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Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

291–300 of 371 posts

Re: Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience from lifting now for 30+ years and seeing thousands of people lift is it is: 1. Genetics. Also in first place: steroids. The bodybuilding magazines loved to talk about genetics because they didn't want to say the quiet part out loud. Nowadays people are more willing to talk about it.

Steroids, the main excuse of lazy people who are searching for excuses, without realizing that the main problem is their own attitude based on the mistaken pattern of comparing yourself to unreachable elite instead of to ordinary folks and to your former self. 1. Compare only to former yourself (you can't even know your genetic potential until you start training). Did you improve? Yes? Great, continue. No? Change som…

What are you even responding to? I go to the gym and lift and cardio for my own health, but this is this and that is that. If you want to look like the guys featured in the magazines you need steroids. If you want to make a body transformation like actors do you definitely need steroids.

Re: Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

#292
post #197

Why is this article showing up on New Year's Day like the flock of newbie gym customers attracted to the gym only to quit 30 days from now? Every year without fail. Let's ignore this article for a moment. Overall factors that REALLY matter building muscle: 1. Consistency - Working out each muscle group at least once a week....every week. 2. Diet - Making sure you are consuming enough protein in your diet, approximate…

This is a physiology research article published in a physiology journal, not a Tiktoken influencer peddling "get ripped fast" schemes. In an ironic twist, you then proceed to peddle your own. In a single paragraph you added more contentious "advice" than in the entire article you're dismissing. > Stop reading these studies thinking there is some optimal way! It's just hard work over time. "Hard work" and "learning ne…

Still, a "given all else, this optimal thing giving +1% growth" is negligible percentage, when all the other mentioned factors are several orders of magnitude more important.

My point is, simply doing it consistently, even if slightly less optimally, will trivially surpass anything else in the long run and there are no "silver bullets" in training.

The only importance is safety, avoiding injuring oneself.

Also, the article also states this: "RET-induced hypertrophy is mediated to a far greater degree by inherent endogenous biological factors"

Re: Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

#293

You cannot be strong without being big and you cannot be big without being strong. Of course there are levels to this, variations within “weight classes”… but in general this holds true. Also consistency trumps any program.

Wrong.

Getting more muscles leads to more strength (because the strength of the muscle is determined by the cross-sectional area).

But you can definitely be natually strong without having a lot of muscle.

And you can definitely get much stronger without getting much muscle.

In other words, any person with big pecs and triceps will be strong in bench (even without training). But strong bencher will not necessarily have big pecs/triceps to show.

That's the whole premise behind the popularity of the Anatoly gym pranks.

Re: Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1. Consistency >5. Vary your workout The muscle "shock" broscience has been disproven many times: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35438660/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349502442_Does_Vary...

It doesn’t really affect hypertrophy but it matters because imbalances will get you weird injuries and/or mobility restrictions in the long term.

Not true, no one is symmetrical or fully balanced in strength. outside of extreme cases, so called imbalances arent a problem on a population level, at least as far as we know today.

Re: Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

#295
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and 400 deadlift is decent intermediate for the average man, but let me suggest a counterpoint. Strength is the greatest indication of health among the elderly. A strong old man doesn't break his hip when he falls, he doesn't fall at all actually because strength is balance, and he doesn't have trouble getting off the toilet, and he doesn't need a cane. These are serious QOL issues. It's a mindset issue. If you…

I’ve been a longtime competitive athlete and my best deadlift was 545 lb. I’ve been in many gyms in my life and I’ve only met maybe a dozen men lifting more than say 350 or so. Expecting the “average” man to get to a 400 or even 300 lb deadlift is absurd. Sure, most people could be in better shape but a 4 plate deadlift is much more strength than most people need… and more than most people’s bodies can safely handle…

The average male 20-29 in USA is 85KG. A deadlift of barely over 2x bodyweight is not remarkable at all! The average young man does not train and when they do they train stupidly; this has no bearing on the fact that they could achieve a 400 deadlift within a few years of intelligent training.

Most gyms are not serious. You'll find no one lifting heavy at Planet Fitness, and you'll find that a 350 deadlift is one of the weakest in a dirty powerlifting gym. Among people who actually do the activity, it's not impressive. The thing is you just have to actually do the activity. My metrics are only "absurd" if you think I'm saying that the average man has the willpower and interest to achieve this; of course they don't; the average man is obese and lazy. My claim is that the average man has the physical capacity to achieve this.

