Optimal Volume, Long Muscle Length Training, & How Much Protein w/ Dr. Eric Helms (SSOF Ep 140)

Dr. Eric Helms0:54

And they first looked at that same traditional relationship. They also looked at only direct sets, so only the prime mover would count. So, for example, in that bench press one, you wouldn't count it at all for triceps. And then they used one other method, which is an exploratory approach where they wanted to see, all right, if we actually look at the data and we try to fit a line to it, what is best representative of the sets being performed and the relationship with hypertrophy, they found that the quote-unquote indirect method was actually the best fit.

And it seemed to more reliably be predicted by the data. And what that means is that in that example of bench press and measuring pec and triceps hypertrophy, the primary mover, the chest, would count as one set, but the triceps would count as half a set.

And really important to understand while this is a better model fit when we look at all the data, it's not literally true that all indirect exercises count as half a set for the secondary muscles and they count as a full set for the primary, because that would mean that bench press, incline dumbbells, flies, push-ups are all exactly the same stimulus for chest, and it would mean that they're all exactly half for triceps, and it would also mean that all triceps exercises are exactly the same.

But when you zoom out and you're trying to isolate the effect of volume and you're looking only at the average response relationship and trying to plot a model that describes what we see in all of the studies, we're talking dozens across like I said a thousand participants, it fits the data better. So, right now the best method we have for the purpose of hypertrophy in a practical way of counting volume is indirect counting method, where it's primary mover, one set, secondary muscle group, half a set.

James de Lacey3:58

Perfect. And is there a certain number of sets or maybe a set range that would be deemed quote-unquote optimal for maximizing muscle growth?

Dr. Eric Helms4:21

I like that you said optimal, and then you said for something, because I think a big bit of the pushback that you were kind of framing this conversation with comes from people not really defining the constraints for what is ideal. So, if you said what's optimal for a bodybuilder who has a lot of free time, and has a great recovery environment, and is ready to do everything they can to progress in their sport, and they have a history of responding well to high volumes, and they're good about programming and knowing how to distribute stress, that's a very different number if you said, "Hey, I've got a fighter who needs to put on a little more size.

They're already doing six training sessions that are not related to hypertrophy, and I need them recovered for their fights and not incurring a lot of soreness."

Now I'm going, "Okay, what is optimal in these constraints?" And the reason why that's important is because in one case you're looking to get the most you can out of the minimum dose. So, you're thinking of like an investor in that latter example. You want to be efficient. You want to have the highest ROI, the highest return on investment. But in the former example of the bodybuilder, muscle size is their sport.

So, telling them that they'll get 1% better if they double their time in the gym, that might be worth it in some instances. Maybe that's an extreme example, probably not, because now you're looking to be deloading more often, etc. But I think you have to look at this in a specific context.

And the data generally describe what we would say is a diminishing returns relationship, which means that the initial sets you do are far more effective than the sets you do later and later in that relationship, going all the way up to where we start to lose confidence in the data just because there's not enough high volume studies to give us statistical certainty in the relationship.

Right around 30 sets is where we're going, "Okay, at this point, any more than 30 indirect sets per week per muscle group, we're not sure what that relationship looks like anymore." And we have reasonable confidence within some pretty important confines, which we can talk about, that up to that you are getting some return on investment.

But the kind of return is really important to contextualize. You would have to do basically two relatively high volume programs to get the kind of return that like you did to triple your volume, basically, to get a two times improvement from say doing like 10 sets or eight to 12 or somewhere in that range.

And it really starts to not make sense for a lot of people at that point. And when you start to look at the absolute changes when they convert it into percentages, I think Pellan and colleagues did a really good job of trying to say like, "Hey, this relationship is really bad from an investment standpoint, but maybe from a maximalist standpoint, yeah, it could be worthwhile for short periods or for one muscle group."

And there's some other context that's important to talk about the way that research is done and how it is not necessarily entirely ecologically valid because saying what produced the most hypertrophy in one muscle group in a non-representative training study that is trying to look at the relationship between hypertrophy and training, and like I said, it might only be bench press and nothing else, is a very different question to "How much volume should I do perpetually for my training career?"

James de Lacey7:36

Yeah, for sure. And are we assuming that those sets are taken relatively close to failure as I guess as a marker of a working set in that instance? So, if you're saying 10 sets, it's 10 sets that are relatively close to failure when we're talking muscle growth.

Dr. Eric Helms7:56

Yeah, and that's a really good point. When you look at a meta-analysis or meta-regression, which is a study of a whole bunch of other studies, they're going to be limited based upon what is included.

And there's a really good set of figures that describe what types of studies were included in this meta-regression, and about 80%, so probably the majority of them are actually using momentary failure, where the participant attempts a rep and fails, and then maybe a minority, but plenty of them are doing what we might describe as this volitional failure, when the participant thinks they can't do another rep.

Or sometimes they'll say volitional failure, and many reps are actually to momentary failure, but I would say you're probably looking at like an average RIR at the lowest in these sets of like one. So, yeah, they're hard sets.

James de Lacey8:59

Yeah, for sure. I have a question in the chat here for you. I don't know if it's a little difficult to understand, but I'm going to throw it to you anyway. For fighters or for any athletes I guess who need strength and endurance, are submax auto-regulated sets with higher volume more effective than linear periodization? How would you balance fatigue while maximizing strength and power? I think you kind of touched on that a bit before, but I'll throw it to you.

Dr. Eric Helms9:15

Yeah, I think the big thing is that when you're trying to maximize strength and power, the relationship with volume is very different if we're still talking about volume.

So, in the same meta-regression, they looked at not only the relationship between volume and hypertrophy, which had diminishing returns, but also volume and strength. That also had diminishing returns, but it started to diminish way faster, like right around like five sets. It started to show this poor relationship.

Where it's like, "Ah, I'm not sure you're getting any better." And an important thing here is this is also indirect sets. So, that means that if we were want to get better at bench press strength now, anything that is a bench press counts as one set, but anything that trains the muscles that contribute to a bench press that are not a bench press set would count as half a set.

