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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
What's up everybody? Welcome back to Iron Culture presented by Mass. It is me, Eric Trexler, joined as always by the Dr. Eric Helms. Helms, how are we doing tonight?
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A
Yeah, I'm doing really well this morning. It's, it's a wonderful Wednesday morning here in New Zealand and I'm glad to hear that you're having a great night out there in North Carolina on, on a Tuesday and.
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B
Absolutely. Have you been following the World cup at all?
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A
I followed it for a little bit. Now that I am forced to understand sport more broadly if I'm going to be the purported director of the Sport Research Institute New Zealand. And once New Zealand was out of the World Cup, I didn't keep following it, but I was tracking it when we had maybe one more game we could get that last spot. But no, I didn't follow it quite as much as I did say IPF Worlds. Yeah.
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B
Well, fair enough. We are in North America. We're hosting it. So I told myself if America makes the final game, then I will start following it. And I've been informed based on everything I've read that we will not be making the final. So therefore it saved me a lot of trouble and I was able to bow out and stop following before I began following. So. So I am both disappointed and relieved that I don't need to incorporate a new sport into my repertoire here. So for now I'm just going to try to stay busy for the next like six to eight weeks and then college football will be back and then we can talk about it. Every episode.
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A
Perfect. Besides everything you just said after and then we can start. But no, I get it. You know, each person has their own sport related interests or sport adjacent interests. In my case, if you want to be critical of what's defined as a sport and I respect them for each individual person. There you go. Political response. As someone in my position, you got to do it.
- [02:03]
B
All right, Helms, we got a quick little short Q and A episode tonight, but before we do that, we got to do business here. So folks, I'm going to run down the list. Make sure you like, rate, subscribe, review. Generally we prefer good reviews over bad reviews. So leave a five star or as many stars as you can squeeze in on whatever platform you are rating on. That would be helpful. Share the show, send it to a friend, get more people under the big tent that we're putting together for the Iron Culture community. Make sure that you support our friends. We have a beautiful, beautiful partnership with our dear friends@elitefts.com they make extremely high quality gear and apparel for related to lifting. So if you need straps, you need a new gym T shirt, you need all sorts of different lifting stuff, go to elitefts.com, use our discount code. MRR10 stands for Mass Research Review 10 and you'll get a 10% discount. Why not, right? And finally, you might, you know, MRR 10. We gotta bring the Mass Research Review into the fold here. So folks, if you want to support the show, the best way you could do that, the thing that is essentially the lifeblood of the treasure chest that funds iron culture, the entity is the Mass Research Review. It's our day job. So if you want to throw a couple dollars in the hat, head over to massresearchreview.com not as an act of charity, but as an act of education. So every month we put out a new issue which covers all the latest and greatest research related to exercise, nutrition, everything training and nutrition adjacent, performance, health, hypertrophy, fat loss, you name it, we got it usually ends up being a good eight, nine, sometimes even ten pieces of content, depending on the month. And we have a lot of very, I would say, broad and comprehensive topical coverage. So if you open up an issue of the Mass Research Review, you are going to find something that piques your interest and helps you address what you're trying to work on or what your clients are trying to work on. Helms, did I forget anything business related?
- [04:10]
A
No, you crushed it. It did so good. Beautiful. And yeah, we got a lot of positive feedback on the issue that just came out because we did exactly that. Deep dives across a lot of complimentary, useful topics for pretty much everyone who's in the fitness space big time.
- [04:26]
B
All right, Helms, now we got to give the people what they want on the podcast here. So we got some Q and A. This one I believe is reminiscent of your experience. I forget which. I know you've talked about having different experiences with upper body and lower body training and kind of getting them to grow, taking a different approach. So we had a question here from Anonymous. Sorry, no, this one came from Oscar. So Oscar said, I've been training for a year now and I've made pretty substantial leg gains. However, my upper body is severely lacking. Is it worth it to swap out one of my lower body days for another upper body day to boost that volume? I think my legs are big enough and I do a lot of leg based cardio. So the question is, when you have this discrepancy, upper body versus Lower body. What's your approach for trying to basically unlock that growth and catch up the lagging hemisphere of the body?
- [05:19]
A
Yeah, I think a lot of it, the knee jerk response is, oh, you need a greater dose of training for the upper body, which is true if you take a appropriate definition of dose, which is the overall stimulus under the curve and not just supplant that in your mind with volume. Because I think that matters. Like some people don't have very effective training for their upper body and you want to make sure that that is established first before then you get into upping the dose. Right. In some ways, I think lower body training is just kind of an issue of consistency and you can apply the kind of traditional concepts of bodybuilding pretty easily because of the, the basic movements and the typical resistance profiles that are associated with most leg training. Like if you do a leg press, if you do a squat, if you do a hack squat, if you do a lunge. They're generally pretty good at training your glutes and your quads and they load them at a pretty deep position. And you are also going to have a decent baseline of muscle mass if you've been a generally physically active person because you've been on your legs a lot of. So you have maybe a slightly higher training age. But when it gets to how do I get my back to grow effectively? Especially I think some of the pressing musculature is a little easier. You can find yourself doing a whole lot of volume that's not super effective for especially your back. And certain other muscle groups that I see are pretty consistently lagging on people if they don't improve the quality first to make sure that they're actually getting a decent return on investment when they start to do more. But ultimately you may need to do a bit more for your upper body. That's something I've seen pretty notably in people who have a, like a lag in terms of which muscle group they train more. I find this is also pretty common in not always, but a lot of women with an athletic background, they have pretty well developed lower body because of the sports they participated in and the strength conditioning that might have been embedded into them or might not have been. And they make pretty quick gains in the upper body. But then if you're thinking about like what do they need to maintain or grow or keep kind of like the level of development they have in their lower body versus what do they need for their upper body, you might need to do a little bit more. And it's not that Their legs are growing faster anymore. They're not, it's just that they're lagging behind. So if you want to play, quote unquote, catch up, then you want to increase the rate of growth in the upper body and that might sometimes require a little more investment. And the good news is that you can pull back pretty substantially on the lower body unless they're like, you know, way massively developed from you doing as much possible training as you can and they're only going to stay there if you're doing a decent amount. But yeah, this is a pretty common anecdotal experience in the sport of bodybuilding, I would say, is that people with really, really good standout body parts, they can pull back and not lose on those muscle groups. And it's not just like the simplistic explanation I said for being on your feet more and having a sporting background and that it's sometimes like if you talk to people who have really, really stand out body parts, they'll mention that they immediately start to feel a strong contraction there, a burn, a pump, uh, they have a good quote unquote mind muscle connection, which sometimes is kind of a gestalt combination of all that. And they are often the limiting factor on multi joint movements that include that muscle. So you know, someone with great biceps and, and, and not a great back, sometimes they'll find that the limiting factor for a lot of their rowing and pull downs is their biceps. And they just seem to be really, really involved, which is great if you want big arms, but not awesome if you're trying to develop say your lats for example. So what that means is that every unit of training for biceps is more effective than every unit of training for other muscle groups. So you can kind of pull back on it or look at ways to try to isolate the back. And that's sometimes a pretty effective strategy. And you can see some similar things in terms of like glute development in the lower body, don't get me wrong. But yeah, I think those are the general kind of broad picture that I would take. So it's quality first and then quantity. And don't be afraid to pull back on a muscle group that seems like it's really well developed because you're probably have a higher quality per unit of training anyway and that's why it's advanced.
