Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Stop WASTING Your Gym Time (What REALLY Builds Muscle After 40) | Ep 478

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Stop WASTING Your Gym Time (What REALLY Builds Muscle After 40) | Ep 478 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you've been changing up your exercises, chasing the perfect rep range, switching programs every few weeks to keep your muscles guessing, and you're still not seeing the muscle you'd expect for how hard you feel like you're working, this episode is for you.
• 0:14
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to show you the three things that actually build muscle and why everything else that you've heard about on social media or elsewhere is more for optimization.
• 0:26
  Philip Pape: If you can get these three things right, the rest really don't matter as much as you think.
• 0:35
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:45
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape, and I'm over 40.
• 0:48
  Philip Pape: Many of you are as well.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: You're probably lifting weights, and maybe you've been doing it for a while.
• 0:53
  Philip Pape: Maybe you are a gym rat.
• 0:54
  Philip Pape: I don't know your situation, but you've heard maybe a hundred little rules about how to build muscle and different rep ranges.
• 1:03
  Philip Pape: What range is best?
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: How heavy should I go?
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: Is eight to twelve hypertrophy versus say, you know, one to five is strength?
• 1:11
  Philip Pape: You do you have to mix things up to confuse or to challenge the muscles?
• 1:15
  Philip Pape: Do you have to switch your program every X number of weeks following a D-load?
• 1:19
  Philip Pape: What exercise selection do I do so I'm not wasting my time?
• 1:23
  Philip Pape: What about effective reps?
• 1:25
  Philip Pape: What about training close to failure?
• 1:27
  Philip Pape: And the list goes on and on.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: And I think the fitness industry is just making a ton of money selling you all the variables to optimize this stuff, all the programs you need.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: And I'm sure you've poured a lot of your hard-earned cash into these things, or at least a lot of time on social media.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: So the problem I see with a lot of you, and I've dealt with this in the past for years and years and years until I finally figured things out with the help of some amazing people, is you're working incredibly hard.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're not even going to the gym at all, okay, fine, let's stop right there.
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: You're gonna have to train, you're still gonna take a ton away from this episode.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: In fact, you're gonna be ahead of the game.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: But many of you are spending your effort and your attention on variables that do not move the outcome, or you're going to the gym and not even progressing at all, and you're just moving weights around.
• 2:11
  Philip Pape: Yeah, you feel good.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: Maybe you get a sweat.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: Maybe you're just kind of hold on, you know, holding on to what you have, but you're not really making any progress.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: And that can be very frustrating.
• 2:20
  Philip Pape: But really building muscle comes down to just a few key principles.
• 2:25
  Philip Pape: Okay, that is what we're gonna talk about today.
• 2:27
  Philip Pape: Everything else is optimization, everything is dialing in, maybe, but we're gonna focus on what matters.
• 2:33
  Philip Pape: I'll say that this is not a beginner episode necessarily.
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: Like we're not gonna talk about, okay, step one, here's how you train.
• 2:41
  Philip Pape: Step one, right?
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: This is really, if you already know the basics, you know what a deadlift is, you know what a squat is, you've been already listening to podcasts, reading articles, et cetera.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: And maybe you're a little tired being told, okay, here's another thing you have to do.
• 2:54
  Philip Pape: Maybe you listen to Mind Pump or something like that, which I love these shows, but they can confuse you because there's just so many things that they throw out there as information or tips.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: But it's more liberating sometimes when you just have simplicity.
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: So we're gonna try the two, we're gonna try to do that today.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: And then if you stick around to the end, you know, I always like to throw in something special at the end of the episode.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: Today I'm gonna give you something to do in the gym to tell whether you're training hard enough and also whether you're training close enough to failure versus what you think you are.
• 3:25
  Philip Pape: We're gonna do it very objectively.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: A lot of people would get that part wrong and it kind of holds you back on progressing the right way.
• 3:32
  Philip Pape: Today you're gonna learn the one thing that's the actual proximate cause of muscle growth.
• 3:38
  Philip Pape: It's just one thing.
• 3:39
  Philip Pape: Also, why proximity to failure matters more than weight on the bar.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: I know shocking to hear me say that.
• 3:46
  Philip Pape: How many hard sets per muscle you actually need in a week, because there's a lot of confusion there, and then the role of recovery, which may have some surprises in store for you today.
• 3:57
  Philip Pape: So let's start with what most people believe building muscle is about.
• 4:01
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 4:01
  Philip Pape: If I ask the average dedicated lifter, Jim Goer, what they're focused on, I will hear specifics like, okay, I'm doing these rep ranges, these are my exercise selection and variation.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: Sometimes people talk about, you know, mixing it up and making sure they're trying to hit all the muscle groups.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: You know, we talked about muscle confusion in a recent episode.
