Transcription
These are some evidence-based guidelines for hypertrophy, so building some muscle, especially if you're over the age of 40. Now, the guidelines that Mr. Stan Efferding and I are going to talk about today definitely don't just apply to people over 40. They're applicable throughout all age ranges, but we want to put a little bit more emphasis on that.
So, I have with me Mr. Stan Efferding, who is obviously an expert in building muscle and has a lot of accolades behind him. So, Stan, awesome to have you. Thank you.
You know, I've been at this a long time, over 35 years. And back when I started lifting, we didn't have all of this information. The internet didn't even exist. It was back when dinosaurs were still roaming the earth. So, I had to hop in my car in Oregon and drive all the way down to Gold's Gym Venice, the mecca of bodybuilding at the time, with all the big names and magazines, and ask a lot of questions. And in doing that, I acquired a lot of pretty good information.
And here we are, 30 years later. We've got some fantastic scientists, Brad Schoenfeld, Bret Contreras, just a couple of many fantastic researchers that have done a lot of studies. And they put together kind of the best evidence for hypertrophy. And so, these are the guidelines that I give my clients in order to optimize muscle hypertrophy. We'll talk a little bit about some variations here in terms of strength and, uh, joint integrity, but mostly I just want to dial in on the most important stuff for hypertrophy.
The first question I get asked, you probably do too, is way down here on the bottom of the list: What's the best split? You know, and that's whether you do an upper body, lower body, or you do a, you know, two days on, one day off, or all those questions. And people think there's some sort of magic split. It's way down here at the bottom of the list because it's one of the least important things. So, it's really a matter of personal preference and your schedule. What can you do consistently that fits within your lifestyle? That's most important in terms of the split. But there's a lot of things that once you decide what your split's going to be, there's a lot of things that you do have to apply in order to optimize hypertrophy.
And we'll go down the list. First of all, is frequency. It seems optimal to train every body part twice a week. That means that you could do your full body on Monday and your full body on Friday. You have satisfied that evidence-based guideline for hypertrophy. Or you can do upper body Monday, lower body Tuesday, upper body Thursday, lower body Friday, and so on. But you're training everything about twice a week. That's optimal for for hypertrophy.
Then people ask, well, how much volume? How many sets do I do? The range seems to be 10 to 20 sets a week. And that would be sort of what's considered a minimum effective volume and maybe a maximal recoverable volume. Some people may be able to do more. So maybe you come in on to do, say, your split is a Monday, Friday full body, you'd only have to do five sets per body part on Monday and five sets per body part on Friday to achieve the minimum effective volume. That would be hypertrophy, not just maintenance. That would actually cause you to grow. For maintenance, you might only need five sets a week. Wow. To be able to maintain muscle tissue. And we, we promote that heavily in terms of people who are dieting to lose weight. Yeah, please lift weights, otherwise you'll lose muscle tissue and you'll lower your BMR. And what we're trying to do is make sure that you hold on to as much muscle as possible. That would be maybe your minimum commitment, five sets a week per body part, maybe only training once a week. Just get to the gym once a week and do five sets per body part. You could be in and out of there in 30 minutes. You could hold on to your muscle. But to optimize hypertrophy and grow, that's about the volume that we're looking for. So anywhere from five to 10 sets per body part twice a week would get you your range of 10 to 20.
So, just to interrupt. So you could, you could feasibly do, uh, even a full body split a couple times per week as long as you're kind of hitting that volume? Absolutely. Yeah. And full body splits actually seem to have the best effect in terms of, uh, kind of your overall body fitness and insulin sensitivity. So it's really a good idea. Okay. As you progress and you get closer to this 20 sets per week, it becomes harder to do the full body workout. That's your workout. And that's just a matter of what are your time constraints.
Now, effort. This is pretty important. I, I liken this to the difference between exercise versus training. If you do 10 reps and you could have done 20, you're exercising, you're not training. The effort invested in that set is probably not enough to cause an effective stimulus to grow muscle. And so we do want to get within one to three reps of failure. The more experienced you are, the closer you want to get to failure. But a newbie, you, you can leave three or four reps in the tank and still make sufficient progress. You don't have to go to failure. I always thought that. And you end up creating a lot of fatigue, a lot of delayed onset muscle soreness, potentially get closer to injury. And so, you know, we like to let people leave reps in the tank so that we can optimize the frequency. Now, you can come back two days or three days later and feel refreshed instead of burned out.