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B
Yeah. You know Helms, when I was going into my first bodybuilding show, I talked to my coach at the time and I said, listen coach, I have huge traps, should I intentionally avoid them to bring my physique into balance. And he very kindly, in a very supportive way, basically said, well, Eric, you basically have two options going into your first show. You could show up on stage with one well developed muscle group or zero. So I would encourage you to go ahead and keep the traps. So just a little bodybuilding humor related to muscle imbalances. But it is worth saying for someone who is a year in, it is good to be thinking, hey, something's lagging. How do I bring it up? But I definitely would encourage people, like when you're kind of comparing the rate of growth, muscle group to muscle growth at the mic, muscle group to muscle group at the micro level, make sure you zoom out and look big picture and say, hey, between now and where I want to be, there's going to be pounds and pounds and pounds of muscle gained all over my body. So at a certain point it's kind of, you know, pick your program that's sustainable, gets everything generally moving in the right direction. There's gonna be a lot of time for the very delicate balancing and nitpicking a little bit later in the career. But yeah, the first goal is to basically develop your first muscle group. Then at least you're started, right?
- [11:21]
A
I'll be honest, like, my back wasn't identified as a weak point reliably by me and other people because we get in our own heads when we look at our physique. Until I had been training for seven years. So like around 2011, when I started lifting in 2004, people were like, like, no, like you, you look, your front shots are, are good. Your side shots are better just because of your structure. But when we turn to the back, like that back lat spread and also that front lat spread and also your front relaxed, like, what's going on there? You got a T taper, like, you've got a good upper shelf and you've got good arms and you've got good leg development, hamstrings, quads, sure chest. But there's there, there is a notable gap in your physique and it, it's harming not just your perception of size, but also symmetry. But if you'd taken me back to 2007 people, I would have brought it up. And people like, yeah, you know, just put in some good off season time. Do you eat enough? Like, that's the kind of response I would get, you know, And I'm, but I'm, I'm, I'm noticing it and I think I'm right and I wasn't. But you know, so.
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B
Yeah, I hear you. All right, Helms, moving on to the next one, gonna talk a little bit about fatigue. So this one comes from Dominic. I would be curious to know about sequencing exercises for fatigue from sess to session. What actually goes into that? How do you avoid overloading? Why not just do chest every day as part of a full body routine? Helms has talked a lot about full body routines, but it's unclear how to apply all this newfound freedom at times. So if you are going to do one of these kind of, let's say you are going to go a high frequency full body routine, how do you manage that session to set? Because a lot of people, it's sacrilegious. The idea that you would do a leg exercise on a Monday and come back on Tuesday and do a leg exercise. Right. It gets drilled into us before. I feel like before I even started lifting, I knew that you needed at least 48 hours for each muscle group. Right. So. So Helms, take it away.
- [13:19]
A
Yeah, I think there's one important caveat and distinction I need to make. And then there is a one shift of perspective from categorical to continuous understanding of fatigue. And then finally there's a. Here's what you do. So I'll go through each one sequentially, but also not spending a tremendous amount of time on this. So first off, I had been misunderstood many times when I talk about not using traditional splits is to think that I am saying train full body, when in reality I am saying don't restrict which body parts you train on any given days. And because we like to think in splits, the brain defaults to, well, therefore it's full body. But when I have previously discussed this, I might mean you're doing a bunch of pushing exercises and upper body and then a leg curl on one day and then you're not necessarily doing a hamstring exercise the next day, but you might be doing other leg training. So I think that's really, really important. And that is part of the reason that it is confusing and hard when there's so many options on the table, as this person says, is that if you're not really comfortable with that type of programming, which I often describe as inside out, as you think about what level of total training volume do I want for each muscle group and then how many days per week and how much time do I have to train and then how would I best distribute it to get the overall net stimulus and lowest fatigue that will look full body esque, but it's not full body. And I am actually in many cases, just like you said, not training the same muscle group on back to back days. However, then I do think there is a time and a place where you absolutely can train the muscle group on back to back days. And this is where we shift from a categorical to a continuous perspective. There's a huge difference between doing 10 sets to failure for a given muscle group and then coming back to train it the next day and doing three sets where you go from a 2 rir to a 1 rir to a 0 rir, not failing, but just doing as many reps as you could and you're not attempting the rep where you would fail and then coming back and doing that again the next day. So I think the, this, this is the one thing I want people to think about. It's like the rule that bodybuilders have often said if you don't train the same muscle group twice in a row is based upon the way that bodybuilders train. Like to train in bodybuilding psychologies, where if I'm going to train a muscle group, I better damn well know I trained it. You know, it's either going to be high volume or it's going to be butt gusting all out to failure and forced reps and negatives and all that stuff. And I should be getting sore and I like to get sore and I like to feel trashed in that muscle group. And there's going to be fatigue generated by one of those two pathways. And what bodybuilders do not like to do. But you'll see other strength athletes do it because they're thinking about performance is getting just a little bit of a stimulus and therefore less fatigue. And then training it more frequently because you're trying to maybe preserve neuromuscular performance while stimulating enough hypertrophy and enough ability to improve other pathways to strength. And there's a huge skill component. This is why Olympic weightlifters may be doing 10 sessions a week which of movements that always include a squat. And even if they're doing variations that change it and it's not an issue because they're doing a whole bunch of different doubles, triples and singles at 60 to 90% of one RM with movements that sometimes have no eccentric, they're actually dumping it right. And high contraction velocities. So there's not incredibly high forces, so there's not a whole lot of muscle damage. So that is something that I'm not saying you should train like Olympic lifter, you shouldn't. But you need to Think about if, even if I do three really hard sets, how fatigued can I be the next day? Is it really going to reduce my performance to the point where it is a net negative for training it again versus some other setup? And there is probably some apex based upon how much repeated bout effect do you have, how much experience do you have, your own makeup, what you like, and your personality that's going to dictate the right dosage there. So most bodybuilders, most people who I talk to and based upon their time constraints, probably do want to hit a given muscle group on a given day with a decent amount of stimulus to the point where it might be better served to take at least a day between training it or not. Right. So in many cases the, the way you would do this is you would train opposing muscle groups, maybe in a full body approach. So you might do your pressing exercises and quads and calves on one