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The Neuro Experience
If You Want To Build Muscle FAST You Need To Start Doing THIS! | Brad Schoenfeld
01:13:07
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- [00:00]
Brad Schoenfeld
Majority of literature shows that if you just do a half repetition in the lengthened portion, it's as effective as doing the full range of motion.
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Louise Nicola
What? We can also build muscle by doing high reps and low weights. That disproves everything that we thought we knew over the last 20 years.
- [00:18]
Brad Schoenfeld
Certainly some research supporting it, that type 1 fibers might be more predisposed to growth with lighter loads and type 2 fibers might be more predisposed to growth with heavier loads. If that is the case, combining some higher rep training and some lower, heavier and lighter load training might optimize hypertrophy to a greater degree.
- [00:36]
Louise Nicola
Do you think that we've got a problem there with maintenance and building muscle because of GLP1s?
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Brad Schoenfeld
Now GLP1s, they intend to induce greater or more rapid weight loss. More rapid weight loss is generally associated with more rapid muscle loss.
- [00:52]
Louise Nicola
What is the single most dangerous lie being told right now about how to build muscle?
- [00:57]
Brad Schoenfeld
One of the things that I think is really counterproductive is I'm Louise Nicola
- [01:04]
Louise Nicola
and this is the Neuro Experience. Brad, this is a very exciting time for me. You and I have known each other for quite some time. We met back in 2020 and here we are. And since then, I believe that you are one of the most highest published people in the area of muscle growth. I think you've got now around 400, close to 400 papers, close to 400. When you first started out in the 90s, you were a personal trainer and then you went into academia. And just as the natural progression in life, things change and that's what science does. What do you think was a belief that you held back then in the 90s as it related to hypertrophy and muscle growth? That is no longer true.
- [01:54]
Brad Schoenfeld
There's been quite a few. I think the one that stands out probably the most is that you have to train all out failure to optimize muscle development. So I came from the old school, either you go all out or you go home. If the vein in the side of my head wasn't bulging at the end of every set, I wasn't training hard enough. And the research that we have on the topic now really shows you can be couple reps or three short of failure and still get roughly the same amount of muscle growth, which is, first of all, it's a revelation given my previous thoughts. Like the old bodybuilding school mentality, not only was I training a failure, but I was doing drop sets and four straps. But it also, I think has a lot of importance for adherence because a Lot of people don't want to lift weights or reverse to it because it's, there's discomfort involved and the closer you are to failure if you're, you know, if you go to muscle fear there'll be more discomfort. So the fact that you can stay a couple reps short of failure, which by the way is still training really hard, people think, well you're a few reps if you're not training a failure, it's no, you're not really training hard. If you're a couple reps short of failure, you're still training really hard. But it's not, certainly not as discomforting as it would be if you go to all out failure. And I think that can help with adherence in the general public. And I think the last stats I see, I saw was that 80% of the population does not lift weights on a regular basis or when I say lift weights, perform resistive exercise, which encompasses lifting weights and can be other body weight exercise. But the statistics are pretty grim given the importance of resistance training.
- [03:38]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, I think you can probably agree with me. We've seen this massive influx of people really understanding the term longevity muscle as a longevity organ, the importance of muscle. I think it really took place even though you as a scientist have always known this. But I think the general public has now understood in the last three to
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Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
four years, hey, muscle is important.
- [04:00]
Louise Nicola
So I think we've seen like this uprise of people doing resistance training.
- [04:06]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, it's getting better. That's not saying much. Like I said, there's still a huge number of huge percentage of the population that doesn't. So a lot of times people can know, yeah, it's beneficial, but I don't have time or I don't want to go through the effort involved and whatever the excuse is. So it's one thing to know that something or to have heard research on the topic, it's another thing actually to put it into action. I think that's where these types of revelations can help to promote adherence participation.
- [04:40]
Louise Nicola
Exactly. I think I really want to start and open up the field of longevity. And you're at your third edition for your book, correct? Have you included longevity in this third edition?
- [04:54]
Brad Schoenfeld
Well, not really because it's focused on just the optimization of muscle or not only optimization, but just the development of muscle size, muscle mass and optimization as well. It kind of maybe in a future edition that can be something to touch on, but it's such a wide ranging field. I mean I do touch on sarcopenia and the effects of Aging certainly. But getting into the health related benefits is somewhat outside the scope of the book.
- [05:22]
Louise Nicola
I want to ask a left field question. With the amount of resources that we have right now, the amount of information on hypertrophy, what do you think makes this book different?
- [05:32]
Brad Schoenfeld
Well, it really is not only the first but still the only book that has really delved into the scientific aspect of understanding the mechanistic aspect and then putting the mechanisms into perspective with the application. There's a lot of books that are just more guidelines as to you with a lot of opinions based. This really is a scientific book, it's a textbook. And there really is no other certainly that I'm aware of textbook that just deals with muscle growth.
- [06:05]
Louise Nicola
So I want to go into some of the, the biggest subjects within that book and I actually want to start with a study that I read with Stu Phillips and this is the one that you were talking about where I, you know, I, I documented this on Instagram like I think it was in December and it was the first time that I've seen an academic paper really put forward the fact that what you just said, that we can also build muscle by doing high reps and low weights, which is amazing because it disproves everything that we've thought we knew over the last 20 years. Can you walk me through the mechanisms by which that happens?
- [06:41]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, sure. So first of all, that's certainly another area where I've almost done a 180 on in terms of my opinion because it was always taught that you did really light weights and you're not going to not going to build appreciable muscle and. Funny, somewhat funny story. It's funny looking back at it, but Stu, actually, Stu's a good friend of mine and a terrific researcher. He published a paper back in 2012 on untrained subjects just doing leg extensions and he looked at 80%1 RM versus 30% and showed that 30% and 80% had virtually identical growth. And I'll never. He posted this on Facebook. I went on Facebook and I said, come on Stu, these are untrained subjects just doing leg extensions. I said, they can do spin cycling and they'll get jacked. I said I'm going to carry the same study out or a similar study in well trained subjects, total body workouts and you're going to see it's not going to be enough stimulus to promote substantial muscle. Well, long story short, a year later I finished that study and no difference. It's basically the exact same results and there's been literally Dozens of studies over time since then that have showed the same thing. If you're asking mechanistically, it's somewhat difficult to tie in mechanisms, but at least the speculation is, is that the mechanical tension is long. So it's predicated by the way the light weights are training very close to failure, to failure or close to failure. As long as you have substantial effort, the last repetitions are going to promote substantial mechanical tension, which is the primary driver of hypertrophy. And thus you're going to induce similar, somewhat similar muscle growth. I'll say this, the one caveat that I'd give is that there may be differences. And I want to confirm this in the perspective that it's may because we don't have good evidence on it yet. But there's some, certainly some research supporting it that type 1 fibers might, might be more predisposed to growth with lighter loads and type 2 fibers might be more predisposed to growth with heavier loads. And by the way, for those who don't know, type 1 fibers are endurance related fibers and type 2 fibers are quote unquote strength related fibers. Conceivably, if that is the case, combining some higher rep training and some lower, heavier and lighter load training might optimize hypertrophy to a greater degree. Whole muscle hypertrophy. But on a whole muscle basis, if you just look at one versus the other, virtually identical growth.
