TMGP Ep 30 with the world-renowned Muscle Researcher and PhD student Daniel Plotkin

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 gains gurus and welcome to tmgp the muscle growth podcast episode 30 I am your host Rosco and today we are welcoming Daniel Plotkin onto the show for part one of his two-part series Daniel Plotkin is Making Waves in the world of exercise science and muscle physiology currently pursuing his PhD at Auburn University Daniel is not just a researcher he's a passionate advocate for evidence-based Fitness practices that can help individuals achieve their muscle growth goals Daniel's journey into the realm of muscle physiology began with his own passion for fitness and strength training over the years he has immersed himself in understanding the intricate mechanisms that drive muscle hypertrophy the process of increasing muscle size his commitment to unraveling the complexities of how our bodies respond to different types of training has positioned him as a thought leader in the field one of Daniel's most notable contributions to the fitness Community is his recent research comparing the effectiveness of squats versus hip thrust for muscle growth this study has sparked considerable interest among trainers athletes and fitness enthusiasts alike as it challenges traditional Notions about which exercises are most beneficial for building strength and size in the lower body Danel will share practical science-based takeaways that listeners can incorporate into their own lives this episode isn't just about research it's about real world application you'll find valuable insights to enhance your understanding of studies related to hypertrophy and the basics for getting jacked the simple stuff Beyond his research Daniel is dedicated to advancing our understanding of muscle growth through education and Outreach he believes that by sharing knowledge and fostering a community grounded in science we can all make better decisions regarding our health and fitness Journeys so whether you're a gymgo looking to maximize your gains or a coach seeking evidence-based strategies for your clients this episode promises to be both enlightening and engaging join us as we explore the fascinating world of muscle physi ology with Daniel Plotkin in today's episode we dive into a wide range of insights some of the topics include the definition of science what is an RCT why is good science so difficult to conduct the peel method simple stuff formula why science the minimum criteria for a quantification tool to be useful why are muscle growth mechanisms so difficult to explain and so much more get ready for a truly informative episode if you're injured or in recovery visit the injury consultant.com and schedule a free consultation to explore how I can support your healing restoration and journey to thriving Health the injury consultant now offers specialized packages for fight loss muscle gain and Longevity interested book your free consult today a little disclaimer this show does not contain medical advice the views and opinions expressed by guests on the muscle growth podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect my beliefs or The Stance of the podcast while we aim to provide valuable insights and information it's important to approach all topics with critical thinking I encourage you to do your own research consider multiple perspectives and form your own conclusions healthy discussion is always welcome and I'm happy to engage with listeners in the comments to continue the conversation lastly don't forget to follow us on all major social media platforms including Instagram YouTube Tik Tok and X find us atth muscle growth podcast and myself at reps with Rosco welcome Daniel to the muscle growth podcast where we explore subjects related to muscle signs 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 muscle research yeah so I started my journey basically just trying to get as good at lifting SL wrestling as I could so that was in high school and that made me obsessed with performance enhancement from the side of supplementation and just trying to get as strong as fast and as powerful as I could be and then you know as one does they get obsessed with how they look in the mirror a little bit so I got really into the hypertrophy space because I wanted to just you know side walk cracking type dude and just look really really aesthetic so I got really into that side of thing and saw that so I did my undergrad in Queens College where it was a little bit more clinical I worked with HIV positive individuals and then once I saw that Dr Brad shonfeld was in my area and I was already starting to get obsessed with the aesthetic side of things hypertrophy side of things why does muscle grow and so on I went and did my masters with Dr Brad shonfeld and then after doing that I got obsessed with all right well we're looking at the Practical side of things how does muscle growth actually get regulated so then I went to a molecular lab so now I'm here at Auburn University where we're at the molecular and applied sciences lab where we basically look at what regulates muscle growth as well as practical questions related to how best to grow muscle so uh people might have heard of Brad um Professor Brad shal he's uh very well known and uh are you currently pursuing your PhD there yep exactly so masters with no no Masters was with Brad and then he a PhD program yet oh yeah I'm doing my PhD in Auburn yep that's exciting and how's it going it's great very busy yeah uh learning lots of new techniques and yeah can't complain but as you said definitely lots of energy not available during many moments I get you I get you what is your topic and when are you set to finish yeah so I'm probably going to continue to look at the lengthen versus shorten question that's super popular right now okay but hopefully get at it from a slightly different lens in looking at one multiple muscle group so often it's one muscle group being looked at so thinking about all right if I change the range of motion how can I affect the growth of another muscle group as well as the muscle of Interest as well as looking at some molecular underpinning so what are the mechanos sensing proteins the basically structures within the cell that sense tension and how does that tension get turned into hypertrophy and does that differ between a lengthened partial or the lengthened position in general versus uh more shortened biased