• 4:21
  Philip Pape: Go look that one up.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: It's actually a pretty cool discussion.
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: I hear about sometimes time under tension and tempo, about mind muscle connection, about this split or that split.
• 4:31
  Philip Pape: Now, those are tactics.
• 4:32
  Philip Pape: None of that is worthless.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: I would say it's you've got to learn, you've got to find what works for you and understand that there's a spectrum of stuff tactically that influences muscle growth.
• 4:45
  Philip Pape: But all of these are downstream.
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: They are like the trim on the house.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: And we want to focus on the foundation of the house, not the paint on the wall, but the frame of the house, the foundation.
• 4:58
  Philip Pape: So I want to reframe, pun intended, this whole concept today using the way that I like to think about things, which is an engineering problem.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: When you have a system that isn't producing the output you want, you've got to fix the system.
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: You don't fiddle with the dials.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: You identify the constraint.
• 5:12
  Philip Pape: What is the one bottleneck that is limiting the results?
• 5:15
  Philip Pape: And then put all your resources there.
• 5:17
  Philip Pape: That is a very efficient approach.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: For most lifters, especially as we age, we're over 40, over 50, and you're not building muscle the way you want.
• 5:25
  Philip Pape: The constraint is almost never exercise selection, guys.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: And yet that's often the top of the list.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: Oh, what exercises should I do to X, Y, Z?
• 5:35
  Philip Pape: It's almost never the rep range.
• 5:37
  Philip Pape: Oh, should I be working in five to 10 or 10 to 12?
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: I get that question a lot.
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: The constraint for most of you is this you are not training hard enough on the sets that you do, and you're not doing enough of those hard sets across the week.
• 5:50
  Philip Pape: That is it.
• 5:50
  Philip Pape: That is the whole game for most people.
• 5:52
  Philip Pape: Listen up, I'm gonna repeat myself.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: You're either and either or not training enough, hard enough on the sets that you do, and you're not doing enough of those hard sets across the week.
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: Now, notice actually, neither of those is technically volume in and of itself.
• 6:07
  Philip Pape: It's effort and frequency that leads to volume and ultimately will tie to the one principle that glues it all together that we're gonna talk about.
• 6:15
  Philip Pape: So those are the things you're gonna want to nail.
• 6:18
  Philip Pape: Now, I know you're a lot of you are saying, wait, I do train hard.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: I'm wiped out when I go to the gym.
• 6:22
  Philip Pape: Well, hold that thought because we're gonna test that out.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 6:25
  Philip Pape: Getting wiped out, being sore, being, you know, and sweating is not a primary variable.
• 6:30
  Philip Pape: Those aren't primary variables of what actually drives muscle growth.
• 6:34
  Philip Pape: So if it is not, let's say, rep range and it's not exercise selection and it's not variety, then what is it?
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: Well, the answer that we definitively know at this point is mechanical tension.
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: Mechanical tension is the proximate cause of muscle growth.
• 6:49
  Philip Pape: It is the cause of muscle growth.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: That is the thing that your muscle fibers respond to.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: It's not the burn or the pump, not the soreness, not any of those things.
• 6:59
  Philip Pape: Although those can come along for the ride.
• 7:02
  Philip Pape: They can be there for sure for different reasons.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: But the signal that tells a muscle to grow is high tension, mechanical tension on the fiber, repeated and accumulated over time.
• 7:14
  Philip Pape: So it's not a one-off, but repeated and accumulated over time.
• 7:18
  Philip Pape: And here's why that matters in plain terms.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: When a muscle fiber is under high mechanical load, that physical force gets converted into a chemical signal inside the cell.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: This is fascinating.
• 7:31
  Philip Pape: The science term is mechanotransduction, mechano, as in mechanical, transduction as in trans, you know, transduces or uh changes or converts into chemicals.
• 7:43
  Philip Pape: The upstream part of how the force becomes the signal is actually still not understood, guys.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: That's why I use the term proximate cause.
• 7:51
  Philip Pape: The upstream part in your body of how that force becomes that signal, even by people who study this for a living, tell us we don't quite know.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: But the downstream part is very clear.
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: That signal, right, from the mechanical tension into the chemical signal, that signal then ramps up your muscle protein synthesis through a pathway called mTOR.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: And that's what builds new contractile tissue.
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: And I think there's a newer name for mTOR today, but we're gonna go with mTOR because that's what everybody knows and loves.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: Now, for a long time, we talk about or we have talked about three drivers of growth mechanical tension, metabolic stress, which is like the that burning feeling you get when you lift weights, and then muscle damage, which often is correlated with soreness.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: That's what we used to talk about.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: Over the last decade or so, the field has consolidated to no, it's mechanical tension.
• 8:44
  Philip Pape: That's the one that matters.
