Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Strength vs. Hypertrophy (The 65% Threshold for Lifters Chasing PRs vs. Muscle Size) | Ep 297
Transcript
- 0:01Philip Pape: Whether you just got into lifting or you've been training consistently for years, you might be aware of a paradox that going after maximum numbers seems to limit the development of your physique and muscle, while focusing on just hypertrophy or muscle size development doesn't seem to deliver the ultimate strength numbers that you want.
- 0:23Philip Pape: Well, research shows that, beyond the novice stage, strength and size gains follow fundamentally different pathways.
- 0:31Philip Pape: Today, we're talking about the science-backed differences between training for maximal strength versus optimal muscle growth and how to program for both without compromising either.
- 0:41Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
- 1:00Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and today I'm going to address one of the most misunderstood relationships in fitness the connection between strength and hypertrophy, the fancy word for muscle growth and I want to give a shout out to my lifting buddy, tony.
- 1:14Philip Pape: You know who you are as well as my client, len, who have pushed me recently to cover this topic in depth and it's a good one, because I see this confusion constantly with clients in our online communities, where people ask should I lift heavy to get stronger, or should I use lighter weights or more reps to build muscle?
- 1:32Philip Pape: Or they'll say I'm getting stronger but I'm not seeing much size increase or development of my physique.
- 1:38Philip Pape: Or, conversely, you know I look bigger but my lifts aren't really going up that much.
- 1:42Philip Pape: Look bigger but my lifts aren't really going up that much.
- 1:45Philip Pape: And the separation between these two training goals you know it's not as black and white as many believe, like the old school.
- 1:49Philip Pape: Well, strength is one to five reps and hypertrophy is eight to 12, and so on.
- 1:54Philip Pape: There is significant overlap, but there are also significant differences in how you should approach each one, and understanding this relationship is critical to design an effective program, or at least choose a program so that you know it gives you the specific results you want.
- 2:10Philip Pape: Now, if you want to put these principles into action immediately, I've definitely got something special for you today, because I'm giving away a complete set of my physique and strength-focused workout programs from Wits and Weights Physique University totally free, giving you the whole thing for the current month for all skill levels, all types of equipment.
- 2:34Philip Pape: There are swaps, there's video links in there, there are instructions novice, intermediate, glutes and legs.
- 2:40Philip Pape: There are a lot of different programs and they're the exact programs that our WWPU members can choose from, including a built-in log, exercise substitutions for home and travel, you name it.
- 2:50Philip Pape: So just go to witsandweightscom, slash free or click the link in the show notes.
- 2:55Philip Pape: If you go to our website, just look for Physique Focus Programs I think it's called but just click the link in the show notes to get a free copy of that today.
- 3:04Philip Pape: All right, so let's clear up the confusion between strength and hypertrophy training once and for all, making this the definitive episode on the topic.
- 3:12Philip Pape: First, let's define what the heck we're talking about.
- 3:16Philip Pape: Strength training primarily focuses on increasing your ability to generate maximal force.
- 3:23Philip Pape: How much weight you can lift for low reps, ideally for one rep, the most you can lift for one rep, but in that range.
- 3:31Philip Pape: So think about powerlifting powerlifting competitions, where athletes perform one rep at the heaviest possible weight for their deadlift, their squat and their bench press.
- 3:40Philip Pape: And this is something I didn't understand for many, many years, and once I did and focused on it when I was a beginner, the gain started to take off and it opened up a whole world of learning and understanding about this.
- 3:51Philip Pape: But then at some point you start to hit a wall and you're like why am I not getting stronger, or why am I not getting the physique I want?
- 3:58Philip Pape: So hypertrophy training, on the other hand, in somewhat contrast to strength, emphasizes increasing muscle size using the ultimate principle, which is mechanical tension, and it's often by doing it through moderate I'll call it moderate weights.
- 4:16Philip Pape: I don't like to say lightweights, it's just moderate weights.
- 4:18Philip Pape: It's sub-maximal or far from your max for mid to higher tier rep ranges like 6 to 15, up to 20, even up to 30.
- 4:28Philip Pape: That's what I'm saying is there's quite a wide range where this can be effective.
- 4:32Philip Pape: Now, the interesting part here is that if you look at the science, we see that these adaptations share a fundamental driver and that is mechanical tension, which I just mentioned in the context of hypertrophy.
- 4:44Philip Pape: But the way your body responds to this tension is going to differ, based on load volume and other variables, and here's where the 65% threshold becomes important.
- 4:57Philip Pape: I think this is really important.
- 4:58Philip Pape: So listen up.
- 4:58Philip Pape: Research consistently shows that to build maximal strength, you generally okay, generally, this is a combination of the research need to train with at least 65% of your one rep max.
- 5:09Philip Pape: Okay, that is 65% of your max.
- 5:12Philip Pape: This is an intensity threshold that ensures that you have sufficient neural right, your nervous system, neural recruitment and adaptation.
- 5:23Philip Pape: But if you're just trying to build muscle and I say that in quotes we're going to get to the differences and the overlaps.
- 5:29Philip Pape: You can potentially go as low as 30% of your one rep max.
- 5:33Philip Pape: Provided that you are training close to failure, you're still leveraging the principle of mechanical tension either way.
- 5:42Philip Pape: So I want to explain why this happens through the lens of the research.
- 5:45Philip Pape: So in the early stages of strength gains this is when you're a complete beginner or a novice or even a late novice most improvement comes from neurological adaptations, not muscle growth.
- 5:57Philip Pape: Your central nervous system, your CNS, becomes more efficient at recruiting muscle fibers and synchronizing your motor units, and studies show that in novice lifters, increases in muscle size might explain as little as 2% of the variance in strength gains.
- 6:15Philip Pape: That's pretty telling, right?
- 6:16Philip Pape: That tells you that it's not.
- 6:17Philip Pape: It doesn't have much to do with muscle at all, because nearly all strength improvement comes from better neural efficiency and technique, and this is why you can gain massive strength very quickly early on, because you don't need to grow new muscle tissue to get there.
- 6:32Philip Pape: You're simply training your body to coordinate better effectively.
- 6:38Philip Pape: So you guys probably know Dr Eric Helms, one of the guys I follow.
