← The Neuro Experience
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- [00:00]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
You need to design your workout around your life. So periodization was originally meant to balance the stress of resistance training in the context of sport. If we make a statement that skeletal muscle mass is good for health and longevity, then where do we put a stop to that? Right? Because obviously, at a certain point, that additional tissue, which has additional metabolic cost, you would cross some threshold from this is a positive thing to this is a negative thing. Sleep is rarely accounted for in the resistance training literature. Adaptation always comes at a cost, and that cost he called adaptation energy.
- [00:38]
Louisa Nicola
Welcome back to the show. It's Louisa Nicola.
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I'm a neurophysiologist and human performance coach.
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I'm the founder of neuro athletics, where our mission is to democratize brain health education so you can perform better, think faster, and live longer.
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And on that note, how can we live longer? Well, research says that we can live a much better life if we improve.
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Our skeletal muscle, both from a skeletal muscle mass and skeletal muscle strength perspective. This is why I have brought on Dr. Samuel Buckner to today's episode.
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Sam is an assistant professor at the.
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University of South Florida, and his interests lie heavily in skeletal muscle mass and.
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Blood flow restriction and everything to do.
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With exercise resistance training to improve your skeletal muscle.
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So in today's episode, we're going to be talking about skeletal muscle, what it is, how do we assess it, how do we grow it? We really bypass all of the myths that you're probably seeing on social media.
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We go into Sam's research on strength, where he took a group of individuals.
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Who were previously trained and had skeletal.
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Muscle, and he put them through a.
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Vigorous resistance training protocol for one year, and you would be surprised at the.
- [01:58]
Results that they achieved in a natural state. So if you are wanting to optimize your performance from a science perspective and you want to get super jacked, then.
- [02:08]
This is the episode for you. Very quickly, this is a free podcast. It's very free for you guys, and.
- [02:15]
We try and recruit the best people possible. So in order for that, I'm asking for you to pay back by giving the podcast a written review on Apple, itunes or conversely, go through rate us on Spotify. It doesn't take long, and it will mean the absolute world to me. Dr. Samuel Buckner, welcome to the Neuro Experience. I am so excited to have you here. You are a professor of exercise science, but you have a keen interest in skeletal muscle, skeletal muscle growth, resistance training, blood flow restriction, everything. So excited to talk to you.
- [02:51]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
Yeah, I'm excited to be here.
- [02:53]
Louisa Nicola
Why don't we get Straight into it. Because I know that your lab is focused on skeletal muscle growth and how resistance training plays a role in increasing both muscle mass and muscle strength. And I kind of want to just break that down and first understand what you've found so far in terms of how to grow muscle and how long it takes.
- [03:20]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
Yeah, that's a great question, because I think a lot of what I'm interested in is how we can make muscles grow, but also what that time course looks like and, you know, how much growth we can hope to achieve over time. So these are all questions that, you know, I, I'm trying to answer. And you know, we chip away at it a little bit at a time and, you know, you never answer everything you want to with a single study. But I suppose when I was new to research, you know, I had read textbooks and I had taken coursework and I was learning about hypertrophy. And you know, even today in class I was teaching on hypertrophy and we, I put up the figure from our textbook. And you know, for muscle growth, it's traditionally suggested that you need to lift around 8 to 12 reps to or near failure in order to make your muscles grow. So a weight that's relatively heavy. And, you know, that's what I had learned and that's what I had mostly done in the gym up until my graduate work. And then the early years of my graduate work were actually focused on low load alternatives to making muscles grow. So this idea that you don't need to lift heavy weight, you don't need to lift the weight that you can only lift 8 to 12 times in order to make your muscles grow, and you can accomplish the same overall adaptation as far as growth is concerned. So, you know, early on in my graduate work, I began to realize that it was about fatiguing and activating a muscle. And something about that process stimulates a signaling cascade that, you know, makes that muscle grow. And it's interesting to me that, you know, we have so many alternatives now that we can recommend to people who maybe their preference isn't lifting heavy. Maybe they would prefer to lift a lighter weight, or maybe they're contraindicated to lifting heavy weight. So a lighter weight alternative is an attractive option. Another thing I discovered along the way that I suppose I didn't necessarily expect is somewhat of a divergence between a strength adaptation, a muscle growth adaptation, and a strength adaptation. So when I began studying low load alternatives for skeletal muscle growth, what we found is you would grow, but you wouldn't get strong like you would if you lifted heavy, so the growth was there, but the strength adaptations weren't always there in the same way. So that really challenged my thinking, or at least as far as the conventional story of adaptation, because a textbook, again, a textbook will tell you that when you begin training, you, you increase strength by neural mechanisms in the first several weeks. But somewhere around weeks 3, 4, 5 or 6, neural adaptations are becoming less and you begin to become stronger by hypertrophic adaptations. Right? So