So, now I'm moving from a muscle movement mixture. So, if you were to take someone on a typical low to moderate volume strength and hypertrophy plan, eight to 10 sets per muscle group, you've probably maximized the short-term strength response and you have not maximized the hypertrophy outcome.

And that might be more appropriate for someone who's training for performance. But I think long-term, we also need to remember that just because we don't see agreements between the magnitude of change or even the relationship between the change of hypertrophy and strength over a short-term study, when we take athletes or any participant and we acutely cross-sectionally measure a metric of force production primarily and then some metric of muscle size, cross-sectional area, thickness, lean body mass, then we see pretty strong relationships or at least moderate relationships between those two.

So, long-term strength is going to be heavily affected by how much contractile tissue you have and overall mass, but in the short-term, if you're going, "Hey, I want to be stronger at the end of this training block," doing more volume to get more hypertrophy, you're not going to see that direct one-to-one payoff.

And also when your goal is strength and power, you're going to have to do some things which dampen the hypertrophy outcome. So, the closer you train to failure, the slower your velocity is going to be towards those last reps. And we have seen in some of the velocity-based research that when you say stop a set at a 20% velocity loss, which is closer to like a four or five RIR, you get better conversion to type two fibers that are a little more fast-twitch dominant, more powerful, if you will, some better markers for jump height.

And when you go all the way to failure, you do seem to get better hypertrophy, right? But you are sacrificing some of that because it's less specific to your goal of training for power.

So, to answer the question, there should be some periodization if you're a performance athlete. And the timing of that really depends upon when do I need to be strong and powerful and then also acknowledging that long-term, I do need to think about the size of my muscles to maximize my potential for strength and possibly power.

James de Lacey12:18

Got it. And for the person who asked that question, I just did a video on that velocity loss stuff, so it's somewhere on a few videos back on the channel, so that's perfect. I guess still down the volume and muscle growth debate.

A couple of things that have stood out to me. I guess from the other side of the crowd. I mean, you're kind of middle grounded on all of this, so the other side of the crowd is kind of, you want to say, let's just say dogmatic about some of the stuff.

And one of them is around the, I think I guess it's called the effective rep model. And I'm sure you're familiar with everything that's going on in that space, but basically people are saying, "Hey, you don't need to do more than six to eight reps because all that is, it's about we just got to accumulate sets close to failure. So, if we get close to failure faster, we maximize the mechanical tension, blah blah blah. So, we just have less fatigue and we can just do eight reps and we don't have to worry about doing all these other reps and have all this other fatigue."

Obviously, within the research, we see all the rep ranges help you grow muscle. Obviously, less more reps you're going to need more volume through more sets, etc. And there's a trade-off with doing 10 sets of three at whatever percentage at times. So, I'll be interested to hear your take on, is it accurate to say that, "Hey, you can just do no more than eight reps and you're still going to quote unquote maximize muscle growth or is there more to this, basically?"

Dr. Eric Helms13:34

In the research we have, which is typically short-term, we have definite evidence that heavier is not better than lighter and that lighter is not better than heavier.

Most of the rationales I've seen around fatigue are very kind of mechanistic in their understanding and they rely on a few assumptions that haven't actually been proven. And fatigue is pretty, we say not well established. Yeah, the definition of fatigue varies.

We haven't identified all aspects of it. A lot of the anecdotal experiences of lifting heavy, if you look at powerlifters and what they associate with CNS fatigue, which is probably not the accurate descriptor of what's going on, we don't have something to map to that super well.

And I think the effective reps model, if you want to say broadly the closer you train to failure, the more effective reps you're going to get, I'm 100% on board. If you give me a specific rep range that is not incredibly broad, then I'm saying you're having a really tough time comporting with the data.

So, we go back to that Robinson published now meta-regression. They had I think 1,500 people or so on the hypertrophy data, maybe more. But over a thousand see hypertrophy all the way from 10 RIR to failure pretty reliably. And if you think there's a unclear relationship in the volume data, it's less clear.

If you look at the exponentiated response ratio over percentage change in hypertrophy from zero RIR all the way to 10 RIR, yeah, if you look at like two RIR and eight RIR, you can see the clustering of studies are a bit down shifted and up shifted, but it's not a massive amount.

And yeah, it's a mixture of trained and untrained people, but it shows you that effective reps is a spectrum and it's a range, right? And the closer you get to failure, the more stimulative, but you're having some trade-offs there.

So, it is true that if you have to accumulate a whole lot of reps to get to the point of failure, you're going to have potentially some types of fatigue being higher from higher reps. And there are data when you look at say acute studies that indicate you are looking at some higher markers of fatigue if you do like a 25 or 35 rep set to failure versus a 10 to 12 rep set to failure.

And certainly the perceptual demands are higher. Session RPE is higher, discomfort is higher. You're more likely to misgauge your proximity to failure. So, I do like say reps under like 12 for most hypertrophy training. But you take any, when someone is dogmatic about this, the one thing I know is they've never actually trained people.

Because some movements are just not a great fit for high reps. Some movements are just not a great fit for low reps. And you would never as a practitioner or strength, especially strength conditioner, take low load training off the table for athletes which are coming to you with musculoskeletal joint injury history.

They are potentially just not wanting to put that much load through a joint sometimes. If you're doing an isolation movement. And then finally, I would say from a pure maximalist bodybuilding perspective, if I was to hedge my bets, there's enough hints in the data that it's not specifically about one rep range being superior to others or high versus low reps, but having a broader spectrum of rep range training has popped up as being either significantly better or better but not significant enough times that I think there might be something there to at least not write it off.

There's comparisons of daily undulating periodization where they do a high rep day, low rep day, and a moderate rep day that the effect sizes favor that versus say just always eight to 12.

And there's pyramid training comparisons that they have a broader pyramid from all the way to 15 to five versus say 12, 10, eight that seem to have better effect sizes. And there's one periodization protocol where they did like a hypertrophy strength and a hypertrophy block that did slightly better than the straight hypertrophy training for the whole 11-week study.

