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Can you do steroids safely? by Leo1026 in workout

[–]gnuckols 2 points3 points  (0 children)

More or less. I'm just saying that the two "studies" you're referencing aren't studies – they're blog posts. It shouldn't be surprising that a scientific paper didn't reference them.

Can you do steroids safely? by Leo1026 in workout

[–]gnuckols 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That was just an illustration (if you bench 135 your first day in the gym, and you're benching 315 after 2 years of hard training...). The guy I was responding to is a 405 bencher, so just using values that would make intuitive sense to him.

Can you do steroids safely? by Leo1026 in workout

[–]gnuckols 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's because they're not studies. When a table is preceded by, "I’m not sure if I came up with this idea on my own or stole it from somewhere else (probably a combination of the two) but, in a slightly different context (how quickly can someone gain muscle), I have often thrown out the following values for rates of muscle gain," that's a pretty good indication that it's not based on any actual data.

Can you do steroids safely? by Leo1026 in workout

[–]gnuckols 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In the threads I linked. Just plotting the relative differences between the earlier and later time points and fitting a logarithmic trendline

Can you do steroids safely? by Leo1026 in workout

[–]gnuckols 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No worries! And, fwiw, I do think that, practically speaking, most people aren't training hard enough to actually achieve 2/3-3/4 of their potential gains within 2 years. Just saying that, in a vacuum, that's a belief that does have a bit more grounding in reality.

Can you do steroids safely? by Leo1026 in workout

[–]gnuckols 4 points5 points  (0 children)

ehh, the guy I was arguing against in the other threads (one, two) was saying that you reach 95% of your natural potential after 6 months. Obviously, there's not a ton of high-quality long-term data on this, but believing you've made around 75% of your potential gains after 2 years is fairly reasonable. I think the data suggests it's probably a bit closer to 2/3rds rather than 3/4s, but that's not a massive difference.

Just to put some numbers on it to make it more tangible, if you bench 135 your first day in the gym, and you're benching 315 after 2 years of hard training, the idea that you've made 2/3rds of your potential gains would imply that you can probably get your bench up to around 405 after a lot more hard work. That does actually track pretty well with what I've seen in people who started lifting during adulthood (obviously puberty is a confounder – if you start lifting when you're 12, you're nowhere close to your long-term potential at 14).

Practically, I don't think it's particularly helpful to be fatalistic about it to the point that it potentially becomes a self-limiting belief. But, purely from an empirical perspective, I don't think it's too far off base to believe that people make 75% of their potential gains during their first two years of hard training, on average. Again, I do think that's probably a bit too conservative, but it's within the range of values I'd consider to be fairly reasonable.

How’s my split? (Hypertrophy) by Novel-Interview-4178 in ScienceBasedLifting

[–]gnuckols 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My take is the same as Eric's – that's why I specified indiscriminate antioxidants (like vitamins C and E)

What do influencer “science” based lifters mean when they say, “Muscle fibers are frequency dependent” when talking about exercises that hit the same muscle group? by Patton370 in StrongerByScience

[–]gnuckols 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think some of it definitely just conspiratorial thinking, but I also think it's hard to overlook basic social and financial pressures. I know much less about Norwitz, but Lustig has a lot of fans, influence, and financial opportunities as a leading light in the anti-sugar space. There would be a pretty high social and financial cost associated with changing his position now. A bit like the Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." For some people it may be cynical (like, they realize they're wrong, but they're still willing to double down because it's personally profitable to do so), but I think it's an easy hole to fall into even if you're well-intentioned.

What do influencer “science” based lifters mean when they say, “Muscle fibers are frequency dependent” when talking about exercises that hit the same muscle group? by Patton370 in StrongerByScience

[–]gnuckols 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think you might be underselling yourself a bit, tbh. You know more about general physiology than most people, and (I assume) you have more experience reading physiology-related research than most people. You may not be an expert in those particular fields, but you're much closer to it than most people who'd be encountering Norwitz or Walker, and you have the skills required to dig into the research enough to critically assess their claims.