Yeah, it's exactly kind of where I'm at now with small kids. It's like, I don't want to just debilitate myself. I want to be able to be on the ground, you know, with my kids and rolling around and not hurting. So, in essence, is there, would you say there's like, kind of a line of diminishing return with how close you get to failure? Like, if it's, you know, you get to three reps within failure and you, uh, you still get the job done, you still get the hypertrophic response, but you feel alive, you feel energetic the rest of the day versus going all the way to failure? I mean, is it, does it kind of decrease the closer that you get? Like, if someone's going all the way, are they really getting that much more than someone that's leaving two in the tank? No, and maybe not as, maybe not anything more. That's what we're seeing now. Going to failure is no more effective than than leaving a rep or two in the tank in terms of the measurable benefits for hypertrophy. And that lends itself well to what you said when we started, uh, appealing to people over 40, because it's less fatigue. And that's one of the biggest concerns for joints and just for general energy, etc., mental energy, is that you don't need to, to create that much fatigue for your body and, and cause that much DOMS to delayed onset muscle soreness. And it should be enjoyable. You should feel refreshed. You'll be a little sore, but it should be the muscles, not the joints or the, the central nervous system. You get that, that post-squat, what we call the sleepies, where you're just exhausted the whole next day and you got brain fog, or it loops around and you don't sleep because you're 100%. Yeah, it's not essential. Yeah, it's really not. And I used to think it was. It's coming from a guy who's a powerlifter first and foremost, and I always tried to grind out that last rep to failure and have somebody give me a spot. Not terribly more effective. Yeah, you're not at all more effective.
That gets us to load. You can lift a heavy weight, about 85% of your one rep max for around five reps, or you can lift a medium weight, around 70% of your one rep max for between eight and 15 reps, or you can lift a pretty light weight, about 30% of your one rep max for 20 to 30 reps. They all yield equivalent hypertrophy outcome, assuming you get to within one to two, one to three reps of failure and have adequate volume and frequency. The load, you get a consistent hypertrophy response irrespective of the amount of weight that you use. Interesting. Having said that, you get more fatigue in the five rep range. You do get stronger. You'll get more strength. You get more fatigue in the five rep range. You also experience a little more fatigue in the 20-plus rep range. So this seems to be the sweet spot in terms of getting the best hypertrophy with the least fatigue, again, allowing you to recover faster, increasing your volume and frequency over time. There is a caveat to that in terms of tendons. You need about a minimum of 70% of your one rep max to get an effective stimulus to strengthen and grow tendons over time. Okay. So the lighter weights probably not terribly effective for that. But you don't need the 85% loads, uh, which I liked as a powerlifter, but I discovered that that wasn't the best way for the optimal way for hypertrophy because it would compromise the amount of time to hit you to recover, and that would compromise your volume and your frequency.
Now, I know there is a, you know, a formulation for this or a formula for this, excuse me. But for someone that is is new, how do they just determine their one rep max? Is there an easy way for them without having to, I mean, calculate everything or without literally having to test your one rep max? Yeah, if you can just add, keep adding weight until you, you know, have a difficult rep, you're within 10, and you can just make a, you know, kind of an average, an estimate of what that is. The one rep max, it can be a guesstimate. It can be a general number. Still, when you, uh, when you want to find the right rep range, anywhere between eight and 15 reps, it's just an estimate. But you'll know. Here's how I kind of determine it. When I get a client, they'll ask me how many reps. If I don't know yet what they're capable of, whenever this happens, yeah, then I know they've reached maximum muscle fiber recruitment and some of the fibers are dropping off and failing. Yeah, I'm good. That's the end of your set. You don't need to grind out another one. When the speed significantly reduces, I know they've reached what we call maximum muscle.