day and then you'll do your pulling exercises and glutes and hams on the next and do something of that nature. Or you can kind of split up your legs basically between all the days you do and like make sure that they're not overlapping. And the challenge is that obviously your glutes maybe not obviously your glutes are going to get probably the most overlap because hinging movements and squatting movements train them. And then you have to do things like manipulating the way you do those exercises so that the glutes are or are not the limiting factor. Because then just because you quote, unquote, train them again, continuous versus categorical look doesn't mean that they're like brutalized. Like you walk around all day, you know, you flex your hip, you know, you extend your hip, you extend your knee, you flex your knee. It doesn't mean you trained your quads or glutes or hamstrings. So, for example, when, when I post my videos of training, I will often show me doing a leg press and people freak out because I'll have my heels off the platform and, and not only that treks, but I will also allow my back to round and my glutes to come up off the seat of the leg press. And how do I not die on a regular basis? Right? Force leakage, not optimal. Bad. And don't ask people why they don't know you're not supposed to do it. It doesn't look right. Trainers told me not to, but I'm actually purposely doing that because it increases the range of motion I can get about my knee. Does it make Me weaker? Yeah, because I'm not able to actually do quite as much of the hip extension component. But it makes it more quad dominant. Right. And it makes the limiting factor less likely to be my glutes. And I can do a set of leg press three sets to failure, and then do leg extensions. And you're thinking, oh, but you did three sets of leg press, which is quads and glutes to failure. And if your brain is thinking categorically, it's three sets to failure for glutes, three sets of failure for, for quads. But that wasn't the limiting factor. And then I can come back the next day and I can hit a lifetime PR and rdls. So clearly my glutes weren't sufficiently fatigued to prevent me from making adaptations that enabled me to move forward. And that's how you know, like anytime you take a theoretical concept, you need to be able to tell because you and I may not have the same femur length, we may not be performing leg press the same way. And you might also have a very different training history or goal. So what I describe works well for me is not necessarily going to apply to you. So you need to think about if you train a muscle on back to back days, how do you prevent the fatigue from becoming a barrier to getting a good stimulus or a good enough stimulus the next day? And if the way you train, the way you're built, what you like to do isn't facilitated of that, then full body and the strictest logical interpretation is not what you do. You just make sure that you have at least one day between training the same muscle group hard and hard. Could be via exercise selection or it could be via something else. Like, yes, there's a little bit of quads in a hip thrust, right? But it's probably not going to interfere with your quad dominant leg pressing, hack, squatting or leg extension. If you did those on back to back days. Now, if you did a high foot stance, you know, leg press that was very, you know, glute dominant and, you know, high feet together, you know, pushing through your heels, and then you did rdls the next day, that'd be different than if you did like a narrow stance, hack, squat, right? So I just think people need to understand that the practical application generally is what I think is start with just doing opposing muscle groups or alternating upper upper lowers. And then if you have specific muscle groups you want to get more volume on, you can microdose them so that even if you did train them pretty hard, you can train them on multiple days per week, even back to back sometimes. And it's a non issue, especially if they're muscle groups that don't necessarily contribute to a lot of your other big lifts. An example of this is that I do train my calves and my middle delts every day. Because while middle delts are involved in a lot of movements, they're rarely the limiting factor and they're rarely getting a lot of fatigue unless you're actually doing a lateral raise or something that heavily uses the middle delts to failure. But you're going to feel them a little bit in some type of incline press. You're going to feel the, the calves a little bit when you're doing hamstring curls. They might contribute a little bit to leg presses, but they're not going to fatigue your calves to where you have a noticeable drop in performance. Doing calf raises the next day, as an example.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I used to, back when I had a whole roster of clients as a coach, I would always build my program such that let's say a client was doing a three day program, I would always build them where if they needed to, they could do workout A, B and C on three consecutive days, or if it's a four day program, again, consecutive days. And so whether you're doing, you know, full body training or not, I think it's a good idea to think through your kind of sequencing of your exercises day to day to day and say like you were saying, like, okay, is there technically some small degree of overlap between those RDLs and those walking lunges for from workout A to B? Technically, yes, but I'm still gonna be fine. You know, I'm moving in different enough ways in the ways I'm stimulating those muscle groups, especially within the way I'm managing the amount of volume in the program. I can do rdls Monday and walking lunges Tuesday and I'm gonna be okay. Right? So I just think that's good. Practice in general with your programming is to think through how workout A goes to B, goes to C goes to D. And if they just so happen to be full body, great. You know, it still applies in that case. But like you said, the idea of kind of easing into it, micro dosing, I think, is a really useful thing because a lot of people, I think we're really susceptible to this in the lifting world. We get some heuristics and then we pour a lot of concrete around them and they become solidified rules. And then eventually you do this for like 20 years and you break A rule and you kind of like, you know, close your eyes and hold your breath and say, oh God, I'm going to break a rule. And then you do it and you go, oh, that was nothing. That was really not a big deal. I don't think we should have poured concrete around that rule and, you know, put it in stone. And when you do start to actually do these, you know, back to back, you know, I had leg presses on Monday and I did some leg extensions on Tuesday and actually it was fine. And you go back and check your workout log and you're like, not only was it okay, I don't think my leg press performance dropped at all. You know, so I think when it comes to lifting heuristics, which become, you know, rules etched into tablets, it's good to push them from time to time to realize how flimsy some of them are. And once you do that, the reason I say it's good is because, number one, it, it boosts your self efficacy. It stops locking you into these like programming pretzels where you feel like you're very fragile and you'll break if you, you know, cross one little line. But, but it also opens up this huge world of possibilities for how you want to program your training. And so like a good example is like sometimes it's actually good to be an underthinker rather than an overthinker. So I didn't torture myself with a lot of like programming Tetris early in my career. I just saw a bunch of huge people that bench a lot. Did Smolov Jr. And I want to be huge and bench a lot. And so like, you get over that fear pretty quick of back to back days when Friday is eight heavy sets of benchmarks and Saturday is 10 heavy sets of bench and you're like, oh, not only was that okay, but over the course of a month I added like £55 to my bench press. Turns out four days a week, which necessarily requires back to back days of heavy benching, is totally fine. Right. So you'd be amazed what your body can adapt to and helms. How would you feel if I made a controversial statement in general?