See, I keep seeing those and I'm like, "You know, there's enough of a rationale here where training across a broad spectrum of ranges might elicit slightly better hypertrophy because it doesn't always look the same in terms of muscle activation, potentially regional recruitment, your ability to go to failure in one type of movement is better for that person psychologically. Some people really have a tough time going heavy on certain movements. So, I think it would be a really big mistake to take those loads off the table.

And finally, I would point out that it doesn't just come down to the load. There's a lot more that goes into this. But when we look at injury rates and we compare powerlifters, bodybuilders, weightlifters, strongmen, probably the best comparison is powerlifters and bodybuilders. More similar movements, they have eccentric. It's both lift and slow and close to failure as a function of load or as a function of trying to go to failure.

Very few bodybuilders who don't do some type of hinge, squat, and bench pattern. But you see like a third to a quarter of the injury rates in bodybuilders. And the big difference is they don't have to do a squat, bench, or deadlift heavy.

And you probably you'd still get less injured if you said, "I'm only going to do five to eight reps at a two RIR." But now you're definitely hanging out in a much heavier loading range all the time and I would suspect that that might be slightly more risky.

If we - I mean, it's all very low risk compared to say playing basketball or getting punched in the face, but training is not dangerous. And I don't want to mean to fear monger, but I wouldn't exclusively train heavy for all of these indirect reasons.

James de Lacey19:32

I mean, variation is also fun, isn't it? Keeping someone mentally engaged is important, right?

Dr. Eric Helms19:32

I mean, even if you think about some of the old - even some of the old school physical culturists and some of those things - the squat sessions they were doing. John Grimek's old squat session in the 1940s or something was like 20, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6.

I actually did that a few years ago. It was awesome. But it's brutal and those methods work. So it's not like you have to throw those out the window. A lot of the advanced training stuff too, when you're trying to eke out 1 kilo of muscle over 5 years as an advanced lifter is finding a way to come to the gym every day and challenge yourself.

And find a way to hit some type of PR and move forward. And then do that for months on end to get minimal return, really. So yeah, when people take these very narrow views, I think they're missing out on the potential to gamify training, to stay engaged, stay focused.

And I think there is so much to say for maintaining that motivation and that belief that you were going to grow like a new lifter even though you absolutely won't, so that you can bring the type of intensity you need to grow to whatever degree you can.

James de Lacey20:45

I think that's kind of - that's funny because the way I guess the gym and fitness information has changed over the years. Back in the day you'd go to gym and you would do things or you'd just do stupid stuff every now and then or you'd do some crazy sets.

And that would be your training, it'd be fine. And I think now - I think mainly with the big influence from RP, and I know you were on RP channel semi-recently too and I enjoy their stuff - but I think a lot of that information has kind of come down now into mainstream fitness where everything has to be optimized for the perfect reps for muscle growth, the perfect sets, the perfect split.

And kind of the idea of, oh, I'm not going to do 20 rep squats now because for whatever reason based on the scientific thing. When you could be going in and I mean if you're doing 20 rep squats, you're going to grow. There's just no way about it. That [expletive] hard.

Dr. Eric Helms21:36

I think science is really helpful and it helps us understand the constraints of what we can operate in, but not providing unnecessary constraints. And if you're truly evidence-based and you look at the data on the whole and not focusing on one influencer's take of mechanistic data.

And you use the hierarchy of evidence and you go, all right, what's the meta regression? What's the applied data? Not theoretical stuff. Almost all rep ranges except for really really light can get you there. And there are downsides to both.

Like I said, you know, lifting exclusively heavy, you're making the same deal with the devil the powerlifter - you're going to get some aches and pains. Lifting really really light, you know, it's going to degrade your ability to gauge proximity to failure and it's going to feel harder but not necessarily give you a payoff.

And there's no guarantee that you have that same pain tolerance or motivational environment that is going to enable you to get to failure, because when you go to a lab and you do a set of 25 to failure, you got three graduate students yelling at you.

You and I both know this. We've been in these environments. And when it's just you and your head and you're like 25 reps to failure, it's going to be sometimes if it's not a great day, 25 reps to hard. And that can be almost any load cuz 25 reps is always 15, 15 - oh, that's enough.

James de Lacey22:52

It's got to be close to failure, right? For sure. And I guess one more question on this topic too is the idea of I guess the backlash against the mechanisms of muscle growth. So obviously mechanical tension's kind of been the poster child for muscle growth.

And then the idea of metabolic stress is kind of been shunned. And it's interesting to just kind of shun one mechanism and say this has no influence at all on muscle growth.

And it's interesting cuz if you think just a scheme of preconditioning or just blood flow restriction for people in bed rest from surgery who have that put blood flow restriction, do nothing, but it's maybe able to maintain some of their muscle mass.

There's no lifting mechanical tension going on there. It's kind of just you're blocking blood flow and it's a metabolic stress increase. I guess I'll be interested to hear - you're more well versed in this than me.

So I'll be interested to hear your take on this idea of those mechanisms of hypertrophy. Is metabolic stress - I won't say getting the pump - of metabolic stress and doing those reps and feeling that pump, even though that might not be what it is, but regardless of feeling that pump and getting that stress, is that something that can potentially influence muscle growth?

Dr. Eric Helms24:15

The jury's definitely out on this one, and there's a couple reasons why it is worth thinking about in a more full understanding. One: mechanical tension is not something we fully understand. And there's many different types of mechanical tension. We're still discovering all the mechanosensors.

And when people think mechanical stress, a lot of the times they think lifting heavy in the 5 to 8 rep range and that's what you got to do, and they're thinking about kind of the whole muscle tension sensing, right? Metabolic stress, they think about the pump, burn, high reps.

But it is very possible that high rep sets - you know, some people be like, well high rep sets work because of metabolic stress, cuz I mean they wouldn't work otherwise. You know, we see lower peak EMG values, higher fatigue, so there's got to be something to kind of make up for that difference.

It's possible. But it's also perfectly comporting with it also being predominantly mechanical tension. Because what is actually happening when you do BFR or when you do a high rep set - our best guess as far as what's going on at the motor unit recruitment level is we see what's called motor unit substitution or motor unit cycling.