it's believed that muscle growth becomes the primary reason you become stronger as you progress in a training career. But we were finding that people could grow even if they're trained, and that growth wouldn't always necessarily lead to strength and vice versa. We found that very trained people, people who had been lifting for a long time, could get stronger and that strength was not always accompanied with a muscle growth adaptation. So those are things that I think probably fuel a lot of my current curiosity. You know, how can we get bigger or stronger? And what's the relationship between these adaptations? But not only that, what does muscle growth look like? In the context of most research we do at a university is eight weeks, 12 weeks in duration. In the United States, they're mostly eight weeks. And a lot of people don't know this, but studies are eight weeks because of our semester schedule at school. So in the fall you have to finish before Thanksgiving and in the spring you pretty much have to finish before spring break. So that gives you about eight or six weeks to do a training study. So a lot of the knowledge that we have on skeletal muscle adaptation is just a very small snapshot of what adaptation looks like. And because of that, since I've got my job here at usf, I've tried to do longer studies than what's typically been done. And we recently wrapped up data collection on a one year study. So looking at growth over an entire year, and I think we have some pretty fascinating results. It's not published yet, it's not even written up yet. But we've taken a glimpse at the data and I think the future for me is just finding unique and different ways to answer questions and design studies in a way that's going to add to what we currently know. But a one year study, just for example, I think we need more studies like this. But to recruit about 33 to 35 people, it took me six years. It's a study I ran in the background. Because a one year study is not going to get me tenured at a university when it takes six years to get your sample Size, but it's something that every year we recruited for and you know, we'd maybe recruit 10 people and a year later half of them dropped out. So we're like, okay, we have to run the study for another year and things change. Yeah, it lets us. Some pretty cool insight.
- [09:00]
Louisa Nicola
What I think is really fascinating is you distinguished between muscle mass and muscle strength. And I know this to be true in the scientific literature where you now see more correlations with all cause, mortality and longevity pointing towards strength, strength rather than mass. And I think we, I, by we, I mean the broader community, especially when a lot of people now are getting their education from Instagram, which is quite scary. When I say that out loud, people think, okay, let's just lift for mass and mass equals strength. But they're two different things. So what, what is the difference between strength and muscle mass? And that actually as I say that out loud, it kind of reminds me of the bodybuilders who are just, you know, huge. I'm talking the non natural bodybuilders who are just jacked, but they probably can't even do a pull up.
- [09:52]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
Yeah, I think there's, there's a lot of interesting things that we can discuss around skeletal muscle mass and strength. And when I was younger again in grad school, you'd see a paper and you know, that paper would say that grip strength is associated with, you know, better mortality outcomes or better all cause mortality outcomes. And the recommendation off some of that data was, well, lift weights so you live longer and at a surface level, I think that makes sense. But that's something I've actually looked into more and thought about more. And you know, grip strength is a proxy for evidence of lifting weights. Is, is actually doesn't pan out so well. Right. So when you lift weights, grip strength doesn't change appreciably, at least the way that most people train. And we looked at some data, I'm trying to think because it's been a while since we engaged in this paper. It was strength and physical activity and mortality. And Scott Dankle was the lead author and he looked at outcomes of strength and engagement, engagement and muscle strengthening activities. And he actually found it's more important to be strong than it is to be engaged in muscle strengthening activities. And that's as defined as the NHANES data set. So it's an imperfect data set, but that told us that there is something important with being strong and health outcomes. And when you look at skeletal muscle mass and the example that you provided is the extreme end of that Right. If we make a statement that skeletal muscle mass is good for health and longevity, then where do we put a stop to that? Right? Because obviously the endless pursuit of skeletal muscle, you know, in a bodybuilder maybe it's a good and a bad example because naturally we can't acquire that. But let's just say that was our, our goal at a certain point, that additional tissue, which has additional metabolic cost, right? You would, you would cross some threshold from this is a positive thing to this is a negative thing. And I don't know that this is true, but I suspect that it's true. When you look at most metabolic theories of aging, you know, if you are. If you have more muscle tissue, have more metabolism, you have a greater demand for resources, extreme amounts of muscle tissue probably don't lend themselves to longevity. Right? So I think from a health standpoint, there are strength outcomes that we should focus on. I think we should also focus on the acquisition and maintenance of muscle tissue. But I don't know that I have a good grasp or a strong recommendation on how does that training look right. In class, when I, when I teach class, I ask my students, why do they train right? And most of them are training for increased muscle strength and increase muscle mass. And I ask, well, why is no one in here training for health? Right? And of course, the reason is they're young. They're not. They're not thinking about that. But then I challenge them. If you were training instead of for aesthetics and performance, what would your training look like? Right? What, what types of volumes would you pursue? What type of exercises would you pursue? Because we have research that shows that knee extensor strength is associated with more positive health outcomes. So we know that having maintained strength is important, and we know that lean body mass, maybe it's perhaps more of an inconsistent marker of health and longevity. But I still think there's a lot of reasons to pursue skeletal muscle growth and hypertrophy.