- 6:41Philip Pape: He's a natural bodybuilder, he's a researcher, always on the podcast circuit Stronger by science, mass, all that good stuff and he explains this phenomenon very clearly.
- 7:01Philip Pape: He says when you first start training your body and coordinate the muscles and that's where beginners again can double their strength but have minimal visible muscle gain, and that can be it can be both exhilarating because your numbers are going up, and frustrating because your physique isn't quite changing yet.
- 7:16Philip Pape: And then, as you become more advanced, the relationship shifts very dramatically.
- 7:22Philip Pape: For experienced lifters, muscle mass then becomes critical for further strength gains.
- 7:28Philip Pape: You've heard of you know, working on your weak spots, for example, and it potentially explains 65% or more of the variability in strength increases.
- 7:39Philip Pape: Okay, listen to what I just said.
- 7:41Philip Pape: When you're more advanced, muscle mass becomes more relevant for strength.
- 7:46Philip Pape: So, in other words, once you've optimized your nervous system and your lifting technique, getting stronger largely means building bigger muscles.
- 7:55Philip Pape: And so the chicken and egg is always confusing here, because it's like which one supports the other.
- 7:59Philip Pape: The answer is yes, and this explains why elite power lifters are also quite jacked.
- 8:06Philip Pape: They're quite muscular, right, they have to be, even if aesthetics isn't their primary goal, and you might see the big guys who carried a lot of extra weight.
- 8:13Philip Pape: They then cut down because their goals change.
- 8:16Philip Pape: Maybe they even go into bodybuilding and I won't say it's easy for them because it's going to depend on their shape and their symmetry as well.
- 8:23Philip Pape: But you see that fat fall off and they've got tons of muscle slabs and slabs of meat on their frame and so at advanced levels, more muscle becomes necessary to continue breaking strength plateaus Really really important, because I think people get stuck in the mindset of doing the same.
- 8:42Philip Pape: You know, three by five program forever, and they are leaving lots of potential gains on the same.
- 8:45Philip Pape: You know, three by five program forever, and they are leaving lots of potential gains on the table, even for their strength.
- 8:49Philip Pape: So now that we understand the relationship between strength and size, kind of at a high level I don't want to get too deep into the weeds here.
- 8:56Philip Pape: There's so much evidence and research out there that you could explore I want to talk about how training variables differ between strength focused and hypertrophy focused programs, and again we're going to get to where these overlap and how you can incorporate a little of both.
- 9:12Philip Pape: But I want to start with intensity right, Probably the most important variable that I learned early on, especially when you're getting started.
- 9:18Philip Pape: Intensity is not sweating or feel, intensity is just the load on the bar, it's how heavy you lift relative to your maximum in this context.
- 9:28Philip Pape: All right.
- 9:29Philip Pape: So for strength development, research is clear on this Lifting heavier weights is superior and that means working at 80 to 100% of your 1RM for your core compound lifts.
- 9:41Philip Pape: The heavy weight forces maximal motor unit recruitment from the first rep.
- 9:48Philip Pape: That's what's important here, and it trains your nervous system to handle near maximum lows.
- 9:54Philip Pape: And you can go down other rabbit holes and argue about intensity versus volume.
- 9:58Philip Pape: I think both are extremely important.
- 10:01Philip Pape: I think using intensity and then jacking that up with volume is a great approach.
- 10:06Philip Pape: Or going a little bit less intense and making up for in volume, or a little bit more intense and a little bit less volume.
- 10:13Philip Pape: It all works and in some cases you cycle through both within one training block Very common.
- 10:18Philip Pape: I just increased all of my max lifts.
- 10:20Philip Pape: Doing that, I had a base phase where I had lots of volume sub-maximal but then I switched to a peaking phase where I was in the 80 to 90% range with much less volume, to train my nervous system to get ready to hit those max singles, which eventually I did, and it actually felt pretty easy when you take the right approach.
- 10:42Philip Pape: So that's strength.
- 10:44Philip Pape: Now for hypertrophy, the intensity range is much broader, which is kind of neat, because if you're really if you don't care, I'll say care about your max PRs and you just want to look better, you want to build muscle, you want to be generally fit and strong, but not strong in terms of the maximum strength.
- 11:01Philip Pape: A hypertrophy approach can be helpful and flexible.
- 11:05Philip Pape: It can give you a lot of flexibility because the evidence confirms that muscle growth occurs effectively from as low as 30% up to 85% of your 1RM, as long as the sets are approaching muscular failure.
- 11:19Philip Pape: And the key factor here again is mechanical tension, not necessarily how heavy the weight feels.
- 11:26Philip Pape: And that's a distinction, because some people, I have to be honest, are not training hard enough.
- 11:31Philip Pape: And the most recent program I ran and I have one of my programs in the Physique University that is inspired by Alex Bromley.
- 11:39Philip Pape: He has a volume-based approach, but the key is he uses AMRAP sets while building that strength base so that you can tell whether you are heavy enough on your load and you're pushing hard enough, without having to rely on subjective feel.
- 11:52Philip Pape: And I think objectivity is a really helpful tool throughout this process.
- 11:57Philip Pape: A 2017 meta-analysis by Brad Schoenfeld found that when sets are taken to momentary failure, muscle hypertrophy gains are similar across a wide range of loads.
- 12:10Philip Pape: However and this is really important maximal strength was not equal across rep ranges.
- 12:17Philip Pape: So let me just repeat that when you take sets to failure just for a moment, you're going to gain hypertrophy no matter the load, at least when it's above this 30% threshold, but your strength isn't the same across different rep ranges.
- 12:31Philip Pape: The same review found that heavy load training produced significantly greater one-arm strength gains than light load training.
- 12:37Philip Pape: It's not really a surprise to those of us that have done this and trained with this, but it's important to understand that that is the case.
- 12:43Philip Pape: That is where some of the differences exist.
- 12:45Philip Pape: The second major difference is volume For hypertrophy total volume, which is your sets times reps.
- 12:52Philip Pape: You could also say times load, because that gives you your tonnage and remember we are talking about vastly different load levels, so it's important to have that in there.
- 13:01Philip Pape: Volume is a primary driver of growth.
- 13:04Philip Pape: Meta-analysis indicate that multiple sets per exercise yield more hypertrophy than single set training, and higher weekly sets per muscle group usually around 10 to 20, tend to produce more growth than lower volumes.