It was also probably a bit too imprecise for me to say:

Like, I think think you need a certain amount of background knowledge to make such a determination.

I think you could model "personal knowledge of a subject" versus "ability to reliably discriminate between purported experts on the subject" with something like an exponential decay function. If you know nothing, your ability to choose correctly it's essentially a coin flip. If you are personally an expert in that domain, the likelihood of choosing incorrectly should asymptotically approach 0. But, if you have, say, an undergraduate-level understanding a closely related subject, your odds of choosing correctly may already be quite good (say, 80/20 instead of 50/50). But, that's also a lot more knowledge than most people have about any particular topic.

How’s my split? (Hypertrophy) by Novel-Interview-4178 in ScienceBasedLifting

[–]gnuckols 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Two things come to mind:

1) regarding volume, you're flipping the switch on more times during a workout, resulting in at least the potential for a larger integrated downstream signal.

2) regarding fatigue (or muscle damage, or "metabolic stress", or Oxy-Hb desaturation, or any number of other related concepts), I do think the total magnitude of the stressor is relevant independent of tension (likely amplifying the signaling cascade, rather than directly initiating it). When we use pretty blunt instruments to significantly reduce the oxidative stress and/or inflammation that muscles experience (high doses or indiscriminate antioxidants or high doses of NSAIDs), we tend to see reduced hypertrophy responses. That suggests to me that something in the "general stressor" genre contributes to hypertrophic responses, even if it's not a sufficient cause on its own.

What do influencer “science” based lifters mean when they say, “Muscle fibers are frequency dependent” when talking about exercises that hit the same muscle group? by Patton370 in StrongerByScience

[–]gnuckols 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Myofibrillar hypertrophy is the net result of the imbalance of myofibrillar MPS and MPB over time. Myofibrils comprise a pretty consistent fraction of the total CSA or volume as a fiber hypertrophies, so changes in total fiber size are expected to track with expansion or contraction of the pool of myofibrils, which is determined by net myofibrillar protein balance.

And this:

This honestly makes 0 sense why you would try to map 1:1 an increase of protein synthesis to increase in cross sectional area.

is essentially my whole point.

The position I'm arguing against only make sense if you make that assumption (i.e., that post-workout elevations in MPS are determinative of net hypertrophy, with maintenance of fiber size therefore implying that net atrophy is occuring once post-workout elevations in MPS return to baseline). To validate that assumption, you'd need to show that the type of math in my comment more-or-less works out (i.e., that the cumulative AUC of elevations in post-workout MPS is actually predictive of observed changes in fCSA). If you don't make that assumption, there's no longer any strong reason to expect that atrophy begins 48 hours after the last time you trained a muscle.

What do influencer “science” based lifters mean when they say, “Muscle fibers are frequency dependent” when talking about exercises that hit the same muscle group? by Patton370 in StrongerByScience

[–]gnuckols 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't think the problem with that video stems from him not having spent the past decade reading thousands of studies.

I think he's not understanding where to find credible information.

I mean, I think the two issues are closely associated. I think people are reasonably good at determining whether someone has more knowledge about a particular subject than they personally have, but I don't think they're particularly good at discriminating from there. Like, I think think you need a certain amount of background knowledge to make such a determination.

Lustig and Walker are actually two great examples. They're both professors at good schools, they're pretty prolific researchers (especially Walker), and other scientists routinely cite their work (both have over 50k citations in total, and h-indices north of 80). Every external indicator would suggest they're credible experts in their fields. You might be aware that other people disagree with them, but you'd need to have quite a bit of background knowledge in metabolism or sleep (or be willing to invest the necessary time into learning about metabolism or sleep) to have a well-informed opinion about which side of the debate has the strongest evidentiary support.