- [13:50]
Louisa Nicola
I want to zone in on, actually the anatomy, since you are a professor of skeletal muscle, and ask you the question of what is skeletal muscle? Because I guess it's counterintuitive when you compare the studies you mentioned, you've got better metabolism, and that's mainly because more, more mitochondria is evidently in existence with more skeletal muscle mass. So how. What is. What. What is skeletal muscle?
- [14:18]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
All right, so skeletal muscle, there's. There's different layers of organization. So I suppose if we zoom in, you have a muscle fiber, and a muscle fiber is made up of contractile components, and the ones that most people are familiar with are actin and myosin. Right? So fibers are made up of myofibrils, which are made up of sarcomeres. So these are different layers of organization. You zoom in, you get to more intricate and intricate properties. At its most basic level with contractile proteins. So when you lift weights, we say that you stimulate myofibrillar protein synthesis or the formation of proteins associated with the myofiber. So you zoom out a bunch of myofibers make up fibers themselves, and then your fibers are organized into fascicles, and a bunch of fascicles make up a full muscle. So when you train, you're contracting your muscle, right. And transmitting that force amongst those different layers of the muscle. Right. To produce the force output, you know, that we know is lifting weights. And when you lift the weights, like I said, you stimulate something known as muscle protein synthesis. And the goal is to activate myofibular protein synthesis, synthesis of the contractile aspect of the muscle. Now, of course, we know that when the muscle grows, the other components of the muscle are also increasing. And there's been a lot of discussion over the past several years of the sarcoplasmic component, which I kind of view as the support mechanism for the myofibular components. The myofibrillar is the contractile or functional aspect of the muscle. And the sarcoplasmic component in many ways supports the myofibular. Right. We store calcium, and our calcium is involved in the contractile process. And then you mentioned the mitochondria. So when you train, you also have mitochondrial protein synthesis, and we increase the number of mitochondria within a muscle cell. And when I kind of related it to metabolism, I also think of just the protein turnover of having more tissue. You have more tissue, and you have to maintain that tissue. So it's going to be a greater metabolic demand. And one of the things that I. I like to lean on when I think about the acquisition of large, large amounts of muscle tissue is some of the theories proposed by Han Selye. So Hans Selye, in my field, it was a. He was in pharmaceutical research. He studied drug interactions, and he gave us something known as a general adaptation syndrome. So the general adaptation syndrome was this idea that when you face a stress, you first have alarm, then you have resistance, you begin to adapt, and then eventually you succumb to that stress. And in his models, that meant the rodents that he was studying would die. Exercise science took his concept and came up with this model Called super compensation. Molecular physiology, I think has largely dismissed the concept of supercompensation. But Hans Selye would explain adaptation in a certain way that I thought was intriguing. He would say that adaptation always comes at a cost. And that cost he called adaptation energy. So, meaning that adaptation. And if you think about this, I think it does make sense. The more stress you put yourself under, the more you're trying to adapt to at a given moment. Right.
- [18:00]
Louisa Nicola
Well, that's the primary role of how we adapt with the nervous system as well and how we evolved. So I guess it would, it makes, it's true for skeletal muscle then too.