- 13:16Philip Pape: Now I've said before that as low as five to 10 can still get you a lot of the gains that you want, but it's not optimal, it's not going to get you the most.
- 13:24Philip Pape: And for those of you really serious about this that are putting in the work, just understand you generally need about 10 to 20 sets per week and again, that's a pretty well-established range that gets talked about in the industry by now and it's it holds up, based on the research.
- 13:37Philip Pape: So that's that's volume for hypertrophy.
- 13:39Philip Pape: Now strength training even though you do need adequate volume, it places greater emphasis on intensity over volume.
- 13:48Philip Pape: Right, you can't do as many sets with near maximal weights without your performance tanking and having recovery issues and tons of fatigue.
- 13:56Philip Pape: And that's where quality becomes more important than quantity.
- 13:59Philip Pape: And that is why, again, to go back to the program I just ran, when I was building the base I was far sub-maximal.
- 14:05Philip Pape: I was around 65, 70, 75% of my max, doing more volume, and then, as I got closer to my test, I ramped down the volume and increased the intensity.
- 14:17Philip Pape: Another thing that changes quite a bit is the rest periods.
- 14:20Philip Pape: Strength training typically uses longer rest intervals between your heavy sets three to five, six, seven, eight, 10 minutes, sometimes even longer for super heavy, let's say deadlifts and this allows for your ATP-CP this is the adenosine triphosphate, creatine phosphate energy system to replenish itself.
- 14:43Philip Pape: Right, it gets depleted very quickly.
- 14:46Philip Pape: It also allows your central nervous system to recover and now you can go after maximal performance on each set, which is ultimately the goal, whereas traditional muscle mass or hypertrophy training often uses shorter rests 60 seconds, minute and a half, two minutes, three minutes I usually like two to three minutes for most, unless you are intentionally going after building your work capacity or doing a superset or circuit style training where you are just trying to get to those near failure reps quickly and the theory here is you're trying to increase your metabolic stress.
- 15:23Philip Pape: However, however important here, current evidence suggests that longer rest intervals, even with hypertrophy, can actually enhance the muscle growth because they allow you to have more training volume, and this goes back to the volume versus intensity, versus effective reps arguments.
- 15:40Philip Pape: A study by Schoenfeld compared one minute versus three minute rests in a hypertrophy program and found that the group that used the longer three minute rests achieved significantly larger muscle thickness gains.
- 15:55Philip Pape: The last thing here is exercise selection is a pretty important variable.
- 16:00Philip Pape: Strength programs are gonna focus heavily on compound lifts, compound movements that allow for maximal loading.
- 16:06Philip Pape: These are the lifts where you use multiple joints for maximum use of muscle mass and loading.
- 16:12Philip Pape: And that would be your squat, your bench press, your overhead press, your deadlifts, your even rows and things like that, whereas accessory work is also chosen primarily to improve these main lifts rather than necessarily build muscle.
- 16:27Philip Pape: So those might be developmental or targeted variations of the squat, the bench, the dead, the overhead, et cetera.
- 16:35Philip Pape: Hypertrophy programs can still be centered or foundational around compound lifts, so don't think that it just excludes them.
- 16:44Philip Pape: And when we say compound lifts, we also have to expand our vocabulary to include all the variations of compound lifts.
- 16:50Philip Pape: Like a Romanian deadlift is still a compound lift, a pull-up is still a compound lift.
- 16:56Philip Pape: However, hypertrophy programs will also include more isolation exercises to target specific muscles from multiple angles.
- 17:05Philip Pape: A bodybuilder might do flat bench, incline bench, decline, bench flies for chest development.
- 17:11Philip Pape: They might do them all in one day with a body part split.
- 17:13Philip Pape: A powerlifter, on the other hand, might just do their flat bench and maybe one or two variations both on or on a different day, like their other upper body day, to address weak spots, and might have some other work in there.
- 17:27Philip Pape: And that's the big caveat that there is a big overlap here, because when you look at Louis Simmons and the West Side guys and again I know they were equipped, they were enhanced and all that but if you look at something like the conjugate method or really any power building program, you do see a combination of both, with the theory that one enhances the other.
- 17:48Philip Pape: So I want to translate this science into practical guidelines for your training based on your primary goal, and this is going to be a really important episode to come back to when you're wondering if the program you're looking at or the program you're designing is meeting the goals you intend.
- 18:03Philip Pape: So if your main objective is maximal strength, maybe you are a competitive power lifter, maybe you just want to be as strong as possible and, by the way, you can cycle through going after strength, going after muscle, doing a little both.
- 18:17Philip Pape: If your objective is strength, here's how I would structure your training.
- 18:21Philip Pape: I would center your workouts on compound lifts, using primarily the, let's say, one to six rep range at 80 to 90% of your 1RM when you get close to hitting your PR.
- 18:35Philip Pape: That doesn't mean you're always working in the 80 to 90%, and that's one of the many caveats I have to give you here because you're probably going to want to add some volume at lower percentages of your max as you build to those lower rep ranges.
- 18:51Philip Pape: And we see this in some of the classic programs like 531, 852, where you're cycling through slightly higher rep ranges, slightly sub max, and then you're getting more intense at lower reps and then you're cycling through those.
- 19:04Philip Pape: You're also going to take long rest periods, and by long I mean longer than you're probably used to, but sufficient to increase quality as much as possible.
- 19:13Philip Pape: Quality is more important than quantity here.
- 19:15Philip Pape: So at least bare minimum three to five minutes between your heavy sets.
- 19:20Philip Pape: You're going to focus on quality over quantity and that just means that your form it should always be important, but when it comes to really heavy lifts you've really got to be dialed in on your form.
- 19:32Philip Pape: This usually means get a coach who knows what the heck they're talking about, which is also hard to find sometimes.
- 19:38Philip Pape: But get a coach you know a starting strength coach is a great idea.
- 19:42Philip Pape: Even if you're not doing starting strength, they can help you out.
- 19:45Philip Pape: You can definitely reach out to me.
- 19:47Philip Pape: I can refer you to people locally or online.
- 19:50Philip Pape: There are good people.
- 19:52Philip Pape: There are good groups where you could do form checks.