exercise okay well that's super interesting is that going to be an extension of Dr Milo Wolf's um work um it's similar in topic but it's definitely not I know he has a multi-site project that either just got wrapped up or it's still going on that's not in conjunction with that but the topic is definitely pretty much similar exactly the same in terms of scope yep yeah okay and when are you set to wrap that up and Dr Plotkin Dr Plotkin here can't wait to start introducing myself as that it forcefully I'm gonna say no no yeah so I finish in a decent while a year and a half um going into year three of my PhD or a few months into year three and it'll be four years total so a little over a year and a half left for my until my dissertation okay okay well that's exciting and I wish you all the best for that I'm sure it'll be a lot of work but well worth it in the end so uh let's chat about uh let's go right back to like the big picture stuff how do you define science yeah so I mean science is basically just trying to figure out what question you care about and attacking it from multiple different angles and prove yourself wrong so not prove yourself right but see all right this is my hypothesis and then how can I test this hypothesis in the most controlled fashion so controlling as many variables as possible and answering a very specific question and then get at it from multiple different angles to try to show that the hypothesis is wrong and then if the hypothesis still holds up then you can say all right we're on to something here and this is something that we can apply to either training or obviously in other Realms producing drugs preventing heart attacks and so on so that's a very simple High View and I think it's one that's palatable to people where all right you have a question there's multiple ways to get at that question try to prove yourself wrong as much as possible and have all the controls that are necessary so make sure you have if it's a supplement of placebo if you have a training trial have a group that is either doing nothing or doing something that's comparable that you really want to get at and then if it's still standing then you're on to something that leads very nicely to the next question what is an RCT and why are they important yeah so a randomized control trial is important for a bunch of reasons one is that it's randomized so the first part of randomized control trial you have a bunch of individuals that come in and are randomly allocated to two different groups and so if you didn't have this random allocation then whether you're overtly biased or not you could subconsciously be biased so I let's say I really think that high volumes are better for hypertrophy and I see that the untrained individual that comes in looks like they just have a physique that would lend itself to growth I might inadvertently put them in the group that I think will get more girls so I might inadvertently put them in the high volume group but randomization allows for not having that issue of bias from the researcher's perspective and then the controlled part means that we control as many variables as we can so one group is doing one specific thing while not doing anything else you try to control for nutrition as much as you can and so on and then obviously there's going to be limitations there you can't control for everything we're not putting them in a metabolic Ward and watching them all day but as controlled as Pro possible so that way you can isolate one specific variable with this many people two groups variables controlled as much as possible randomized do we actually see a difference for whatever outcome we care about whether it's how many sets you're doing or how much how many times per week you should train or whether you should train in the length and position and so on you want to control for as many variables as you can and then see if that outcome of interest is actually different between groups and is that to reduce bias yeah it's one to reduce bias and two to just have a necessary control to allow for you to isolate the question so the randomization portion definitely reduces bias if there's a placebo involved it can definitely reduce bias if you're blinded so if the researcher doesn't know which group is getting the Intervention when they're doing the measurements obviously that will reduce bias because you know let's say I'm doing the ultrasound for the study that we were talking about with high volume low volume and I know one individual was in the high volume group and I really really want it for whatever reason most of the time researchers don't want to bias or study but it could even be subconscious where you'll press a little harder on the ultrasound if you're super biased for whatever reason but if you have no idea that the individual is in either group then of course you can't systemically bias things in a certain way and then control is a little bit less about bias and more about just making sure that other confounding factors are not bleeding into the results so if one group is eating way more calories for for example then that could affect results if one group is doing outside volume and you're not accounting for that then obviously that could affect results so you want to do two things you want to make sure you have as much control as possible and also minimize bias have all the things in place that make it so that you're less likely to input your own bias and that's things like randomization that's things like having placeo that's things like blind so if possible you blind the individuals to their intervention but in the case of resistance training obviously you can't blind them to the intervention they know that they're training they know what they're doing when they're training but there's even been some interesting studies where let's say for strength outcomes they actually put like a garbage bag over the weights to not show the individuals what weight they were lifting and so there's even creative ways you can get around some of that stuff so it's pretty cool and just underlines how you know nitty-gritty you can get with some of the science stuff so I think you've probably touched on a few of the points in in your one of your last uh answers but why is good science so difficult to conduct yeah I mean there's too many reasons so one is just time so there's participants that come in typically in a college setting and you have really the semester I mean they're