Please don't misconstrue my claim of what is possible for what is likely. The average man can easily learn to cook well, read a few books per year, get their chess elo into the top 30%, run a 5k, learn to draw basic portraits, deadlift 400 pounds, and many other things that the average man will never do because they don't want to train for it.

If I said the average man could practice drawing for a few years and end up drawing basic portraits, or study chess or cooking for a few years and end up better than almost anyone they know, this is mostly uncontroversial. When I say the same for strength training, it seems to anger a lot of people for some reason. My experiences tell me that these are comparable levels of goals.

To the original point, seriously, my 102lb wife squats more than 1 plate and she's been training for 4 months.

Re: Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

#296
post #196

Why is this article showing up on New Year's Day like the flock of newbie gym customers attracted to the gym only to quit 30 days from now? Every year without fail. Let's ignore this article for a moment. Overall factors that REALLY matter building muscle: 1. Consistency - Working out each muscle group at least once a week....every week. 2. Diet - Making sure you are consuming enough protein in your diet, approximate…

"approximately 1gram/pound of body weight" I believe this should be lean mass, not total mass. I think people tried to calibrate this metric since most people don't have scales that can measure composition... but if you're obese, you're going to be consuming more than you need to, which is counter productive if you're obese.

Yes! The "lean mass" caveat is oft ignored by bro scientists, and even LLMs have incorporated the error due to training on bro science forums.

I use this as a bit of a canary. If you see somebody making this basic mistake (like the post you're replying to did), you should be highly skeptical of their other claims too.

Re: Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

#297
post #202
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"approximately 1gram/pound of body weight" I believe this should be lean mass, not total mass. I think people tried to calibrate this metric since most people don't have scales that can measure composition... but if you're obese, you're going to be consuming more than you need to, which is counter productive if you're obese.

It's actually not, because nothing provides as much satiety as protein. Every calorie you get from protein reduces your cravings for food significantly more then the equivalent carb and fats. You still need to get over the initial insulin normalization though from reducing sugars. Nothing reduces that pain, no matter what you try.

I think there was a study last year or so that investigated whether protein rich meals actually made people consume less calories, and i think it didnt really, despite the fact that it feels more satiating and the TEF is also higher than for carbs.

So i think for long term weight changes it doesnt really help, at least not via its satiety response. Probably more through displacing other stuff from the diet and improved body composition.

Re: Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

#299
Not sure why it gets attention here. The "finding" is the long standing assumption as it is, absolutely nothing new discovered here. It could be notable if it was of some particularly high quality, but here it is 20 untrained individuals doing some dubious exercise regime for 10 weeks and finding out that on average one dubious exercise pattern wasn't particularly better than the other, and overall exercising seemed to be good for all of them, although inter-personal coefficient of variation is up to 28.3%… Like, really? That was the study that impressed 211 upvoters?

These journals keep publishing such studies, because there is nothing better to publish in this branch of, uhm, "science", and I would even argue it's not a bad thing, because something is better than nothing, and it's basically impossible today to do more impressive research in this field (because testing humans is far costlier and logistically more complicated than writing equations and running simulations on your PC). But it's funny that it gets someone's attention.

Re: Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got back from the gym and it was surprisingly empty. Actually, more empty than normal. My experience from lifting now for 30+ years and seeing thousands of people lift is it is: 1. Genetics. Everything else is a distant second or third. This was actually something that was widely understood in 90s bodybuilding magazines. Lifting is mostly a display of genetics. That worked when you could sell magazines of gene…

What? I mean.. seriously, what? There are people with great genetic potential that lives like couch potatoes. What good is having the potential of you don't use it. Genetics is important, but there are many elements and just dropping this here is, IMO, irresponsible, because some people will read this and go... Ah, I'm out of shape because of genetics, nothing I can do, oh well.

No one claims you can do nothing, exercise has numerous benefits that extend beyond hypertrophy or even strength. i think the point is that you have way less control over the outcome than youd like, because individual responses vary so wildly. You can improve your odds by ticking the usual boxes and finding and following a custom program that works for you, but none of that is going to make as big of a difference than your genetic base.
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