TMGP Ep 14 with Researcher, Lecturer, and Fitness Buff Max Coleman

oo another white boy with a podcast pronouns Jim bro another white boy with a podcast you want to see the video it went viral hi Gaines gurus and welcome to tmgp the muscle growth podcast episode 14 I am your host Rosco and today we are welcoming Max Coleman onto the show Max Coleman a Leman college graduate and lecturer is a passionate researcher who delves in into how training variables affect muscle hypertrophy his love for science muscles and cooking is evident in his work making him a valuable Scientific Advisor at bolw Worth Science Max Coleman's research at Leman college is not just about understanding muscle growth but also about optimizing it through practical strategies his work explores the mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy the impact of different training variables and the role of Nutrition By focusing on topics such as periodization training volume and Recovery Coleman's findings provide actionable insights for individuals athletes and fitness enthusiasts striving to achieve their muscle growth goals Max Coleman has been featured in various podcasts and videos discussing topics related to muscle hypertrophy and resistance training research these podcasts delve into the science behind muscle building training techniques and research findings in the field of resistance training additionally Max Coleman collaborates with Professor Brad shenfeld a renowned figure in exercise science on studies focusing on muscular adaptations and maximizing muscle hypertrophy in today's episode we can look forward to insights from Max related to his research study and vast knowledge using science to drive muscle hypertrophic gains Max boasts one of the highest research gate paper read counts that I have ever seen so you can rest assured that he knows a thing or two about muscles given that brief glimpse into Max's remarkable background let's jump right into the show Welcome Max to the muscle growth podcast where we explore subject related to muscle science and hypertrophy I'm thrilled to have you join us for today's conversation let's Jump Right In and dig into some exciting topics together can you briefly introduce yourself and your journey into the world of hypertrophy and muscle signs yeah absolutely man one obviously like like all podcasts with two dudes start thank you so much for having me on uh it's truly an honor to be here and I really appreciate you bringing people on to talk about science and and stuff that we that actually matters in life right like getting as jacked as possible uh so that kind of DB tells well into how I got involved with research in this area in general right so I started lifting when I was pretty young I was about 12 years old and the re the reason I got into lifting in general is just because I wanted to look like Hugh Jackman in the Wolverine and like just like most people who started lifting um and saw less than favorable results in the first few years of of lifting uh just the cards that I was dealt with respect to muscle growth for my parents weren't the best so that kind of led me down the rout the rabbit hole of you know how can we go about actually manipulating training variables and diet to actually elicit some sort of response because just going to the gym and lifting willy-nilly certainly wasn't it for me um and that ultimately turned into a huge hobby of mine and eventually became uh like a my career uh originally I went to college for something else and then a bunch of stuff happened and I ultimately switched over to exercise science and then very luckily got involved in research at Auburn University under Dr Michael Roberts uh and he set me up with uh Dr shonfield here in New York City which is where I ultimately got my masters and then as soon as I got here I basically do Dove head first into the actual like conducting of research and stuff like that with respect to how we can manipulate training to get as jacked as possible hopefully that's a good somewhat overview of how I got into it that's a fantastic overview what did you study originally uh I went to school for nursing um and the reason I went to school for nursing was CU it actually has to do with muscle growth or lifting in general it was look you make a decent salary to lift and it'll make give me enough money so that I can build a decent whole gym didn't really care about nursing or anything like that it just was a route to basically lifting essentially and then found out that I can actually I actually went to my first uh exercise physiology course after uh dropping out of Nursing and I was like oh [ __ ] you can just you can just do this this thing that I was trying to go to college just so I could do it as a hobby on the side is something that I could actually turn into a career uh and so that's what led me to like switching to exercise science in general and then really pursuing research from there where did I uh cut off I can start back where I was sorry sorry I didn't mean to interrupt but that's much better um you mentioned how you went to nursing school initially and then just as you uh dropped out you went to your first physiology class and you're like this is this cool I like this yeah yeah so I was 8: a.m. and I was I had just dropped out of the nursing program because they it was just a bunch of [ __ ] that happened with like bureaucratic like Academia [ __ ] that I'm sure people are used to hearing about um and so I was like my father was like just switched to exercise science you clearly care about that way more than you care about anything else uh so I switched over and then went to my first class was exercise physiology led by pety Mumford shout out um it was an 8 a.m. course and I hate waking up early and the fact that I was excited to go to class and learn about exercise and anatomy and physiology it was like a kind of an inkling there and then within the first five minutes I was like oh I can just I can just do this for the rest of my life like that's surely what I'm going to try and do and that's what