going to leave after the semester or if they don't leave you better pay them a whole lot not to leave for vacations and stuff like that and then that touches upon the next part which is if you really want to get people to do what you want money so money is a huge huge Factor especially when you're studying stuff that can't make you money on the back end so if you're studying a drug you can put a millions of dollars into conducting studies because you can make potentially billions on the back end if I'm trying to study what's going on with let's say length and partials or how what's the least amount of volume you can do in order to get gains you know unfortunately big weights is not is not paying us so there's nothing that they can sort of sell on the back end that my study would help them sell if we find a minimum effective volume if anything that might actually get in the way of them trying to you know sell whatever product if you're trying to figure out what can people least get away with and questions that a lot of people care about because most people probably just want to do the least not the most even though some of what we study is the exact opposite but many of the questions definitely don't lend themselves to Big payments from any companies that would have a vested interest so time huge one money huge one control is a really big one so if you want to have massive control you have to get people to do exactly what you want them to do and that's obviously really hard to do with humans with rodents you can do that really really well but with humans what they go home and do you know you could have individuals in one study let's say you had a study with 10 individuals and for whatever reason they see each other in the gym they decide before the final testing they want to go party do Cain pain uh not eat anything and then come back in and get tested for their muscle size you know they decided to party they lied they said that they didn't actually uh do anything they whatever uh had a normal day last night and then you tested all of them and the reason that the results happen was because these participants just happened to make friends with each other and do a whole bunch of crazy stuff I'm not saying that happens often it's just an extreme example of what could happen with human beings that you know you're not you don't have a magic wand over them so lots of stuff can happen which is why you want to look at the aggregate evidence all the studies in an area it could be one study was just an anomaly from a St statistical standpoint it could be it was an anomaly from did the participants actually comply with your instructions when you were talking about body composition testing and so on so lots of things to consider when it comes to actually executing and control controlling for all those factors and raising money and so on absolutely and I think you mentioned a major factor there um adherence from the participants I think is a major obviously a major factor um and like you said you can control for it a little bit especially with incentives like money but at the same time like they could get the money and then just tell you no they haven't partied in that example that you used and there's no you can't really be like but I think you did cuz unless they take photos and you see it all over the social networks then you got some proof and like guys come like really tried here but anyway and then um reproducibility as well like uh like you said you it's important that you don't just go off what one study says because it could have been a bad study or it could have been um again a statistical anomaly like you said so you need to be able to reproduce the results and uh so those are all important important things what's your favorite kind of study favorite kind of study it depends you mean within resistance training or just general yes let let's let's stick with in resistance training let's stick with it resistance training I think the my favorite kind of study is really one that I think the field sometimes lends toward studies that would be ecologically valid so stuff that people might do in the real world but my favorite studies are generally ones that really try to isolate a question so I've been looking at recent studies with like Ecentric Overload at different speeds so they had an isokinetic dynamometer and then they had one group do let's say 180 degrees and another group do 60 degrees per second and just look at the outcomes for leg extension and that's super super super isolated so you know they're not going to mess up the leg extension too much you know that the actual speed is accounted for by the dynamometer there's a lot of control so you can actually get at pretty good outcomes there and you could be more confident in those outcomes as opposed to a study that might be more ecologically valid which is important but obviously there's always going to be limitations in terms of execution and just being able to isolate the question as much as possible and um H how can we integrate uh the decisions into an applied science or application you mentioned earlier about um practical things that you you're looking at for for your particular field of research how um how can we use these studies uh more practically yeah so I think it's important to sort of look at it from a bird's eye view where some of the studies inform principles so I think of this is the peel method so principles experience evidence and logic so you can form principles around studies that are conducted um even if they're not necessarily ecologically valid but they're well controlled you can say all right there's a principle here of diminishing returns where as I do more of X let's say volume that starts to taper off and then you can say okay so in this case we're having a principle that we can probably apply to a bunch of areas and one that we're start to see a dose response in the studies but we don't have to do exactly what's in those studies we just take that principle and apply to our own training based on our own recovery based on our client's recovery and so on without necessarily taking those numbers as gold you know you just take what makes sense and use those numbers as a good starting point and use that principle to Overlay how you're going to go and apply that to an individual or to yourself and after that obviously the experience component you try things out you see if they work in the real world past an 8 