- [09:11]
Louise Nicola
I want to talk about the difference between type one and type two as you just elucidated, but from my understanding, type two is the one most closely linked to longevity and the one that atrophies the fastest. Is that correct? So we, we lose it as we get older, Correct?
- [09:27]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah. And sarcopenia is the age related loss of muscle. And over time the type 2 fibers are more predisposed to atrophy than type 1. Various, at least speculative reasons. And not only that, there's evidence that if in severe cases of sarcopenia there's actually programmed death of where actually you lose the type 2 fibers. And it's very important from a functional capacity because that isn't. The type 2 fibers are involved in power and people experience falls as they get older. These type 2 fibers are what helps to reverse the fall. You're not able to avoid a fall if you don't have a lot of power producing fibers.
- [10:09]
Louise Nicola
One of the best ways to improve brain energy metabolism is to make sure that you have adequate ketones circulating in your body. This is why I ingest ketone iq. I'm obsessed with ketones. They're one of the brain's most efficient energy sources, especially as we age and glucose handling changes. I use it for deep work or for long days when I want to focus without caffeine or crashes. But, but I also use it just in my day to day to make sure that I am neurologically adequately fueled. If you haven't tried ketones, you must. These ones taste great and you can get 30% off your subscription@ketone.com neuro+ get a free gift with your second shipment. So it's really important to be able to maintain those. And, and, and can we regrow them?
- [11:01]
Brad Schoenfeld
Generally, no. You can make the fibers that you have bigger. That, so it's not like you lose all the type 2 fibers, but there's some of the data I've seen, there's a loss of 20, can be up to 25% of them, but you can make the type 2 fibers that you have larger. Again, I think the, from, at least from the literature I've seen, the death has to do with nerves being not innervated properly. If the fibers are not properly innervated by the nerves, you're going to lose the capacity to develop the fiber. But you can make the fibers that you have stronger and bigger and stronger. And thus you can help to avoid falls and other functional aspects.
- [11:44]
Louise Nicola
When we look at the literature on brain health, right. We've seen, and I've published on this, that even just two days a week of resistance training can have meaningful effects on mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease risk. We're seeing a reduction of upwards of 30 to 50%. Right. Which is, which is really big. And that's just two days a week. But where I, what I'm trying to understand is, you know, when you go back to the, you know, higher reps, lighter weights, it doesn't involve as much neural real estate. You know, from a neuromuscular perspective. Right. So when we're lifting lighter weights, we're not really activating as much neural real estate in our brain, is that correct?
- [12:28]
Brad Schoenfeld
You know, certainly the neural neurology is not my area of expertise. I'm certainly aware of a lot of literature on, first of all, on mood depression. There's a lot of evidence. Muscle itself secretes myokines, which are substances produced within the muscle. And some of them are sent throughout the bloodstream. One of them is bdnf, which is involved in brain health. Um, so developing your muscles themselves helps to produce the myokines. If you're asking during the actual activity of lifting, I'M not aware the motor unit recruitment so. Well, the motor unit recruitment's gonna be somewhat. So there might not be as high type 2 fiber unit recruitment. That's where I talked about preferential type 1 versus type 2 hypertrophy. But what I'd say is the evidence we have, even if it's not complete type 2 recruitment, in high rep and lighter load training, you're getting a substantial portion of the motor unit pool. And again, this is predicated on training to failure. I think that's one of the limitations with some of the research. They look at lightweight training where they're stopping 10 reps short of failure and you're not stimulating the muscles first of all, and likely not stimulating brain activity, I would assume. But again, that's really somewhat outside of my area of expertise.
- [13:49]
Louise Nicola
So if somebody listening to this is thinking, okay, so I can go into the gym and I can really just perform lightweights. But there is a caveat. As you said, we do have to be getting to a, a failure and we have to be fatiguing close to failure. Close to failure. And does it. Are we talking like we can go upwards of. Because I don't, I wouldn't see a Mike Israel in the gym doing lightweights, for example, to failure. Maybe. I don't know what his training schedule looks like, but I would imagine that men are choosing still to go back to the old phase, which is 3 by 10 or 4 by 10 reps.
- [14:26]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, so a couple things there. Number one, we have evidence up to 30 to 40 reps can produce roughly similar whole muscle hypertrophy as 10 reps. Now the question then becomes what is the practicality of it? And what I'll say is high rep training is not fun if you're going close to failure. So study we carried out that I mentioned was on resistance trained individuals. They had an average of three to four years training experience. Half of them puked the first week of training. I mean, it's a group, there's a lot of acidosis that is produced during the training. Now it does dissipate. So the early phases, if you keep doing it, you're going to get just like almost anything, the body acclimates to it, but it's still not. The longer you're under tension, the more unpleasant it gets to be. And that's why you know, when you're training with lesser, with heavier loads and thus less reps, you get the set over with quicker and people can deal with it better. So I'm not saying that you should be using Lighter weights. Although I am saying that if you're a bodybuilder, I do recommend having some sets that are in the 20 to perhaps 30 upwards of 20 reps just because you may get type one benefits. And if you can optimize type one and type two hypertrophy, the combination can give you conceivably greater whole muscle hypertrophy. You don't have any evidence to the contrary that it hurts. There's some evidence that it helps. So I would say it's a worthwhile endeavor if your goal is absolute maximal muscle growth. On the other hand though, I want to point out that a lot of older individuals it's quite common, they have osteo issues in the joints. So let's say you have any type of joint related issue and you're lifting with heavier loads, it's going to put a strain on the joints. And a lot of older individuals have difficulty, feel pain, discomfort when they're training with these heavy loads. It's certainly an option to train with lighter loads and still get roughly similar benefits. I I'll also add strength is not as as high. You get greater strength with heavier loads. So there is. Even though muscle growth is roughly the same, we're similar on a whole muscle level, strength does follow a dose response where the heavier loads do produce greater strength. That said, you still get quite good strength related results with lighter loads. And from a functional standpoint, maximal strength probably is less important than muscle endurance. Most of your everyday tasks are more muscle endurance oriented than maximal strength oriented.
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Louise Nicola
So I'm seeing a lot of right now a big proportion of women especially opting in for ballistic power movements because we're now seeing how important it is like especially for longevity sarcopenia. What's your do you want to just outline for us like the difference between strength and power?