- 19:53Philip Pape: I think quality is really important because you're only doing, let's say, three to five sets and you're not doing that many reps, but you're really having.
- 20:02Philip Pape: You've got to make sure those reps are done well.
- 20:06Philip Pape: The next thing I think about with strength training training for strength is training with explosive intent Really important.
- 20:13Philip Pape: Listen to me here.
- 20:14Philip Pape: This is not wishy-washy.
- 20:16Philip Pape: Even though the weight is moving slowly, you're going to try to move it as fast as possible on the concentric, like in a squat.
- 20:23Philip Pape: That's the up part of the squat.
- 20:25Philip Pape: When you're driving up with your hips, you're going to explode into that movement.
- 20:29Philip Pape: You're going to at least think that way to maximize your motor unit recruitment.
- 20:32Philip Pape: This is important.
- 20:33Philip Pape: This is something I didn't understand for a while.
- 20:35Philip Pape: You know a lot gets talked about tempo and time under tension which, by the way, is not a thing that is effective at all time under tension.
- 20:43Philip Pape: But explosive concentric movement is important.
- 20:46Philip Pape: The eccentric it can vary.
- 20:49Philip Pape: It depends on what you're going for.
- 20:51Philip Pape: It depends on if you're going to have a pause in there and everything.
- 20:52Philip Pape: But the explosive intent is important.
- 20:56Philip Pape: Avoid training to failure.
- 20:57Philip Pape: That is another important thing.
- 20:58Philip Pape: Your programming should be designed where you are somewhat sub-max but still heavy and doing the right amount of reps so that you're at least probably two or three, if not four, reps shy of failure.
- 21:10Philip Pape: Now, four reps shy of failure.
- 21:12Philip Pape: That is quote-unquote.
- 21:13Philip Pape: Six RPE and I rarely use I never use RPE as a training variable.
- 21:18Philip Pape: I only use it as a lagging indicator, as a metric to evaluate how you did on something, but not as a metric to tell.
- 21:22Philip Pape: I only use it as a lagging uh indicator, as a metric to evaluate how you did on something, but not as a metric to tell you how you should do something.
- 21:27Philip Pape: That's where I differ from from some folks.
- 21:30Philip Pape: But you want to stop short of.
- 21:32Philip Pape: You don't want to be in a total grind where it's an utter failure on your main lifts.
- 21:36Philip Pape: The only time that should really ever happen is if you are testing a one rep max, then it it's, there's a chance it could happen, right?
- 21:43Philip Pape: That's just because you're really trying to push to your max ever.
- 21:45Philip Pape: And then here's the other thing people miss.
- 21:48Philip Pape: Okay, beyond the novice phase, you want to have strategic accessory work in there, because you're going to have weaknesses and you have propensity for injury when you're constantly doing the same lifts and you haven't used variations of those lifts to try to shore up your weak spots.
- 22:04Philip Pape: You're going to keep getting kind of stronger in the primary muscle groups involved in that movement while everything else kind of lags, and we don't want that, and that's why there's always a case to be made for some variety once you get past the novice stage.
- 22:19Philip Pape: So that's my thoughts on strength training, and again, those are principles.
- 22:23Philip Pape: I noticed I didn't give you an actual program, because there's a million ways to do that, but I will suggest a few things later on.
- 22:30Philip Pape: If your primary goal is hypertrophy, you want to look bigger, you want to look more muscular right, many of us want that.
- 22:37Philip Pape: Even if we are trying to push big lifts, we still want that as well.
- 22:39Philip Pape: Here's what I suggest.
- 22:41Philip Pape: You're going to use a blend, a mix of compound and isolation exercises.
- 22:46Philip Pape: So this is where you've got to have some targeted work in there to hit muscles from different angles.
- 22:52Philip Pape: You're going to work in a wide variety of rep ranges.
- 22:55Philip Pape: You're going to work probably predominantly in the middle, like 6 to 12, which is equivalent to about 60 to 80% of your one RM.
- 23:04Philip Pape: Notice, that's still pretty heavy.
- 23:05Philip Pape: But you're going to include some lower rep work three to five potentially, which sounds like strength, doesn't it?
- 23:11Philip Pape: And higher rep work 12 to 20.
- 23:13Philip Pape: I mean, if you're doing a leg press, 15, 20 reps believe it or not, it can be super, super effective.
- 23:18Philip Pape: That or hack squat or something like that and it's still going to feel pretty darn heavy and hard with all those reps.
- 23:25Philip Pape: Doing lots of reps is its own mental challenge compared to doing lower reps but heavy, and then you're going to take these sets pretty close to failure most of the time.
- 23:34Philip Pape: If you're working in the low rep range, like three to five, you still may be more in that strength mindset of leaving a little bit in the tank.
- 23:41Philip Pape: It should be two, three, four reps.
- 23:44Philip Pape: But with most of the other stuff, your accessories and especially your isolation movements you're probably going to be around one to three reps of failure.
- 23:50Philip Pape: You're rarely going to go all the way to failure, but it's totally doable to do that with something like bicep curls, where you just keep going, you keep going, you keep going and you literally cannot get another technical rep and then you failed and that's okay.
- 24:03Philip Pape: But there are some things where you don't want to do that.
- 24:06Philip Pape: And then we mentioned volume.
- 24:07Philip Pape: Volume is really important here because you want to accumulate enough volume to grow your muscles.
- 24:12Philip Pape: So that is 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week.
- 24:15Philip Pape: If you are time starved, if you just have to be as efficient as possible, going as low as five could give you some results, but they're not gonna be optimal.
- 24:23Philip Pape: So 10 to 20 is solid.
- 24:24Philip Pape: The rest periods are gonna be, in general, two to three minutes, but some may be as low as a minute or even 30 seconds.
- 24:31Philip Pape: Some small isolation work.
- 24:32Philip Pape: Or, of course, if you're doing things like drop sets, mile reps, rest, pause sets things that I'm not even gonna get to detail on here but supersets things that I'm not even going to get to detail on here, but a lot of the fun bodybuilding stuff, supersets and so on.
- 24:49Philip Pape: They're very time efficient ways to train and still get a similar result but fit more work into less time.
- 24:52Philip Pape: But generally I'm thinking two to three minutes.