to 12 week time window and see where the pitfalls are are people's joints more achy did one person's sleep really get affected by doing either a high intensity or a high volume did really short rest periods and one individual not create a drop off in reps but another individual they just completely end up from you know 10 to four or something along those lines you want to always look at the person in front of you the principles that come from both studies and even honestly experience and then just logically apply things so as you work with an individual you can even go against the grain but you want to have a very good reason why you're going against the grain because you saw X Y or Z that wasn't necessarily comporting with what you know the average individual experiences in a study so make sure that you're principle in the decisions make sure that the starting point is at least one that comports with the available evidence and then don't be afraid to course correct and do what's maybe the opposite of what people would expect if you're seeing something that's not necessarily trending with the group averages that you see in studies and so on absolutely and I think that's important that individualization aspect where if something might work for a group of people that's great for that group but it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for you it might and it probably will but you might also you might be the anomaly in that instance and that's where your um principle of logic comes in and if you see logically it's not working for you then you can uh adapt a different euristic or like you said do the opposite of of what is maybe recommended yeah in that case logic would literally be doing the opposite so you try something out that makes sense and then it would be logical it would be illogical to continue to do that thing that's not working so you logically pull yourself in a different direction in order to actually you know see the outcome of Interest absolutely so you have a beautiful um formula for the simple stuff do you mind uh telling us what that formula is the formula the formula simple stuff hard work and consistency yes exactly I mean honestly that's probably all of it right exactly no I I love that formula so do you mind just explaining uh especially with regard to Growing muscle um why hard work is important and why consistency is important and uh why those are two like methods uh or thought processes that are super important for longterm muscle game yeah I mean those are really the main two components Basics that if you're not so if you look across individuals if they're not applying those two in almost all cases they're not going to end up in a place where they want to be all of the other stuff that comes up on top can be an unlock in certain individuals maybe and in certain contexts and I consider them tools in the toolbox so manipulating any of those training variables but when it comes down to it if you don't have the consistent component and if you're not working reasonably hard you're just not going to get the gains that you want so if somebody were to come to me and say you know I'm trying to hack this thing I'm trying to hack muscle growth then I would say sure there's things that you can do that allow you to do the minimum to get a good amount of gains but even within that realm you're going to have to consistently show up and you're going to have to work hard like there's no way of getting around that even if you're trying to do the least to get the most the Bottom Rung is always going to be consistently show up even if it's not necessarily super often but it needs to be consistent let's say let's say it's even one time per week you need to make sure that you make it there one time per week or you're no matter what you do science-wise hackwise it's just not going to happen and the same thing goes for working when you're in that for that when you're in there for that one session you better be working pretty hard or nothing that you do will actually come and turn into gains so those are the foundation that will be the weave across all of the other components and honestly if you were if I was just telling an individual you know one piece of advice is just work hard show up try things out and you'll probably be fine obviously you can overlay things and have expert help and get a better starting point when you follow the sence but if somebody just showed up consistently for 10 years and worked hard they would probably probably look really good at the end of that 10 years or probably honestly within the end of a couple of years absolutely well I think uh you just uh ended the show there cuz that's normally like the last question we do so you're going to have to remember what you said there for any advice for like general population so we're going to have to Circle back and you'll have to add on one or two little additions to that um so basically hard work and dedication and hard work I think is uh I think David gogin said that uh so you got to listen to him for some things not not too many um why science uh what can scientific thinking help with yeah I think I think one of my passions is just to help people realize what we were talking about earlier and that it's very easy to fool ourselves like surprisingly easy so realizing that having controls in place and having this scientific method is something that I got really really passionate about when I first entered the space where wow like there's not a lot of things that we can know with a really good amount of certainty with without having a scientific minded approach and controlling the variables making sure we're not fooling ourselves and so on so one thing that I'm really passionate about is taking this hypertrophy thing which you know to many might be something that's like oh who cares about an extra inch on the bicep and so on but using this Popular Science to sort of help people understand wh why Science Matters and why we can pretty easily convince ourselves of things and be really really passionately wrong about things just because of our experience but when you pan out and actually look at you know more controlled trials and look at the combination of all of the things that make up the scientific method including mechanisms and trials and so on you can start getting at all right what are the causal links here and how much do we know and how much don't we know and the how much don't we know part is