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A
I mean, you do it every time we get on, so I'm used to it.
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B
Yeah, I do this just so I can clip them and go viral on the Internet. How would you feel about the general premise that lifters, by and large in the aggregate, spend way too much time being concerned about fatigue if I just lobbed an irresponsible, vague statement out there, how viscerally do you react to that statement?
- [26:34]
A
I would say, you know, the funny thing is I'm old. So my visceral response is that that has generally not been true, except for in very specific dogmatic circles. But as of late, for the last five to 10 years, 100% agree. And it is jarring for me because people would over embrace fatigue in our day. Damn it. Yeah. Old man yelling at cloud. And now it is. I don't even want to produce a stimulus because stimulus sometimes produces fatigue. And I'm like, well, just don't train, you know, like, this isn't for you. Like, I get bothered because I'm like, you're so worried about fatigue. I used to like it too much. We're not the same. I'm old. Yell at clouds. This generation say the same thing everyone never said forever. And then I, I bring it back a little bit. But I do think there's something to be said for it. Like there is far too much fatigue mongering at the moment.
- [27:23]
B
Yeah. And even back in the day, man, like, it's interesting how the trends go in waves, but like back in the day, you know, Arnold, when he would talk about training, I don't know, I feel a little out of my depth here, a little uncomfortable. The clips I've heard of him talking about training, he did not talk about it like going to war. He talked about like, oh my God, this is great. I get to go to the gym and hang out with my buddies and do fun stuff and feel a pump for two and a half hours. Like he would go in there and do a bunch of high volume stuff. And a lot of the interviews with him about training, you don't get the impression that he felt once about the idea of this crushing burden he's putting on his body or this fatigue he carries around or you know, dragging his shield and sword into the gym to go into battle. It seemed like he was at an amusement park for the most part. Now on paper, was he accumulating very generous amounts of fatigue from huge high volume workouts that lasted for hours? Yes, he did. Okay. He seemed to have a very good time. Then helms in like the like 2000s, 2010s, people then were like they were embracing the fatigue, but almost as if it was like their burden to bear in life, you know, where it's like, I'm gonna go beat the crap out of my body and feel terrible all the time. Yeah. But look, look at me. And all I'm willing to do and put myself through for this endeavor. And so it took a very different, like, it was less joyful and more dutiful of, I'm going to go in and do what it takes because I'm tougher and I'm going to hate every second of it. But F you, I'm doing it. But now, like you said, Helms, it's. It really has changed a lot to the extent that, yeah, I get a lot of folks who will come to me, you know, and they'll be like, hey, man, I just can't grow. And I don't know, maybe my. Maybe it's just not in the cards for me. My genetics suck. Nothing's working. And, like, because I do teach, like, some, you know, beginner level and intermediate level weight training courses. And like, sometimes I'll just like, look at, like, well, what have you been doing? And I'm like, dude, there's just no volume here. Like, I could not realistically expect you to grow much beyond the extent you have, like, on such a meager program. And then, you know, sometimes you'll say, well, let me watch a few sets. And it's like, brother, if you're doing a low volume program, you gotta push it. And like, there's eight reps in the tank here. So no, the one set of muscle group a week is not gonna cut it when you're leaving eight reps in reserve. We call that not training in our business, you know. So, yeah, it's just been really fascinating to see those trends come and go and hopefully we'll snap out of this one and get into. Let's go back to the fun one where people like to go to the gym and train with their buddies and enjoy it. How does that sound?
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A
I like it. And I. Can I say something controversial? Yeah. Maybe even anti science.
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B
Yeah, I don't like science. Go for it.
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A
That's stupid. You actually kind of brought this up. It's like whenever we pour concrete around a heuristic and don't. Don't challenge it, that's a problem. I think that is when we make rules, it's really important to figure out where did that rule come from and what is it based on? And when it comes, if it's based upon a mechanistic theory or a scientific hypothesis rather than actual data or a rule that came from a rather dogmatic group that only applies in this very specific context, that's where you can get into trouble. However, if you base a rule or a heuristic around repeated observations from, like, the actual anecdote, not the social media Hyped or controversial take that gets amplified on social media or the just gets repeated, but people have never actually tried it. But if you talk to a whole bunch of different bodybuilders in different contexts and they all seem to be like, oh, every time I do this, this happens. Like if they're actual observational experiences, true anecdotal evidence, not dogmatic things that have been repeated but never tried or tested, there's very little risk. And I think that is quite interesting because it, you know, like automatically it couldn't have been a barrier to them getting to where they went. So they might have some belief that is inaccurate or the narrative is inaccurate, but the observation holds. So it's either not enough of an issue with the way it's viewed, or it is maybe an accurate view or sufficiently accurate. And I think it is this lack of effing around and finding out that is occurring right now. Like the young folks you're talking about who've only been lifting for months, maybe a year, they might have gotten a very specific dogmatic message of you want to be doing a high frequency, low volume approach and never go past a 2 rir, but they've never anchored a 0 rir or failure, right? So that drift becomes, not only do I not know what a real 2 rir is and it's actually a 4, but I'm also afraid of going past a 2 rar. So I'm not going to err on the side of let me go to failure, I'm going to err on the side of let me do a 4rar. And then there's no volume to make up for it. Because I've also been told that you can't do a high volume program because that'll also produce fatigue. And at best, these things are true if it's as real 2rar, and if you're actually doing a higher volume approach. But they're not. These are dogmatic things that have been repeated and repeated, repeated, repeated and then amplified by social media. So in my mind, what you were talking about, the way you just didn't really worry about it. And I think if you look at a lot of those dogmatic things that come from science, they started with a shitty scientific hypothesis that somehow became a, a rule, you know, like growth hormone is what actually causes growth. So we got to do, you know, like all of the things that our field we kind of are embarrassed about. Like when we were focused on like a mechanism rather than an actual empirical.