So when you're lifting something you can do for 30 reps and you're 10 reps in, fatigue is definitely accumulating. And some of the most powerful fibers are not recruited yet. But some of them are. And the body will actually purposely derecruit them physically to try to preserve them.

Cuz it's trying to be efficient and it's trying to think about this from a survival standpoint, right? So you'll get these different high threshold motor units that are cycling in. That's why you never see a peak EMG that reaches the same as a high load.

But you still see similar hypertrophy. We think what's going on is by the time you get to the point where a 30 rep set is moving slow and those last three reps look the same as they would if you did a set of five in your last three reps, is because you've exhausted the motor unit pool.

Everything has been substituted in, cycled through. So it could purely be that the fatigue that you're generating, the energy system demand - trying to meet the demands of anaerobic glycolysis, which is what produces metabolic stress - is functioning to end up recruiting all the muscle fibers to then get you to mechanical tension.

Cuz tension, to our best understanding, is sensed at the muscle fiber and intermuscle fiber level. So you have costameres, sometimes called focal adhesions. Shout out to Back old EMP from the AUT. I think I've still got those lectures on my laptop somewhere.

I probably have to go through them again to be honest. I mean, this is stuff that was in that course 10 years ago talking about Titan, talking about costameres. And they serve multiple roles. First, you want a muscle to be efficient.

You want to have an ability to store elastic energy not only through the muscle tendon unit on a macro scale but also on the sarcomere level. So the Titan is this giant molecule that connects to the cytoskeleton and it unwinds and it actually generates the ability to produce force eccentrically through that dynamic contraction the same way a tendon does.

It's also a mechanosensor though, and we think it has to do with anabolic signaling. And potentially costameres do, which then distribute force laterally. So even when one fiber is contracting and another one's not that might be next to it, there's still force being dissipated across all of it.

And even when you denervate animal muscle and you stretch it, you see hypertrophy in response to it. So it's really quite fascinating. And there are other mechanosensors like nuclear flattening - actually flattening the myonuclei in skeletal muscle, which occurs at long muscle lengths and potentially short muscle lengths, and you get a pump.

That might even be a mechanosensor. And there's more. Just calcium ion gates, there's stuff that's going on on the surface of the muscle cell, stuff that's deeper muscle physiology than I currently understand. There's at least five or six potential mechanosensors and I guarantee it's not all of them.

So not all forms of mechanical tension are even the same. So when people say mechanical tension, a lot of them feel like they've got that on lock and they understand it fully when they really disconnect, like length tension relationship, right? When they're talking about that, they often are and they're only thinking of Titan.

And a lot of these, like the narratives can get very simplified and they can be logically cohesive but they may not represent what's actually happening because we don't fully understand it. So metabolic stress could be a non-thing. I will fully admit that.

And when you look at studies where they do, well, they take high mechanical tension and they try to add metabolic stress on top of that you don't see major effects like hypoxia or doing, altering the rest period and having someone do BFR on top of 70 or 75 or 80% of one rep and trying to match total volume, you don't seem to see additional hypertrophy.

So it could just be that there's a very low threshold for metabolic stress to provide a small metabolic or sorry, hypertrophy signal that is enough that you get in bed rest or that you might see if you take lactate and put it in a petri dish on a muscle cell culture. But that when you're doing any kind of resistance training, it's insufficient.

Or it might be that the types of, or the magnitudes of metabolic stress that we get from training are just not high enough. And it takes something truly novel to get a pretty big effect.

So I think the jury is still out. I think we don't fully understand the influence of it. I think it would be premature to dismiss it. And I think also we need to move beyond the whole like muscle damage mechanical tension metabolic stress when we talk about muscle hypertrophy signaling and mechanisms because those all sit on different kind of ways that you might describe a mechanism.

I mean you could also get to a deeper level and say is this specific pathway a mechanism for hypertrophy and then mTOR AKT, like MGF, like there's so many things that are going on. I think people probably need to dig into the more recent papers rather than a 2010 review that are in the 2022 like Wackerhage and some of the ones that have been published in the last four, five, six years that kind of dig into the stuff because it is, it's relatively deep physiology.

And you're right, some funky things happen out there where you can, animal models or single cell cultures, you can just experimentally add to a muscle metabolic stress in the form of lactate and things happen.

James de Lacey30:54

It's tough to say in that bed rest example you gave me because you still have some postural support and when someone is in that position it requires so little of quote unquote mechanical tension to provide some type of stimulus so you could plausibly maybe say that's not, it's not the metabolic stress, because a BFR is just getting you closer to failure if you're walking it.

If you're walking with BFR which is sometimes shown to be better more anti-catabolic or even induce hypertrophy in untrained people, it's like oh well that's not lifting. It's like well it's still movement, we're still in a gravity well on earth. When they're normally walking they might be at a 500 RIR but now they're at a 100 RIR and that's enough just to get a little bit of hypertrophy.

Dr. Eric Helms31:24

And it's hard to argue with, yeah.

James de Lacey31:24

And fair enough and you segue this well anyways getting into this idea of long muscle length, another topic that has people up in arms on the, there's just literally like insane like camps on either side which is quite funny. I think some of it has been driven honestly by one particular exercise and that's Dr. Mike Israetel's lie, like decline curls upside down.

Because curls, every time I see an Instagram video it started lying flat and now it's gone decline, it's just gotten more and more. I think that's honestly, I think that is just a thing that's kind of just divided this whole thing in half, just quite funny.

So it'll be interesting to hear your take on this idea of long muscle length training in terms of hypertrophy and we actually talked a lot about this recently with some people from Hammer and Forge Sport New Zealand, a Bill Smart who is working with City Kickboxing them and doing long muscle length isometrics to like extreme failure just to see if you potentially get that increase in muscle fascicle length and things which is quite interesting.

So for hypertrophy though, okay I guess some of the arguments are it works for some muscle groups maybe but not for other muscle groups or long muscle length doesn't matter for some whatever reason. So let's just, I'm just going to throw it to you just to kind of go from wherever.