probably more important because that's where we can play in terms of experimentation but it's also what's important to realize when you see the latest influencer talking really really confidently about something like is this within the realm of where we don't know this thing but people are really confidently saying things and almost always that's the case because what we already know without a shadow of a doubt like we were talking about consistency and hard work you don't see a whole lot of people screaming about that but within the realm of what we don't know everyone has super strong opinions and the louder you scream them the more people are like oh this person must know what he's talking about and then you end up feed forward looping all of that and you get a whole bunch of camps with really strong opinions squarely within the realm of stuff that we really don't know so I think that's why just being scientifically minded and understanding the scientific method allows you to have that sort of smell test for information that you take in where you're like all right this is interesting I'll try it out but I'm pretty confident that this is definitely not the capital T truth because the level of evidence needed for that to be the capital T truth would be astronomically higher than what's being presented or what exists absolutely I think you make a excellent point I think you need to Snuff test a lot of influences when they uh when especially when they're so sure about things and they use words uh Dr Lan Norton often talks about when uh when you listen to a researcher like yourself you'll rarely say this is definitely the best or this is definitely the worst you will rarely ever say the word definitely because nothing's very little is actually definite um you you'll rather use words like I believe this may be beneficial as opposed to this will give you gains this will work you not you you can't be that uh that sure even if the evidence is good you can say listen the evidence is good but you've also got to think of you mentioned the influences um are they getting paid do they have incentive to say the things they do and the if you follow the money the answer is often yes um often they say an ice bath is the reason that they got big we have evidence to the contrary of that and uh but they're sponsored by an ice bath company and like oh well I wonder why they'd say that that's the reason that they put on five pounds of muscle in a month as opposed to other reasons maybe yeah exactly yeah yeah it's always entertaining when there's evidence to the contrary and many times a decent amount of evidence to the contrary and it still you know gets widely accepted and regarded but I would say the vast majority of products and things that are perpetuated are mostly within the realm of we have very little to no evidence or very weak evidence so they capitalize on the fact that oh we don't know so it might work but there's tons of things that might work that end up not working so there's an issue there but then yeah the funniest and maybe the most unfortunate is when we have pretty good evidence that it's either neutral to negative for the outcome of interest and there's still a whole bunch of people doing it and claiming it's you know the best thing since sliced bread it's shocking and and for me I I lose a lot of respect for especially big companies that still sell products that we've got evidence uh of that they are uh either like you said neutral at best and sometimes even negative for the The Wanted effect and it's like why do these big companies still sell it and it's because well they've got a chain already of that product they have a product line and it will cost them a lot of money to be honest and say listen sorry this doesn't work we're recalling it or this is actually detrimental to the outcome that we're pretending that it gives you but uh I I don't like companies that are like that and that's why I prefer the companies that um will admit when they make a mistake and say sorry this product's actually not good for its intended use but those companies are very few and far between unfor yeah for sure I can only think of a few and they're usually tied to some sort of you know scientist who has four four supplements total and they're the run-of-the-mill you know supplements like a creatine a caffeine and so on yeah yeah H but anyway and then then what is the minimum criteria for a quantification tool to be useful a minimum criteria for a quantification tool to be useful you mean in terms of measuring like outcomes like ultrasound or something better yeah so I think you mentioned uh the two factors being measurability and then relatively consistent dose response relationship oh yeah so in terms of when you're looking at the outcome of interest and what you're claiming to map on to the outcome of Interest yeah those are really going to be the main two components that you care about you want that specific thing to be measurable so if it's not measurable then obviously you can't see if there's any sort of dose response and you want that measure to be you know somewhat stable and then you want to make sure that there is some sort of dose response whether it's you know uh Parabola or linear and so on you it can't just be random because then obviously you don't have any clear relationship there so often times you'll see people who use criteria that could never turn into something that lends itself to a dose response because they're choosing a criteria that's basically immeasurable so one thing that I see often and you know there's different ways of going about defining it so some individuals can Define it in something that is a little bit more measurable in terms of at least conceptually but time under tension is really one that commonly gets or at least people try to use it as some sort of a quantification tool but the problem with time under tension is that one the most commonly way that it's defined is just literally looking at the amount of time within a set and then that's the amount of time under tension and the problem ends up being that if you have a set that's 30 reps and if you have a set that's 10 reps obviously time of their tension is vastly different but hypertrophy outcomes are generally very similar so you have something that's not able to give you a dose response because when you change that variable you have tons of counter evidence to show that that hasn't created the type of