- 24:53Philip Pape: So if I'm going to do pull-ups, I'm going to rest two to three minutes.
- 24:55Philip Pape: If I'm doing moderately heavy barbell curls, I'm going to go two to three minutes.
- 25:01Philip Pape: Now, if I'm doing 20 reps of dumbbell, hammer curls with rest pause sets, well, those by definition are going to be probably only about 30 seconds.
- 25:11Philip Pape: You're also going to when you do bodybuilding or hypertrophy type work.
- 25:17Philip Pape: There is sometimes a benefit to having a really controlled eccentric.
- 25:21Philip Pape: That's the lowering phase.
- 25:23Philip Pape: Now, this is not because of time under tension.
- 25:26Philip Pape: This is more so that you get that pause in the bottom and that stretch in the lengthened position, and it also makes it a little bit harder to come back.
- 25:34Philip Pape: You're taking out the stretch reflex.
- 25:36Philip Pape: I found that's really good for tendons and connective tissue as well.
- 25:39Philip Pape: So one of the things I've learned a lot from injuries and surgeries is the value of pausing.
- 25:45Philip Pape: And when I do, for example, an easy bar curl, I don't just go all the way down and just smack it back up, back and forth like bouncing out of the bottom.
- 25:52Philip Pape: I go all the way down almost fully unlocked.
- 25:55Philip Pape: I don't go all the way 100% unlocked, but pretty close to it, where it's a very stretched bicep, I pause for a half second and then go again.
- 26:03Philip Pape: It's not like I'm waiting down there for a minute, but try it out.
- 26:05Philip Pape: It will make it a little harder, you will have to drop the load slightly, but you'll get in a very effective workout.
- 26:11Philip Pape: And then, of course, you want to train each muscle group at least twice per week, and this is more of the frequency variable that we didn't really touch on yet.
- 26:20Philip Pape: We talked about intensity, we talked about volume, but frequency is also important, and you're going to want to hit every muscle group at least twice a week, not necessarily directly, right?
- 26:29Philip Pape: If you hit triceps one day and you're doing close grip bench the other day, you hit your triceps twice.
- 26:34Philip Pape: So directly and indirectly, but one at least once directly and then and then at least twice or more directly or indirectly.
- 26:42Philip Pape: Total, now, that's strength and that's hypertrophy.
- 26:46Philip Pape: But where most people get confused is well, I want both, like I want to have my cake and eat it too, and you kind of can.
- 26:53Philip Pape: Okay, this is where power building comes in.
- 26:55Philip Pape: The quote unquote power building, and I have no problem with the term.
- 26:57Philip Pape: Some people roll their eyes.
- 26:58Philip Pape: Oh, power building, what is that?
- 27:00Philip Pape: I don't think we have to judge the term, just define what it means.
- 27:05Philip Pape: And so I think it's an excellent approach for intermediate lifters.
- 27:07Philip Pape: I got introduced to it through my coach, andy Baker.
- 27:09Philip Pape: He's been on the show like three times, I think he has the record for being on the show, and since then I've discovered lots of other coaches who have a similar style approach to programming.
- 27:19Philip Pape: It's a lot of fun.
- 27:20Philip Pape: It covers both strength and hypertrophy, both styles.
- 27:23Philip Pape: It helps you learn a lot about your form, about lifts, about how to program for yourself, about how to manage fatigue and recovery.
- 27:29Philip Pape: I'm like a walking sales pitch for it because I think, like most, let's say, the guys I identify with in their forties who don't have a crap ton of time, they have some time and they dedicate time to training for sure, maybe four days a week for an hour, hour and a half, but they want to get both and they're like well, if I just focus on going after max PRS, my muscle development's going to lag.
- 27:51Philip Pape: If I just go after bodybuilding, I'm going to not get those PRS that I really want.
- 27:55Philip Pape: Okay, you can, you can combine both, and so to do that, you're usually going to start your training session with a heavy compound lift or two in that strength regime, three to six rep range.
- 28:06Philip Pape: Maybe you're cycling through whatever.
- 28:08Philip Pape: You're then going to follow it with some accessory or targeted developmental work that gets you a little bit of hypertrophy, a little bit of strength support.
- 28:17Philip Pape: Right, it works on your weak spots.
- 28:18Philip Pape: But also maybe you're in the eight to 12 range for some muscle growth as well, and it really depends on the movement, some parts of your work training block you might be doing goblet squats as your variation, others you might be doing safety bar, heel elevated squats, and one might be more fatiguing than the other.
- 28:37Philip Pape: So you're going to have to judge how many sets you're going to end up doing, how much rest you need and what rep ranges you work in.
- 28:44Philip Pape: And then you're going to include both strength specific exercises to support the you know, the competition lifts basically, but also bodybuilding style isolation work.
- 28:53Philip Pape: So it's sort of a whole gamut, kind of like a spectrum, and it usually looks like compound accessory isolation, each of those being one or two lifts.
- 29:02Philip Pape: So a total of anywhere from three to six, seven or eight lifts, depending on how much time you have and how many sets you're doing, how much volume you can take, how much recoverability you have.
- 29:11Philip Pape: And then you're going to periodize your training over time.
- 29:14Philip Pape: You might spend part of that time let's say four to eight weeks, not really doing many of the main lifts but just doing a lot of accessory versions of them and emphasizing hypertrophy.
- 29:24Philip Pape: But then you might spend 48 weeks really just focusing a lot on the big lifts and again, nothing precludes you from going all in on strength for a while and all in on hypertrophy for a while, and all of this stuff recognizes the fundamental truth that strength and size complement each other, and you will be better for it if you do cycle through.
- 29:44Philip Pape: I am not talking about program hopping.
- 29:46Philip Pape: I'm talking about spending a methodical, dedicated length of time in one mode learn about it, grow from it, get everything you can from it and then say, okay, I have achieved some level of growth that is meaningful to me.
- 30:01Philip Pape: Now I'm going to go and work on a different part of my growth, because that kind of variety itself can be very powerful.
- 30:09Philip Pape: More muscles does give you greater strength potential.
- 30:13Philip Pape: Getting stronger does allow you to use heavier weights for your hypertrophy work, and so it creates a virtuous positive feedback loop.
