They aren’t the same thing. I made small, incremental progress in my performance, and probably added some muscle along the way, but I never did anything to circumvent the brake on hypertrophy that is the repeated bout effect. In fact, I essentially gave up on hypertrophy as a goal, focusing on strength instead and figured whatever hypertrophy came with it, I’d take it. However, hypertrophy is a significant component of strength. Neuro adaptations and motor skills are two parts of three, the third being larger muscles. I can’t get larger muscles without overloading my body’s current muscular system, and I can’t do that because I can’t get any stronger. Hence, I’m stuck in maintenance mode. That’s not a horrible idea as I enjoy lifting, organizing my day around my training, sticking to a diet, and looking good naked. By the way, I weighed in at 170 lbs this morning, and my average weight last week was 171.8, so I’ve averaged .5-lbs of weekly weight loss (hopefully fat loss) over the last month. Right on target.
Here are the issues as I now see them:
Bodybuilding is a steroid sport. The training ideas that sprung forth from the competitive bodybuilders were based on what they did for hypertrophy, however steroids change the playing field dramatically. Steroids cause muscle hypertrophy even without lifting weights. The weight training coaxes the hypertrophy along and amplifies the steroids. How? Well, we know now that muscles grow from applying mechanical tension to the muscle fibers. This strains the fibers, creating a stress response from the body which repairs the damaged tissue. The repairs include new muscle proteins, but also protective mechanisms to prevent future damage. Those repairs took place due to increased muscle protein synthesis which occurs after training. If it’s a truly novel exposure, i.e. a person had never applied this tension before, the muscle protein synthesis is probably elevated for a few days before returning to baseline. But steroids turn on muscle protein synthesis 24/7. It’s just always on. The body is always building. So steroid using, hypertrophy pursuing people can go to the gym, move weights around and grow like a weed. They don’t have to select the optimal exercises for a body part (more on that shortly), they don’t have to have great form, they don’t need to worry too much about volume, intensity or recovery. They just need to provide the stimulus and the steroids do the rest. I’m glad this blog is private or the steroid users that read blogs would light me up right now about how it’s all in the work man. Hard work.
Q. Can you explain over the last four or five years your amazing production, your tremendous growth in muscle strength getting stronger as you get older? Can you finally put to rest —
BARRY BONDS: Can I? Hard work, that’s about it. Now it’s to rest.
Q. That’s it?
BONDS: That’s it. ¹
Sure Barry.
So the average young man looking at Muscle and Fitness and FLEX magazines, who want to look like the dudes on the cover and on the pages within, copies their routines. I did too. The routines aren’t optimized for hypertrophy, they’re just a way of helping the steroids grow as much muscle as possible. There are too many exercises, too many sets, too much volume, not enough frequency and no methodology for continuing to progress. More on each of these components shortly.
In the background, not nearly as ubiquitous as bodybuilding magazines, were strength sports. Athletes have been doing Olympic Weightlifting for years, and Powerlifting for not quite as many years. They train in a completely different way than what was espoused by the bodybuilding mags. Don’t get me wrong, these athletes use steroids too, but their training was set up to improve performance. Hypertrophy was a byproduct of the training and the drugs. The internet allowed for the spread of these more or less cultish sports and people who’d been lifting weights to look like bodybuilders starting lifting to weights to bench press more. As I learned when I first started powerlifting, it’s a whole new world.
What’s fascinating is how the two worlds combined. The internet provided an avenue for strength athletes and bodybuilders to make money teaching others how to get strong and/or big. The fitness industry explodes with online trainers and eBooks. What ended up happening is that strength oriented programs, designed to peak an athlete for competition, start being used by average gym people who just want to be big and strong, like me. Sure I competed a couple of times because I’m a goal oriented person. But I’m not competitive because I’m not strong. I’m not strong because I’m not big. I can’t get big because I was training to get strong. Insert vicious cycle.
If you look at the smartest guys in the fitness business right now, like Brad Schoenfeld, Eric Helms, Alan Aragon, Menno Henselmans, et al, they focus on research, interpreting research, or in Brad’s case, setting up new studies to create new research. Eric Helms did create the Muscle and Strength Pyramid, but if you look at his programs, even the ones specifically for “bodybuilders,” they are still strength oriented programming.
Back to how muscles grow. Apply mechanical tension to the muscles in a way the body isn’t adapted to, and that stimulus creates the cascade of events that create new muscle proteins. The body protects itself from future encounters with that stress, so future applications of mechanical tension will not produce the same amount of damage to the muscle fibers, and hence, less stimulus for added growth. Do this enough times, and growth is all but complete. Add a little heavier mechanical tension and the process can continue.