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Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah. So strength is the ability to produce force. Power puts a time component into it. So it's the ability to produce force over time. So the more quickly, the more rapidly you can produce force, the greater the power. That's the simple kind of the simple explanation from a training standpoint that mean if you want to train for power, you do need some power is built on a foundation of strength. So conceivably you do want to have strength type training heavier loads. But you also there's some quite compelling evidence that also doing some higher velocity training. I was involved in a meta analysis of older individuals and really interesting findings that adding power movements, meaning that on the concentric action you lift it quickly and then you lower it under control. So high velocity concentric action and then a controlled eccentric action produced substantially greater functional improvements in older individuals than just training in the traditional slower style.
- [18:28]
Louise Nicola
Is that still heavy though? Like at around 80% of 1 RM,
- [18:32]
Brad Schoenfeld
I generally don't even like to talk about percent 1 RM because at 80% 1 RM, some people will be able to get 8 reps, some people will be able to Get 12 reps, some people would be able to get 15 reps. There's a very wide range inter individual. It also depends on the type of exercise, upper versus lower body, multi joint, single joint. So I like to give more of a rep range but that's in the traditional 8 to 10 rep range.
- [18:57]
Louise Nicola
So this meta analysis you did, can you walk me through it a bit more?
- [19:01]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah. So we looked at all studies and it's been a while since we published it, but I believe it was 65 and older. They had to be average age 65 and older. And we looked at all studies that had a functional component like a get up and go test, a sit to stand test. These are all basically power type functional type tests that's done assessments in older individuals to see their functional capacity. And we looked at each group or each study had to have one group that did a power type exercise where they formed the concentric exercise very quickly and the other group had to do it slowly on the concentric and both X. On both groups they lowered the weight under control and we found the effect size was about.03. So it's a third of a standard deviation or so. Not a huge difference.
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Louise Nicola
But still.
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Brad Schoenfeld
But in my opinion that certainly could be practically meaningful for an older individual who's starting to become functionally dependent in their, in their everyday living.
- [20:04]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, I've seen that. There's this famous study that I always point out which was done on twins to show who has better brain functionality and it's the, the twin who was able to maintain lower leg power better than the twin who didn't. And it was directly proportional to how well they performed on cognitive tests and even down to how large their brains looked on MRIs. So I think there is a large component and a relationship between power, well, I mean strength as well, but power especially for longevity.
- [20:38]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, no question. Again we mentioned earlier that falls when you, when an older individual falls and breaks their hip, the mortality is I think 50% after two years and 50% another really obviously mortality is a huge issue, but functional capacity, quality of life. I think half of the older adults who experience a fall never fully recover their Functional capacity. So what prevents that is power. You're able to reverse the fall and if you don't fall, you're not going to fracture your hip.
- [21:15]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. You know, we brought up Stu earlier. I love Stu. He's been on the podcast as so incredibly well researched, well read. And it's funny because he's like, he's now bringing out his own podcast, I believe, which is great because he's like, I just want to just clear the air when it comes to all of the misinformation as you, you've probably seen on social media.
- [21:38]
Brad Schoenfeld
I just, by the way, did Stu's podcast and we covered several myths. It was a myth busting podcast, which
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Louise Nicola
I want to know because you've said that the fitness industry has a misinformation epidemic. What is the single most dangerous lie being told right now about how to build muscle?
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Brad Schoenfeld
Oh, there's so many. I mean, one of the things that I think is really counter productive is that there's one best way to build muscle and to build strength and just develop the body. You know, that's kind of the influencer method, is that you take off your shirt and you say, this is how I did it by my program. And many roads lead to gains. There's very many, you know, a plethora of ways that you can go about building muscle. The basics are gotta train hard, you gotta train relatively close to failure. As I mentioned two, maybe three rep short, you gotta be consistent and you gotta train all your major muscle groups. As a general rule, you gotta get a total body approach. Other than that, I mean, then it comes down first of all to n equals 1. People respond differently to different things. Some people respond better to somewhat lower volume. Somewhat higher volume. What are your goals? Do you want to be a bodybuilder? Do you want to be an athlete? Do you want to be just more fit? So there's so many things to take into account and certainly there's not one way to train.
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Louise Nicola
What are some other things that are happening right now that you think you need to clear the air on?
- [23:11]
Brad Schoenfeld
Well, I think one thing that's really counterproductive is the, is the promotion that you need to, or wouldn't even say promotion. I think it's just the thought in a lot of people that you need to spend a lot of time with resistance training, that people won't have time to do it. Now again, if you want to be a bodybuilder, if you're looking at bodybuilding style workouts, yeah, you're going to have to put in more time in the gym. The higher your expectations, your goals, the more effort and the more time you're going to have to expend to get to achieve that. But for the everyday individual, again, 80% are not even doing any muscle strengthening. Two 30 minute sessions or so per week is sufficient to see substantial improvements. Substantial, substantial. In multiple in strength and muscle development and metabolic health, brain health, et cetera. As long as you are training hard and as long as you're consistent. So you do it twice a week and you got to show up twice a week.
- [24:13]
Louise Nicola
I think the word hard is, is lost on many people. Even myself, for example. I don't feel like I can go as hard by myself as opposed to if I had a trainer with me, you know, getting me to that last rep, whether it was assisted or just speaking to me.
- [24:29]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, I mean a lot of people do think that. And again, it's a lot of, it comes down to motivation. You know, if it's easy to say I've not done, I did enough. And, but if your goal, I mean, again, I come from a bodybuilder. I was a natural bodybuilder for quite a number of years, my younger years. And I would have eaten the grass off my lawn if they had told me I was gonna get more jacked or more cut. But it was all motivation. So it comes down to intrinsically, do you really want to make the gains? And look, I'm not saying that you don't get anything if you're not training quite as hard, but to optimize results, particularly in the, in more minimum dose type routines, meaning shorter when you're not doing as much volume. You need to be training really hard or when I say need to, you're going to really compromise your gains if you don't.
- [25:22]
Louise Nicola
Guys, I am a big believer in testing instead of guessing, especially when it comes to your health. And for years we've been told to wait until something goes wrong before looking at our blood work. I mean that's, that's what the medical system is right now. You know, you break an arm and you're in the hospital and that's great,
- [25:41]
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- [25:43]
Louise Nicola
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Louise Nicola
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Louise Nicola
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Louise Nicola
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- [26:28]
Louise Nicola
up at functionhealth.com louisianicola or go to functionhealth.com use code neuro100@signup to get started. I think one of the other misalignments that we're seeing as well is the protein debate. The RDA, the 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight is needed to activate muscle protein synthesis. Where are you sitting now on that, on that nutritional line of how many grams of protein you need to increase hypertrophy?
- [27:03]
Brad Schoenfeld
Well, so the first thing we gotta talk about is whether you're talking about someone who's resistance training or not. If you're untrained. So when you resistance train, you need more protein to build muscle. You can maintain. If you're not resistance training, you're not building muscle. But from, from a maintenance standpoint, the RDA is 0.8 grams per kilogram per day.