- [18:10]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
Yeah. So his, his model again, it's not a perfect model and I, I think I just appreciate it from a critical thinking aspect. You know, I've talked to stress researchers and they say, they mentioned his research historically, but they don't really subscribe to his model. But his, his mechanism of adaptation was that adaptation always comes at a cost. And in his models, what he found is you expose the rodent to a stressor and no matter the stress, if the stress was extreme enough, they would expend all their adaptation energy and they would die. So when I think of having more muscle, I, I think of expending more resources, requiring more resources. And then when you look at models of adaptation, like a metablock theory of, of aging, right. You know, having more, costs more, so you, you use up your adaptation energy more quickly. So I think from a longevity perspective, I think it's a balance of how much muscle do I need for proper function. But I don't want to acquire too much such that I put myself under more stress and the need for more resources, the more need for resource allocation and these sorts of things.
- [19:24]
Louisa Nicola
So then it must be okay. So then let's, let's talk about how you actually increase the muscle mass and strength. Because I know that in some of your work, I believe you did the findings of a. You tracked resistance training individuals to see how much they could grow skeletal muscle over time. And your findings show that they didn't really grow a lot or at all. And they were previously trained individuals of up to about five to seven years.
- [19:55]
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- [20:38]
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- [20:39]
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- [21:49]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
You refer to the year long study, correct? Yeah. So we had a pretty high training age in that particular study. And you know, again, it's has to be one of the longest studies ever done. And I know a year is not that long in the context of an entire lifetime.
- [22:07]
Louisa Nicola
Right.
- [22:07]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
But in the context of conducting research, it was a big undertaking. And yeah. What we found is that over time, if you just looked at Pre and post 12 months, there was no measurable skeletal muscle growth occurring. And one of the things we did is we.
- [22:25]
Louisa Nicola
That's a bit devastating.
- [22:27]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
It is. Right. And it kind of runs counter to a lot of the eight week studies. Right. So the question becomes why didn't Dr. Buckner's lab see growth over an entire year when many labs, including my own lab, have observed muscle growth over eight weeks? Right. And I think that's really interesting to think about and I have a hypothesis. It's just a hypothesis and I think there's some merit to it and I think it does impact how we interpret things. So I believe that when individuals sign up for an eight week study that you have supervision. Right. When you typically when you sign up for a study, it's supervised resistance training. And in many ways that that training is kind of hyper focused. Right. If you sign up for a study and we're training your quads, and we're having you do 20 sets of quads per week, there's a very good chance that your quads will grow. But if I said go train your quads on your own and give you a range of number of sets to perform, is there the same guarantee that your quads will grow? Well, there's research that came out in the past few months that showed that supervision has a pretty good impact on, I think, the intensity of effort and other things related to the training process. Maybe the fact that it was unsupervised meant that the likelihood of growth was going to be a little bit less. But still, most people that train aren't supervised. Right. A lot of people go to the.
- [24:02]
Louisa Nicola
Gym is actually daunting to me. I speak about this often, and this comes down to my field, which is Alzheimer's disease. And obviously we have a huge component on resistance training. And what I see is that a lot of general. I won't even say older folks. I'm talking like in their 60s. I actually see younger. Like this morning I went to the gym, and I just. I couldn't understand. I believe what one girl was trying to do was a deadlift, but that was just. It was like. Everything was just. I'm not an expert, but I could see that she definitely needed some form of supervision in that. So it's madness to me that people aren't being supervised. Yeah.
- [24:43]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
And, you know, I think maybe even if it's just some initial coaching. Right. In the context of our study. So they have been lifting. They know how to lift. Right. So in the context of our study, I think we. We. We did have confidence that they know how to train, and we asked them to train to or near failure. So this is what I actually think happened. When you've been training for five to seven years. Right. And I think our highest training age was probably over 10 years. How much more muscle growth can you expect? Right. So I think a lot of our results are actually driven by the fact that muscle growth is not infinite. Right. You do not.
- [25:24]
Louisa Nicola
That comes from your 2016 paper, Growth to Infinity and Beyond.