So now we have Part One and Part Two: Mechanical Tension and Progressive Overload.
Since the increase in muscle protein synthesis for non-steroid using humans returns to baseline about 36-48 hours after the disruptive stimulus was applied, we should apply a progressively heavier stimulus again at that time. Waiting longer than 48 hours is not nearly as effective as growth has stopped and we can prime the pump again. So Frequency of Stimulus becomes our third part. Designing a training “split” is probably where I’ve spent the most amount of mental energy over the years. I like to tinker so coming up with new, fresh combinations of lifts in a given weekly format is just fun for me, in a frustrating kind of way. But a hypertrophy specific training plan must take advantage of the first chance to apply a new stimulus to be optimally effective. 48 hours after we trained a muscle, we should train it again. So part III is frequency of application.
The total amount of work completed is a component of hypertrophy, and this is where things really go awry. There’s so much information out there about how many sets and reps of an exercise one should do that the average trainee has no reasonable process for deciding how much work they should be doing. Usually, they do what their favorite guru is doing. 3 sets of an exercise is a common plan, but what is that based on? What’s so great about 3? As it turns out, nothing.
Here, Chris Beardsley has accumulated all the available evidence and summarized thusly:
What is the summary of findings?
In summary, out of all 11 studies assessing the difference
between low- and high-volumes of training on hypertrophy,
3 have found statistically signifcant benefts of using a
higher volume, 7 have found non-signifcant benefts of
using a higher volume (which may or may not be because of
a type II error), and 1 study has found no beneft at all of
using a higher volume, although that study used perhaps
the most unreliable measurement method of hypertrophy
(arm circumference). In trained subjects, the only 2 studies
that have been performed so far have found non-signifcant
benefts of using a higher volume (which again may or may
not be because of a type II error).
What is the bottom line?
In conclusion, using multiple sets to achieve a higher
volume of training appears to lead to greater hypertrophy
than using either single sets or a smaller volume of training.
However, the current literature is plagued by a lack of high
quality studies with sufcient statistical power and this
conclusion can only be drawn based on a meta-analysis of
studies and based on a review of non-significant trends.
What are the practical implications?
Training with multiple sets to achieve a higher volume of
training appears to lead to greater hypertrophy,
irrespective of training status and age. Additionally, there
appears to be a dose-response to volume of training to a
degree, although it is not clear at what point increasing
doses cease to be increasingly effective. Finally, the law of
diminishing returns seems to apply to hypertrophy training:
in that the first set may be the most important and each
successive set offers a steadily reducing stimulus.
Therefore, for those who are short of time, fewer sets may
be appropriate.
Brad Schoenfeld recently completed a meta analysis and found that total weekly volume was probably more important than any one session, and found that even 5 sets of resistance exercise for a muscle group over the course of a week produced muscular hypertrophy. That said, 10 sets per week produced a lot more hypertrophy. There’s clearly a point of diminishing returns where more volume may elicit a bit more growth, but at the expense of significantly increased fatigue and longer recovery times. Knowing that we want to train the muscle every 48 hours means we need to be cognizant of recovery time from too much per session volume. Brad’s not willing to declare 10 weekly sets per muscle group is the ideal amount, but it’s got some support in the literature. So the fourth component, total volume of work, is a bit of a grey area.
Subtotal of parts:
- Mechanical Tension
- Progressive Overload
- Frequency of application
- Enough total volume of work
As further evidence of my contention that sport specific strength training has hybridized with hypertrophy specific training, look no further than the concept of the deload. Performance athletes taper their training coming into a competition so that they can perform at their best on competition day. Training intensity and volume are steadily increased up until a specific time before the competition and then it’s dramatically reduced. Why is this done? Because of the Fitness Fatigue Model. As you train, your fitness improves and your performance improves, however the training process increases fatigue, which masks performance. As one continues to train, fitness continues to climb, but so does fatigue. Eventually, there’s enough residual fatigue that performance no longer can be demonstrated to have improved. Continue to push the training higher with more intensity, more volume of work, maybe more frequency of effort and fatigue climbs to such a point that even fitness improvements level off. Fatigue has caught up to fitness and now performance is flat lined or even declining (because if you had to perform in this fatigued state, it wouldn’t be the best you’re capable of) and fitness itself is flatlined or declining. Time to back off the training some to allow this residual fatigue to dissipate before you crash and burn. A smart training program for a competitive athlete would not allow the above scenario to actually take place. The training would get harder certainly to force the body to adapt to higher volumes and harder workloads. But regular reductions in volume and intensity to allow fatigue to dissipate would be included over the course of the training program, until the ultimate fatigue dissipation–the taper–is used to coast into competition in top shape.