• 8:45
  Philip Pape: That is the one that matters.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: So please consider this an update in your scientific library.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: The other two, the burn and the soreness, they mostly seem to matter to the extent that they help you produce more tension, or they are just byproducts of the work.
• 9:00
  Philip Pape: The source, soreness is never the goal.
• 9:02
  Philip Pape: It's like a side effect of sometimes what you're doing correctly here with mechanical tension.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: But the question is, how do you produce high tension on a muscle fiber?
• 9:11
  Philip Pape: Because what we care about is what do you do?
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: As a human being, going to the gym with a fitness lifestyle, what the heck do you actually do?
• 9:16
  Philip Pape: So let's get practical.
• 9:18
  Philip Pape: Your body recruits muscle fibers in a specific order.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: Smallest and weakest first, biggest and strongest last.
• 9:25
  Philip Pape: It's called the size principle.
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: The fibers with the most growth potential, growth potential, the high threshold ones, those only get called into the game when your effort gets high.
• 9:37
  Philip Pape: And that's either because you're lifting something genuinely heavy as a percentage of your max, or listen up, or because you fatigued the smaller fibers enough that your body has to recruit the bigger ones to keep the set going.
• 9:53
  Philip Pape: So do you see what this means?
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: It means that the last few reps of a hard set, the ones that get difficult, the ones that, let's be honest, you are attempted to not do because it's getting hard, right?
• 10:06
  Philip Pape: Those are the reps where the magic happens.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: Those are the reps that put you your most responsive fibers under the real mechanical tension.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: If you stop a set when it starts to feel hard, you're actually walking away right before the part that grows the muscle.
• 10:23
  Philip Pape: Now it's it may not be as close to failure as sometimes claimed.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: So there's a little bit of a window there for sure.
• 10:31
  Philip Pape: Okay, we we can talk about that nuance, but it's the principle we're talking about here.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: And so this brings us to the single most important number in this conversation, and that is proximity to failure.
• 10:41
  Philip Pape: Like if we need a metric, it is proximity to failure.
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: How close are you actually training to the point where you can't do another rep?
• 10:49
  Philip Pape: And the research here is pretty consistent.
• 10:52
  Philip Pape: Muscle growth increases as your sets get closer to failure.
• 10:55
  Philip Pape: You don't have to go all the way to failure, and I'm gonna come back to that, but you have to get close.
• 11:00
  Philip Pape: And by failure, I simply mean, again, you your form would completely break down and you literally can't do another rep.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: The most useful way to think about this proximity to failure is reps in reserve, R-I-R.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: Now, there are two systems there's rating of perceived exertion, RPE, and then the inverse of that is R I R.
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: We're just gonna go with IRR.
• 11:22
  Philip Pape: R-I-R, it's a really easy way to think about it because it's how many reps are left in the tank.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: RPE gets confusing, so we're not even gonna go there.
• 11:31
  Philip Pape: So let's say if you have five more in the tank, that's five R I R.
• 11:34
  Philip Pape: And so as you can see, the smaller the IRR, R I R, the closer you are to failure, all the way to zero R I R, which is complete failure.
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: And the closer you are, generally with a dose response that is mitigated somewhat by how much fatigue you're getting in the set, we're gonna talk about that, affects how you build muscle.
• 11:52
  Philip Pape: Now, this should affect how you train significantly if you weren't doing it right the first time and if you're not getting a result.
• 11:59
  Philip Pape: Now, we take somebody like Dr.
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: Eric Helms, who I very much respect, and his colleagues, they've done a lot of work on this.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: And there's a finding that keeps coming up in the research.
• 12:07
  Philip Pape: Most people, especially less experienced lifters, which I know a lot of you are.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: Heck, I've been training now for about five years pretty well.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: And I consider myself pretty experienced when I compare my form to, say, someone who's newer, but I have a long way to go and a long way to learn.
• 12:21
  Philip Pape: I'm always trying to improve.
• 12:23
  Philip Pape: So let's just assume we're all less experienced.
• 12:26
  Philip Pape: Many of you dramatically underestimate how hard you're actually training.
• 12:32
  Philip Pape: You think you're one or two reps in reserve, but you're actually five or six.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: This is very common.
• 12:39
  Philip Pape: In one set of studies, when trained people were pushed, okay, trained people, people who already resistance trained regularly, when they were pushed by a coach, they got an average of five, two, six more reps than they predicted on a load or a weight on the bar that they thought was their limit.
• 12:59
  Philip Pape: So that's five or six more that they were able to get.
• 13:03
  Philip Pape: That is a lot.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: That's a difference between a set that really does effectively grow muscle and one that's kind of on the edge, or maybe it's not even really moving the needle for you.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: It's just burning calories, makes you feel like you did something, but now you're gonna need a lot more volume or time to get where you want.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: And if you're let's say in a bulk or a maintenance or body reconp, you're just not getting everything out of it you can with your training stimulus.