- [27:23]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [27:24]
Brad Schoenfeld
And that even that has been shown to be too low. Just from a maintenance, it's probably somewhere around 1 gram per kilogram. But yeah, the literature that we have, I would say kind of the minimum threshold in my opinion, in my interpretation of the literature, is around 1.6 grams per kilogram per day. I think there are some.
- [27:45]
Louise Nicola
If you're resistance training.
- [27:46]
Brad Schoenfeld
If you're resistance training.
- [27:47]
Louise Nicola
Okay.
- [27:47]
Brad Schoenfeld
There is some muscle protein synthesis studies that show it can go up to around 2 grams per kg per day if you're in a caloric deficit, in an energy deficit. So if you're trying to lose weight, it can be even a little higher. We have actually research that's in review that does show that going above 2 grams may be to optimize, to order prevent muscle loss in a caloric deficit. But I would say if as long as you're at maintenance or above slightly above 1.6, I think for the majority of people, certainly again, this depends. If you're a bodybuilder, I'd say you want to earn the side of caution, you go a little higher, there's going to be inter individual needs. And everyone, when we research, we look at the means, the average responses, people are not an average. People are Individuals and there's going to be variation around that mean. So again for the average individual. Yeah, I would even say if you're a little below that, it's just not gonna make a meaningful difference. If you're 1514 probably it's, you know, might you not optimize? Yeah, but it's. Most people are not gonna look at themselves and say, oh my God, I missed that 0.2 grams of protein. But if you're an elite athlete or aspiring to be or a bodybuilder or even just someone who wants to maximize their muscle growth, going a little above I think is a good cost benefit. Yeah, you know, it's not going to hurt you.
- [29:17]
Louise Nicola
I was talking to, I forget his name now.
- [29:19]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
He was.
- [29:20]
Louise Nicola
Is a scientist, a PhD and he came on the podcast and he's done a documentary before on Netflix and he was telling me that he doesn't believe in the, the protein and the eating protein and that it's more, it's. We actually just only need the 0.8 grams. So that caused a lot of stir on. On my podcast and that's why we brought Stu in and Stu was more on the bandwagon of the stimulus is actually the most important thing. Like you can't just. Yeah. Over protein. You can't just eat 100 grams of protein a day and expect to build muscle. It's actually more stimulus. And so if even if you have to bring it down to let's say 80 grams a day, which is below your. Your threshold, but you're still hitting the gym and getting that mps at the gym, then that's the most important thing.
- [30:03]
Brad Schoenfeld
I completely agree with that that you can be deficient in protein. You'll still build muscle. But again, is it. What is our goal here? Is it to maximize muscle growth? So yeah, you're not going to max if you are at 0.8. Just all the literature we have. I'm not sure how someone could say that if they're actually they're a scientist. And looking at the literature, all the literature we have show there's a much greater need for protein in those to optimize. Doesn't mean you're not going to gain muscle. You can gain muscle in deficient state. So you can do a lot of things. You can train substandardly and still gain muscle. Doesn't mean that is optimal if you want to maximize. I mean to me again, I'm a former bodybuilder so I'm somewhat biased in that respect. But even if you're going to, to me, if you're going to do something, you should at least try to get the maximum benefit within what you can do. And I don't see why. There's very little to no downside of consuming the higher protein. I'm not seen any literature showing that at even the levels, even higher levels, but certainly at 1.6 grams per kilogram there'd be any health, health related issues with that.
- [31:14]
Louise Nicola
Back in the 90s you probably didn't see the rise of the GLP1s but now you're seeing that. Do you think that we've got a problem there with maintenance and building muscle because of GLP1s now?
- [31:27]
Brad Schoenfeld
I don't necessarily. It's interesting you bring that up because I'm collaborating on a study, see what happens. But that's gonna involve resistance training where we're actually looking at MRI, looking at muscle development. Most of, I mean the GLP1s where you're seeing this massive muscle loss along with the weight loss is without resistance training. So yeah, if you just. And by the way, anytime you diet without resistance training, the literature we have shows around a quarter of each pound that you lose is from fat free mass. Now remember this too as DEXA derived that we're estimating through DEXA dual, dual X ray absorpt geometry that is not fat free mass, is not muscle mass. It's, it constitutes, there's a component of muscle mass but it's all non fat tissue. One of the primary tissues is water. So adipose tissue, fat tissue is 20%, 25% water. When you lose fat, you're going to lose water from the fat cells along with that. So that will show up on DEXA as a loss of fat free mass. I'm not saying certainly there will be a loss of muscle mass as well. Now one of the issues with GLP1s is that they intend to induce greater or more rapid weight loss. So you see weight loss instead of having, let's say £2 a week, it might be £3 or £4 a week. More rapid weight loss is generally associated with more rapid muscle loss. So that is an issue. But if you're counteracting that with resistance training, I'm not convinced there's going to be that big an issue. And the other thing that I would say, and I kind of touched on this before, but having a higher protein intake during fat loss also has been shown to maintain more muscle.
- [33:16]
Louise Nicola
You know, the more that I hear and the more that I talk to people and study, the more confused I Get. But again, I've really just come back to it's not rocket science, but we're complicating it. I feel like we're just complicating everything. Going into the gym, doing a certain set of weights, because we're looking at somebody who does a certain thing on Instagram. We see the reels, we see this, and we're like, I want that. And at the end of the day, it's something that we've been doing for hundreds of thousands of years, right? You just go in, well, exercise. No, we haven't lived, but we have. It's. It's literally just exercise. It's stimulus. That's all it is. It's placing load upon a stimulus for it to grow.
- [33:59]
Brad Schoenfeld
I would completely concur with that for the general public.
- [34:02]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [34:03]
Brad Schoenfeld
And now again, if you're a bodybuilder, then you need to more scientific basis, in my humble opinion. I. I don't think it's even debatable that you're going to need to focus more not only on the science, but also inter individualizing your programming. Because you can't just use science. As I mentioned, each person is their own. N equals one experiment ultimately. But you need to micromanage your resistance training and your diet to a much greater extent if that's your job, if your goal is to maximize your growth. So the closer you get to your genetic ceiling, meaning everyone has a hypothetical point where they can no longer gain muscle. By the way, in my humble opinion, no one ever reaches that. It's kind of a concept because there's always different things you could do. There's no way to research have you actually gotten to your ceiling? And I've worked with very, very high level bodybuilders who've been able to add more muscle by just manipulating variables differently. But what I would say is the closer you get to your genetic ceiling, the more intuitive and insightful you have to be in doing things differently and manipulating variables to eke out the smaller amount of gains that you have left.