This has nothing to do with hypertrophy, but coaches and personal trainers borrow the concepts and plug deloads into their proposed bodybuilding programs. Here’s why that doesn’t accomplish anything: If we go back to the parts we have thus far, we see that by applying mechanical tension in a progressive fashion often enough with sufficient total volume of work to illicit a hypertrophic stimulus, we get hypertrophy. Suddenly reducing the workload removes part II of our formula; the progressive overload. The repeated bout effect is chasing us as we continue to train, making the muscle more and more resistant to further damage from our training efforts. Applying less mechanical tension now for a deload week means we’ve gained nothing. Hypertrophy isn’t operating on a Fitness Fatigue Model. What we need is a way to beat down the repeated bout effect. A way to make each training session productive. Adding a ton more volume to try to create more damage to the toughened musculature is one option, but diminishing returns is a real bummer and part III is always looming. We need to apply the mechanical tension again in 48 hours, so too much volume in one session is going to make the next session less productive or maybe not even possible. So for hypertrophy, we’re not deloading anything. We keep progressively adding weight to apply more mechanical tension than last time on a frequent basis with just enough volume to illicit some growth.
The real dilemma is when you can’t add any more weight. Voluntary strength levels met. Gravity wins. I can’t add weight to the bar. It weighs a shit ton already and I can only get 3 or 4 reps. It’s kicking my ass. Repeated bout effect is making every set and every workout less effective. I guess I’m as big as I’m gonna get. Not so says Bryan Haycock.
This is the most counterintuitive part of HST, but in reality, it’s the most brilliant. When we reach that point where adding more weight just isn’t possible, we’re not going to deload, we’re going to stop training altogether. We’re going to try to decondition the muscles. Remove the stress we’ve been applying completely so we lose some of the protective attributes we’ve gained from all the training we’ve done. We’re going to get immobilized to let the body become unaccustomed to the weight training. Then, before any muscular atrophy sets in, we start training again, using just enough mechanical tension to create the hypertrophic signals again. We’ve set repeated bout effect back on its haunches. It thought we were done and it took a nap, looked the other way, read a book or went to the movies. We can get ahead of it again and make new gains from using weights we’ve used before! Bryan Haycock calls this Strategic Deconditioning. Greg Nuckols is a smart guy who writes exceptionally long articles and he came to the same conclusions! There’s even studies to back it up.
One study showed that alternating 6 weeks of training with 3 weeks off for 24 weeks (train 6, off 3, train 6, off 3, train 6) produced the same strength and mass gains as training for 24 weeks straight.²
Another study (by the same authors) found basically the same thing, over 15 weeks, with one group training for 15 weeks straight, and one group taking 3 weeks off in between two 6-week training blocks.³
This study shows that it only takes 12 days without resistance training to restore mTOR (the primary hypertrophy pathway) signaling to newbie levels. Granted, it’s with rodents whose days don’t translate perfectly to human days, but the concept is supported nonetheless. ¼
Bryan recommends:
Your muscles will be fully recuperated within the first 7 days of the deconditioning period. At 7 days you will also still retain most of the repeated bout effects. Additional down time is required to allow the muscle to lower its defenses. 9-12 days is just long enough to allow deconditioning, but to prevent undue muscle atrophy.½
So there we have the final part in the hypertrophy puzzle: deconditioning.
To recap:
- Mechanical Tension
- Progressively Applied
- Applied Frequently
- Applied enough
- Decondition
- Repeat
So that is where my journey heads next. I am currently testing rep maxes to set my first training cycle up. I will then lay on the couch and try not to move for at least 9 days, but I’ll try to go 12 if my mind doesn’t snap from the lack of lifting heavy things up and down repeatedly.
While HST uses 15, 10 and 5 rep maxes for its progressive overload scheme, the thought of doing 15 rep sets of squats or bench press makes me queasy, so I’m using 12, 8 and 4. Close enough for government work. I will throw in some myo rep sets during the 4’s to increase total volume of work on the muscle because I’m not planning on doing more than 2 sets of each lift. PS The “split” is gone. It’s full body training every other day. I have an A workout and a B workout and I’ll just alternate them.
A
Low bar Squats
Incline Bench
Romanian Deadlift
Weighted Dips
Chin up’s
Face Pulls
Cable Curls
Donkey Calf raises
B
Front Squats
Bench Press
SSB Good mornings
Overhead Press
Pulldowns
Horizontal Shrugs
Hammer Curls
Seated Calf Raise
I’ll write about how I selected those particular exercises some other time.
¹ Link
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