• 13:27
  Philip Pape: So that's why I'm sharing this with you guys.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: This is so important.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: That's why this episode is called What Really Builds Muscle.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: I think I think it's after 40, but it really is for everyone.
• 13:35
  Philip Pape: So we've established a mechanical tension as the driver, and that the effort you put in that gets close to failure is how you produce that tension.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: Now we have to talk about how much because that effort without enough repetition, without enough volume, does not get you there.
• 13:52
  Philip Pape: You're gonna get detrained.
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: You need to continue to challenge your body to continue so that it adapts onward and upward.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: I mean, that makes sense, right?
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: Like if you have the best gym session you've ever had in your life, you train hard, you're in the gym for two hours today, and then you never train the rest of your life, well, obviously you're not gonna keep building muscle.
• 14:08
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 14:09
  Philip Pape: So the framing I love comes from Brad Scheinfeld uh and others like him.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: It's basically this if intensity, okay, intensity in this case is proximity to failure, I apologize because we also use intensity to mean load on the bar.
• 14:22
  Philip Pape: But if if proximity to failure is the drug, if we're talking about dose response and that's the drug, that's the stimulus, then volume is like the dosage.
• 14:31
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: You need both of them together.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: So it's not that volume in and of itself is anything special, it's that volume at high mechanical tension is special.
• 14:42
  Philip Pape: So then what is that dose?
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: What is that volume?
• 14:44
  Philip Pape: Well, when we talk about volume for muscle growth, we typically count hard sets per muscle group per week.
• 14:49
  Philip Pape: It's a nice, easy metric that you can quantify.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: Not the total time or tonnage or how trashed you feel or how sore you are, not even how many days in the gym, right?
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: Because you can you can at work, you can get a good volume from three days or from six days.
• 15:08
  Philip Pape: It's hard sets.
• 15:10
  Philip Pape: Okay, and the research is really clear on this.
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: A recent large analysis that pooled dozens of studies, so we call that a meta-analysis, found that more volume reliably produces more growth with essentially 100% certainty in the direction, but with diminishing returns as you go up.
• 15:29
  Philip Pape: So the curve starts to flatten, diminishing returns.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: So when we talk about dose response in fitness or nutrition, it almost invariably is an asymptotic curve for my math nerds out there.
• 15:40
  Philip Pape: In other words, it it increases, but by less and less as you go.
• 15:44
  Philip Pape: So the marginal increases get smaller.
• 15:46
  Philip Pape: It's not a linear relationship, it's more of a curve.
• 15:48
  Philip Pape: Very important to know because then you want then you can find like that sweet spot where you get a lot of the response, but you don't have to put in significantly more effort for a little extra, which also, by the way, has negatives in terms of fatigue and recovery.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 16:02
  Philip Pape: For most people, what does that look like?
• 16:03
  Philip Pape: Well, the responsive range of volume is around 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle per week.
• 16:12
  Philip Pape: If you are newer to lifting or if you're short on time, you could get a lot out of that low end, that 10 sets.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: That 10 sets.
• 16:20
  Philip Pape: In fact, if you look at the dose response curve, you can go as low as five and still get a response.
• 16:25
  Philip Pape: You're just leaving some stuff on the table.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: That's my point, right?
• 16:27
  Philip Pape: You going from zero to five is a massive improvement.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: And then five to ten is another big improvement, but then between 10 and 20 is a decent improvement, and it depends on how much you want to put in.
• 16:37
  Philip Pape: And if you're newer, you're gonna get a huge responsiveness anyway, even with fewer sets, which is why I don't focus as much on volume for new, new for uh newbies for beginners.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: I focus more on, hey, get in the gym three days a week and do the main lifts for a decent amount of, you know, for like three sets, and you're you're generally covered.
• 16:56
  Philip Pape: If a specific muscle is a priority and you're recovering well for that muscle group, then you might say, okay, I need 15 to 20 sets on that upper range.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna do a little specialization.
• 17:07
  Philip Pape: One of my all-time favorite coaches, Andy Baker, he puts it simply, he's like, look, if you want to get bigger arms, you got to do it twice a week, two different exercises, which, you know, depending on the number of sets, can put you around 15 to 20 because you also have a lot of indirect work generally hitting those muscle groups, right?
• 17:25
  Philip Pape: So specialization in one exercise, you just got to think about the number of sets.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: Beyond that, beyond the 20 sets, the evidence is a little murky.
• 17:32
  Philip Pape: It's also very individual.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: And for a lot of us who are older, this is where the over 40 piece, the recovery is really an important variable.
• 17:40
  Philip Pape: And if you're training too much, you could just be constantly fatigued and underrecovered, let alone if you're not sleeping well, if you're stressed, and if you're not eating enough.
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: Those stack on.