- [35:17]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, I know that for myself as well. And then we also forget that real life comes into play, especially for women, whether they're going through, maybe they're pregnant and they're going through childbirth and their primary caregiver, then it's like sleep loss. And all of this adds up at the end. I want to go back to the power, the power versus strength, because I looked up your meta analysis in JAMA Network in 2022, looking at the explosive lifting. Is that the one that we discussed earlier, we discussed that. I think what I find terrifying there is that when we're looking at, you know, you look at longevity science, right? And yes, it's about sarcopenia and the loss of sarcopenia, but it's also related to osteoporosis, Right. Osteoporotic fractures. As we get older, especially for women in, you know, in their menopausal years, if they're going to get a hip fracture, we know that they're not going to leave the hospital bed. Maybe they've got like a 30% chance of dying afterwards. And that's pretty scary as well. And so this notion of power is really important. I just want you to just walk me through what that might look like from a, an actual standpoint. If someone has 90 minutes a week to work out what does power and strength look like in that 90 minutes each week.
- [36:36]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah. So the art of programming is an art that is based on the underlying science and that again can be done in so many. There's not one way I can give you certain examples that doesn't mean that is the only way to approach it. And so here's what I will say. You don't need to do all power training. Certainly it's not like every set that you're doing needs to be explosive, concentric and then control decentric. Some portion of that 90 minutes should be devoted to it. It could be done, let's say you're doing three days a week, half hour sessions or two days a week, 45 minute sessions. You might do one day power training, another day strength training. You might do one extra multi joint exercise power and a single joint exercise strength. Again there's just so many different ways that can be rolled out. And what I would say is that needs to be specific to the individual preferences are going to come into play. The most important thing is adherence. Someone doesn't like what they're doing, doesn't matter. You can have the best program. If they don't enjoy the program, they say, you know what, I'm not going to do this. What good was it? So what I would say is as long as you are getting some strength related training in so and it doesn't have to be heavy, we talk about strength related. It should be somewhat heavier if possible. Probably 6 to 8 to 10 reps. Somewhere in that range would be. Now if you're a power lifter then you want to be doing one rep and three reps and then you want to be training really heavy. But for the general public, the cost Benefit there is not great in my opinion. There is certainly an increased injury risk spotters and there's other things that can be problematic with training really heavy but you're gonna get the majority of your maximal strength gains training with 6, 7, 8 reps and then using some somewhat lighter loads, let's say 10 reps and just training more explosively on the concentric and lowering it somewhat slowly.
- [38:39]
Louise Nicola
One thing that you haven't mentioned throughout all of this is aerobic training. Where do you sit right now with that and do you do any studies related to aerobic or anaerobic threshold training?
- [38:51]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, so I'm, first of all I'm a muscle researcher and bias certainly I, I, if you would ask me what is the most important thing you could do for your overall health and wellness, et cetera, I would say it's resistance training. With that said, I'm a huge proponent of aerobic training. I'm not an aerobic researcher so we've done, I might have been involved in a couple of studies over the years that in collaboration that have involved aerobic training but it's certainly not my focus. That said, I incorporate aerobic training. When I say aerobic training I, I'm a step count person. I really am a big fan of making sure I hit my roughly 10,000 steps. Not like it's a magic number but if I get somewhere close to 10,000 steps a little more, a little less on a daily basis, I think I'm hitting a pretty good target for aerobic fitness. There is good research showing that high intensity interval training can actually help to maximize optimize cardiorespiratory fitness, your maximal aerobic capacity which is linked to longevity. But again there's a trade off in terms of enjoyment. High, high intensity interval training not isn't necessarily fun. I do sometimes when I'm doing my walking as long as I'm not walking my dog who does not like to run. But I'll do some, I'll throw in some sprints as I'm walking to try to kind of get touch on that aspect. But I don't think that the, it's going to be hugely different in terms at least from a longevity standpoint. Again if you're a, an athlete who's an anaerobic athlete, you're going to certainly need to do high intensity interval training or some form of anaerobic threshold training.
- [40:36]
Louise Nicola
You said that you're obviously you're a muscle scientist. We've touched on the importance of muscle for different areas of longevity where you Know as it relates to, you know, functionality and being able to get out of bed. But what are the other areas that muscle is contributing to health?
- [40:55]
Brad Schoenfeld
Muscle improves virtually every organ in the body organ system. So first of all, metabolic health, one thing that's really underappreciated is that number one, having more muscle allows you to store more glucose. So metabolic disease, particularly diabetes or insulin resistance has to do with the inability to properly store carbohydrate in the. The muscle is the primary storage house. So you, the liver does store a little, but. And muscles become insensitive if you don't lift weights, they tend to become insensitive to storing glucose. And the more muscle you have, the more it's kind of a sink reservoir, restoring glucose, you have greater capacity. So that in itself will help to reduce the incidence of insulin resistance to diabetes, but it goes beyond that. Resistance training itself helps to wake up what are called GLUT. GLUT4 receptors, which are inside the muscle. They're kind of chaperones. They function as chaperones that basically meet, they go to the insulin receptor and they meet the glucose there to bring it into the cell. So they kind of chaperone the entry of glucose into the cell. It's been suggested, at least some of the literature indicates that a lack of activity of these GLUT4 transporters will enhance the possibility of or increase the possibility of insulin resistance. And, and even just at the receptor level, having greater affinity, a receptor affinity for allowing the entry of glucose. So on multiple levels, muscle is, is a metabolic synapse.
- [42:44]
Louise Nicola
Would you say that that's the most important correlation? Because I'm seeing some, some great correlations between even immunity.
- [42:52]
Brad Schoenfeld
Well, so there's certainly other. Yeah. So immune function. So as I mentioned earlier, muscle secretes myokines which, which helps with chronic inflammation.
- [43:00]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [43:01]
Brad Schoenfeld
So chronic inflammation has many negative effects on the body, including by the way, it diminishes muscle building capacity. So older individuals tend to have a lot of chronic inflammation. These cytokines and muscle secretes anti inflammatory myokines which help to counteract this chronic inflammation. Talked about brain health, brain level. I mean posturally it's not necessarily an organ system, but at the spinal level. So helps of course to resistance training to give you greater improve your posture, which has not only effects on how you look and how you present yourself, but also on health overall when you're stooped over. Yeah, it actually saps energy and has effects.
- [43:51]
Louise Nicola
I actually feel like that's me sometimes just because I'm always at My desk and I'm noticing it in my back and I'm like, what is going on with me? So now I've like been optimizing my lap pull downs as much as I can and the rose as well. I feel like at 400 peer reviewed articles, right, you'd think what more is there for me to study?
- [44:13]
Brad Schoenfeld
Oh, there's so much. So I mean what I would say is we're still in the relative infancy of studying all the things that basically first of all your variables. My primary focus is on variables. But I mean we have almost no studies comparing. So most of the studies that we have in variables compare, let's say heavyweight versus lightweight. We have very few studies that look at combining. I've mentioned the combination, I've carried out one. But it's not like one study solves anything. And you need many, many studies to really get confidence. Each study is a piece in a puzzle. So even just looking at clarity on a given topic for a single area, you need 5, 10, 20 or more studies to really start to draw confidence in your conclusions. And then again going beyond that, there's just so many topics that haven't in my opinion been adequately looked at. We have very poor, when I say poor, limited research on advanced training techniques. So various time saving strategies like rest, pause training, intercept repetition training, drop sets, supersets like these are advanced training techniques that we have a few handful of studies on them.