ultimately led me to doing podcasts like these which is really nice that's so cool and now you work with one of the world leaders in in hypertrophy research yeah I was really lucky um so I happened to be at Auburn University which is in Alabama and there's a really really good researcher there named Michael Roberts Dr Roberts and he does he he is in of himself a leading expert in combining the training side of exercise as well as the molecular side of muscle growth so he's really leading the the frontier on not only how can we get as jacked as possible but at the cellular level why is are different training modalities leading to different growth Pathways and and different differential growth between interventions in general so was really lucky to work under him and uh him and I kind of hit it off we just anyone who knows about muscle growth in general like it's a small world so uh it's pretty easy to pick up conversations like that and he just happened to know Dr shonfeld relatively well and put me in touch with him and then that that was just a super clear like oh that's what I'm going to do not only do I love New York City but uh I've known who Dr shonfeld was for a very long time so was a very clear pathway to to come here for my masters so are you finished with your Masters now yes yeah yeah I graduated in May of 2023 it's May of 2023 so I've it's been almost a year now since I finished congratulations and any chance of doing your PhD yeah absolutely um I I entirely intend on on attending well I I absolutely intend on attending a PhD program I'm waiting for a PhD program to open up here at Leman just because Dr sh and I Dr shenfeld and I work so well together and I I thoroughly enjoy the environment that he's curated over the last several years uh SO waiting for that opportunity to open up here and until then just kind of Dipping my feet into the industry side before enrolling back into Academia for a little bit brilliant and your work with Bol with science is that is that what kind of work is that yeah so that's just um I was very fortunate that Daniel plin who I met at the master's program in New York and who also happens to be doing his PhD in Auburn Alabama so him and I kind of switched places to a certain extent and uh he was working with Jeremy Ethier or Ethier is how you're supposed to actually pronounce it supposedly um and he they were looking for another researcher who was really interested in making content with respect to muscle growth and Daniel was nice enough to suggest my name so that's how I ended up doing that and it's it's really cool I get paid to uh have a podcast and talk about muscle growth and there's kind of like no better gig than that if you ask me that sounds like the perfect gig for you so is that the main thing that you're doing at the moment before your um Doctrine so I do that I don't know to say the main thing is kind of difficult but I do that uh I teach at Leman now which is really nice that they they offered me that opportunity and I also do online coaching and inperson personal training in New York city so there's a couple of things that I'm I'm dipping my feet into and then now actually just making my own content on Instagram obviously that doesn't pay any bills but it's it's certainly like a really fun thing to do and we're growing slowly but surely and what inspired you you mentioned that your parents didn't give you the best uh genetics but like what inspired you to want to grow muscle and and that kind of thing was it do you want to do bodybuilding or you just want to be jacked or is it a longevity thing biohacking what what is it that got you like I want to be swall yeah I mean is there any I don't think there's anything underlying it other than I want to be swole like it's just like I think muscles are so cool looking I think muscles are awesome I an aesthetic look yeah exclusively like I don't I don't you know live fast and leave a big coffin as they say that really the only thing that I care about is being as jacked as possible okay and I don't really really care about strength or longevity or anything like that those are nice byproducts of getting jacked uh but really the only thing I'm interested in both from a pragmatic sense like what I actually train like and from a research perspective are just how can we get as jacked as possible and do you want to do bodybuilding one day or just for yourself yeah maybe uh maybe I would do bodybuilding just for the sole purpose of actually coaching other individuals through bodybuilding um but I have no real like desire to actually compete in bodybuilding or physique or anything like that it's more of like a personal I just really enjoy lifting and I really enjoy training and like the process of dieting and bulking uh but to actually do a competition seems a bit moot to me okay no well that's that's a perfectly reasonable uh response and I I completely get get your drift um shall we hop straight into some of your amazing um papers that youve published I see you've got some really cool ones to your name um do you have any specific ones that you'd like to start with or shall we just go down your list I pulled up your research Gates and I just put them in there so then we can maybe you can give like high level overviews any conclusions or interesting findings um maybe some methods I know results don't get too deep because then we're going to be here for a long time we can if you want I know it's completely up to you man just name a study and I'll I'll give like the brief findings methods and then we'll talk about practical takeaways from each one too that sounds absolutely phenomenal let's do it so the first one up on the list gaining more from doing less the effects of a onewe de lo period during supervised resistance training on muscular adaptations yeah uh aside from a terrible title the whole point of that was that over the last five years or so there's been this like Resurgence not Resurgence but this um the prevalence of people discussing D Loess and and the impact of D Lo and dra trining periods on muscle growth