• 17:51
  Philip Pape: Now, we take everything I just talked about, and now let's tie this together because what does it mean?
• 17:55
  Philip Pape: Well, a set only really counts toward that volume if it was hard, which means reasonably close to failure.
• 18:02
  Philip Pape: If you had 20 lazy sets with the same, I hate to say pink dumbbells, but whatever weight you did last time, and it's five, six, seven, eight, nine reps in reserve, every time, even if you feel like you got some work done because you're sweating, you're just not gonna get the same result.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: In fact, you might not be getting, you might not be putting pushing the needle enough to get stronger over time and actually increase the weight.
• 18:24
  Philip Pape: And next time you go to the gym, you can't do any more until you train harder.
• 18:27
  Philip Pape: So it's not just about counting the sets, it's counting the ones that are hard.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: Now, for those of us logging, you're gonna count all your sets.
• 18:33
  Philip Pape: The point isn't to only count hard sets.
• 18:35
  Philip Pape: The point is make sure that all your sets are hard.
• 18:38
  Philip Pape: Okay, that's my point here.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 18:40
  Philip Pape: Warm-up sets don't count.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: In other words, you should track your warm-up sets, in my opinion, so you can kind of repeat them next time, but only the working sets that are close to failure.
• 18:50
  Philip Pape: So let's say you go to the gym on Monday or whatever your next training day is, you're gonna pick the movements that you can load up and repeat week to week and actually progress on.
• 19:00
  Philip Pape: You don't need 12 exercises per muscle.
• 19:03
  Philip Pape: You don't need to do body maxing or whatever you want to call it here, full body maxing.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: You just need a handful that you can develop skill on and get better at because there's a neuromuscular piece and then there's this the muscle piece.
• 19:15
  Philip Pape: And you're gonna take, I'm gonna say, all of your working sets to within one to three reps of in reserve.
• 19:23
  Philip Pape: Bigger lifts tend to be farther, like three, maybe four reps from failure, whereas smaller lifts, isolation work, bodybuilding type accessory work is gonna be closer to one rep in reserve, maybe even zero.
• 19:35
  Philip Pape: I'm generally working around one to two for almost everything.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: If I'm doing major squats, major benches, something like that, I might have a set.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: My first set might be three sets or three, maybe four reps shy from failure, but generally three.
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: So that's kind of my thought there.
• 19:51
  Philip Pape: And then you're gonna count up your hard sets per muscle across the week and aim for that 10 and up range.
• 19:56
  Philip Pape: Now, you should do this ahead of time by planning out your workout that way.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: If you're following a decently designed program, it should cover those bases.
• 20:05
  Philip Pape: One thing I noticed in the program I built for myself recently is somehow I totally forgot to put in lateral delts, even though I'm trying to build up my shoulders again since my surgery, and I had too much rear delt work.
• 20:17
  Philip Pape: Now, rear delt work is great when you've had rotary call surgery, but I had like way too many sets of that and very few of lateral.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: So I'm getting very specific in terms of muscle groups.
• 20:28
  Philip Pape: You don't have to do it that way.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: You can generalize to shoulders, upper legs, arms, right?
• 20:33
  Philip Pape: It depends on, you know, back.
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: You could do it that way as well.
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: But you've got to find where you're responsive, what you need, and then you're gonna build from there.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: So that's kind of the program.
• 20:43
  Philip Pape: Notice I didn't tell you what exercises, when, what order, none of that.
• 20:47
  Philip Pape: Those are tactical details.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: The point is 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle group per week.
• 20:52
  Philip Pape: That is what works to give you mechanical tension, repeated enough so that you keep getting stronger and building muscle.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: It's not about muscle confusion, it's not about the perfect rep range, because like I just said, mechanical tension can occur at a wide rep range.
• 21:06
  Philip Pape: It can occur anywhere from like three reps to 30 reps, believe it or not.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: And I know it sounds crazy, but if you do something for 25 reps, yes, it's a lot lighter.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: But man, if you are one rep shy of failure on that 25th rep, you're still hitting those muscle fibers we talked about before, and you're still going to get the mechanical tension.
• 21:25
  Philip Pape: It's pretty mind-blowing in a way.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: Now, we're not talking about strength, we're not talking about specificity.
• 21:31
  Philip Pape: Those are different.
• 21:32
  Philip Pape: We're not talking about bone density and some of the other benefits of lifting heavy, heavy meaning more down in the four to six rep range.
• 21:39
  Philip Pape: Okay, that has its own unique benefits.
• 21:41
  Philip Pape: We're not talking about that today, but there's a lot of overlap that you can take advantage of when designing programs for efficiency.
• 21:48
  Philip Pape: Now, you're listening to this, you're like, okay, I'm sold on this, but how do I know if I'm hitting one to three reps in reserve?