measurement or the dose response that you're looking for and there's tons of examples of that where what you're actually trying to map onto a dose response just doesn't lend itself to that because the actual construct is too sensitive to changes in other variables so even if you try to quantify the tension component how does that tension change with fatigue what amount of tension is necessary in order to actually get the level of signaling and anabolism that you're looking for so even if you Tred to include the tension component within time of tension there's just so many unknowns there that it ends up being just a weird situation of you trying to deduce what's going on and then forcing or mapping on based on your own perception but not something that's objectively measurable so I think just understanding the construct so in this case if we're looking at volume particularly in the literature it's hard sets and understanding the limitation of that construct but also the upsides of that construct in all right this is a stable measure that we can actually see that one it's actually measuring what we say it's measuring and two we're able to actually create a dose response and test if that dose response holds in whatever situation absolutely and you made a good uh point about the time under tension uh it's very difficult and I think an important thing for any future time under tension studies is that they need to Define time and detention to make it reproducible again and like you said it's kind of difficult to Define without kind of boxing it into your own definition that would again go back to what you said about you kind of uh trying to adapt your uh research to uh agree with your hypothesis which isn't what you want exactly yep why are muscle growth mechanisms so difficult to explain yeah so this one is definitely one that is within the realm of people speaking super super strongly but us not having the evidence so the biggest Reason by far is because when you have a person lift weights there's so many factors that are occurring at the same time where you could have a lead Domino so a lead Domino of causality let's say and let's just assume that lead Domino is tension right so the amount of fibers that are actually so the amount of M that's attaching to the actin let's say um the problem with just using tension is that there could be many moderators that affect that lead Domino so after you get that lead Domino there could be you know metabolites there could be hypoxia there could be the position in which the actin and mein are interacting so could it be that the strain of the mein versus the stress in a particular area has differential effects when it comes to the anabolic signaling and how do all of those come together in order to create an outcome so the the issue is is that we have a lot of candidates and we probably know that tension is at least the main player there but how those all come together in a Symphony of anabolism is really impossible to parse out because you can't isolate one without creating either massive issues so you could try to knock out genes in certain mice and try to really isolate mechanisms but usually you end up doing something that causes a lot of other Downstream effects that would make it really impossible to practically take that evidence and apply it to training or if you really try to create a design that minimizes one thing or another let's say metabolites and so on you still have them at play so really isolating anything within this context to me just seems to me just seems like an impossible task so I can't think of and I think this is a really important one when it comes to just science in general you ask people what study would you need to see or what group of studies would you need to see in order to show that this definitively is the case so that it's definitively the case that tension is the only mechanism or it's definitively the case that metabolites do modulate anabolic signaling and so on and many times they just don't really have a good answer and sometimes for good reason because there just isn't a study design that lends itself to isolating these things well or they'll give you a really bad answer in terms of a design that couldn't isolate those those variables and then you know you have your answer again in terms of whether that information is really reliable and can tell you how to actually go about parsing whether something does end up producing that anabolic signaling so basically you're saying there's just too many components at play simultaneously and maybe not simultaneously and it's very difficult to study any one of those components in isolation uh so it's not really possible at this current uh stage to definitively say thust causes muscle growth thust doesn't kind of thing yeah exactly especially when they can come together and cause muscle growth so it could be that one thing wouldn't cause muscle growth in isolation so one thing is something can be necessary to call cause muscle growth and sufficient to cause muscle growth or both but sometimes it doesn't have to be either necessary or sufficient but could still modulate the anabolic effect so there's always going to be questions there because like exactly like you said you can't isolate those variables in a way that could allow you to parse whether it's actually having an effect without either you know killing the animal or doing something super weird that just wouldn't be done in practice yeah please don't kill the animals scar um but on at least for a for a study um unless you're going to eat it afterwards uh but yeah um so how are uh STS counted in research to hear Daniel's answer to this question and much more you're going to have to tune in again on the next episode of the muscle growth podcast thank you for tuning in to the muscle growth podcast if you found value in today's episode we'd really appreciate it if you could leave us a fstar rating and a quick review it helps us grow and reach more people just like you don't forget to follow us on all major social media platforms including Instagram YouTube Tik Tok and Xs find us at the muscle growth podcast and at reps with Rosco for more insights exclusive content and full episode visit the musclegrowth podcast.com your support truly makes a difference so please like share comment and follow we're grateful for every bit of it until next time keep pushing your limits and staying focused on getting bigger stronger and better