- [45:31]
Louise Nicola
And this is really.
- [45:32]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, yeah, I know we like to think that we're in this enlightenment.
- [45:35]
Louise Nicola
I'm saying like drop sets are like a really great thing to do.
- [45:39]
Brad Schoenfeld
Well and when you say great, the evidence we have now, so again it's still quite limited. We did a mate analysis a few years ago on the topic. There was only six, I think there were five or six studies that actually met inclusion criteria. It was a very small maiden. Since then there's been a few more, a couple more, but still. And there's again there's gaps because how you carry out that study is not, you're not just replicating the same study, you're carrying it in a different way. And it's well, how does this fit in in the overall literature? So you just need many, many studies to really draw a good insights. I would say the biggest, one of the biggest areas of interest is in mechanisms. We've come a really long way in understanding what drives hypertrophy. But it's very difficult to tease out mechanistically what is causing muscles to grow most. The vast majority of research on the Topic are either in cell culture, in test tubes, which have of course, limited extrapolation to humans, or in rodents, which still have a little more than test tubes but still have limited extrapolation. You're just not going to be able to do the things that are necessary to humans to understand what goes on.
- [46:51]
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- [48:47]
Louise Nicola
So you're telling me in 20, 26, 400 plus papers and we still don't have a definitive answer for what causes muscle hypertrophy?
- [48:56]
Brad Schoenfeld
Well, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that we have a better understanding, but we still. There's many things we don't know.
- [49:03]
Louise Nicola
I mean, what do we know?
- [49:05]
Brad Schoenfeld
We know that mechanical tension is the primary driver of hypertrophy. Now, again, I don't think we have enough time to go take a deep dive into this. But mechanical tension are the forces that are acting on the muscle. Number one, there's active tension and there's passive tension. So passive tension occurs during a muscle stretch, which is both either passive, you can passively stretch, or even when you're, let's say, in the lengthened position of a movement like a curl. If you're in the bottom position, the muscles are under passive tension at that point even as you're act. So there's a combination of active and passive tension, which contributes more. How much we know that both do contribute. Is there an optimal way we can utilize these concepts? We don't know if to the extent to which other potential mechanisms may contribute. So I wrote a paper for my capstone project in my master's program 17, 18 years ago now, which was published in the Journal of Strength and Condition Research, where I kind of took a stab at what the mechanisms were at that time, what we knew. And I talked about mechanical tension, but also metabolic stress and muscle damage. And we've gotten more insights that certainly these alternative factors have less relevance certainly than I think the literature had suggested that it might be at that point. But we still don't have great evidence that there's no contribution to it, or if there is, what is the contribution? And maybe there are other factors that, that are involved. So again, it's not. It's not an either or do we have knowledge or not, but it's the extent of the confidence in our knowledge in saying this is where we're at at this point. And so I'm saying the needle has gone a little over. Back when I did my paper, it was very weak evidence. Now we have stronger, but still, in my opinion, fairly weak. It's maybe more towards the moderate. And I don't have a lot of. I have a lot of confidence in saying mechanical tension as a primary driver. I do not have a lot of confidence in saying there might not be other factors, mechanistic factors that also do contribute in a synergistic fashion.
- [51:23]
Louise Nicola
What are you confident? You mentioned that you have to have replication, I guess, or not just replication of studies, but a large body of work to suggest that one thing you can confidently say that this is true, like you mentioned, with a certain area of hypertrophy and mechanical tension. What other areas have you explored that you can definitively say, okay, I have high confidence that this is true?
- [51:46]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, so we talked about one is the fact that light loads build muscle. Very high confidence, I'd say I have there's. At this point, there's been so many. We have dozens of studies and they all show no difference. Basically they're all. When I say almost all right on the needle, there's a few kind of somewhat outliers. But I don't say, in my opinion, I can't see. There would have to be so many studies that just show something different, which is so unlikely. I think we'd have a greater chance of seeing landing on Pluto at this point than we do of getting evidence where the lighter loads are less effective than heavier loads on a whole muscle level. But even within that, as I mentioned, there's much less evidence is there may be specific effects on fiber type. So even though we know on a whole muscle level, so when we do MRI or ultrasound, we actually look at the size of the muscle as a whole, we're not looking at the fiber level. The studies on the fiber type level have been somewhat mixed and there does there's at least suggestion that there may be type 1 fiber hypertrophy with lighter loads. When I say it doesn't mean you don't get type 2, it just means there might be somewhat greater hypertrophy in type 1 fibers and somewhat greater hypertrophy in type 2 fibers, which would mean that conceivably combining them. So this is where again you talk about. Even in a given topic, you might have a lot of confidence in one aspect of that topic, but other aspects might be lower on the continuum.
- [53:17]
Louise Nicola
What is your stance now? And we mentioned it briefly on rest intervals. I think that's probably the hardest thing. Either we're resting too much or we're not resting enough. In between sets.
- [53:30]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah. So we're talking about for muscle development, for muscle hypertrophy. Another area where I've somewhat changed my opinion on. We carried out a meta analysis on this topic. We've carried out a lot of meta analyses. And what I would say is, is that the literature at this point shows that if you're resting very, have very short rest periods, like 60 seconds or less, you will compromise muscle growth. Whereas once you get up to around 90 seconds, it seems there's not much difference between 90 seconds and more. But even with that said, you talk about the confidence. I don't have great confidence that that's the case because, number one, there aren't still that many studies on the topic. The meta analysis had, I think, nine studies.
- [54:11]
Louise Nicola
Nine?
- [54:12]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah. Not a lot.
- [54:12]
Louise Nicola
It's not a lot at all.
- [54:14]
Brad Schoenfeld
And the. There was heterogeneity in the methodologies. So trying to pull the data, you do have some skepticism in terms of the conclusions you can draw. I would say that to me, at least where I'm at now, probably on single joint exercises, less complex exercise like machine training, 90 seconds or so probably is gonna be somewhere in that range. But if you're doing squats or deadlifts, probably two minutes or perhaps more might be needed to fully recuperate.
- [54:46]
Louise Nicola
But why is it that if we go over, let's just say you're having five minutes between sets. I mean, I don't know who has time for that, but let's just say you are for argument's sake. What's that doing?
- [54:56]
Brad Schoenfeld
Well, so the seeming issue with short rest interfering with hypertrophy is that when you rest very short periods of time and you then go back and do another set, you're going to have to lower the load a lot more because you're still going to be fatigued. There's residual fatigue from that previous set. So you're either going to have to make the weights lighter to get the same amount of reps, or you're going to have to do less reps with the same amount of load. Whereas if you rested two minutes, you'd have more recuperation. There doesn't seem to be much benefit beyond around two minutes or so. And we have some data coming out that I think is going to show that even more.