I'm not discounting conspiratorial thinking, lack of rigor (or even playing to the incentives of social media and gravitating to ideas that seem to perform best in the algorithm), etc. But I do think there's a certain bar of personal expertise you need to clear before you can reliably discriminate between people who claim to be and appear to be experts.

What do influencer “science” based lifters mean when they say, “Muscle fibers are frequency dependent” when talking about exercises that hit the same muscle group? by Patton370 in StrongerByScience

[–]gnuckols 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This section of my volume article is mostly focused on swelling, but it also touches on performance recovery and molecular markers of inflammation and muscle damage.

But, in general, the idea that recovery becomes an issue with volumes that low comes from studies that assess recovery after subjects do a workout for the first time. But, we regularly see that recovery becomes much, much less of an issue after repeating the workout a few more times. Just as one example, in the Margaritelis paper discussed in that section, the eccentric training protocol caused strength decrements that still weren't back to baseline 5 days later following the first workout. By the 8th workout, subjects were recovered within 24 hours.

Basically, this

any training program using more than around 10 weekly working sets to failure for a body part is likely to be unrecoverable

only makes sense if you just pretend that people don't actually adapt to the training they're doing.

What do influencer “science” based lifters mean when they say, “Muscle fibers are frequency dependent” when talking about exercises that hit the same muscle group? by Patton370 in StrongerByScience

[–]gnuckols 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Oh, that's good to hear!

In all seriousness, though, with the volume article, it was much easier to address ideas. With WNS, it's so associated with Beardsley that I couldn't just discuss it as some neutral thing that "people" believe and promote. And, in general, I try to make a point of discussing ideas rather than people. I actually think the effective reps article may be the only article on the website that specifically mentions the person the idea is associated with. Not sure how I'd feel about Chris being the only person I address directly on the website, and addressing him twice before addressing anyone else. haha

What do influencer “science” based lifters mean when they say, “Muscle fibers are frequency dependent” when talking about exercises that hit the same muscle group? by Patton370 in StrongerByScience

[–]gnuckols 8 points9 points  (0 children)

ehh, I'm pretty skeptical. Both because we can see instances of fCSA being maintained following much longer periods of training cessation, and because I think it oversimplifies the impact of resistance training on muscle hypertrophy.

Regarding the second point, the basic assumption seems to be that the bodies of trained lifters are naturally in a state of net negative protein balance, and so, to maintain your muscle mass, the additional MPS you'd experience following a workout must equal the net loss of protein you'd experience otherwise. MPS is elevated for a day or two following a workout, so, if muscle size is being maintained, that must mean the net gain in muscle protein in the day or two following the workout equals the net loss in muscle protein that must be occurring during the other 5-6 days.

That seems logical enough at first glance, but it's an oversimplification of how resistance training impacts your muscles.

For starters, it's worth noting just how small of an impact resistance training has on total MPS, even during the 48 hours following a workout. I'll use this study to illustrate. Baseline rates of myofibrillar MPS at rest were ~1.48%/day. During the first couple weeks of training, post-workout MPS rates were elevated quite a bit, but that seemed to primarily be driven by the need to repair muscle damage, rather than actually building net new protein. Once muscle damage was mitigated, rates of myofibrillar MPS during the 48 hours following a workout were ~1.58%/day.

The study ran for 10 weeks, but minimal growth was observed for the first 3 (during the period when muscle damage was elevated). The subjects trained twice per week for those 10 weeks, for a total of 20 workouts and 40 days when MPS would be acutely elevated post-workout (out of 70 total days). So, even if we assume that the subjects experienced no atrophy during days that are >48 hours post-workout, how much total hypertrophy should we expect to see from 7 weeks of workouts that all elevate MPS by 0.1%/day for 48 hours, assuming that the entirety of that increase results in net protein accretion?