• 21:55
  Philip Pape: How do I track my heart sets across a week?
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: How do I design my program?
• 21:58
  Philip Pape: What program should I?
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: Build.
• 22:01
  Philip Pape: And we have an app called Fitness Lab that solves that for you and will give you exactly what you need.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: Fitness Lab is my AI coaching app.
• 22:10
  Philip Pape: It is not a tracking app that stores your numbers.
• 22:12
  Philip Pape: It works alongside tools that you have.
• 22:14
  Philip Pape: It integrates your data.
• 22:16
  Philip Pape: If you have an iPhone, it connects to Apple Health.
• 22:18
  Philip Pape: And it can prescribe for you workouts across any combination you can imagine.
• 22:24
  Philip Pape: And it could even work with you if you have a trainer or your own workouts.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: So it can do either mode.
• 22:31
  Philip Pape: And it's, I don't want to say vibes.
• 22:34
  Philip Pape: I hate that term.
• 22:35
  Philip Pape: But it asks you questions about how the session felt, how close you got to failure, and things like that in plain English.
• 22:42
  Philip Pape: So it's beyond like, okay, for example, macrofactor workouts and boost camp are two of the workout loggers that I like as well, personally.
• 22:49
  Philip Pape: But they're much more numbers-based, they're objective.
• 22:51
  Philip Pape: Fitness Lab does that plus the subjective piece, like you had a coach, and you're like, hey, this is how it felt.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: This is what I did.
• 23:00
  Philip Pape: By the way, here's a video of my lift.
• 23:02
  Philip Pape: Give me a form check, and we have amazingly advanced AI that will give you feedback on your form.
• 23:10
  Philip Pape: Now, isn't that incredible?
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: I think it is.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: I think it's awesome.
• 23:12
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweights.com slash app.
• 23:14
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.com slash app.
• 23:17
  Philip Pape: And you know what?
• 23:19
  Philip Pape: I thought I wouldn't do this, but I will.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: We are not in a promo right now.
• 23:23
  Philip Pape: But if you send me a personal email, okay, join my email list, witsandweights.com slash email, and reply and say, hey, I want your discount.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: I can give you a private link for 20% off.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: So that's witsandweights.com slash app to check it out.
• 23:34
  Philip Pape: But again, send me an email if you want a special link for 20% off.
• 23:39
  Philip Pape: All right, so we've covered tension, effort, and volume.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: There is a fourth piece here, very, very, very, very important.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: And that is, you guessed it, recovery.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: I want to give the right frame on recovery though, because I think a lot of people put the cart before the horse.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: Recovery does not cause muscle growth.
• 23:56
  Philip Pape: Training causes muscle growth.
• 23:57
  Philip Pape: Recovery is permissive of muscle growth.
• 24:00
  Philip Pape: It allows your adaptation to occur.
• 24:02
  Philip Pape: Okay, think of it this way: your training is like the seed.
• 24:05
  Philip Pape: If you were to plant something in your garden, recovery is the soil of the garden where the soil doesn't grow the plant, right?
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: It gives it nutrients, but it doesn't grow it.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: If you plant a seed in bad soil, you don't get a plant, but you still have to have the seed, is my point.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: So training is the seed.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: Is that I hope that's a good analogy?
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: Because like without training, it's there's nothing.
• 24:29
  Philip Pape: You have to have the training.
• 24:31
  Philip Pape: So you have the training, that's the seed.
• 24:33
  Philip Pape: You have your recovery, that's the soil.
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: When the soil is bad, when you don't have good sleep, when you don't have enough protein or calories, when you're stressed to your gills, the same hard workout results in less of a result.
• 24:47
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 24:48
  Philip Pape: So you did this work and you don't get to get the result.
• 24:51
  Philip Pape: I don't like that equation for you guys.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: I don't.
• 24:54
  Philip Pape: And that is exactly what makes people quit, besides a lack of consistency or it's not enjoyable enough or whatever.
• 24:59
  Philip Pape: The biggest reason is, man, you're just tired, you can't fit it in, you don't get enough sleep, you're not eating enough, you don't get the result, you start to get sore, your joints start to hurt.
• 25:09
  Philip Pape: A lot of that is a recovery issue.
• 25:11
  Philip Pape: And I think the biggest levers are sleep and protein, or I should say sleep and calories.
• 25:16
  Philip Pape: It really depends on who you are.
• 25:17
  Philip Pape: Some of you, some of you are getting enough protein, but not enough calories.
• 25:21
  Philip Pape: Carbs, I would put off to the side, although I'm a big fan of carbs, that's usually not the main issue for folks.
• 25:27
  Philip Pape: It could become an issue if other things are dialed in as an optimization.
• 25:31
  Philip Pape: Again, going back to the big rocks versus the small optimizations here.
