Differences in Gains Between Individuals, and What You Can Do About It (Ep 99)

[@jasongross7977]

This podcast is my happy place.

[@KenanTurkiye]

...everyone needs one to escape from this mad state humanity has managed to establish called ''world''. Yeah. :/

[@leonidas3127]

Is there a study, or perhaps podcast episode, on the topic of explaining strength variance? The more I train, the less I believe that different powerlifting programs do different things, and that it all comes to your genetics, training specificity (lifting heavy), and adequate rest (stimulus to fatigue ratio).

[@KenanTurkiye]

Just like ''IQ'', you can develop it to a certain degree but ''...recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%'', I believe a same/similar genetic role plays in this issue as well.

[@dvsn23]

Thank you for letting me drop this temporary, primary, guest comment.

[@manuag3886]

Massively underrated channel

[@Tldr205]

The emperical study is very interesting and shows variabilty as you explained well. Do you think the numbers are higher, because of biases (asking only powerlifters, and there might be a chance that people that trains for 5 years are better responders, since low responders have higher qutting rate). It's just that when i compare to a local gym i see very few people squatting 3 plates (of course multiple reasons can explain this as well))

[@strongerbyscience]

I specifically discussed that. Around 46:30 or so

[@sempervirens2]

Very disappointed be the lack of Fat Bear Week content this year, tbh. 747 reclaimed his title 🎉

[@seinsfrage]

Sincere question(s): Does studying the effects of resistance training that trains only one muscle group during the course of the study skew the results in terms of what can be extrapolated? (Most people don't train just one muscle group for 16 weeks--or am I misunderstanding how the studies were run?) For example, would the results be skewed because (1) the body's ability to recover isn't as taxed as it would be for someone who trains multiple muscle groups/areas 2-3x per week? [thereby enabling greater gains in that muscle group] or (2) the limited training of the study limits the degree to which the body (as a system) responds by stimulating anabolism/MPS [thereby limiting gains]? I hope that makes sense. Thanks for all you guys do! P.S. Did the studies you cited control for nutritional intake?

[@greglnuckols]

I think that probably does have an effect. It's probably one of the reasons why the rates of strength gains and hypertrophy seen in the lab (for a single muscle group or exercise) tend to be considerably higher than the rates of general muscle growth and general strength gains we see in the "real world". The Davidsen study (I'm pretty sure it's one of the ones I cited; microRNA study) didn't control nutrition intake, but it monitored intake, and the high and low responders had similar intakes iirc

[@seinsfrage]

@@greglnuckols Cheers, Greg!

[@robertseybold3665]

Another Feats of Strength? Is it Festivus already?! 🎉

[@Yupppi]

We should not forget the "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial" on BMJ ;) I feel like the "absence of evidence" phrase is something that is so catchy and practical that people caught it from "science based" channels or people who wanted to fight the evidence based approaches. You know, similar to how study's conflict of interest got all muddied when people who didn't quite understand (or care to understand or learn) the details of the concept learned the term and started using it. It sounds like you understood something about what you're talking about, and your critique has to be heard and answered, without you having to commit anything to the argument against the idea or show that you actually have studied the matter. Also if the response to calling it out is something like "you don't present the evidence to my critique, you just claim that I haven't read the article or studied the topic or that I'm not ready to accept your truth", it gets kinda difficult to carry on that conversation. Like not many professional academics who have strong understanding in what they're talking about don't to my understanding resort to sort of empty phrases, but formulate their thoughts around it and explain why they think there isn't sufficient evidence. And I'm not saying that from the holier than thou perspective, because I can admit having used terms like that when I've been lazy in a discussion, without knowing the details or having studied the topic and just wanted to show that I'm critical towards the idea for whatever reason (sometimes just the initial emotional response). And this makes me wonder, how often do you guys have professional peer feedback on your articles versus more layman, like me who has academic background and interest on science and learning, but in a totally different topic and who is not well versed in nutrition and strength/sports sciences? But please explain how can a completely untrained person LOSE bicep size by training them? I want to assume the training program wasn't too intense, and as far as I understand, it's difficult to make an untrained person go through a program that they don't just quit from being unable to continue, that would cause them decrease in gains instead of poor or awesome gains. The only way I can wrap my mind around it is assuming that the study was silly and the person lost a lot of fat while gaining some muscle and they just measured the arm.