with a lot of individuals prosti and and singing the the Praises of how amazing uh D loads are uh but the amount of research that we actually have on the on the matter is is very limited there's very few studies that actually examine D periods and how they affect muscle growth so that was the purpose of doing that study and you basically the title gives it away which what with respect to what we did which was we had like 50 individuals we started with 50 we ended with 39 uh individuals go through nine weeks of training one group trained the entire way through and the other group just took a one week break after four weeks of training and then hopped right back into things and then we measured muscle growth and muscle strength pre and post and found no ultimate differences in muscle growth between individuals but those that took a onewe dra trining period ultimately saw far less strength adaptations than those that trained continuously for the full nine weeks and we can touch on some of the psychometric findings that we had as well as soon as you figure out the issues with your ring light no no it's not even uh it's not issues with the ring light it's something called um load shedding uh where the electricity gets cut for a few hours a day between 2 and 6 hours a day and uh as it will as it will have uh it's just happened I was about to say your actually on my um on my Mac so yes yeah so sorry sorry about that that's so funny that uh we were getting I was getting all confident about sou Africa's uh internet infrastructure there and then and then they turn off the electricity so would you recommend based on on that stud I see you've got another um D Lo paper we can hop into that one next for the flow of things um but would you recommend then not deloading ultimately for strength so I definitely wouldn't recommend like avoiding deloading in general and this is especially true because D loing is a little different than what we did in that study uh so there's not really a universal definition both in the especially at the time of that when we conducted and wrote that study uh but that second paper you're talking about the purpose of that was to actually provide a definition for what D loing was right and I think the ultimate I'm I'm going to botch this I'm sure but the ultimate definition that we proposed was a period of reduced training volume or intensity with the intent of uh improving training adaptations and and and and following training Cycles essentially um so technically speaking you could say that a draining period is still a D Lo you know how like all rectangles are squares and but not all squares are rectangles type of thing or maybe it's the other way around I never remember uh oh no no carry on carry on there we go okay um yeah so uh I wouldn't say that we shouldn't do a D Lo at all right uh however uh if you're looking to get maximally strong it's probably not a good idea to take frequent full breaks away from the gym for weeks at a time or for even a week at a time uh just because of the very limited data that we do have would suggest that it's probably not ideal if you're looking to maximize strength gains uh the good news however is that uh the the evidence that we have on dra trining suggests that muscle is not going to fall off your body very quickly at all you have like you there's multiple studies look at dra trining looking at dra trining in general and a bunch of studies looking at just lower training volumes and how they can uh be used to maintain muscle mass which is really nice so I definitely don't think that we should just rule out D Lo entirely I would hope that no one would say that just from the findings of one study right um but it might PR the idea that maybe we don't need to Delo as often as we think uh partially because we in in conversations with the subjects in that study uh even after the nine weeks the individuals in the continuous training group were like no we like we were we ask them do you need a D Lo or do you feel like you need a D Lo now that you've gone nine weeks of training and all of them were like no we're ready to get back to training as soon as we possibly can so we're just excited to be able to train on our own and not have to follow the program that you guys have set out for us so definitely don't write offs entirely uh but probably better to go with like a reactive approach with Ds as opposed to a proactive approach in in terms of reactive uh approaches um I saw an article about again I'm not sure if it was a good article not but about maybe just or suggestion even about D loads maybe not um planning your D loads but on um maybe if you get sick then that's a that's a D Lo that like you said reactive then you react to being sick or in then again a reactive D Lo is that kind of what you'd suggest maybe don't plan your D Lo cuz D loads are going to happen to in life like you're going to get sick you're going to get injury um you're going to go on holiday well if you're lucky these are all obviously not guarantees but will have these kind of things and then those can be considered so-called D loads even if they're not um planned um well holiday might people hopefully had a little bit of planning but um they kind of come with life circumstances rather than four weeks hard training one week soft training four weeks on kind of thing yeah absolutely so like I don't think necessarily that you just shouldn't play D loads like for instance I'm just all for doing whatever is going to keep my clients in the gym the longest uh just because the ultimate goal right is just making the world a more jacked place and whatever we can do to do that I'm happy to do right so if I have clients that really enjoy that like structured DLo Paradigm where they know that they're going to get a break at the end of these five weeks uh so they're going to push as hard as they can yeah that's fine I'll totally throw them a Del Lo no worries but I would say that you're probably better off just listening to your body and whenever your body tells you you need a de lo whether that be uh you're