- 30:23Philip Pape: I'm experiencing that right now.
- 30:25Philip Pape: I just hit my maxes last week my squat bench and dead and now I'm back to doing a little bit more power building and I'm finding that I'm way stronger in a bunch of my accessory and isolation lifts.
- 30:36Philip Pape: Well, great, what does that allow me to do?
- 30:39Philip Pape: That allows me to build more muscle from those.
- 30:41Philip Pape: You can't just stay stuck in one.
- 30:44Philip Pape: One of the guys I follow.
- 30:44Philip Pape: He was on the show he owns Macrofactor he's part of Stronger by Science is Greg Knuckles.
- 30:49Philip Pape: You guys know Greg Knuckles, If not, look him up.
- 30:51Philip Pape: Great guy, respected, very respected strength researcher.
- 30:55Philip Pape: He nerds out on this stuff and he summarizes this strength hypertrophy relationship perfectly.
- 31:01Philip Pape: He said early on in training, muscle mass explains only a few percent of strength gains and in experienced lifters it can explain 65% or more.
- 31:12Philip Pape: And I mentioned that earlier and I wanted to reiterate it here in a single quote.
- 31:15Philip Pape: All right, when you start you've got to get strong and as you get more experience you can do a little of both, and this shows why an integrated approach is going to yield the best result.
- 31:26Philip Pape: When you become more advanced and more advanced doesn't take long to get to.
- 31:30Philip Pape: If you do this right, your novice phase might be six months long, maybe nine months, maybe a year max, but then you're an intermediate lifter, then you go after it.
- 31:39Philip Pape: So, as we clarify this relationship between strength and hypertrophy, I want to address some of the mistakes and misconceptions that could be holding you back right now listening to this, because you've heard it over and over in the fitness industry and it's just plain wrong.
- 31:51Philip Pape: Okay, the first one is this notion that you must train super heavy to build muscle.
- 31:57Philip Pape: Now I respect the starting strength guys, mark Ripoteau, I came through that world.
- 32:01Philip Pape: It changed my life.
- 32:02Philip Pape: Everyone should buy Starting Strength.
- 32:04Philip Pape: In fact, I think Starting Strength is a phenomenal beginner program for anybody to follow and if If you just follow it, you're going to be golden.
- 32:13Philip Pape: However, there is a lot of discussion about how only training that way is sufficient to build muscle, and I know they don't always mean that.
- 32:22Philip Pape: What they're saying is for novices don't worry about building muscle, just get strong and the muscle is going to follow.
- 32:27Philip Pape: That is true, I do agree with that.
- 32:29Philip Pape: But if your goal is to build muscle, you don't necessarily need the heavy close to maximum load training.
- 32:35Philip Pape: Goal is to build muscle, you don't necessarily need the heavy close to maximum load training.
- 32:37Philip Pape: Research definitively shows that moderate weights as low as 30% of your 1RM can build just as much muscle as heavy weights, provided the sets are taken near failure.
- 32:46Philip Pape: The key is always again, mechanical tension and effort, not absolute load, and this is great news if you just want to enjoy the process of building muscle.
- 32:57Philip Pape: You have joint issues.
- 32:59Philip Pape: Maybe you have limited equipment that you can't get to those loads.
- 33:01Philip Pape: You're just not interested in maximal strength.
- 33:04Philip Pape: Now I still think that's going to limit you long-term in terms of overall size and muscle development, but you're still going to build a ton of muscle.
- 33:13Philip Pape: The second thing is the idea that you can get as strong as possible without focusing on building muscle, and I don't think the research supports that.
- 33:22Philip Pape: I think, early on, getting as strong as possible is the way to go.
- 33:25Philip Pape: It's very efficient.
- 33:25Philip Pape: It's what you need because beginners can get stronger through neural adaptations without much increase in size, but advanced lifters almost universally need more muscle to keep getting stronger.
- 33:36Philip Pape: If you've been training for years and your strength has plateaued, then focusing on hypertrophy for a while might be exactly what you need.
- 33:44Philip Pape: And I hear it anecdotally every day.
- 33:46Philip Pape: Somebody says look, I took a break from going.
- 33:48Philip Pape: After PRs, I worked on a more well-rounded training program for muscular development.
- 33:54Philip Pape: I came back and a lot of my lifts increased.
- 33:56Philip Pape: Now it doesn't mean it's gonna directly translate to a specific lift right away, but it's gonna allow you to get to new levels of maximal strength and I think that's an important caveat or an important nuance in that.
- 34:09Philip Pape: For example, the program that I just ran I didn't just start right away in triples, doubles and singles in the hopes that I just ran.
- 34:14Philip Pape: I didn't just start right away in triples, doubles and singles in the hopes that I was going to get new PRs.
- 34:17Philip Pape: No, I actually took a step back and I did more volume to get exposed to the movement patterns while being in more of a hypertrophy range, and then I started to shift more toward the strength range as it supported my strength and then I could hit new numbers.
- 34:34Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
- 34:35Philip Pape: I hope that makes sense.
- 34:36Philip Pape: The third big myth is that getting a pump, feeling the burn, getting sore, means an effective hypertrophy workout.
- 34:44Philip Pape: I am all for getting a pump.
- 34:46Philip Pape: It's fun.
- 34:46Philip Pape: It is fun and you will get sore when you're exposed to a movement for the first time or two.
- 34:52Philip Pape: That's totally normal.
- 34:53Philip Pape: And while metabolic stress contributes a little bit to growth, again mechanical tension is the primary driver.
- 35:01Philip Pape: The more research has come out, the more we've discovered that's the case.
- 35:04Philip Pape: A workout that leaves you pumped and sore is not necessarily better for muscle growth than one focused on progressively loading, using good form and getting that mechanical tension.
- 35:16Philip Pape: And you know you're hitting mechanical tension.
- 35:18Philip Pape: When you're somewhat close to failure and you're actually able to lift more the next time, I mean that's a really good indicator that you're getting it, not that you're sore, you're getting a pump, et cetera.
- 35:29Philip Pape: And then another misconception is thinking that bodybuilders are not strong or that powerlifters don't care about muscle, Because at the elite level I've talked to these guys directly or on the podcast, or I've listened to them there's a lot more specialization at the elite level and most successful bodybuilders are super strong.