Dr. Eric Helms32:49

Yeah it's actually been shown in various different relatively clever designs of how do we isolate training at a long muscle length from the range of motion you perform it at, right? Because I think that that's where this all started was people were going yeah we know that more range of motion is better but there was a few isolated instances in the research where people would do less range of motion, they would do a partial but that partial would be at a longer muscle length and then it wouldn't be clear that more range of motion was better.

So it's like oh what's going on here and some of the early research was done by like McMahon in 2014 and a few others in 2015 looking at this and that's when the speculation came well maybe it's something about training at a long muscle length.

And if you go back and look at Morachev and there's a I think Alegre, there's, there's I'm aware of like three isometric quadricep papers where there no range of motion so now we've effectively isolated muscle length right? We have just somebody kicking against an immovable pad like an isometric done on an isokinetic dynamometer at two different knee joint angles and the effect sizes all favor and in I think two out of the three studies the actual significant difference favors being at a more knee flexed joint angle so quad being at a longer muscle length getting more hypertrophy in this isometric training.

So that's the clearest evidence we have of whether something going on here but other interesting ways are when we take a biarticular muscle so it crosses two joints and we manipulate exercise selection so the range of motion about the joint is the same but the degree of stretch that's in the muscle is higher in one condition versus the other. So for example the hamstrings are in a seated leg curl when you're in a seat and rich position versus a lying leg curl.

A group in Japan led by Sumiyaki Mao did this using, yeah using MRI so it's quite cool using MRI muscle volume and very consistent findings really well done research and it comports completely because the sartorius which is a weak knee flexor which sits on the front of the thigh attaches on the anterior hip, it's more stretched in doing a lying leg curl. So the sartorius grew more in the lying leg curl while the hamstrings grew more in the seated leg curl.

And then Sumiyaki and his group they replicated that recently looking at Nordic curls compared to seated single leg eccentric biased, you know like two down one up style. And what's really cool about this one which I think is relevant to performance athletes is they also looked at some of the attachment sites and the regional adaptations around the tendon and basically how much interface was there between the muscle and tendon in the areas where you typically see people get hamstring strains.

Because Nordic curls, they're great for someone who doesn't have access to a leg curl and wants to get big hamstrings but they're also used really commonly in injury prevention for team sport athletes. You know, they're part of the FIFA soccer warm up and conditioners use them all the time and they were able to show that there were different architectural adaptations that might reduce hamstring tear injury risk.

So I think there's a lot potentially there because when you are training a muscle a longer length it's producing higher tension, it's producing higher tension at a more distal position near where the tendon interfaces and you are potentially getting some of those fascicle length adaptations and shifting there which which portion of the length tension relationship they can operate on.

So when you typically see injuries in sports it's when you're asking a muscle to produce a lot of force in a long muscle length and they can't. Then so if you can shift that length tension relationship a bit which it seems you can from a performance perspective when you train at longer muscle lengths you get stronger longer muscle lengths, it might also increase resilience.

So I think there's applications to this from a performance perspective period but it's also pretty consistent so we have those like leg curl comparisons, we have also an overhead triceps extension versus a typical triceps extension comparison and then another, there's actually three studies all showing the same thing in the biceps which is one of the muscles the arm biceps not the leg biceps where people say oh no no the arms don't benefit from long muscle length training.

We now see consistently in three studies comparing incline curls to preacher curls where you see more distal growth or more proximal growth depending upon which exercise you're doing and that more distal growth especially when you're looking at ultrasound it can't differentiate between the brachialis and the biceps brachii, you're seeing the benefit of the preacher curl.

Producing a more favorable resistance profile at a longer muscle length. Because when you've got your arm nearly parallel to the ground on a preacher, it's immediately hard when your bicep is at a longer muscle length. It's not your bicep, it's actually brachialis because it's monoarticular. The bicep, however, crosses the shoulder, so when you're doing an incline curl, now you've stretched it at the shoulder joint and you see more proximal growth.

And it's not necessarily regional hypertrophy what they're actually capturing, which is confirmed by Kobayashi, who is part of Mao's group, with MRI. It's that you're seeing more biceps growth in the incline curl and you're seeing more brachialis growth, which is really hard to differentiate on ultrasound, from the preacher curl.

So this again really lines up with training at longer muscle lengths. Brachialis doesn't matter where your shoulder is, so what's going to grow it more? The thing that produces more tension at a longer muscle length, the preacher curl. But the biceps, when you're in shoulder—when you're doing the Dr. Mike curls, now you're actually stretching that more because you're messing with its attachment at the shoulder joint and it's producing more growth.

So it's, to be honest, when we look at this body of literature, we're approaching like 20, 30 studies in various different ways of looking at, quote unquote, long muscle length training in one way or another. And it's about half of it which does show significant positive differences, and there's no any findings that go the other way. And the other way to control for range of motion is just shorten partials versus lengthen partials, and those are pretty consistently showing, and sometimes in the arms as well, that you're getting better growth at a longer range of motion but the same total number of degrees of movement around the joint.

So it's relatively compelling. The effect sizes are small, and I think we need to realize that when we're using small sample sizes, especially when looking at trained lifters over short periods of time, which I would describe as almost all studies, you should only expect to see small differences. And then if you're comparing two interventions which are both reasonably good, like if you're going to do full range of motion versus lengthen partials—out of all the different types of long muscle length training, that comparison I would expect the smallest difference because they are both reaching a long muscle length.

One is just spending a little more time there. And if the resistance profile is not that favorable for it to make it lengthen partial better, where it's harder in the shortened position, then why would you expect a difference? They're almost the same intervention.

So it's very hard to capture that statistically, and you would need a ton of studies or one really big multi-site study that has a huge sample size and pretty tight measurement error. So I, it's tough because most people don't understand the statistics involved. They're following the content treadmill. New study comes out, doesn't look like long muscle length do well. Like the new quad, the leg press one, right? That new one?

Or the new one that compared like a dumbbell lateral raise to a cable lateral raise.

James de Lacey40:33

Yeah, I remember that one too.

Dr. Eric Helms40:33

Which are actually the same data collection. And they had them doing both. If you look at the pre-prints, and these are things where you have to look at all the data on the topic. And also think about what are we actually comparing.