just your motivation to go to the gym is perturbed or maybe you're starting to feel exercises in areas that you wouldn't normally so let's say you're doing bent over rows for six weeks and all of a sudden you start feeling it in your lumbar spine in your rotator cuff instead of like your traps and your lats and your delts maybe it's a good idea to to maybe pull it back a little bit and then of course if you're seeing uh some perturbations in performance in general week to week especially like over the course of like two weeks or so yeah maybe it's a good idea for us to pull back reduce some fatigue a little bit and then get back to hard training uh but I don't think it's something that we need to like very strictly plan out over the course of any amount of time unless that's something that you very much enjoy and that's something that's going to keep you in the gym longer absolutely that makes total sense on that note what was was the previous I guess best or most common so best in inverted commas or most common approach to to D Lo was it once every four weeks or every eight weeks or or what was the kind of most common thing that you that you'd see so there's there's a ton of variability with respect to how athletes go about D loing or how coaches go about D loing their athletes right there's no Universal Paradigm by which people do this buy uh in fact there that one of the stud that you pointed out earlier was a an a survey study that we put out to a bunch of highle coaches in the field of physique Sport and strength sport right so we had CrossFit coaches uh strength or sorry uh strongman coaches and and bodybuilding coaches and powerlifting coaches all answer these questions with respect to how they go about D loing their athletes and there was a ton of variability with respect to how they actually did it so a lot of them did it reactively very few of them did it very proactively and strictly adhere to doing it proactively so I would say that reactive is probably a good bet not only from the evidence that we do have but also just from expert opinion in general uh but yeah that some people reduce uh the number of exercises they do some people reduce the number of days by which they're Del loading there's a bunch of different ways by which they do it and I wouldn't say that that we know what the best way to go about D loading is by any means is is that um kind of uh consensus that you that you mentioned the integrating D loading into strength and physique Sports training programs that one the international delfy consensus approach yeah so that that's the that's exactly the study I'm referring to and we found like I said we found just a bunch of variability which is why we made the definition what we did so broad uh which is just a period of reduced usually about one week period of reduced training volume and intensity that's about as that's about as universal as it gets with respect to how variable all the answers were from the various coaches brilliant now that sounds good and I'm really glad that you guys are are looking to kind of Define things I think that makes a lot a lot of sense um and I hope that more uh definitions can come out of the research and things that can then be replicated in in further studies you'd be shocked how few things are like actually defined in the literature um people don't often talk about how young exercise science is uh it was invented the 1960s and that doesn't sound very young I mean 60 years old is is certainly not Young by many standard but with respect to disciplines in science if you think about how long people have been conducting studies in chemistry or physics or biology it really puts into perspective how young uh exercise science is itself right so that's why there's a lack of a definition for D Lo or Universal Paradigm by which people do drop sets or anything like that right training to failure being a big one yeah I mean training to failure in of itself is something that is difficult to Define absolutely but like surely people can try and have specific definitions for different kinds of training to failure like momentary failure and just fatigue failure those those kind of things maybe then it would be a bit more easy to to draw conclusions on failure training I guess right and I mean that's what we do have we have several definitions by which we Define failure so like you were just saying we have momentary muscular failure which is defined as the inability to perform another repetition uh while maintaining proper technique in the exercise being being performed but you also have voluntary failure um yeah voluntary failure which is just in which the subject uh stop performing the exercise because they think they are unable to perform another exercise so it's probably better to call that something like voluntary sensation uh because it's not necessarily the case that they're actually failing the exercise sounds good would you suggest uh talking about anything else to do with dealers or shall we go on to the next topic I'll just wrap it up real quickly and just say that like there's really no way to go about D loing that is the clear correct way of going about it probably best to avoid periods of straight up not training for an entire week just because that might have some impact on muscle strength but muscle growth it doesn't seem to impact super greatly um and do whatever D loading practice is going to be the most enjoyable for you and is the most suitable for you for some people they can go nine weeks without d loing uh but I think Jared feather for still does the four weeks on one week off Paradigm and it works really well for him clearly so follow whichever Paradigm you enjoy the most and it's probably not going to lead to any drastic reductions in muscle size it's probably also not going to lead to any drastic increases in muscle size either so not like Mike Mansa where he says you got to take at least 48 hours off otherwise a clown otherwise there's no growth um how yeah we can talk about Mike mener being a clown for the next two hours if you'd like like I can't