- 35:51Philip Pape: They could not get to the size they are without being strong.
- 35:55Philip Pape: Most accomplished power lifters they've built tons of muscle mass.
- 35:59Philip Pape: Just stop trying to separate them as if they are in separate vacuums.
- 36:04Philip Pape: They are not the difference in those athletes.
- 36:07Philip Pape: Their training emphasis and their competition goals cause them to train a bit differently, but their fundamental physiological adaptations are the same.
- 36:18Philip Pape: The last thing I want to say that is super important and useful program hopping is not going to help you.
- 36:26Philip Pape: Program hopping between strength and hypertrophy approaches like really quickly, within just like a few weeks at a time, without giving it either time to work, is going to set you back for years.
- 36:38Philip Pape: You're just gonna be stuck.
- 36:40Philip Pape: You've gotta give it time and you have to have patience.
- 36:43Philip Pape: Both strength and size development require consistently training, showing up to the gym, progressive loading over time, over months and over years period.
- 36:54Philip Pape: I'm sorry to say it, but I'm not sorry, because once you get into it and you realize how fun the process itself can be, you are not fixated on that final number.
- 37:03Philip Pape: There is no final number.
- 37:04Philip Pape: I look back every year and I say, well, I wanted to accomplish X and I realized I accomplished Y, and Y might be more or less than X and it might be different than X, but I've grown and that's really important.
- 37:16Philip Pape: And then you learn from that.
- 37:17Philip Pape: But if you jump between programs every few weeks, you're not going to have the accumulation of adaptations, of volume, of even frequency, needed for significant progress.
- 37:26Philip Pape: So stop doing it.
- 37:29Philip Pape: So now that we've covered the science and the practice, I want to give you one more thing that might change how you view your training career, and that's what it is.
- 37:39Philip Pape: If you're listening to Wits and Weights, strength training should be at the top of your list numero uno.
- 37:45Philip Pape: It is the driver of body composition more than anything else.
- 37:49Philip Pape: Whether you're trying to lose fat, build muscle, whatever, look great, feel great, get lean, the relationship between strength and hypertrophy is going to change dramatically based on how long you've been training.
- 38:04Philip Pape: So I want you to think about this your training career when you're a beginner a lot of you are.
- 38:06Philip Pape: You're listening to me.
- 38:07Philip Pape: You're thinking I got to get off the couch, I got to start training.
- 38:10Philip Pape: Or maybe I used to work out years ago, I've got to get back to it.
- 38:13Philip Pape: Or maybe I've been going to the gym for 10 years but I'm not really getting the results.
- 38:17Philip Pape: You're a beginner.
- 38:17Philip Pape: You are a beginner.
- 38:18Philip Pape: If you don't feel like right now you are constantly getting stronger and growing and building muscle, you're doing something wrong and you're a beginner and that's okay.
- 38:25Philip Pape: I envy you because you could now, doing it the right way, get jacked and strong so quickly.
- 38:32Philip Pape: And so beginners want to focus primarily on getting stronger.
- 38:37Philip Pape: In that moderate rep range, I'll say four to six to really narrow it down for you.
- 38:41Philip Pape: Right, fives are classically thrown out there because of starting strength and what is it called?
- 38:46Philip Pape: Strong lifts?
- 38:47Philip Pape: Five by five, all of those, but even like five to 10, you know, through compound lifts you're just going to get so strong and you're going to build some size.
- 38:56Philip Pape: Once you get past that first few weeks of neuromuscular efficiency and actually start adding new muscle, it is the most efficient path period.
- 39:04Philip Pape: The neurological adaptations come quickly.
- 39:07Philip Pape: They call them newbie gains.
- 39:08Philip Pape: The moderate volume provides enough stimulus for initial growth.
- 39:12Philip Pape: And then you have a lot of frequency in that you are like squatting every session.
- 39:16Philip Pape: You're deadlifting every session and you can do that.
- 39:20Philip Pape: Don't think that you need to squat once every two weeks.
- 39:23Philip Pape: You're not advanced enough to do that.
- 39:25Philip Pape: You need to do it frequently.
- 39:26Philip Pape: So a program like Starting Strength, as mentioned before, is ideal for this.
- 39:30Philip Pape: And you know, if I remember to do so, I'm going to throw a link in.
- 39:33Philip Pape: No, you know what, I'm not going to throw a link in my show notes.
- 39:35Philip Pape: I already have a link to the workout programs from Physique University in the show notes and in that file.
- 39:41Philip Pape: All you have to do is ask for it.
- 39:43Philip Pape: You'll download it In that file.
- 39:45Philip Pape: If you go to the novice tab, it actually mentions starting strength and it points you to resources, a walkthrough that I've done on it, all the things you need to know.
- 39:53Philip Pape: It's all in there, okay, and I give you other options for novice programs as well.
- 39:58Philip Pape: These things will produce strength and visible muscle gains.
- 40:01Philip Pape: If you're a novice and those first six, nine, 12 months are magical, if you do it consistently, if you eat enough, if you sleep enough, it's amazing.
- 40:09Philip Pape: I am jealous for you.
- 40:11Philip Pape: You've got to get on that right now.
- 40:13Philip Pape: Now for intermediates who have been training for, say, one to three years, seriously doing it the right way, using a barbell, using heavy implements, whatever it takes to get stronger from wherever you were, wherever you started, power building, I think, is great.
- 40:28Philip Pape: I think the power building approach might be I don't want to say yields the quote unquote best results.
- 40:34Philip Pape: That's a subjective statement.
- 40:35Philip Pape: But it gives you enough heavy work to keep developing that neurological efficiency and keep those movement patterns in there, but also sufficient volume, variety, frequency of smaller isolation work to continue building muscle.
- 40:48Philip Pape: So it's a nice blend if you have the time and the inclination for it.
- 40:52Philip Pape: It's also a lot of fun.
- 40:53Philip Pape: I think it's a great way to just keep yourself motivated.
- 40:56Philip Pape: And now, if you're more advanced than that, if you're pushing four, five, six years of serious progressive training getting strong, building muscle, you're going to need greater specialization period.
- 41:06Philip Pape: Your nervous system adaptations are pretty much tapped out.
- 41:10Philip Pape: They've maxed out.