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Next would be exercise selection. We like to put multi-joint movements in first. Your bench, your squat, your deadlift, your dips, your chin-ups. Things that, you know, a push exercise that works chest, shoulders, and triceps. A pull exercise that works back and biceps. A leg exercise, of course, that would work, you know, all of your quadriceps and glutes and your hip flexors, etc. Those would be prioritized. But single-joint exercises can provide just as much hypertrophy benefit. But you need to probably do a variety of exercises to hit your chest and your tris and your shoulders. If you're doing things like cable crossovers, then you also need to do tricep pushdowns and also need to do some side laterals. Whereas a dip or a bench press or an incline press would get all three. And you kind of see because people, you know, genetically, they respond differently. So you can see over time which body part is responding well and which are lagging.
And then, uh, we go down to exercise order. And you can prioritize those that you want to preferentially grow. You consider to be a weak point. It's not getting, uh, proper work from your current program. You mentioned something yesterday that I think is just a really good little gem for people. Stan had mentioned when it comes time for cutting and dropping fat, one of the things you used to do is you would do multi-joint movements, but then rather than prioritizing some forms of cardio, you would do maybe some single-joint movements in between or do some auxiliary moves in between, just kind of keep moving that way. And that almost serves as, in a way, for lack of a better term, a form of cardio, which is just not necessarily in line with building muscle. But I thought it was a great point to mention because it was a really cool little trick. We're going to touch on that again here just a couple of things down the road and talk about our workout today briefly, okay? And how that accommodated people with time constraints. So, uh, prioritize the exercises, the body parts that you want to, to get the most results from. So you've got lagging calves or hamstrings, train those first. Biceps, train them first, and then do your stronger parts afterwards. And you might get better results from that.
Tempo. A lot of, uh, discussion about what, what the pace that the rep should be at. It seems that about a two to five second eccentric, you bring it down under control, is really all that is. You know, one, two, press or one, two, three, press. A 10-second eccentric's unnecessary and not more effective. Uh, yeah. And a one-second eccentric where there's no resistance on the way down, not as effective as controlling the movement. And so that would be your tempo.
Rest periods. Two to three minutes. There's a lot of discussion about this. We're talking primarily about hypertrophy today. Yeah. And the research suggests that if you give your body, say, if you do a dip for chest, give it two minutes before you do another set of dips. A smaller body part like triceps or biceps might only need 90 seconds. Calves might only 90 seconds. A squat, you might need three or four minutes just to remember your name if it's a heavy, you know, set of 12 or something like that. So, kind of base it on your ability to recover from that set and be able to invest a similar amount of effort without a significant decline in the number of reps or the amount of weight that you used previously, which would be mostly from say, oxygen debt or, you know, lactate, hydrogen ion buildup. You want to be able to, to somewhat recover from the previous exercise or the set of dips that you can do reasonably close to the same amount of reps or weight that you did to the prior set. A lot of times people will, will do a lot of sets very fast to save time, and you end up down into kind of what a muscular endurance, really kind of like a CrossFit, or and that would be specific to your sport. That might be, it's one of the ways that we train MMA athletes is we, we shorten the rest periods. And that's because they've, you know, the demand of their sport is such that you, you have to keep a certain level of aerobic fitness or muscular endurance. But for hypertrophy, try and give yourself two minutes. Now, I know a lot of folks, they got to get in and out of the gym. Yeah. And they don't have time to sit there and wait for their chest to recover from the previous exercise. Well, that's when we start using what we call supersetting antagonistic body parts, like we did today. So you would do a set for chest and just rest one minute, and then do a set for back and rest one minute. Well, by the time you get back to chest, you've had your two-plus minutes of rest, and you can get an equivalent number of reps or move about the same amount of weight the same number of times. Yeah. And that will give you an optimum hypertrophy benefit, but also shorten the window under which you have to be here in the gym. We finished an entire workout today where we did, uh, eight sets for chest and eight sets for back in 25 minutes. Yeah. And there was four of us in here training. And so that was, uh, that that got us into this time constraint for busy professionals.
That gets us down to the split. We kind of talked about that as personal preference. You can work your full body twice a week. You can do a push-pull leg, say, a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then take a day off and do it again. You can do an upper-lower split. However, you decide to do it, it doesn't matter as long as it fulfills these, uh, hypertrophy guidelines, so you get the best benefit out of it.