- [55:32]
Louise Nicola
But is it detrimental?
- [55:34]
Brad Schoenfeld
No, it's not. Well, it's detrimental from a cost benefit if time is a factor. So whereas is you're saying is it detrimental to rest longer?
- [55:42]
Louise Nicola
It detrimental to hypertrophy itself to rest longer? Yeah, no. So you could, if you had time, do one set, rest for five minutes, do another set, rest for five minutes if you, that's the way you wanted to train. Wow.
- [55:57]
Brad Schoenfeld
But again, most people, the majority of people, time is a primary battery. So I think one of the things we want to emphasize is that you don't need to rest long periods of time to still maintain, still get the maximal benefits. But yeah, I mean, most many people do their cell phone workouts. So I'll give you a scoop here where the study we're carrying out now, we don't, we haven't analyzed it yet, so I can't give any insight into muscle development. But we looked at one group who rested two, two to three minutes. So fairly, you know, we're kind of within the guidelines of what's optimal. The other group, we let themselves select
- [56:35]
Louise Nicola
their rest intervals, what was their sets and reps.
- [56:39]
Brad Schoenfeld
So they. We told them, just come back whenever you feel you're. You're ready to train. And here's the thing. We took away their cell phones. We did not let them use this.
- [56:47]
Louise Nicola
Oh, my gosh.
- [56:48]
Brad Schoenfeld
So we're. There was actually a better. We got better insights into their actual recovery. What they felt was their recovery needs. They ended up resting over a minute longer. So whereas I think it was 2.3 minutes in the average rest in the group that we had fixed rest intervals, the Rest are like 3.6 minutes. So like 1.3 minutes more. And I'm sure if we had to let them use their cell phones, it would have been five or more minutes. You know, they get lost in space. In terms of texting.
- [57:20]
Louise Nicola
Oh, yeah, yeah, that. I've actually got a new rule now. So I lock my phone when I go to the gym in terms of. I take my phone with me, but I've got this specific device that locks me out of Instagram, my Gmail and my text messages. So. And it's such a natural thing because between sets I do touch my phone to try and go into, and it's locked. So it's like this habitual thing that I'm used to that I'm now breaking out of. And my workouts are so much better and more enjoyable. And I'm actually there instead of thinking about work.
- [57:50]
Brad Schoenfeld
That's great.
- [57:51]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, I'm obsessed with that now. I want to just keep. I just want to know more about what other conclusions that you've come to over the span of your entire career, because you're up to the third edition of your book. So I'm pretty sure that there's other things in this book in the third edition that you've covered that you probably didn't cover now that you have all of the available evidence.
- [58:10]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, I think one of the. Another really interesting thing that is. We've gotten quite a bit more insight to over the past decade or so is the importance of the lengthened position during resistance training. So you'd see a lot of people work out and they'll do like a shoulder press where they just do it in the short. They'll do like a little half rep in the short position.
- [58:31]
Louise Nicola
So not full range of movement.
- [58:32]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah. And what we found is, is that even if. So the. It doesn't even have to be a full range. The most important part, if you're going to do a shoulder press, if you want to do a half rep, do it from here to here. So the first. The initial portion to like the mid portion is the most important, at least in most muscles that we've studied, the most important portion of a movement. And there's quite a number of studies. Now, the majority of literature shows that if you just do a half repetition in the lengthened portion, it's as effective as doing the full range of motion.
- [59:04]
Louise Nicola
What?
- [59:05]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, but. And it's much more effective than doing. If you do just lengthened partials versus shortened partials, the lengthened partials get much better hypertrophy.
- [59:16]
Louise Nicola
Is that just. If we're talking about deltoids.
- [59:19]
Brad Schoenfeld
No, no, no. I just use that as an example.
- [59:21]
Louise Nicola
Okay.
- [59:21]
Brad Schoenfeld
But no, we have. Actually, we don't. Even to my knowledge, it hasn't been studied in the delts. But I mean, the majority of evidence we have are in the biceps, the triceps, quads, the hamstrings and the calves. So in the limb areas it could. Look, there could be muscles that, that we just don't have evidence of it. But it might be. Certain muscles are more predisposed to lengthen training than others. But the evidence that we have virtually the entirety of it in the muscles that we've studied, which is limited generally to the limbs, seems to show a benefit to the lengthened position over the shortened position.
- [59:55]
Louise Nicola
Like if you're doing a bicep curl and you're doing the half range of movement, you're looking more at the biceps head at growing. Like if you, if you're just doing.
- [60:07]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, so the.
- [60:08]
Louise Nicola
Probably because of the mechanical tension placed upon that.
- [60:10]
Brad Schoenfeld
So we go back to the passive and active tension. There's greater passive tension in the initial phase. So look, there could be a. This is just speculative. That's why studying mechanisms we can study, hey, if you do this versus this, what's going to produce more hypertrophy? Trying to figure out what is causing that difference, what's responsible for the differences in growth is much more difficult. We can speculate based on theoretical knowledge, and that does drive hypotheses. But trying to actually understand that in vivo in the living is much more difficult.
- [60:47]
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Louise Nicola
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Louise Nicola
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- [62:14]
Louise Nicola
The hardest part for me to train for some reason is always my. My triceps but also re delts. I wish I could just. I wish I could just get there and do my bent over rows and I don't know why, it's just for some reason I just can't get my head around it. I don't know what it is.
- [62:33]
Brad Schoenfeld
You know, different people. The one thing I'll say is that everyone has things areas that they enjoy training more and they're more in tune with like mind muscle wise. I always had, when I say always when I initially started training I had difficulty with my lats trying to engage my muscle and really feeling the contractions over time. With practice I was able to do it but a lot of it is just practice and you gotta try to will it away.
- [63:00]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. Have you seen. So there is this little at home machine that I'm thinking maybe I should get that. And basically it's a. It's this machine that adds load to. It's just got a. It's just a pulley machine. Okay. And it comes with a bar. You can just be sitting there at home and you do this and it's actually got weight on the eccentric and on the concentric phase. Have you seen anything like that? This new. I don't know you can actually click it. I wish I knew what it was called. You can like hang it anywhere and it just provides more load as you're pulling the thing. So basically you can work out anywhere if you just take this with you.
- [63:41]
Brad Schoenfeld
If, if I am understanding what you're saying there is the. Some devices that use electromagnetic Technology and that can be very effective. Yeah, well, anything that adds resistance, you can get resistance bands. Now there's some limitations to bands because then the. And when you're doing the initial phase, there's not as much tension. Tension actually comes more in the end phase, which is somewhat of a detriment to them, at least when you're using them as a standalone. But certainly they can help you if you want to travel, put them in your suitcase and you can use them. But yeah, the electromagnetic can be a very effective technology.