stand his Resurgence oh yeah no I'm sure I'm sure but but anyway um no we can we can ignore him for now we can agree that he's but of a clown he had an impressive physique but uh that very he's actually funny he's my favorite bodybuilder really is my one of my favorite physiques of all time uh I think he is like I think he has one of the coolest like densest most compact physiques ever yeah uh but yeah he's he his training philosophy with respect to how we can build as much muscle as possible or just entirely misguided I guess you I get you all right um sorry I had I had a specific question now that I've gone blank on but let's while I think of that let's get back to uh supervision during resistance training positively influencing muscular adaptation and resistance trained individuals sorry I really Haven squinted my little uh screen here that's it's totally fine man I understand yeah so that one is not super crazy uh nothing super interesting about that one all we did there was we had individuals 25 of them we just gave a program to and said here go perform this on your own and the other 25 we had them come into the lab and train with us three times a week that was the only differences between groups whatsoever uh and ultim and we measured again muscle growth and muscular strength uh pre- and post and we found very pretty substantial increases in muscle growth uh in those that trained with both groups grew muscle don't get me wrong but those that trained with the uh research team the research assistants myself self and uh all the other individuals obviously shut out the whole team uh grew substantially more muscle uh they also got substantially stronger in the back squat uh but there was actually similar um muscular strength increases with respect to the bench press uh which was really interesting I'm not exactly sure why that was the impetus to do that study was just to there's this thing called the Hawthorne effect which was noted in like the 1920s or something like that which suggests that people just perform better when they're being watched and it's been it's been demon rated in many other disciplines like for instance teaching and pedagogy people seem to teach better and do better teaching practices in general when they're being observed by either their peers or supervisors um and this held true with respect to muscle growth as well which makes sense I mean people are just more likely to push to failure when there's a group of individuals yelling at them to push closer to failure essentially absolutely that makes total sense and on that does that um I think I noticed I can't remember if it was this particular study that it translates well to uh trainers and training partners and just people in general or is it only in this case specific to people training at the lab well obviously like whenever we're talking about uh translating science to the real world the most honest thing to say is that it only applies to the laboratory setting in which we uh conducted the study right but that's not to say that it's completely um worthless resp with respect to like e ological validity right so everyone in the lab that was involved in that study is a personal trainer or just someone who's really involved in lifting in general uh so yes it does translate well to having a trainer um and it translates well to having a training partner but you want to make sure that that training partner and that personal trainer are individuals who are capable of pushing you closer and closer to failure right or they're they're capable of getting the most out of you right so for instance uh you could like a one aspect of the Hawthorne effect that's been put up into question is that it might not just be that you're being watched while performing an exercise but that you truly believe that the person watching you actually cares about you and your well-being and your performance as well so it's not like all personal trainers or all training partners are created equal necessarily just because of the Hawthorn effect and just because of the study you want to make sure that it's a trainer or a partner who can actually elicit like a high degree of work from you absolutely and so try on that note choose your um trainers wisely or your training Partners wisely is what you say yeah yeah of course basically yeah exactly I remembered what my question was it was to do with the D loads you mentioned that if you take a week off from and you do absolutely nothing there's probably going to be absolutely no change to your muscle size I wanted to know at what stage should you start worrying like for example you're sick so obviously then it's it might actually be different but let's say you let's do two scenarios one where you're sick and one way you just you just Hut uh sorry Hut full means like you're you're over it I guess sorry so burn out you're burnt out um and you just take how many weeks would it take before more or less on average uh before you start losing thighs like actual muscle tissue because obviously you'll lose glycogen stalls and that kind of thing and water weight but at what stage should you be like o I'm actually losing my muscle here that I've trained so long and hard to gain it's hard to say um especially because of the the confounders of muscle like muscle size can be reduced just from the like appearance of it right so like for instance even on an ultrasound uh muscle size can appear smaller due to a lack of water and consequently gly or glycogen and consequently water in the actual muscle itself right so even though you're not losing muscle tissue um muscle size will appear smaller not only visually but in an ultrasound as well right uh so it's really difficult to say however there are some studies out of Japan by ogus saara at all and I'm sure I'm butchering that pronunciation I do apologize a great researcher um has done a lot of really great work and one of his studies was having individuals do uh six weeks of training with three weeks of draining in cycles for an entire I think it was for six months in total right and they