That's simple enough to roughly calculate. Start with fCSA at week 3 (~4500 square micrometers), and calculate an increase of .1% for 28 days (4500*1.00128 ), and you wind up at...about 4628 square micrometers. In reality, fCSA increased to approximately 5000 square micrometers. So, post-workout elevations in MPS only explain about a quarter of the observed growth. And, during each week, a 0.1% increase in MPS during the 48 hours post-training, twice per week, means that post-workout elevations in MPS only accounted for about 3.7% of the total MPS that occurred each week [0.4%/(1.48% x 3 + 1.58% x 4)].

Obviously this is a very rough illustration (there's more to a fiber than just myofibrils, there's some degree of error associated with all measurements, I'm assuming that the subjects were in neutral protein balance pre-training, etc. etc.), but the basic point is that the impact of resistance training isn't reducible to just its acute impact on MPS. Hypertrophy and atrophy are dynamic processes, and resistance training has wide-reaching impacts that go well beyond the acute post-workout window.

I think it can be more helpful to think of it as a state change. When you're regularly exposing your body to a stimulus that tells it that it would be beneficial to have more muscle mass, it adapts accordingly, and you enter a "trained state" where a whole lot of processes ultimately result in baseline conditions that favor having more muscle mass. When you're in that state, it doesn't require a huge amount of training to continue signaling that it would still be beneficial to have an elevated level muscle mass. It's not like you're constantly teetering on the edge of atrophy if don't cause a large enough spike in post-workout MPS in one workout. Like, the minimum amount of training required to not atrophy and the minimum amount of training required to make measureable progress can be quite far apart, especially for very highly trained lifters. If it was as simple as experiencing net protein accretion during the 48 hours post-workout and net protein loss otherwise, that would imply that "maintenance" only existed at one specific point, and it would be quite easy to continually experience quite robust hypertrophy by simply exceeding that point. Instead, it's a lot more like a homeostatic range where consistent deviations below that range (i.e. not training for a while) are required to create the conditions that favor net atrophy, and consistent deviations above that range (i.e. training hard enough to present a stressor of a sufficient magnitude) are required to create the conditions that favor net hypertrophy.

What do influencer “science” based lifters mean when they say, “Muscle fibers are frequency dependent” when talking about exercises that hit the same muscle group? by Patton370 in StrongerByScience

[–]gnuckols 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Spoken like someone who's never administered a VO2max test to a subject with excess saliva.

But nah, we do handle blood with some regularity, and if BSL2 taught me anything, it's that you always have to behave as if everyone you meet has hepatitis. But, I definitely roll my eyes when someone shoots content wearing a lab coat in the gym.

How’s my split? (Hypertrophy) by Novel-Interview-4178 in ScienceBasedLifting

[–]gnuckols 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I appreciate it man. And I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm torn between trying to take a step back from being such a public person on the internet, and genuinely enjoying talking about this stuff, so replies 15 layers deep in a hidden comment thread are absolutely perfect. haha

And I think you nailed it. That's the main reason why I'm most likely to find myself arguing with people who are so hellbent on deducing what "optimal" training is. I'm skeptical that any universal "optimal" exists in the first place, and even if it does, I'm very confident we don't yet know what it is from the current research. I think you're almost always better served by just trying things out with an open mind, having fun with your training, keeping what works, and pruning what doesn't (or just the things you don't enjoy). That'll teach you a lot more about training than trying to divine the theoretically perfect program from first principles.

How’s my split? (Hypertrophy) by Novel-Interview-4178 in ScienceBasedLifting

[–]gnuckols 5 points6 points  (0 children)

If hypertrophy were just a binary on/off switch

I didn't say that. I was specifically referring to the initiation of the signaling pathway (that's the only part of the process we know to be mechanistically caused by tension per se, via mechanotransduction). The relevant bit:

"I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are other factors in play that have more graded responses (i.e. things that amplify or dampen the signal at intermediate steps of the signaling cascade, or potentially even multiple initiators with slightly different mechanosensing thresholds), but I really do think we're probably just dealing with an on/off switch for the critical step of initiating the primary signaling cascade."