So, like, in that leg press comparison, I think it was like 100 degrees to like 140 degrees on average. Those are both decent ranges of motion. So what kind of difference are we expecting in these trained individuals over eight weeks? Or should we be seeing it?

And the lateral raise one, it didn't even go across the body. Is that right, what I saw from the figure? Or am I missing it? Is that the lateral raise—

James de Lacey41:02

I literally stopped at the side, like the dumbbell one, but it was the cable.

Dr. Eric Helms41:14

Exactly. So it didn't get the stretch. Well, no more stretch, but if you think about where does the dumbbell lateral raise get harder? It gets increasingly harder. And when you have the cable set at hip height, it is basically making it so that immediately starting it, you have the highest tension.

And the question is, is that enough of a difference? And it may not be in a trained person over eight weeks. But it's funny. You can tell how people's biases and prior beliefs influence their interpretation. So I've seen people who are a little more anti long muscle length training, or they're anti it in certain muscle groups, and they try to explain away the delt one.

Just like you said, well, they should—if they reach across the body, we would have seen a difference. So basically saying it's not lengthening enough or we would have seen a difference. But then someone else will look at the leg press study and they'll say, "Ah, it doesn't matter. Like, they were already getting long enough." And you can't have it both ways, or you need to have some belief as to that the quads respond at moderate muscle lengths and not longer, and the delts only respond at the extremist muscle lengths.

And we just don't have the data to support that, and some of the speculations about what portion of the length-tension relationship on the ascending or descending limb are these muscles operating best are highly speculative.

What we really need to be looking at is actual hypertrophy outcomes rather than some of our often not very well-informed, even from a theoretical standpoint, understanding of which muscles might respond better. Because length-tension relationships are individual and to individual muscles, they're trainable, and they may not operate the same when we're looking at an isometric research study as we do when we're looking at a dynamic contraction.

So I think I'm not comfortable with that type of speculation, especially when we have seen long muscle length training operate better in the hamstrings, glutes, quadriceps, calves, biceps, and triceps now. You can find all of the research on those six muscle groups are either neutral or positive. All of them. And to me, that means we're probably seeing a real, true, small positive effect size, and it's just very difficult to capture it on all cases. And we should expect mostly null results when we have that type of effect.

James de Lacey43:15

In your experience, then, how much of your training—let's just call these like extreme range of motion exercises, because they're, it's more than a full range of motion exercise for a lot of them. So like, how much of your training program then would involve some of these extreme range of motion long muscle length training, I guess, exercises? Because I'm, you know, there's a trade-off to everything, right? Because the soreness you get from like an incline dumbbell curl is absolutely killer compared to just your regular curls.

So does your training involve a lot of this because of the potential benefits, or is it kind of just like a little icing on the cake maybe at the end of the session?

Dr. Eric Helms43:54

I think the repeated bout effect is an amazing thing, and people do seem to have differences in their soreness. And you can get a pretty large difference in soreness in the similar hypertrophy outcome as well. And I think there's a great study—God, I want to say Gomez, but that might not be the lead author. But anyway, what they did was they compared a three times per week frequency versus a one times per week frequency, just manipulating basically as a bro split or a full body split, same volume, in true intermediate lifters. Same hypertrophy outcomes in the two groups, same exercises.

The only thing that differed was the distribution. So they were training more frequently, fewer sets, and the soreness was way different. On like a scale of zero to 10, the average soreness across a bunch of muscle groups stayed consistently around five or six in the once per week group, and it got all the way down to like one or two or even zero on average for the more frequent training.

So it's very difficult to say, like, if you start exposing yourself to this stuff more frequently—and I know that I tend to be, probably, I've been training for 21 years and I trained to failure with high volume and lots of long muscle length training, but I'm a competitive professional natural bodybuilder trying to compete next, actually this year now. So it's, I don't know that I'm a great case study for this, but I can tell you that in myself, I eased into doing more and more and more of this.

And now I would say most of my exercises have what I would describe as a favorable resistance profile so that I have manipulated them in some way to produce more tension in the initial phase when the muscle was longer.

I don't think it needs to be extreme. I think you do need to be cautious because I have definitely done things where I have like tweaked my brachial nerve, or gotten a little bit of sciatica because I'm like really trying to go to failure on my fourth set of like lean forward arched back seated hamstring curls after RDLs.

So I think you still need to think orthopedically intelligently. And if you're shifting towards this, you probably want to introduce it in phases rather than just going all long muscle lengths all the time. But it's definitely something you can adapt to, and we have that. Going to failure produces more soreness. Doing more volume produces more soreness. Training with long muscle length produces more soreness.

But those are all things that you can acclimate to pretty well, and then you just kind of have to look at it as like what's the person's recovery environment and how long have they been training and how does it intermingle with the rest of their training schedule?

And you would be very conservative this is an S&C setting. And maybe not so much as if you're a bodybuilder and you would just figure out how do I distribute it because it's how do I get the most stimulus area under the curve over time if you're looking for all out hypertrophy.

James de Lacey46:55

Perfect. And that takes us to our last topic on protein and I guess it's kind of been a snowball of literature through the years and I think the most recent one you're looking at dose-response relationship with protein or I guess maximizing muscle growth with protein.

I think you were one of the first to do—was it a review on protein intake? Was it your study that was one of the first ones many years ago? Specifically while someone's in a deficit and they're lifting weights and they're not overweight or with obesity.

That was me in your study, actually. Was that it?

Dr. Eric Helms47:25

I wasn't going to out you, but yes, you participated in my MPhil research on this.

James de Lacey47:25

So, I remember pea protein, so.

Dr. Eric Helms47:25

Yes. That's it was very uncommon at the time and it was an effective tool for blinding. People didn't know which group they were in. They didn't know whether they had the maltodextrin fee.

James de Lacey47:25

I did not know because they both tasted equally disgusting.

Dr. Eric Helms47:40

Yes, I tortured and they tasted equally disgusting. Tortured everybody twice in my crossover. Yeah. You know, the reason I've been talking about protein lately is for two reasons.