- [25:29]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
Yeah. Yeah. So. So Brittany Counts led that paper. And the idea that we wanted to portray in that paper is, you know, muscle growth is not infinite. And if it were, if we could just keep growing. Right. A lot of us would look ridiculous because our goals and aspirations are going to look like people that are on anabolic drugs. And in a sense, anabolic drugs are removing the governor. Right. So we have a governor on our ability to grow. And that's a good thing, right? People are saying, well, you know, why, why does that have to be a mechanism? And it's probably, I imagine, to protect us from ourselves. Because if we could just keep getting bigger, we would get big to the point where, again, I kind of somewhat subscribe to metal block theories of aging, we would be unsustainably large. Right. We would require too many resources. So I don't think our year long study, when it is published, is going to be necessarily disheartening to people. It might be like, you mean to tell me I'm going to go to the gym for a year and I'm not going to grow? But what we saw within our data were fluctuations. So you'd kind of see their muscle size going up and down across time. So I think with, you know, probably different levels of focus at different times in the year, you train a little bit harder. And maybe your, your diet sometimes is better than other times. Your overall stress and other aspects of your life is such that maybe you push hard in the gym at different times than others. And ultimately, you know, my view on skeletal muscle growth, and I won't say that a lot of people necessarily share this view, but I think it's because they haven't thought about it a whole lot yet. When you go from untrained to trained, right. I consider people that haven't trained before their muscles in the untrained state. When you begin lifting weights, and this is kind of conveyed in the Counts paper, your muscle grows. And that muscle growth at the early onset of training is the most robust it'll ever be in your life, right? You're far from your genetic ceiling for muscle growth. So when you engage in training, if you can grow, we all have a different capacity to grow. You're going to grow, but over time that growth is going to plateau. And it's going to plateau to the point where maybe it's discouraging, right? You're training, you're training for growth. You don't see it in the mirror. You can't tell that it's happening. But again, if you're following principles and you're able to grow, you should be growing. Now, when I teach my graduate class in strength and conditioning, I tell my students early on, I say, raise your hand if you lift weights. And most of them in our exercise science program lift weights. And then I say, raise your hand if you've been lifting for one year, then two years and three years. And when we get to a certain point, I say, now I will share with you all that. I believe most of y' all are in the maintenance phase. So you have achieved your muscle growth and now you train, and some of you still train hours a day. But I believe, and I can't guarantee this, but I think there's a good reason to believe that you're largely maintaining now. There might be moments where your, your training just becomes a little bit more focused. Right. So maybe you focus a little bit more on your quads than you typically would during these time periods. I think so your muscle wasn't grown, now it's grown. And if with hyper focused training, I think you can always squeeze a little bit more out, but I don't think it's sustainable, you know, because life happens. So I think a muscle goes from an untrained state to a trained state and it grows. And then once you're in the trained state, I think you can grow a little bit more. And I think often that's what we capture actually in research studies, we capture that, that small ability to increase our muscle a little bit more in a short time period. Does that make sense?
- [29:28]
Louisa Nicola
It does. And then it raises the question that where does rest, I. E. Sleep and protein come into this? Because it's not just muscle protein synthesis with weights, it is also muscle protein synthesis with adequate protein. And then without adequate rest, you evidently, you know, through growth hormone and other various factors will not grow. So it becomes this, this loop and it is a self fulfilling prophecy. You know, you're right. Things do, you know, especially new mums, new dads, God forbid, something, maybe you break your leg and then you go back to ground zero. So where does, where does rest and protein come into this?
- [30:16]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
Yeah, I think these are essential things for the adaptive process. And admittedly I, I would say overall our, my field hasn't done the best job of accounting for these variables because you know, like I said, most studies happen in a college setting and most studies occur in college students. And that means you're up against whatever college lifestyle is these days and you're up against final exam schedules. And so, you know, most resistance training literature that you read, they might account for protein on some level and it might be as simple as providing a protein shake after they complete the resistance training session. Well, you didn't account for the rest of their diet. What does the rest of their diet look like? Like, right. And then sleep, sleep is, is rarely accounted for in the resistance training literature. And I, I think even though these studies aren't accounting for them, other research has informed us that it is essential for recovery and it is essential for adaptation. Because especially if you want to. To maximize adaptation, I get the most you can out of what you're doing. You can't neglect these other variables because let's say you have a study and you know, there's. There's so much research on maximizing the muscle growth response. And it might say, well, you need to do 40 sets per week per muscle group instead of 25 sets per week per muscle group. But if your protein isn't right and your sleep isn't right. Right. And you have a lot of stress in other areas, increasing that volume is probably, probably going to lead to more of a negative response than a positive response. Right. So I think, and I don't necessarily directly research sleep or protein, although I do incorporate protein into a lot of my, my research, just as a supplemental thing. I think that's a great starting point. When someone's sitting down at the drawing board deciding, okay, how many times a week should I train? How many weekly sets per muscle group do I want to be performing? What type of exercise split do I want to create? And you know, in our field, we have something called periodization. So periodization is actually based on Han Selye's stress theory, and it's the idea that you need to design your workout around your life. So periodization was originally meant to balance the stress of resistance training and the context of sport. So the basic premise was when athletes are spending more time playing sport, they need to spend less time in the weight room, and vice versa. When they're spending less time in sport, they can spend more time in the weight room. Well, I think the same applies for life. Right. When your life is more stressful, you need to balance the other stress, and the other stress is the one that you're adding voluntarily. Resistance training, exercise regimen. Right. And at times when you're able to manage the stress of your life, I think those are the times where you can push it harder in, in the gym. Right. Because you can handle the. The cumulative effect of all that stress. And, and that concept is known as periodization. And less people talk about periodization is just a purely a stress management philosophy. But when you kind of look at the roots, that's what it's really all about. It's about managing the stress of life with the stress of your job and the stress of your sport with the stress you're adding through your training.