• 25:35
  Philip Pape: We know that a single night of bad sleep can drop your muscle protein synthesis by up to 20%.
• 25:41
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 25:41
  Philip Pape: We also know we have to have enough calories and protein to support our muscle building.
• 25:46
  Philip Pape: And protein at least 0.7 grams per pound.
• 25:49
  Philip Pape: There's also evidence is as we get older.
• 25:51
  Philip Pape: Again, this episode is titled After 40, because as we get older, we tend to be a little bit less responsive to protein and training.
• 25:58
  Philip Pape: And that's not an excuse not to do it at all.
• 26:01
  Philip Pape: No.
• 26:01
  Philip Pape: It just means, hey, you've got to be getting that protein and you've got to be getting the right training, but not so much training that it impedes your recovery.
• 26:09
  Philip Pape: So that's why it's a nice little balancing act that we have to do.
• 26:12
  Philip Pape: That's why tracking, that's why being time efficient, that's why using compound lifts, all of these things are super effective to master the fundamentals.
• 26:20
  Philip Pape: And it's where I see people go wrong as well.
• 26:22
  Philip Pape: Because they're trying to do a lot of things that like a 25-year-old would do.
• 26:25
  Philip Pape: All the pillars here, you know, get 15,000 steps and get nine hours of sleep and then, you know, train six days a week.
• 26:31
  Philip Pape: You can't do it all.
• 26:32
  Philip Pape: You can't do it all.
• 26:33
  Philip Pape: So you need to be efficient.
• 26:35
  Philip Pape: And then for the women, the ladies who are listening in perimenopause or post-menopause, okay, this is in this is really encouraging.
• 26:40
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 26:41
  Philip Pape: I'm not a fearmonger about this stuff.
• 26:43
  Philip Pape: Resistance training builds muscle and strength just the same, regardless of your age and your hormone status, as a percentage of your current body mass, as when you were young and as when you're old.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: It's all the same.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: In other words, the relative gains you're going to make are the same, even when you weren't in menopause, and they're the same as men.
• 27:00
  Philip Pape: Yes, you have less absolute muscle to begin with, but so what?
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: The change, the amount you can grow and build, the rate is the same.
• 27:08
  Philip Pape: Now, the falling estrogen might make the job a little bit harder and recovery a little more sensitive, but it doesn't take away your biggest tool here, which is training.
• 27:16
  Philip Pape: You can't afford to coast on effort, no matter who you are.
• 27:21
  Philip Pape: And that's not sexy and it doesn't sell programs to say you need to work hard.
• 27:25
  Philip Pape: But it really comes what comes down is it's really what it comes down to.
• 27:29
  Philip Pape: But when you do that work and you get the result and you're 55 and looking better than ever and feeling great and functional, and knowing that no, you're not gonna end up in a nursing home.
• 27:39
  Philip Pape: No, you're not gonna end up having trouble getting off the toilet.
• 27:42
  Philip Pape: No, you're not gonna have trouble playing with your kids or grandkids and being active.
• 27:46
  Philip Pape: Holy smokes, isn't that so empowering?
• 27:49
  Philip Pape: Because you put in a little bit of extra effort and you actually feel so good about it that the effort is something you start to look forward to.
• 27:55
  Philip Pape: Now, I'm not saying rep ranges don't matter.
• 27:57
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying exercise selection doesn't matter.
• 28:00
  Philip Pape: A lot of that matters for other reasons.
• 28:01
  Philip Pape: It might matter because of the equipment you have, it might matter because you enjoy something more than others.
• 28:05
  Philip Pape: Like some people say, Oh, I don't know if I could lift heavy.
• 28:08
  Philip Pape: When you start lifting heavy, you sometimes find sets of four are more enjoyable than sets of 14.
• 28:13
  Philip Pape: You know, even though they're super heavy, there's a difference, mental difference as well.
• 28:18
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 28:19
  Philip Pape: Also, you don't want to go to complete failure on everything because that's gonna create a lot of fatigue.
• 28:25
  Philip Pape: So almost never going to complete failure except for on the small movements, one to three basically captures all the growth from that mechanical tension at a fraction of the fatigue cost.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: Now, if you're an advanced competitor, if you're an athlete, you're trying to squeeze out the last 5%.
• 28:39
  Philip Pape: This episode's probably not for you anyway.
• 28:41
  Philip Pape: You know this stuff and you know that you need to take it really right to the edge and maybe even a little bit beyond.
• 28:46
  Philip Pape: Let's be honest.
• 28:47
  Philip Pape: If you're a competitor, if you're an athlete, you're gonna sacrifice and make some trade-offs.
• 28:50
  Philip Pape: You're gonna, you're gonna live with some pain.
• 28:52
  Philip Pape: But that just is what it is.
• 28:54
  Philip Pape: I'm watching the documentary about Rafa, you know, Rafael Nadal, tennis.