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B
Acute elevations in testosterone after a workout.
- [33:38]
A
Absolutely Almost all of the acute stuff. And now it's done a little differently. It's coming from like a science adjacent kind of epistemology of we can't trust the outcome data so we need to observe the mechanisms. Which just goes back to the same problem. Like good anecdotal observations that are agreed across a huge cross section of bodybuilders doing the same thing in different contexts who don't talk to each other is high quality observational evidence. Right. You could call those outcomes to some degree, but just poorly controlled. But then like the testosterone study or the growth hormone study, that acute data, yeah, that's an actual empirically changed intervention, but it's not the outcome of interest. We're interested and they're not even measuring hypertrophy. So you can get to that same problem from different avenues of doing it through the peer reviewed literature or not. And you can also get to the same monitoring, observe change to see what happens in the trenches or in a scientific study. And there's weaknesses to both, but those are like there's this low risk. So if you're going to pour concrete around something, make sure that that thing was based upon the real world observations, not just group think. Right. Or speculation. And I think that's the issue we're having right now. If you were to just truly uncover like what do people just do and what seemed to work and then in what context and you understood that, you'd be like, I'm pretty confident that if I train really hard a lot, things are only going to go well and I might just have to dial back sometimes. But if it's. This rule is based upon an infographic which is based upon another infographic and I don't know where the origin came from and it seems to conflict with 70 years of what lifters have been doing, I would not feel comfortable, you know, pouring concrete all around that.
- [35:29]
B
Yeah, no, for sure. It's. That's the thing that gets me is, you know, not to be a jerk, but people who have never at any point in their lives made a lot of gains, who will scoff at an extremely accomplished bodybuilder and be like, it's crazy that the world doesn't appreciate that I train way smarter than him. And it's like, well, yeah, but he like did the thing and got huge and was strong and stuff. So like at least what he's doing is on the menu of viable approaches. Right. And of course we'll throw out the whole drug, whatever, because obviously that has an independent effect on growth. But you get the idea, right? Like, there's enough bodybuilders who are excelling and doing well with this particular paradigm and maybe it doesn't match the most recent position stand to a T or the most recent meta regression that's popular on Reddit. It's like, well, we have to like live with the reality that people are succeeding across this broad spectrum of approaches. And that's a good thing. It helps us understand what's on the entire menu and we can then go through and say, well, do you want to try this? Do you want to try that? Which one seems to be the most parsimonious approach, the most direct path towards success? Looks like, you know, slightly better effect size on this side, on this side than that side. But then again, maybe you hate one of these training styles, so you go for the other. It's good to be able to incorporate that real world outcome data and pull it into whatever other decision making factors are kind of on the table.
- [36:55]
A
I love it. Can I give one more example? Then I'll leave this alone. Like you mentioned someone who might do rdls on one day and they find they can do like a lunge relatively close in proximity. You could potentially try to get there via just theory crafting. And if you really, really, really, really do understand things, you could get there. But if there's any flaw in your logicing and speculation, you could be wrong. But if you've actually done a lunge on one day and RDL the next day and you see that both are progressing over time and you've repeated that observation multiple times and you've been like, oh, I am going to failure on both days. Cool. It won't necessarily work for everyone, but like logicing it, you would go, well, the glutes are at their longest position in an RDL and they're training, you know, you're training to failure and that's going to be very fatiguing. And then, you know, a lunge also, same thing, maybe even deeper. But then you think, well, hold on, like, well, how much is the hamstring limiting factor in an rdl? And how much is the glute when your knee is bent and a lunge the limiting factor and you're taking the hammy out and maybe that's why it's. But so like, if you miss any of these pieces or if you take two different anthropometries or two different lunge distances or torso lengths, right, which dictates the level of, of or the degree of hip flexion, those things change. So just try it, I think, is the message that Trex and I want to say.
- [38:27]
B
Yeah, especially when it's like. Like there are certain things like, you know, now that Helms, we're. We're both running labs with a lot of expensive toys, and you can actually, like, run big studies. There's some things that you'd say, I'd like to try this, but we'd have to invest $200,000 to try it. And so therefore we're not going to try it. Right. This stuff is going into the gym, which you're already going to do five days a week, and just doing it. It's going to take you 10 minutes of your time. Hold your breath, you know, give it a shot, you know, throw caution to the wind, be safe, you know, don't actually harm yourself. But these are very triable things, Helms. So, yeah, it does kill me when people lose that kind of spirit of experimentation, which, frankly, every person I know that's gotten into the space of, like, making fitness content that is mostly what kept them interested for 20 years is the fun of experimenting and trying new things and trying to continuously update how they view what seems to be working for them. Informed by the literature, but ultimately, you know, put into practice in the gym. And sometimes the stuff you do in the gym doesn't necessarily have to come straight from the literature.
- [39:33]
A
Well said.
- [39:34]
B
All right, Helms, quick question for you here. So you've talked a little bit about some adjacent topics, so I'm not going to insist you go into every nook and cranny here, but we had a multifaceted question about reds or RED s relative energy deficiency in sport. So this individual basically believes that they have. I'm going to call it reds because it rolls off the tongue better. They believe they have reds based on some clinical indicators. They have elevated liver enzymes and also an elevation in cholesterol, despite the fact that they eat a very high quality diet that would typically be associated with low cholesterol levels. And that was generally the case until they started having these reds symptoms. So when it comes to reds, what exactly is going on here? You can touch on the liver enzymes or not, but certainly the cholesterol. That's an interesting wrinkle. And this person said they've even seen some dietitians say that saturated fats can be good, specifically when you have this cholesterol elevation from low energy availability or red. So they're just trying to make some sense around this and try to figure out what's going on.