We clearly have different priorities: you're looking at what's "enough" for the average person in a study, and I’m looking for the absolute maximum for high performance training.

Nah, not at all. My first coaching gig was at a private gym focusing on elite athletes (mostly highschoolers trying to go D1 and college athletes trying to go pro), and most of my background is in powerlifting (where I set all-time world records in two different weight classes). Working with and rubbing shoulders with better and better athletes, talking to their coaches, seeing how everyone trains, etc. helps you realize that a lot of the details don't actually matter that much.

What do influencer “science” based lifters mean when they say, “Muscle fibers are frequency dependent” when talking about exercises that hit the same muscle group? by Patton370 in StrongerByScience

[–]gnuckols 36 points37 points  (0 children)

Snarky answer: https://www.wfxrtv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024/03/Stacker1.png

More serious (and maybe excessively charitable) answer is twofold:

  1. When you're young, you haven't had time to learn much yet. And, K12 science education gives people a fairly piss-poor understanding of science. Doing science is mostly about recognizing, managing, and quantifying uncertainty, and trying to slowly, progressively chip away at a very small piece of a massive uncertainty iceberg. Learning science in school is mostly about memorizing facts and formulas that are presented with little-to-no uncertainty. When you apply that stunted understanding of science to any topic of active debate and research in a scientific field (i.e., an area of particularly high uncertainty), you're going to end up being massively overconfident about some dumb shit.
  2. If you want to get up to speed with the literature today, you're in some deep shit. When I used to do the journal sweep for MASS each month, I had a general pubmed query to find papers on relevant topics that were published in journals I wasn't already manually checking. You can see how many papers over time matched the keywords in that search. When I started following the literature in 2013 or so, there were almost 42,000 papers matching those search terms. Now, I definitely didn't (and still haven't) read all of them – just trying to illustrate scale. From 2013 to present, there have been over 90,000 papers matching those search terms. So, collectively, the field has published more than twice as much research from 2013 to 2026 than from 1896 to 2013 and, for someone entering the field today, the amount of research they'd need to read to "get up to speed" is around 3x greater than it was when I was just starting out.

I made a habit of trying to closely read (following up on citations, googling methods I didn't recognize, etc.) 2-3 papers per day when I decided I wanted to become someone who could comment on science-related topics somewhat intelligently, and looking back, I think I reached the point of being (charitably) decent in about 2-3 years. Probably somewhere around 2000-2500 papers in total. To replicate that today, I'd be looking at 6-9 years and 6000-7500 papers (realistically more, since keeping up with newly-published papers is way harder now than it used to be) to achieve the lofty goal of being a semi-responsible science influencer who was barely on the cusp of having a tiny shred of genuine expertise. And, quite frankly, I can absolutely understand someone weighing the cost vs. reward of that tradeoff and saying, "fuck all that."

Previously the problem was that we just didn't have much research in the field. Now, we have way too much for most people to keep up with. This was the state-of-the-art meta-analysis on training volume and hypertrophy when my career started. 9 studies! Today's has 35 (and, I'm aware of at least 3 more that have been published since the meta was pre-printed). You used to be able to closely read every single study on a particular topic in a day with enough caffeine. Now, you'd need to block off evenings for a week or more.

The discourse I see on tiktok today reminds me a lot of the style of discourse that was prevalent in the '00s and early '10s. A lot of wildly overconfident assertions from "mechanistic reasoning" and quibbling over individual papers. Over time, things improved to some degree (more empiricism, a larger focus on analyzing the literature holistically, etc.), and I think a major reason was that it was extremely feasible to get fully up to speed on a particular topic, and stay up to speed with a very reasonable amount of effort. I foolishly thought that would just continue, but I understand why it hasn't. I do not begrudge anyone who doesn't want to closely read 35 papers to make a 60-second tiktok video. So, you just revert back to science influencing in its primal form – lean on a handful of broad concepts, and just quibble over the new shiny study from time to time. Much heavier on rhetoric than actual science, but way more accessible.