- [64:18]
Louise Nicola
Did you know, well, here in New York that there's this place that's open. I know this because I have a client who's 62 years old, female, and she has started. She's got this trainer who comes to her house and puts a suit on her, wets her, puts his suit and it's electromagnetic simulation. And she says, louisa, it's so hard what I get done in 20 minutes. The trainer told me that I'm getting done like three or four hours of resistance training within that 20 minutes. What's your stance on that?
- [64:47]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, so I think you're talking about electrostimulation, which is different, the electromagnetic technology from. So you can have resistance that's using electromagnetic technology. But I think what you're talking about is, is electrical stimulation where you put on the little electrodes. There's. It's an area that I've become quite fascinated with because I used to kind of dismiss it and first of all, it used to be promoted for like zapping fat, like the ab belts that would have that and that doesn't do that.
- [65:17]
Louise Nicola
But we, I used the, it's like a tens machine. Right. When I was a triathlete before, like when we would have to travel like even like interstate, we would put it on our legs so they wouldn't atrophy.
- [65:27]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, so that's what I was going to say is that from a muscle building standpoint, the preponderance of evidence now seems to suggest that certainly as a standalone, if you're not doing anything, you can build muscle. And we definitely need more. This is another area. We definitely need more research when you combine it with lifting weights or doing resistance training. But the limited evidence that I've seen does seem to show that it's additive, which is a really interesting concept. Now again, I, I'm still, I'm a, as a scientist, skeptic, but I do think that it's a worthy area. It's something I'm looking to, to study at some point.
- [66:02]
Louise Nicola
What's your Take on cold plunges after lifting.
- [66:06]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah. We did a meta analysis on this and if your goal is to maximize muscle growth, you should stay away from cold plunges. It, it actually hinders hypertrophy. And the reason seems to be again, mechanistically somewhat speculative. But it inhibits blood flow to the tissues. Cold tends to, as opposed to dilating, restricts the vessels. And how do you get muscle protein synthesis? You get it through nutrient delivery, through the blood flow, through the circulatory system.
- [66:38]
Louise Nicola
But it's most important straight after. Like to not do it straight after.
- [66:41]
Brad Schoenfeld
But if you wait three hours, well, that's not clear. We don't have any evidence on that. So. So first of all, here's what I'll say. So that might be the case. Right. The evidence that we had was within 20 minutes post exercise.
- [66:55]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Oh, okay.
- [66:55]
Brad Schoenfeld
Muscle protein. The muscles are sensitized to protein synthesis for 24 hours after a workout. So if you, at any point, if you do a cold plunge, you're still gonna restrict your blood vessels. If you're gonna ask my opinion, I wouldn't wanna put that to the test. If I'm a bodybuilder. Yeah. I would tend to think that it's not going to have a good effect. And by the way, on the other hand, we just finished a meta analysis on heat post exercise. Heat. And that had somewhat of a positive effect. It was very modest, but it certainly didn't have a negative effect. And heat because of growth dilation of blood flow. So at least logically there would be the alternative to cold plunge.
- [67:37]
Louise Nicola
I think that's where the biggest benefit of saunas is come in.
- [67:41]
Brad Schoenfeld
Correct.
- [67:42]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, but not if you're optimizing for hydration, obviously.
- [67:46]
Brad Schoenfeld
Yeah, there's going to be, we look at things in a vacuum, you know, and there's going to be a. You always have to look at the totality of what other things might be influenced and then make a decision. What, what's important to you.
- [67:57]
Louise Nicola
Have you done any, anything on sleep and, and muscle building?
- [68:03]
Brad Schoenfeld
So it's interesting. Yes, I do have a new. Not a chapter, but a section. I did a whole section on sleep in my, in the third edition of my book. And I also am a co author on a paper that has been submitted to a journal. So it was a review paper. So we'll see. Hopefully that'll be published soon. But look, sleep, if you're asking, is there a lot of evidence on it? The evidence we have is somewhat difficult to draw good conclusions on because we know that there's a lot of or at least a good number of studies on deprivation with else and a lot of them are in animals by the way. Like in humans there's some, you have a few. But overall sleep deprivation where you get like 24 hours no sleep. Yeah. There's negative effects on muscle protein synthesis. There's not good evidence while we talk about like seven to nine hours sleep a day is optimal. That's in my opinion that's first of all, it's certainly not based on a plethora of evidence. It's based on an extrapolation of what we think. And my thought would be that it's probably inter individual that we can't, you know, that some people would be able to do well. I think there's going to be a minimum threshold that should be at some point what that is, is it five hours, is it six hours and then too much sleep, is it nine hours, 10 hours? Who knows, somewhere I think the restricted zone or recommendation is a little too. At least it may be the case. I'm skeptical again that we can hone in and say that everyone needs this exact amount of sleep. But the evidence that we have within fairly wide limits doesn't seem to show even if there was a study done showing that restricting from two hours of normal sleep, I think it was where they had them do two hours less than normal did not affect their muscle development overall, an eight week study period.
- [70:04]
Louise Nicola
Would the biggest correlations for this be growth hormone secreted during deep sleep or is it more so about like if you've slept more, you can push harder the next day?
- [70:16]
Brad Schoenfeld
I doubt the growth hormone has that much to do with it. First of all, growth hormone, while the name sounds like it's a real muscle building hormone, it really is more. It's kind of a hybrid hormone but it has greater effect at least on the evidence we have in lipolysis, in breaking down fat tissue than it does. It's more of a quote unquote cutting hormone. And in physiological levels, I'm not again, I can't rule that out. But I don't think it has that much prominence in muscle building where it would have that big an effect. And by the way, how much is growth hormone suppressed if you let's say sleep five hours instead of seven hours, six hours instead of eight hours. I'm skeptical there's that much difference. But yeah, my at least my speculation would be that it has to do with you're not as ready to go, you're not as prepared, you work at, you don't have the mental acuity to really push yourself.
- [71:11]
Louise Nicola
My last question to you is, I'm so excited for your book, by the way.
- [71:16]
Brad Schoenfeld
Well, thank you.
- [71:16]
Louise Nicola
What's the most exciting chapter in there that you've written or the most something that probably people haven't learned about yet that they should look forward to.
- [71:27]
Brad Schoenfeld
So I'm the author. I think they're all exciting. But the one I'm most proud of, I added a new chapter. So I added a lot of other sections in the book and a lot of sidebars, et cetera. And of course, a lot of new information. It's like 30, 40% new information. But what I'm most proud of is the first chapter is on evidence based Practice. How do you what is evidence based Practice? How do you take research? You know, I don't. I, I've written a book and a lot of people I don't think understand, understood how to use it properly. And I went through the whole process of here's the evidence, here's go from mechanistic to applied evidence. And then how do you then take that and use your own personal expertise, the needs and abilities of an individual, talking about statistical analysis, what mistakes that are made. And anyway, I think it's going to be very enlightening.
- [72:23]
Louise Nicola
I'm going to link it below. Brad, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [72:27]
Brad Schoenfeld
It was my pleasure.
- [72:38]
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