- [40:52]
A
No, this is A great question. I think one thing to realize is that, like, elevated liver enzymes is, is like, generally used as a proxy for some type of recovery because, like, there's, you know, cellular and muscular stress. So if you're looking at like, ast, alt, which are both, you know, found in the liver and skeletal muscle, you can see the impacts of a prolonged diet or intense exercise show up there. And there are limitations to those. And you can get like, kind of like false red flags and there's additional testing you can do. So, you know, a parallel also would be. So, for example, when you're looking at other systems, like creatinine, for example. So creatinine is often used as a marker of like, muscle damage, renal function. And, you know, if your doctor, uninformed of, say, sports medicine sees elevated creatinine, they're concerned about kidney function and that's not liver. But this is just, this is useful right now. What they don't realize is that they might realize it, but they may not put all these pieces together. Creatinine is the breakdown product of creatine. The phosphocreatine system is the primary energy system we use to lift weights. And the amount of creatine we have is proportional to skeletal muscle mass. And the amount of creatinine we'll have would be proportionate to the skeletal muscle mass, how much work it's done to result in the use of phosphocreatine for the breakdown of it. And then if you also take creatine, not all of that is necessarily going to be deposited in your muscles. So if you take creatine, have a lot of muscle and then just trained, you're probably going to have slightly elevated creatinine. Now, if you were to take cystatin C as a different measurement of renal function, which doesn't take into account that at all, you could get a very different, you know, look at things. So there's context here, I guess, is what I'm getting at, if I may.
- [43:00]
B
Helms, just a funny aside. I had a buddy who was and is a very good bodybuilding coach. And he was coaching a person that he was. He was his coach, but also a good buddy, and they actually trained together. Here's the problem. Helms. My buddy was my buddy, and my buddy's client was a top 10 Olympia bodybuilder. And there was a big gap between the two. Probably about £100, almost. Not 100, but close. And so he was training with him and like, try like fighting his ass off to go rep for rep with this top 10 Olympia guy in the gym. And so he actually sent me an email with his blood work and he said, hey, my doctor's a little concerned about this. He sends it over, this guy's literally killing himself in the gym. His liver enzymes, creatinine, creatine kinase. His doctor, who's not a sports medicine doctor, said, as far as I can tell, you had a heart attack, you have a pretty advanced case of cancer, and you're in multiple organ failure. Your liver and your kidneys are both shutting down. And he sent it to me and I said, it looks like you're training really hard, I think. I'm not worried about your body, but I am worried about your mind and spirit right now. I think you really need to just take a couple plates off and it'll be okay. But all that is to say, I would imagine a lot of people, whether they have REDS or not, who are engaged in really serious training, probably plenty of endurance training, maybe a combination of the two, would not at all be unusual to see an elevation of liver enzymes compared to the general population.
- [44:38]
A
Exactly. So that's good to know. And if you were to really want to get an accurate view of, say, kidney or liver function independent of just the training stress, even not with reds, you would need to make sure you were hydrated, take a couple of days off of training, and then get some complementary measures that are not necessarily muscle dependent because cystatin C is in all nucleated cells in the body. So it's not going to be scaling to your muscle mass or whether you did a workout that will give you, say, a better idea of kidney function. And yeah, like AST and ALT are markers of liver function, but they are also found in skeletal muscles. So these enzymes will leak into your blood during the recovery window from training. So, you know, depending upon how hard the training was, what you're adapted to your individual genetics, like one to three days, you might have elevated ALT and ast, and that could be unrelated. But if you take a few days off and you still have elevated ALT and ast, that could be indicative of, say, something like reds or another clinical condition, for that example. So the question, getting back to it that's just, I think, useful to understand is your clinician, who might be very, very knowledgeable across a broad aspects of health, may not know those specific things. Right. So when someone is experiencing intense. Say again?
- [46:08]
B
I said cholesterol.
- [46:09]
A
Refocusing cholesterol. Thank you. I appreciate that. When someone is experiencing metabolic adaptation and the various symptoms of low energy availability especially become significantly problematic to the point where it is red S or reds. If you want to have it roll off your tongue, then there are some interesting adaptations that do occur. So we talked about, you know, liver enzymes, AST and alt. But the specific liver enzymes which break down cholesterol, including ldl, will often get down, regulated, consequent to metabolic adaptation, which can create a temporary elevation in cholesterol and even ldl. And those are sometimes happening at the same time as having very low triglycerides, which can tell you something like, okay, I'm using a lot of energy. There's not a lot of like, you know, just fat floating around in my body. My blood pressure's low, my heart rate's low, my triglycerides are low, but I have elevated LDL and cholesterol that are those that, that constellation is often present in people who are relatively lean and energy restricted and have been for a while. So that's, I think, common. But not a lot of clinicians know that. They might think, oh, maybe this person has like the APO A variant or they're, you know, they have, you know, they might not realize that this is actually kind of a temporary metabolic condition consequent to dieting. And you'll see other things if you do extensive testing. Like you'll see elevated SHBG and probably lower testosterone. Lower estrogen in men is something that often people don't flag or understand. When you have really low body fat. That is where we actually convert an aromatase testosterone to estrogen in men. That's another sign that you're potentially too lean. And women sometimes, often will have reductions in testosterone and free testosterone, but it's a smaller number, it's harder to measure. And they will sometimes, but not always see drops in estradiol. And then there's a bunch of markers. I'm not going to go through all the blood work you could have, but, and I. So the one thing this question specifically asked Trex, that I am not aware of is the idea that saturated fat could have some type of positive impact. And maybe my brain's thinking like, oh, that can get converted if it's too low into certain sex hormones. But I'm not confident in that claim. But everything else before that in the question is accurate. Like if you have elevated liver enzymes and high cholesterol and you're lean dieting and training, that could be indicative maybe of having some degree of low energy availability. But I think it's important to acknowledge that red s Is the cause is low energy availability and if it's problematic chronic and or you get lean enough and you have a high activity, which is why it's all in the sport context, then the result is red S. But red S is actually symptom dependent. And if you look at some of the position statements, they talk about physiological symptoms and performance symptoms and those physiological symptoms can include a downregulation in immune function. It can include a downregulation or a change in the gut microbiota and your experience of, of gastrointestinal function and distress. It can manifest as impacting energy levels through glycogen depletion as well as changes in sympathetic and parasympathetic tone. It can also manifest in getting wakefulness symbols signals in the middle of the night disrupting sleep. So there's a new class of sleep medication, I don't know if you've heard of them, called I think dual agonist