did measure muscle size after those 3-we periods of draining and they saw decreases in muscle size uh with respect to to like having taken three weeks off right now the ultimately after those six months of training they grew basically the same amount of muscle at least from a statistically significant standpoint from a group that was training continuously for six months right so even if you do lose muscle size you can be somewhat confident that that muscle size and that muscle tissue itself if you're losing it is going to come back very quickly Upon returning to training is that to do with uh muscle cell memory so potentially um so this is there's something called The myonuclear Domain Theory which is a little bit different than muscle cell memory because muscle memory is I don't know if this is necessarily what you're referring to but muscle memory can be like a an action right there's a a particular movement pattern that can be stored within the neurons of a muscle and within the motor cortex in your brain uh which is why like for instance if someone uh if you're like a well-trained fighter or something and someone goes to like throw a punch at you you almost instinctively put your hands up in a way that would be like indicative of you performing that task um without you even really thinking about it and that's different than what we're talking about because that's muscle that's like what muscle memory is actually referring to and it's it's information that's stored outside of the muscle but in proximity to it uh but then something called you stillar hear what are you kidding me you're Frozen sorry about that um let's get back into it where where were we we were talking about what was the last thing that you remember saying before I left you oh we talking about muscle memory that's exactly where we were yeah yeah so uh we were talking about um will muscle come back after periods of draining um very quickly and the reason why that is we're not entirely sure so there's this idea of something called a myonuclear domain Theory right which is that when muscle cells grow in size uh eventually they get so big that the nucleus of a muscle cell can't really tell uh one portion of the muscle what to do because it's so far away so it's more efficient for these things called satellite cells that surround muscle tissues or muscle cells to donate one of their nuclei uh to the the muscle cell itself and it's ultimately like imagine a very large construction site that just keeps growing and growing eventually you're going to need more and more managers across that construction site to keep facilitating uh productivity right uh and there is a theory that once you have those satellite cells or once you have those nuclei that have been donated from satellite cells that they don't go anywhere even if you stop training however and so that was one of the reasons why people believed that you would see very fast degrees of muscle growth Upon returning to training however uh there have been some issues or not some issues but some uh research that has put that into question in which they had older individuals stop training for a little while and they actually saw a reduction in the number of nuclei that they had within their muscle cells which is uh interesting because it puts that whole thing into question question so not really sure why muscles grow the way that they do when you return to training um but they do and that's something that we can at least be happy that we know that at the very least is that once you stop training and your muscle size decreases you can at least be pretty confident that when you return to training you will see a pretty rapid increase in muscle growth and that would be back to your Bas line before you stop training correct yep correct okay and those um satellite cells that you mentioned please um correct me if I'm wrong I I haven't studied biology um is that although stem cells they are a form of stem cells yeah but again we're kind of like outside of my area of expertise I'm going to start talking about the like the actual physiology of muscle growth itself I have a very rudimentary understanding of how it works so I'm not really the guy to ask questions like that but I do know that yes satellite cells are a form of stem cells which is why they're able to donate their nuclei to be muscle cell nuclei okay thank you for that and I also appreciate your uprightness and honesty a lot of uh yeah eff a lot of uh not saying you're just a fitness influ but a lot of Fitness influencers would try and give me some garbled take on it and say that they're definitely right and uh also protein will kill you H yeah no I'm I'm I'm a failed Fitness influencer at that and also more wrong than I am right or more often wrong than I am right no doubt uh I I'm I'm not sure about that I've looked at a lot of your papers and they look pretty good oh thank you I appreciate it pleasure pleasure so let's let's hop on to repetition performance rating of perceived discomfort and blood lactate responses to different rest interval lens in single and multi-joint lower body exercises yeah so this one is an acute study so not super duper interesting uh with respect to muscle growth uh but basically we just had individuals uh perform uh squats and leg extensions to momentary muscular failure and then we measured their rating of perceived not their rpe but actually their how discomfort how uncomfortable they were following the Set uh using either three minutes two minutes or one minute of rest between each set that they were doing and ultimately we found a the like blood lactate concentration wasn't different between individuals which was really interesting to us um we also found that there wasn't a difference in rep drop off from single joint exercises as opposed to multi-joint exercises which is really interesting but again that one's like doesn't have anything to do with muscle growth and I was just fortunate enough to be able to help my friend conduct that study so that's not really something that I would like I can speak a whole