• 28:57
  Philip Pape: I'm not a tennis guy, but it's incredible to see how much he makes himself suffer and how much intensity he puts into the game.
• 29:04
  Philip Pape: And that's why he's successful.
• 29:06
  Philip Pape: And I'm not saying that's for you.
• 29:08
  Philip Pape: Those of us listening, we just want a really, really great result and we want to feel great and look great.
• 29:12
  Philip Pape: And you're going to, if you if you listen up and follow the principles in this episode.
• 29:16
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 29:16
  Philip Pape: So this is the foundation.
• 29:18
  Philip Pape: Stop worrying about the trim of the house.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: Worry about the foundation of the house.
• 29:23
  Philip Pape: Train each set close to failure, accumulate enough hard sets across the week.
• 29:27
  Philip Pape: That's 10 to 20 per muscle group.
• 29:28
  Philip Pape: Sleep and eat to support it, and rinse and repeat.
• 29:32
  Philip Pape: It is not exciting, but it works.
• 29:34
  Philip Pape: Not exciting, but it works.
• 29:36
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, I wanted to give you a 30-second test to see if you are training hard.
• 29:42
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 29:42
  Philip Pape: I'll give it to you in just a second because it's super, super helpful.
• 29:47
  Philip Pape: If this episode reframed how you think about building muscle, I want you to do things.
• 29:52
  Philip Pape: First, hit follow so you get more episodes like this.
• 29:55
  Philip Pape: If you're not already a follower in your app, just hit follow.
• 29:57
  Philip Pape: Second, if you've got a friend who is frustrated or they want to learn, or you know this can help them, just send it to them.
• 30:04
  Philip Pape: Please text this to a friend.
• 30:05
  Philip Pape: Say, hey, check out Wits and Weights.
• 30:07
  Philip Pape: I really love this.
• 30:08
  Philip Pape: Or give them your favorite episode.
• 30:10
  Philip Pape: And I would be super, super grateful.
• 30:12
  Philip Pape: We we need more people to learn this stuff and go to the gym and really get the results they're looking for.
• 30:16
  Philip Pape: All right, here's a test you can run on your next training session.
• 30:20
  Philip Pape: It takes 30 seconds on your last set of an exercise.
• 30:25
  Philip Pape: So I want you to do this like on a machine or cable or isolation type exercise, something safe where you're not gonna get pinned or super heavy.
• 30:34
  Philip Pape: I want you to first predict how many more reps can you do or do you think you can do when you would normally stop?
• 30:43
  Philip Pape: All right, how many more reps do you think you could do when you'd normally stop?
• 30:47
  Philip Pape: Like, is that two reps?
• 30:48
  Philip Pape: Whatever it is.
• 30:49
  Philip Pape: So you're pre-logging your R your R I R right now.
• 30:53
  Philip Pape: Then doing the exercise, when you get to that point, instead of stopping, keep going and do what's called an am wrap, as many reps as possible.
• 31:02
  Philip Pape: And take that set to the point where you cannot do another rep, absolutely bar none, complete failure.
• 31:08
  Philip Pape: I don't want you to get into bad form, tweak your back or anything like that.
• 31:11
  Philip Pape: That's why you picked like a simple safe exercise here or a safer type of exercise.
• 31:17
  Philip Pape: And I want you to count how many you got.
• 31:19
  Philip Pape: So this is the am wrap technique.
• 31:21
  Philip Pape: And I do this a lot on first sets as well, sometimes if I'm starting a new program just to kind of calibrate.
• 31:27
  Philip Pape: But this is more to see what true failure is for you and compare it to what you thought it would be.
• 31:34
  Philip Pape: So if you guessed that you would be too RIR, but you got five more reps, well, that just taught you something profound.
• 31:41
  Philip Pape: You've been leaving more in the tank than you realized every time you lived.
• 31:45
  Philip Pape: So that is like muscle gains you're leaving on the table, and you can start to close this gap.
• 31:50
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 31:51
  Philip Pape: You can recalibrate.
• 31:52
  Philip Pape: Now you know what the effort really is.
• 31:54
  Philip Pape: Now you can get yourself to push a little bit harder.
• 31:56
  Philip Pape: Now it helps to have a training partner or a coach sometimes for some of us to push us to do that.
• 32:00
  Philip Pape: But try it out and let me know how it went.
• 32:04
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 32:04
  Philip Pape: And you can let me know by the way on Instagram at wits and weights, or you can send me an email, go to witsandweights.com slash email, get on my list, and then reply to any of my emails.
• 32:13
  Philip Pape: All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 32:16
  Philip Pape: And remember, you do not build muscle by finding the perfect program.
• 32:19
  Philip Pape: You build it by doing the basic things hard and then doing them again.
• 32:24
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.