[@greglnuckols]

The thing about it that frustrates me the most is that there's no bright line to determine when there's sufficient evidence vs. insufficient evidence. More often than not, folks will accept basically any evidence that exists (regardless of the volume or strength of the evidence) as sufficient to justify the things they want to believe, but will place an extremely high bar on the evidence that would be sufficient to dislodge one of their current beliefs. As you alluded to, it's very effective, because it requires virtually no effort, and it always shifts the burden of proof to the other party. And, to outside observers, it seems like a reasonable position. In almost all cases, the evidence COULD be stronger than it currently is (regardless of topic), and who wouldn't like to see stronger evidence? It also *doesn't* require you to state your own beliefs, and present your own evidence to counter the position you're disagreeing with, which would open your own opinions up to critique. As to your last paragraph, check the Hubal study. Pretty decent training stimulus, with direct measures of hypertrophy.

[@coldseamonster]

Who does the decorating?

[@markuscollingholmberg4691]

Excellent episode! For me it raised the question of interaction effects (?) and the difficulty of isolating variables for increasing hypertrophy/strength. An example with proximity to failure: If I change my training style and go closer to failure not getting a better response I might draw the conclusion that going closer to failure is not a good idea for me, but this could be in the context of the current amount of sets. Maybe I only get a benefit of training closer to failure when performing fewer sets. This could be the case with any variable. Is this a valid concern and how does one take this into account?

[@azulsimmons1040]

There are smaller women squatting nearly 500 or women at the higher weight classes squatting more at the higher weight classes. Jessica Buettner squat is insane. I feel like less of a man watching her squat. Even at 51 I want to at least squat as much as her. She's too damn strong.

[@johncalla2151]

You can do it too with PEDs.

[@esteb6544]

Why is there a picture of a dog in the middle? Has it always been there?

[@Vandylizer]

Hmm...maybe that's Oswald? Greg's dog?

[@greglnuckols]

because he's a good boy. And no

[@esteb6544]

@@greglnuckols haha awesome. Great episode guys. I’m loving the “shorter” format of this season. Keep it up!

[@robertseybold3665]

@@greglnuckols but he's ok? Alive and well? Good!

[@lesinj]

1:01:30 personal time stamp

[@rikhouben1019]

What can you do if the minimum effective stimulus for strength gain is still too much for your recovery capacity? So you train, make no progress, get really tired. And this over multiple (>5) years. (8h sleep, energy surplus, decent food choices, tried multiple training strategies, ...) Training more/harder only results in more exhaustion (and degradation in performance).

[@stevenuseda6317]

Maybe play around with exercise selection and find exercises with better stimulus to fatigue ratios for you

[@rikhouben1019]

@@stevenuseda6317 Yes, I have tried playing with variations to the point of leaving out the comp lifts completely for a while. I have found no strategy that actually worked. I think I am just a very minimal responder to training stress... or something unknown is hampering my recovery.

[@ashleydawson4057]

Throwing lots of shade on somebody who’s name rhymes with schmayne schmorton in that reverse dieting seg

[@watsonkushmaster3067]

so they didnt train at all and training their biceps resulted in loss of mucle? give me a break...how does that make any sence...did they eat 1000cals under maintaince and sleep 2 hour less every night or what

[@johncalla2151]

Those study results are pretty common. Some people could have muscle damage from the exercise that doesn't repair completely.

[@bradekegren1723]

Is there a reason why you guys keep re-uploading the same videos?

[@bradekegren1723]

@@sagi_tech_n_stuff I see. Still kinda confusing, since each separate video was about an hour each…

[@wilsonman8661]

@@bradekegren1723 Then you might be able to infer from this video being two hours that they're not the same video. They explained what they were doing a few episodes ago, in case you missed it.

[@SirAlexanderdeLarge]

So that people can watch individual segments they're more interested in, and not have to watch the whole episode if there's a segment they don't much care about.

[@bradekegren1723]

@@SirAlexanderdeLarge I see. These guys are killing it lately, compared to renaissance periodization…