Next would be periodization. You should have a plan and then try and progress load over time. Your body will adapt. Yeah. And it has to have a progressive stimulus, meaning you got to add one more rep or five more pounds or one more set in terms of increasing your, your volume, your total sets per week. Progress that over a period of six to 12 weeks through what we'd call a hypertrophy block. Yeah. Um, remembering periodically, maybe every four weeks or so, to to have a, we call a deload, where you just use maybe half the weight for half the reps or half the sets, or just take a day off. Yeah. People think that if they take a day off, they're going to regress. And in fact, the long-term research suggests that those people who train continuously versus those people who take a week off every four to six weeks, they have similar outcomes. Interesting. And so you don't need to invest, uh, all that time and energy, uh, and you won't get any extra benefit out of it. So pay yourself first by giving yourself some rest time every now and then is a good refresher. And you can choose to completely take the whole week off, or you can choose to again, just go in and move a little, half the sets, half the reps, half the weight. Won't feel challenging at all. You'll get nowhere near the amount of volume or effort that would be required for hypertrophy, but it's long-term. Comparing groups of people who use both methods, it's the same outcome.
Awesome. And I know something that people will ask a lot, and they ask me a lot. And of course, I have, I'm at a different stage of where I'm training now. I'm training much more hybrid athlete, a lot of endurance work, is still trying to maintain strength. So what's always applicable to me isn't always applicable to people that are watching. So for someone that is trying to build muscle or even maintaining, given you have all these different options with different splits and different periodization, where does something like high-intensity interval training fall in terms of still having some cardio effect in there, right? You still want people to maintain that a little bit. Some people don't, some people do. But, you know, if someone says, hey, I really like my HIIT, I like the way it feels, where does that fall in? We like to separate that from the hypertrophy workout because of maybe a competing stimulus, at least by six hours. But altering a different day would be ideal. Yeah. So if you could do a hypertrophy workout on Monday, do a HIIT training session on Tuesday. HIIT versus LISS, low-intensity steady-state cardio, in terms of calorie consumption, although you'll burn more calories in a shorter period of time with HIIT, if you compare the two in terms of weight loss, they're similar. Yeah. Yeah, they definitely are. And, and HIIT might even have a bigger interference effect on your hypertrophy training than LISS. Yeah. And so, you know, I do like to separate that kind of thing. And it would be simply, if that's what your sport demanded, or that's what you enjoyed. What's the best exercise? The one you'll do. Yeah. So I always find out first, what, what's your preference? What will you do consistently? A lot of people, we love lifting. Some people don't. And so we have to try and almost tease them into getting some sort of loading, using the kind of of exercises they like to do, just load them. So that's the biggest consideration. In terms of cardiovascular fitness, you don't need HIIT to achieve a healthy level of VO2 max. You can get that just from a brisk 10-minute walk three times a day, like I spoke. Which is probably more sustainable and fits people's schedules better. You can do it anywhere, at any time. I just find that long-term, the compliance is better with the three 10-minute walks. And then, like today, we had a pretty good heart rate going through for 25 straight minutes because we did a dip, we rested shortly, did a chin-up, rested shortly, did it dip. We were gassed by the end of the workout. That I can't call it HIIT because it doesn't meet the, you know, the definition of HIIT necessarily, but our heart rate was elevated significantly for 25 straight minutes. I consider that to be my cardiovascular training in terms of, of health, of course. Yeah. And I also get the benefit of the hypertrophy training because retaining lean muscle mass or building muscle is probably second to your VO2 max, the best predictor of mortality. Yeah. So I think that gets us down. We talked about periodization. At the end of the day, you can't just cross your T's and dot your I's and think there's some special magic program or hack or trick. It's going to be hard work. The easy gains, you know, the honeymoon period will expire between three to six months, and then it's going to just be a matter of going in and continually doing a little bit more, maybe varying the exercises that you pick through your hypertrophy block, just small angle changes, etc. But you're still gonna have to progress that over time with one more set, one more rep, five more pounds in order to continue to make gains. And the gains initially will be great. That's why we love getting people in the gym initially because they'll get really strong, really fast. A lot of that's neural adaptation. It's not necessarily because they got stronger per se, but they got more coordinated in their body, learned to to fire all the muscles so they could do a bigger deadlift. So something like a deadlift or a squat or a bench press will progress very quickly for a beginner. After that, the gains are a little slower. You got to be persistent and consistent, and hopefully enjoy the the training program, otherwise you're not going to do it long-term.