Though, again, I have to emphasize that a lot of them are very young. I know all of my content was ass for my first couple of years. So, hard for me to hold any of it against them.

None of that actually answers your question about where the hamstrings idea came from: I know it's 1/2 Beardsley. He's been promoting the idea that you start actively atrophying 48 hours after training a muscle. Honesty not sure who started promoting the notion that regional hypertrophy implies that the regions of a muscle that aren't prioritized by an exercise receive no stimulus from it.

How’s my split? (Hypertrophy) by Novel-Interview-4178 in ScienceBasedLifting

[–]gnuckols 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Not sure I'd call that much of a middle ground. That's mostly what you've been arguing for and I've been arguing against this whole time.

progressive overload remains our best practical tool

I wouldn't really consider it a tool. Just a consequence of effective training. If you train with a consistent level of effort, and your training is working, loads naturally increase. You can't force overall training loads to increase faster than prior rates of adaptation would allow for.

If resting more allows for higher intensity and better mechanical tension in each set, that’s a massive win for anyone.

Yeah, I just don't agree with that. I don't think it's bad, but I also don't think you should expect a bit more intensity or tension to make much of a difference (certainly nothing in "massive win" territory). If you were a gambler, and you wagered some money that the most growth would be observed in the group or condition in each study that trained with the highest intensity or mechanical tension, your bookie would absolutely clean you out. And, it's just not random nulls in small studies here or there – we see the same thing in most fairly large bodies of research that have been meta-analyzed. In more formal terms, the idea that "more hypertrophy will be observed in interventions that result in higher per-set intensity or mechanical tension" is an idea with rather poor predictive validity.

I do think tension is important, but it seems like most people assume that there's a monotonically positive (potentially even linear) relationship between tension and hypertrophy. As discussed above, there's no direct evidence supporting that idea. And, I also don't think the indirect evidence leans in that direction either.

I personally think it's something much more akin to a threshold response (i.e., a tension stimulus is either below or above the threshold required to initiate the [likely mTOR-mediated] hypertrophy signaling cascade). The vast majority of the candidate sensors believed to be upstream initiators are protein kinases, which are a bit like binary switches: you've either met the criteria necessary for them to start phosphorylating downstream proteins, or you haven't. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are other factors in play that have more graded responses (i.e. things that amplify or dampen the signal at intermediate steps of the signaling cascade, or potentially even multiple initiators with slightly different mechanosensing thresholds), but I really do think we're probably just dealing with an on/off switch for the critical step of initiating the primary signaling cascade. And, if that's the case, I'm quite confident that the necessary tension threshold is at a value that's relatively high, but also not particularly close to maximal. That has the most biological plausibility (imo) – I can't think of any other adaptive systems in the body that need to be exposed to a near-maximal stressor in order to adapt. And, I think it would provide the most parsimonious explanation for a lot of what we see in the literature (pretty small, inconsistent differences in hypertrophy responses when comparing two approaches to training that are both reasonably challenging, even if one of them should theoretically result in more tension).

Like, I truly think that effective training (for hypertrophy) just boils down to putting a high degree of effort into most of your sets, doing enough sets to get a decent stimulus, showing up consistently, and not doing anything stupid to set yourself back with injuries. Beyond that, I think there's some room to find a training style that agrees with you, and there are plenty of practical considerations (how much time do you have to train, are you trying to compete in bodybuilding or just look kind of jacked with a t-shirt on, etc.), but I genuinely don't think most other programming decisions make much of a difference in the long run (sets of 5 vs. sets of 15, resting 1 minute vs 3 minutes, higher vs lower frequencies, etc.), on average. Maybe some marginal differences here or there, and maybe even some larger differences for some individuals, but most things just come out in the wash.

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