lot to by any means okay so what your main take away from the study you mentioned that the blood lactate levels were the same and that the rep drop off was more or less the same um why why what were you expecting I guess we definitely expected to see larger rep drop offs and um lack concentrations from multijoint exercises but we didn't um and there's really not a huge practical take away from that other than uh maybe there's no reason to believe that you're going to see larger drop offs in uh reps from set to set when using uh shorter rest periods for back squats or leg extensions necessarily there's not a huge difference between those two um but it just kind of lends itself more to like maybe it's a good idea to continue using longer rest periods as opposed to Shorter ones and I think you were on that study the way you found two minutes being significantly better than one minute between sets and then but the difference between two and three minutes not being too different is is that correct are you referring to the muscle growth study or now the rep drop off study just to clarify sorry um uh the the study about the intervals between sets the rest intervals yeah so I I don't unfortunately I don't remember the exact findings with respect to 2 minutes and 3 minutes and 1 minute I just remember there the lactate difference not being substantially different between the two exercises and they not being a big difference uh with respect to drop off between reps from leg extensions or back squats depending on the the time period that you were resting but what you're saying does comport well with the general findings that we have from other rest period literature which justest suggest that generally yeah if you're resting around two to two and a half minutes to three minutes you're probably better off doing that than than shorter rest periods um but the rest period literature is a little bit more murky than people in the evidence-based Community often give it credit for because there are some studies uh suggesting that shorter rest periods might actually be better and then that also starts getting conflated when you start bringing in indirect research as well like for instance bfr training and uh superet training and drop set training the very limited research we have on those would suggest that rest periods really don't impact muscle growth that much depending on the modality by which you're performing no I was actually sorry I was referring to uh some of the other research on that particular Point um but since you mentioned the bfr training that's a super interesting one let let's head into into that paper fiber type specific hypertrophy with the use of low-load Blood Flow Restriction resistance training a systematic review yes so that study we were looking at various studies that compared fiber specific growth so your muscles are comprised of different fibers you have type one type two type 2x all that Jazz right um and there are some data suggests that bfr training which is blood flow restricted training for those of you who don't know it's where you olude a portion of your muscle so that you uh impede veinous return from that muscle back to the heart so arteries are still able to deliver blood to the muscle but you olude it to the point where veins can then not return blood to the heart after it's been delivered right uh which creates like a hypoxic environment which has led a lot of people to believe is is is beneficial for muscle growth right and there's some evidence to suggest that bfr training might elicit type 1 specific hypertrophy however uh the data on that is conflicting which is to suggest that uh some data suggest that's not the case and some does and ultimately we can't make a definitive conclusion at this point but the Practical takeaway here is that um if you're looking to get maximally jacked it's probably worth training through a wide spectrum of rep rep ranges not necessarily that you need to use bfr training by any means uh but it's probably good idea to train through a wide spectrum of rep ranges just in case there are any um like load specific mechanisms uh of of growth that occur because like for who knows what reason there's like a bunch of theories as to why that might be the case but point is uh do your fives and do your 25s and you're probably good and you probably don't need to worry about doing bfr training but bfr training can be really fun and it's certainly something that I enjoy uh both from a time-saving perspective and also just from a sensation perspective because bfr training leads to some of the most insane pumps that you'll ever experience in the gym and I believe it's quite useful for if you're injured yeah it certainly can be it certain so there's even some research is really cool there's even some research that shows better muscle retention in bedridden patients this is not my area so I do apologize if I'm botching the findings from this study but there's some data to suggest that you see better muscle retention in individuals that are bedridden when they do um occlusion like not even training just wearing the bfr bands itself can seem to help with muscle retention for individuals that are bedridden which is really important uh because we know that individuals that are bedridden are seeing will'll see very rapid drop offs in muscle size muscle tissue and muscular strength I I should have used that back back when I was bed and off to my back injury that would have been a useful one probably would have helped at least a little bit but fortunately again because the myonuclear domain Theory or maybe something akin to it uh even if you did lose muscle while you were bedridden hopefully it came back very quickly upon your return to the gym so so so so but anyway let's get back to um uh no not get back but um do you mind just explaining Fiber One and fiber 2 type or type like type um muscles as as this new one that I've never heard of 2x so yeah it's fiber typing is is interesting because uh you actually have more than three supposedly you have like multiple multiple types of