And then down here, I kind of mentioned earlier, it's twice as hard to gain. We talked about that in terms of hard work, but only half as hard to maintain. And so you could get away with, we talked about volume, probably five sets a week with a reasonable amount of intensity for every muscle in the body, which would just be a push, pull, or legs, and hold on to muscle tissue with something as minimal as that, if in fact, you know, time constraints were an issue. Yeah. Well, especially if you're, you know, older, you're busy, you're just, you just, you don't have to destroy yourself trying to maintain. You know, and that's, and even with with aerobic capacity, it's different. Aerobic capacity, you, I don't want to scare people and say you lose it quicker, but you do lose it quickly. And it's definitely something that, you know, as you get older, you want to make sure that you're kind of meeting these minimum requirements for maintenance if you already have that lean mass built, so to speak. And then, yeah, it's not a bad idea to focus a little bit on your cardiovascular with whatever means that, you know, that is. And one other thing to consider is whenever you're doing your cardio or your HIIT or anything like that, you have to plan it accordingly so that you're, you know, you probably don't want to have, you know, 20 minutes of HIIT on an assault bike or an Echo bike the day after you crushed legs. It's probably a recipe for disappointment and just discomfort in a bad way. And not to mention, just when you stiffen up, different muscles stiffen up, you know, you're going to be activating different muscles when you're doing your cardio, more risk of injury. So think about that too. If your cardio is more lower body oriented cardio, perhaps you want to have that follow the upper body workout, which was the day prior, kind of.
Yeah, I found that as I've aged, I'm 54 now, and I'm still able to maintain a significant workload, but I have to move more outside the gym. That's why I love the 10-minute walks. The frequency is more important than the intensity or volume in any one. I'm with you. So I just have to keep moving. I'm like the Tin Man without an oil can now. And if I, if I sit for too long, I start to to bind up. So if I have a big leg day, my strategy for recovering from that and getting ready for the next day's workout, I've been using this for 12 or 14 years since 2009 when I was training with Mark Bell. I put a recumbent bike in the hotel room I was staying at down in Sacramento, and I was training with Mark. And on Sunday, we would do heavy squats day. We would get up over 800 pounds on squats. And I would used to just lay in bed for like two days thinking I was recovering. I would sleep as much as possible. I would be sore for a long time. And every time I got up, I was just aching. So I put the recumbent bike in my room. And on Sunday, when I squatted that evening, I would do a little 10-minute HIIT session. I would sit on the bike and I would do about 40 or 50 seconds of spinning at a reasonable pace under modest tension, and then rest for 10 or 15 seconds. I would do that 10 times. Takes me 10 minutes. But I'd get a little pump in my legs, and it was all concentric. I wasn't loading, you know, because it was all just push, push, push. It was a light weight. I was getting my heart rate up. I was pumping a ton of blood into my legs and knees. And I would find that that I would do that also the next day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, three 10-minute bikes. And by Tuesday, I was completely recovered. And so I would just suggest that you try and design something as you age that includes frequent movement throughout the day and pumps a ton of blood into the area. That's why I love running stairs for HIIT, low impact as opposed to sprinting where you have that eccentric, you know, force from from slowing the body down. Yeah. And that can be pretty dynamic, that can be pretty stressful. Pulling sleds is another one, just to load up a sled with weight and put a belt around, just walk with it back and forth. Put a treadmill on about 14 degrees and actually walk backwards on a treadmill. Puts a ton of blood into the knees and the quads. It feels fantastic. You get a little burn, but there's no real loading, there's no muscle damage. It's all recuperatory. Yeah. And I find that's a great way to recover from a big workout and prepare for the next one. Just some strategies to use.
No outstanding. Hopefully, out of this, you can craft your own plan and be off to the races. And Stan, as always, man, it's a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much.