One is we just did this meta-regression you're referring to which I was one of the authors on where we basically updated my master's work because we actually had enough to do a meta-regression rather than just a systematic review of six studies back in 2013 when I first published on does the amount of protein you can benefit from change if you are leaner, lifting weights, and dieting, which combat athletes are frequently doing especially in the lighter weight classes,

weight class restricted strength athletes, and definitely bodybuilders it's super relevant for. So, it's that's why I—that was my first foray into research, you know, all the way back in 2012 when I moved to New Zealand. And I speculated based upon the very limited data at the time that that may be the case, but the systematic review was very limited and we were like, "Hey, I think there's enough to do a meta-regression." So, I hooked up with Dr.

Martin Refalo, Dr. Eric Trexler and we got it together. We got invited to do a paper on this in the Strength and Conditioning Journal and it just recently got published and we had I think between 750 and 800 participants across two and a half dozen studies and we saw a linear relationship between protein intake expressed either as grams per kilogram of fat-free mass or total body mass and the retention importantly of lean mass.

So, these aren't measures of hypertrophy directly, but they're typically DEXA, you know, two-compartment model fat-free mass or lean mass measures. And the breakpoint where we saw wasn't a true breakpoint like Morton and back in the day, but the point at which we saw no lean mass losses was around 1.9 g per kilogram or 2.5 g per kilogram of fat-free mass per day.

But then even after that, going all the way up to the highest measured intakes, we saw this consistent attenuation of lean mass losses going all the way up to and gaining lean mass in a deficit. So, the important thing there is that the effect was quite small.

So, if you go all the way from the lowest measured intake to the highest, we're looking at a small effect size if we were to use a Cohen's D typical family of effect size. That's how we tell the magnitude of something. A P value just tells you do we think there's a real difference between these two averages, these two protocols, these two outcomes, two changes, whatever you're doing that T test or ANOVA or mixed model on.

And then the magnitude of the effect is often represented by the effect size, which takes into account the standard deviation, the measure of variance, and the actual raw change. And we're looking at a small effect size. So, don't expect a tremendous amount, but it's probably a good idea to eat a little more protein when dieting.

Probably closer to around 2 g per kilogram or higher on average. And that is potentially the point where you're plateauing in a surplus. If we look at the most recent meta-analysis on people in an energy balance or surplus by Nunes from 2022, you start to see right around 2 g per kilogram, you start to see the confidence interval, the lower bounds of it start to plateau, and it's very difficult to say that you're benefiting at all from higher intakes.

And that's kind of where you maybe want to hit the minimum in a deficit, but the maximum maybe in a surplus unless you just want to eat more because there's no downside. I think that's kind of cool, but one thing is that most people agree in the sports nutrition world that high protein diets are beneficial for lean mass gain or lean mass retention, supporting strength or supporting hypertrophy, or supporting sports performance generally.

They only quibble over the distinction between what is a high protein intake. One person might say 1.5 g per kilogram. One person might say two. One person might say three. But everyone agrees that high protein intakes are generally better. But the wild thing, James, and this helps us understand why there's flip-flopping data, if you will, in the volume realm or in the long muscle length realm that you can really only get a sense of the true effect on the broader population scale when you look at

all the data, is that despite everyone having this consensus agreement on protein, if you look at that Nunes 2022 meta-analysis, for example, it's got in the resistance training comparison, I think 72 different study groups. So, not individual studies, but extracting study groups. If you look at that forest plot, only six of them actually don't cross that zero line.

Which means that by traditional null hypothesis frequentist testing, that 95% confidence interval not crossing the zero line means a significant difference. That manipulating protein significantly impacted lean mass. That's 8% of the studies. 92% of them are mostly right shifted, but still crossing the zero line.

They were a non-significant difference between interventions. And it's not until we have collated, you know, 2,500 participants ish in the Nunes study across 72 intervention groups, do we see this clear trivial to small effect size of eating more protein. So, yeah, eating more protein will help you get more gains.

Just don't expect it to do a whole lot. Your resistance training program's a lot more important than whether you hit, say, 1.4 g per kilogram protein or two. And there's probably diminishing returns effect there as well because when you look at their categorical comparison, you know, they compared less than 1.2, 1.2 to 1.59, and then 1.6 and higher.

And the difference between 1.2 to 1.59 and less than 1.2 is a small effect, but the difference between 1.2 to 1.59 or 1.6 or higher is a trivial effect. So, it's this, you know, going from way too little protein to a moderate protein intake, you're going to get a lot more out of than going from a moderate protein intake to a high protein intake.

Much like when you're doing, say, 15 sets and you decide, you know what, I want to go up to 20. You may not even notice the difference even though technically it's probably a little bit better. It's kind of saying, well, you know, I went out to the ocean and I wanted to make sure that I'm contributing in against the fight against global warming.

I don't want the seas to take over this beachfront housing. I got out my cup and I took a couple water out of the ocean and I took it away. So, there's now less water in the ocean. It's yes, there is less water in the ocean.

You can tell it is, you know, 400 mils less. Doesn't matter at all, right? So, there are things that can be true, but don't matter. And I think as optimalists and maximalists and people who are thinking about turning over every stone, sometimes we lose sight of that.

And if it takes a lot of energy or if it takes focus away from something else to manage something that is actually technically better, but to no meaningful difference that you will ever notice or it'll ever make a difference, it might be a net loss. And I think that's where a lot of people get caught up.

James de Lacey54:32

For someone who's maybe, I don't know, let's just say cutting weight for an upcoming fight, weightlifter for competition bodybuilder, whatever it is, then do you recommend say that 2 g per kilo body mass as a protein intake, that would be the minimum to take in then to retain as much muscle as possible?

Dr. Eric Helms54:55

There's some other factors that matter there. So, we did a few sub-analyses, and the one of the more convincing ones was we did a comparison with body fat. So, we had men and women. It was about a 38%. It's a 60/40 split if you look at the participants in the meta-regression.

And we categorized people as men less than 12% body fat and women less than 20% body fat. And then an intermediary one of men of 19% body fat up to 20, I think 7% body fat, and women from 27 to 30-ish. But basically low, moderate, and a high body fat percentages.