orexin orexin or another dual orexin receptor antagonists. So they're basically blocking the wakefulness signal, which are pretty useful. People who wake up in the middle of night ruminating and feeling like this kind of oh, I'm, I'm up and awake. And a pretty common thing you'll see in certain people when they diet and have been experiencing pretty substantial deficit and are getting quite lean is it's not just they, they get groggy and they wake up in the morning like oh fuck, why am I awake? It's 3am and they can fall back asleep. It's, they wake up like ready to rock and they can't go back to sleep. And it's kind of like hey, go hunt. Is what we think the evolutionary biology remnant is that causes that. And then eventually they go, well screw it, I'm gonna go do that. But then they get tired at like 2pm and they're crashing when they go to bed, but then they're up in four hours and it's awful being someone who experiences it. So the sleep aids that people try to take typically don't fix that problem. They are taking a sedative which kind of knocks you out. Like if you look at like the over the counter Gen 1 antihistamines, they have these sedation like effects which just force going to sleep. And they can actually, they alter sleep architecture probably in a way that maybe doesn't make chronic use worth it. But the orexin inhibitors, they don't necessarily make you tired, but they block wakefulness. So if you take it like too late in the night, you feel really groggy when you try to wake up, or you might not wake up, but they don't sedate you or make you fall asleep. So I think that's something that tells you a little bit about RED s symptoms, is you'll be dead tired and then you can't sleep consistently. Your immune function, you're getting sick more often if you're not doing resistance training. And especially if you're seeing pretty substantial changes in hormones, especially among women, you can see bone mineral density losses, especially if there's the way that you're in. An energy deficit also includes malnourishment or a lack of certain vitamins and minerals. Right. So you'll also generally see if you're actually experiencing reds losses in certain types of performance reductions like muscular endurance and endurance are probably more noticeable immediately. You know, strength tends to be pretty resilient, but you probably will see reductions in neuromuscular performance as well because it does accelerate muscle loss. So I think that broadly answers the question. But just remember, like, if you're experiencing reds, you should know it or you've been experiencing it so chronically that you've just, you haven't been making gains and you feel terrible and you're habituated to it, which does sometimes happen. But if you're still making progress and you know, you haven't been sick in a year and you're, you got some funky blood work, you might be experiencing like non problematic low energy availability. You're kind of skirting the edges. But I would encourage you to do like further looking into your blood work.
- [53:03]
B
Now. How concerned would you be? You know, we've talked in the past about the concept of a quote unquote lean mass hyper responder. The special cohort of people who allegedly has sky high LDL and for whatever reason they're being told not to worry about it, even though there's no real clear reason why they would not be experiencing the same elevations in heart disease risk. But so what would you tell someone who says, well, hey, every time I maybe prep for a bodybuilding show, between my training and dieting, I get these RED symptoms. I get this elevation in ldl. Should they be worried about it?
- [53:40]
A
Now this is an important distinction. Many people who are being assessed in these lean mass hyper responder studies are people who are very interested in fitness, but they're also dogmatically following a ketogenic or carnivore adjacent diet. And it's very, very high in saturated fat, not necessarily in an energy deficit. And there might be lean because they're involved in fitness, but they are typically seeing. I mean, I think that one paper had LDL levels that were two or three times the upper end of the reference range. Correct. What I have seen when I see blood work of competition bodybuilders with an extended period of a deficit getting quite lean but still having a well balanced diet is more like they've crept up from being 20% below the upper end of the reference range to being 5% above it. And they're a little concerned. Right. And I think those are two drastically different things. Like ideally you wouldn't want to stay in that state for years because it is kind of area under the curve of having more of these things floating around your blood and contributing to plaque formation and specifically a certain type of plaque formation that when it breaks up due to inflammation, it could cause issues. But I don't think that that temporary state is much less of an issue if for two months you're a few nanograms per deciliter over the end, versus because of my dogmatic approach to nutrition and my dietary beliefs, I am doubling the upper reference range for five years.
- [55:16]
B
Yeah. Yeah. And that's the craziest thing is like, if you go into the forums, you'll see, I've seen like screenshots and stuff that kind of go semi viral on Twitter. But it'll be, you'll see the folks who are like, hey, I've had an LDL of like 310, you know, for, you know, three times the upper limit for 10 years and I'm doing fine. And then there will be a post and it's like, hey guys, I just got back from the hospital and like, this is weird, but I had a heart attack. And it's like, they're like, I don't know what happened because I've been exercising, I've been eating a great diet, I've been keeping my LDL as high as I can, and for some reason I had a heart attack. Now, of course on Twitter there's some very. My approach on this is to feel just awful for people who experience like very serious health issues from this stuff and to be extremely. Just to be a complete asshole to the people who are espousing this as if it's some kind of health oriented intervention. But unfortunately on Twitter you will see people who kind of twist the screws and make fun of people who are like coming back and saying like, hey, I just had a heart attack. I don't support that. I think that's totally, totally out of line and mean spirited. But when someone is making a YouTube video saying, hey everyone, I think it's a totally fine idea to keep your LDL at three times the upper limit for a couple or a few decades, then I think any amount of snark that you want to pile onto the table is totally appropriate. But yeah, the short version of the story is with that prep athlete in prep or with an endurance athlete who's kind of hovering in and out of reds. At that point you're kind of looking at and saying, okay, well it's an issue of magnitude. Right. You're not three times the upper limit, you're 5% above. So it's the magnitude issue and then also the just time exposure area under the curve of, especially if you're prepping, this is something you're experiencing for a couple months, every couple years, for the duration of your competitive career, which probably isn't going to be 70 years. Right. So those, the transient nature of it I think really lessens the blow in terms of how concerned you would be. And even frankly, you know, if you're talking about maybe an endurance athlete and they will flirt with more prolonged year over year kind of straddling that line sometimes with reds, even for them. Then you also have to balance like, okay, you are hovering around this upper limit for ldl. And then on the other hand, you're doing everything a human being could conceivably do to reduce your risk of heart disease or cardiovascular issues. So the net balance of it, I wouldn't necessarily be absolutely terrified. I would still try to. Certainly if I had any kind of symptomatic reds I would work my way toward how do I train effectively and compete effectively while not making myself have unfavorable symptoms that hinder performance or hinder my health. But if you're just like, hey, I feel great, I feel fine, I'm performing the way I like and my LDL is just kind of hovering at that upper, upper threshold. Again, health decisions, those trade offs are all personal. But I personally, if I were in that situation, I really wouldn't lose a lot of sleep over it.