- 41:10Philip Pape: Further strength gains are going to correlate very heavily on increasing your muscle size, as we've mentioned a couple of times already.
- 41:18Philip Pape: I mean this is why elite power lifters include distinct hypertrophy blocks in their training cycle.
- 41:25Philip Pape: This is why Westside has power building, slash hypertrophy work constantly in there.
- 41:31Philip Pape: They've got speed work, they've got bands and chains accommodating resistance.
- 41:34Philip Pape: All of this specialization.
- 41:36Philip Pape: You know you may have a part of your body that does not respond as quickly as others.
- 41:40Philip Pape: Maybe it's your biceps, maybe it's your back, maybe it's your calves guys, you know the calves are tough for a lot of us Maybe it's your glutes, whatever it is that you want to get bigger, you might have to specialize, you might need more frequency or a more targeted approach.
- 41:54Philip Pape: And so you know, when you just look at competitive power lifters including those and you understand why and conversely, bodybuilders right, who are advanced bodybuilders, they're going to spend time in some strength periods in the off season, when they're eating, when they're not dieting right, because dieting is a big part of bodybuilding leading up to competition.
- 42:11Philip Pape: But in the improvement season, the off season, they're going to be pushing their strength in the key lifts, not to mention the accessories and the isolation work.
- 42:18Philip Pape: They want to be able to handle heavier weights, they want to have better connective tissue and joint health and ability to handle their fatigue and their recovery.
- 42:26Philip Pape: And they might not test their 1RMs all the time, but they will track their strength to ensure that they're actually improving and getting stronger.
- 42:40Philip Pape: So the surprising truth, I'll say, is that for most of us, who I would call enthusiasts or recreational lifters, the goals of strength and hypertrophy are not competing, they're complementary.
- 42:47Philip Pape: And if you know how to balance and periodize both types of training kind of like, we balance and periodize fat loss and muscle building phases, calorie deficits and calorie surpluses, and it's based on your experience level, based on the year time of year, based on your personal preferences and enjoyment, based on how much stress you have right now, based on how much recoverability you have, based on your diet itself.
- 43:12Philip Pape: Your diet and your training actually go hand in hand as to which one you focus on when.
- 43:16Philip Pape: If you're trying to max out your PRs, you probably should be doing that while you're eating a bunch of food and sleeping right, not in a dieting phase.
- 43:23Philip Pape: You're just not going to.
- 43:24Philip Pape: So if you can do that, you can achieve impressive gains in both, and you're not going to sacrifice either.
- 43:32Philip Pape: You're not.
- 43:32Philip Pape: It's going to work out, it really will.
- 43:34Philip Pape: And isn't that liberating to know that you do not have to choose between being strong and looking strong right, if you have smart programming, you can have both.
- 43:44Philip Pape: So the next time that you are designing your training program or evaluating whether you should follow this strength-focused program here, this power-building program here, this hypertrophy program here, remember a few things from this episode and re-review this episode.
- 43:59Philip Pape: I think it's important.
- 43:59Philip Pape: Number one both strength and hypertrophy training rely on mechanical tension, but they optimize different aspects of it.
- 44:08Philip Pape: Number two is that strength requires heavier loads, usually up above 65% of your 1RM, ideally around 80% or higher to maximize the neural adaptations, the movement patterns.
- 44:21Philip Pape: Number three is that hypertrophy can occur across a much broader range of loads, as low as 30% of your 1RM, as long as you're training hard, as long as your effort is sufficient to get close to failure, to get that mechanical tension.
- 44:33Philip Pape: Number four if you're a beginner, get strong, get strong in the compound movements, ideally with a barbell.
- 44:39Philip Pape: Number five if you're an intermediate, blend heavy strength work with hypertrophy work and kind of work them both in in a power building style.
- 44:46Philip Pape: That's usually an efficient way to do it.
- 44:48Philip Pape: And then, number six, if you're advanced, you've got to specialize and recognize that size and strength will always continue to be interconnected.
- 44:56Philip Pape: So I want you to understand the science at this point is pretty clear.
- 44:59Philip Pape: We're not really fuzzy on this.
- 45:01Philip Pape: If you understand the relationship between strength and hypertrophy, you can train more intelligently and efficiently, saving time, avoiding the confusion that plagues so many lifters out there that do not have a clue.
- 45:13Philip Pape: And if you think you don't have a clue, listen to this episode at least two times and reach out for help.
- 45:20Philip Pape: Go, download my programs.
- 45:21Philip Pape: Join Wits and Weights Physique University.
- 45:22Philip Pape: We'll help you figure it all out.
- 45:24Philip Pape: And by applying these evidence-based principles.
- 45:26Philip Pape: That's what they are.
- 45:27Philip Pape: They're principles.
- 45:28Philip Pape: It's not specific methods or programs.
- 45:30Philip Pape: It's principles.
- 45:31Philip Pape: If you can apply them, you're going to optimize your results.
- 45:34Philip Pape: You will, I guarantee it.
- 45:36Philip Pape: It's physics, it's biology.
- 45:38Philip Pape: It's going to work, whether your goal is to lift more weight, build more muscle or both, all right.
- 45:43Philip Pape: So if you're ready to put these principles into action because that is what you need next, guys, ladies and gentlemen, you need action.
- 45:51Philip Pape: I've created a complete set of strength and physique focused workout programs from Whitson Weights Physique University.
- 45:57Philip Pape: We drop a new set every month and I'm giving you the latest month if you use the link in my show notes and I've got programs in there for novice, intermediate, advanced, different levels of equipment, different days per week.
- 46:09Philip Pape: The programs incorporate both strength and hypertrophy elements and they give you balanced development depending on where you are in your training age.
- 46:18Philip Pape: There's a built-in log, there's exercise substitutions, there's links to videos.
- 46:22Philip Pape: It's got everything.
- 46:23Philip Pape: Guys, what are you waiting for?
- 46:25Philip Pape: It's totally free.
- 46:25Philip Pape: Go to witsowheightscom, slash free or, better yet, just click the link in the show notes to download your free copy today.
- 46:31Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights, and remember, with the right training approach, you don't have to choose between being strong and looking strong.
- 46:41Philip Pape: You can have both.
- 46:42Philip Pape: I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.