So, kind of that intermediate range of for men, less than 12, 12 to 20, or higher than 20% body fat. And then just you can just add, I think, 7 or 8% body fat to that to get the equivalent for women. And an interesting thing we saw is that the slope of the effect of protein intake.

So, when you're looking at the actual graph of on the Y axis, lean mass gained or retained, X axis, how much protein, that line is almost flat when you're talking about the people highest in body fat, and then the lower their body fat gets, it shifts to the right and is inclined.

Which just means that the point at which you see no lean mass losses is higher protein intake the leaner you get, and you're more likely to lose lean mass the leaner you are, which comports with a lot of other data. So, if you are, say, let's say you're 5'6" and you compete in the 109 kilo category as a weightlifter, I wouldn't even change your protein recommendations unless you're just freaking jacked and maybe you're passing that drug test in nefarious ways, but if you're a relatively high body fat, but you also care a lot about muscle, you have some more wiggle room.

And the way we presented this in the paper was two different factors. It is the risk of losing lean mass and then the importance of retaining lean mass. And those are two factors that are going to influence how high your protein intake should be.

So, let's say you have someone who casually lifts weights, but it's what they're doing for health as part of a fat loss program, and they're dealing with the fact that they have, type 2 diabetes and obesity. I would say, "Hey, if you can get up to that kind of 2 g per kilogram range, or in your case, since you have a high body fat, that'll probably give you a too high of a protein intake. Let's use your estimated lean body mass."

So, 2.5 g per kilogram lean body mass. That would be your target. Good job if you can get to it. All good if you're less than that because you're probably not going to lose muscle mass at all because you've only been training for 3 months and you've got all this endogenous stored tissue.

Now, another example would be someone who doesn't want to lose any lean mass. Because this first person who's primarily caring about losing body fat, if they lose a kilo of lean mass or gain a kilo of lean mass, so long as they're moving out of this status of having type 2 diabetes, it makes zero difference. They don't care if they can squat 100 kilos or 110. It makes no difference. That's not a concern.

Now, we have the maybe not super heavy, but a relatively high body weight class powerlifter or weightlifter. They absolutely want every ounce of muscle they can get. But the risk is low. So long as they're doing other aspects of their cut smart. Their training well. Deficit isn't too high. Now it's like, yeah, you probably want to make that your regular target on a day-to-day basis. Try to get around there. Higher than that, extra credit.

Now, if we're talking about a bodybuilder, or let's say a lightweight or a middleweight who is walking around relatively lean and then to compete, they get pretty damn lean. And like your Mark Spooner, looks like he's 6 weeks out when he was doing his weightlifting competitions back when you and I were both around NorthSport. This is someone who is trying to go from lean to leaner. And they want all their muscle mass.

Now, we're looking at that kind of like that's your minimum intake. And then the maximum would probably be where we started to see that the end of that range that we studied, around 3 g per kilogram of protein for total body mass would be where I'd cap it. Because it's not a big deal if you go over the amount of protein you can benefit from in a surplus because you have such a large calorie budget. You're playing with 3,000 plus calories for a guy my size, right?

But if I'm on a caloric budget and I've only got 1,800 2,000 calories to play with, and I decide to max out the potential benefit of protein, by definition, I'm lowering the amount of carbohydrates and fat I can eat. And I have to think about health sustainability and how well can I fuel training. And there probably is a point where you end up robbing Peter to pay Paul, and you have to use the art of coaching to decide where that is.

James de Lacey59:23

What I find interesting as well, because I love watching full day of eating videos and [expletive] like that, right? It's all the juice bodybuilders and IFBB pros. And you look at their breakdown of the macros at the end, it's like 350 400 g of protein for the day, and they weigh maybe 200. Like, holy [expletive], is there some kind of magic effect of all the juice they're taking that they need more protein, or is that just they, is that just old bodybuilding dogma that just decided to stick around?

Dr. Eric Helms59:48

Well, you have to think about like 350 400 g of protein sounds like a lot, but when you weigh 250 lb, the relative amount isn't that crazy. That's one thing.

The second thing is, theoretically, the faster you can grow, the more you'll be able to benefit from the higher protein intake. So, if someone can gain a lot of muscle tissue at once, they would theoretically benefit from more amino acids to support it. And, I'm not saying everyone who's enhanced is growing really fast because they start taper off and they hit limits as well, and you have to up the dose, but I think it's a mixture of culture and what they've done, erring on the side of more is better, and then also just the fact that they're big humans, and we don't always think in grams per kilogram or grams per pound when we're looking at big numbers.

Ronnie Coleman eating 300 g of protein, sometimes that's only 1 g per pound for him, right? He's a big dude. So, I think we forget that.

James de Lacey1:00:47

Nice, nice. Now, I think that was everything I have for you, Eric. I love bringing you on here, and of course we'll keep bringing you on as more of, I guess, the research comes out on these different topics and more topics come up and there's more fitness drama over on Instagram, etc. But, where can people find and follow you and keep up with you're doing?

Dr. Eric Helms1:01:09

Yeah, I think for if people are really interested in more on long muscle length research, protein research, volume research, then the best place to go is massresearchreview.com. We have training guides. If you want to actually get a subscription to our research review, you can get my full thoughts on this. But, we also put out a lot of free content and have download guides, best of issue for people who are and just want to get a feel for what we do and see if it's something that would benefit them.

And then, if you want to follow me for bodybuilding content, then 3dmusclejourney.com. If you're not a fighter, but you're happening to be listening to me because you actually want to put on the speedo or the lifting singlet, then 3dmusclejourney.com is the place to go.

James de Lacey1:01:53

Perfect. I'll link that in the description. Make sure you also check out the Iron Culture podcast as well because that is bomb. And, as I mentioned to Eric before on the podcast, one of the comments on one of the one of my podcast recently was, "This is the Iron Culture for the MMA world." So, if you enjoy this and you like lifting, then check out Iron Culture as well. But, I appreciate you coming on, Eric, and we'll chat soon.

Dr. Eric Helms1:02:11

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.