fibers that comprise muscles but you have different fibers that are responsible for different things so uh you have your type one fibers that are generally more responsible for very long endurant activities and they require um and they they require uh or no not require but they allow for much uh very extended periods of of uh contractions so your like Solus for instance uh which is one of your calf muscles is respons responsible for basically keeping you upright and balancing you while you're standing uh and therefore because we stand so much or at least throughout the history of humans we've stood so much uh you that muscle is very active for long periods of times and is mostly comprised like almost 98% some crazy uh percentage uh is U is type one fibers so allowed for very long sustained contractions that can allow to continue thing doing uh moving for a long period of time or working for a long period of time and then you have your intermediary fibers which is those type 2A fibers right that are somewhere in the middle they display both uh type one and type two characteristics and then you have the type 2 x and I think these are pretty rare uh to find in the body again we're kind of moving outside of my area of expertise when we're talking about the actual like deep physiology and anatomy and and biology of of muscles but uh type 2x fibers are responsible for very large amounts of force production very quickly but unfortunately they fatigue very quickly so they are not able to sustain contractions for a very long period of time so your tricep brachi or your hamstring muscle might be a little bit more fast ttch on average uh but again most of the muscles in your body are going to be a pretty even split of type one and type two fibers uh your eye muscles the the muscles involved in like moving your eyes around or almost entirely fast twitch uh because believe it or not you don't have to throughout history move your eyes around a whole bunch for a very long period of time rather we need to be able to move them very quickly for a very short period of time so it's something that you'll notice if you're like reading for a really long period of time your eyes will actually get tired because they're having to sustain contractions for so long but the muscles that are actually responsible for moving your eyes are not very good at sustaining contractions for very long that's super interesting and I like that you took it to to the eyes I didn't even realize that your eyes had muscles how how do you train your eye muscles now kidding it's probably pretty hard to load them unfortunately you have to tape something to your eyes which would be pretty excruciating I would imagine sounds like a torture technique I'm pretty sure they do do that in the movies at least um okay that's very interesting would you say for a power lifts you'd be using predominantly type two muscle fibers then for if you're trying to do something quickly like a bench press so powerlifter so yes I think what you can say is that like very um very elite powerlifters probably the majority of their muscles that they're using for the movements that they're performing which is most of the muscles in the body uh for powerlifting if you look at all three are probably fast twitch individuals on average uh the same for sprinters like if you look at Olympic level sprinters the majority of their muscles even though most humans and most muscles are pretty even split of type one and type two if you look at like a powerlifter if you took a biopsy from a powerlifter muscles you'd probably see a preponderance of type two two fibers and if you looked at like an endurance Runner or a marathoner and you took a biopsy from their muscles you'd probably see a preponderance of type one fibers and is that uh you mentioned like that balance would that be something you can change quite drastically or not really like depending on your training style and nutrition all of that would would it be pretty constant from when you were born or can you drastically change change that poent so like I was saying you have those intermediary fibers right those type 2 a fibers that can kind of display the uh characteristics of either type one or type 2X and those tend to shift based on the type of training that you're doing so uh if you were doing endurance training for a really long time you would see those type two a fibers uh demonstrating the characteristics of type one fibers more readily and conversely if you were doing like Sprint training or very high-intensity training that required very fast contractions of a lot of muscular Force you would probably see them displaying the character of type 2x uh but there's also some interesting research with respect to dra trining where taking periods away from the gym uh you actually see a shift to type those type 2 a Fiers start demonstrating the characteristics of more type 2x okay so so you'd say that it it it would almost like you'd have to train very hard to get to get more of those fibers and maybe you'd be better off uh figuring out which fibers you have more of and then focusing on that particular discipline if you wanted to be elite basically uh yeah but like honestly I wouldn't worry too much about it because uh like your performance in different uh modalities of Fitness is going to tell you which you're primarily comprised of like for instance uh no matter how this is maybe silly but like no matter how hard usin bolt tried to be an elite level endurance athlete he probably was never going to be an elite level endurance athlete uh conversely insert famous endurance Runner who I mean are always less famous unfortunately uh would probably never is probably never going to be a really good Sprinter just because their physiology and biology and Anatomy have are the reason why they are so talented at whatever uh modality and fitness that they ultimately choose and that's it for part one of Max Coleman thank you very much for listening and stay tuned for part two goodbye gains gurus thank you for listening and see you on the next episode of tmgp