- [58:34]
A
Well said. Yeah, I think. Can I give a little more helpful information if someone really does want to keep unpacking this and figure out clinically what's going on? Yeah. So what is ultimately happening when you have low energy availability that results in physiological changes is, you know, I kind of spoke in broad terms about the liver downregulating certain enzymes. The specific one that often gets downregulated is type 1 deodinase so dial 1. And it is very sensitive to calories and carbohydrate availability. And it does two important things that also decreases the conversion of T4 to T3 in addition to meaning that there are fewer LDL receptors. So if you're seeing higher LDL, but thyroid looks exactly the same as it has and that's been doing really well, that could be something else. Right. And if you see low T3 because of that lack of conversion to T4 to T3 and you know, probably having suppressed metabolism and you're also seeing higher ldl, then maybe red s. But you can also differentiate further. Like you could then look at the specific APOB sub fraction of ldl, which is probably more indicative of this being a dietary or genetic issue. And what you will often see is that LDL is high, but APOB is still reasonably low because of all the other lifestyle factors you have diet, the fact that your HDL is probably high and you will see low thyroid. And then you can be like, yeah, this is probably red S. But again, I would just say like reds is symptom based. And if, unless you've been in this chronic state for a long time, like, you know it. So yeah, I don't know if that. Do you think that was helpful or just, you know, unnecessary information?
- [60:21]
B
No, no, yeah, I think that's very helpful. But I tell you what else. I think we are at the end of the show here. So we're going to do a pretty quick little Q A. We've got some good episodes coming up in the future. I know we, we've had, we had a lively discussion before we started recording about a couple more methods focused episodes we want to do. And I know everyone's thinking, oh, I'll remember to skip those. But I think people are going to be really interested because we are going to be talking about, you know, some like, potential sources of error that come up with using DEXA to measure changes in body composition and even using ultrasound using changes in muscle thickness to make inferences about hypertrophy over time. There's been a couple papers and a couple discussions lately that have really, really cast serious doubts on these methods, which I think for our lifting oriented audience would perk up some ears. Because if, if hypothetically someone were to really undermine the utility of ultrasound muscle thickness to make inferences about hypertrophy, you would say, well, wait a minute, that contradicts my 13 favorite papers about how I choose to lift, you know, so much of the literature in the last 15 or 20 years. Has been based on this extrapolation of changes in muscle thickness via ultrasound and saying this is what makes muscles grow better or worse. So we're going to get into some of that with some new research that's coming out. Also Helms, I've got them sitting on my table right now. There have been three papers in the last month that have all basically come out and said the constrained model of energy expenditure is stupid and bogus and we detest any of those who speak about it favorably. So I've been getting some of my publications, yes, so I've been getting all sorts of DMs about these papers and I physically printed them out because my life is a disaster. I have a 10 hour plane flight coming up. So I'm going to be reading these during my flight and trying to get an assessment of what I'm going to do. So I appreciate folks who have sent me DMs about that and I am going to dive into those and give them the attention they deserve and then kind of come back and, you know, basically say what I glean from them how I think that impacts all the previous stuff that we've done related to the constrain model, exercise energy compensation. But I do think, I do think it's. I. Here's the thing, Helms, I try not to like force my favorite topics upon the audience. Like, you know, with mass, I have to be like really careful about saying, okay, you can't write about exercise energy compensation again or the constraint model again because you write for the audience, you don't write for yourself. But I will say it's an active area of research and there's a lot of really conflicting perspectives among really esteemed top level researchers. So you do kind of have to go back to it somewhat frequently when it is an area of research that's pretty fluid. So I'm excited to read them though, honestly. Holmes, Regrettably, I don't make any money from the constrained energy expenditure model. Yeah, it's really tragic. But if the whole thing fell apart today, or if it fell apart months ago and I'm just learning today, that actually won't impact me economically. It doesn't have my name on it. So I don't have a legacy to uphold here. So I'm very open to all sorts of conflicting and contrasting ideas and I'm excited to dig into those and then kind of come back to the people and say, you know, here's, here's my best take on a very fluid and emerging area of research.
- [64:04]
A
I can't wait to see it. And I'm just glad that I have you and Lauren and Mike to keep me from only writing for myself because I don't have the self restraint.
- [64:15]
B
Yeah, well, we police each other to the extent that it's possible. But in any case, Helms, we got some great episodes coming up. I'm really excited about that.
- [64:25]
A
So everyone also with with with Dr. Laura, Gene Gregario is also coming up.
- [64:31]
B
Yep, yep. We got a great interview talking all about exercise and bone. So if you are listening and you have bones, you are going to have a vested interest in listening to that that episode and learning what you can do to keep all your bones and to also keep them intact and prevent them from breaking. So really good episode there. So folks, make sure you stay tuned. We're going to have some good stuff. Also, I'm sure we're going to do another Q and A relatively soon. So if you want to get your question, I'll be honest, folks, because I didn't promote this for a long time. There's actually some openings. If you want to sneak a question in and get it to the top of the pile. Head over to massresearchreview.com ironculture submit a question for the Q and A, and we would love to discuss it on a future episode. Of course, massresearchreview.com, go become a member of that community. Make sure you support our friends@elitefts.com and that's going to do it for this episode, Helms. We're going to sign off and we are going to encourage everyone to have a fantastic week. And we will see you all in seven days with yet another episode of Iron Culture.