- [33:49]
Louisa Nicola
Yeah. And it brings in an important point that I speak about often, which is in order to actually get the benefits and stimulate the muscle to grow under tension at the gym. You also have to be in a healthy state. And when I say healthy, it's very hard to get to the maximum maximal amount. You know, when you're weight training if you are in a sleep deprived state. I mean, and then you could also argue that, let's just say if we're going really molecular maybe it's also extremely difficult to reach that state and train to your peak. If you are nutrient deficient in any way, I'm talking even like micronutrient, I'm talking about if and if you're vitamin D deficient or even if you zinc deficient. I think there's something to be said that you have to be healthy to train.
- [34:41]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
Yeah, I certainly think that's true. And again, I come from a world where people are constantly obsessed over different resistance training variables. But if you're neglecting the bigger picture of your health, then focusing on maximizing these different training variables is not going to do a whole lot.
- [35:04]
Louisa Nicola
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- [36:57]
So break it down really easy for everybody. What do they need to be doing in the gym? Are you basically saying that just going to the gym, doing three sets of 10 leg curls, let's just say because we're focused on hamstrings earlier, is really not going to be doing anything. If you really want to see an adaptation in your lower body, what do we need to be focusing on? Sets, reps, Pretty much. How do you get jacked?
- [37:24]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
How do you get jacked in a natural way? Yeah. And, and just to be clear, my year long study is people that arguably already had gotten jacked. Right. So if we take in and I, even though at the group level we didn't see growth, that doesn't mean that there's not growth. It probably means that growth is so small that it's difficult to measure. And that's just the nature of adaptation. You know, growth, the rate of growth becomes so slow that it becomes very difficult to measure. But back to your question of you're in the gym and you want to train your hamstrings, how do you get jacked? Now again, the discussions in my literature base, they focus a lot on weekly set number. Right. So recently there was a paper that had people do up to 52 weekly sets on their quads, which is an incredible amount of volume, an insane amount of volume.
- [38:17]
Louisa Nicola
At what do they work on? 1% RM? 1,1 RM.
- [38:20]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
Sorry. They were training, it's around a 70%1 RM, I believe. And they split up 52 sets on two training sessions and it was focused solely on the quads. So they were doing nine sets of leg press, followed by nine sets of squats, followed by eight sets of knee extension per session. Now anybody that's trained I think would say, well, nine sets on the leg press. Are you serious? And that's not something I would recommend. Right. So this is a starting point of like an extreme in my field. I tend to think that in a given movement, so the hamstring curl, the exercise that you had mentioned, the goal when you approach that exercise is, is to activate the majority of the muscle fibers involved in that movement. Right. So you start with a, a fresh muscle and you want to reach the point of fatigue and activating the majority of the fibers involved in that movement. So it seems to be the Case that across three to four sets to or near failure, you're going to achieve that on that given exercise, right? So I typically tell people that I think on each exercise that you're approaching, I think that three to four sets is all that you need to do to maximize what you can get out of that particular movement. So then the question is, well, how many different movements should I perform? Right? So hamstring curl is one exercise for the hamstrings, but should I be doing 5amps hamstring exercises? Should I be doing two or three? And I think this probably depends on the individual. It probably depends on their goals. But I typically say maybe one to three movements per muscle, three to four sets per exercise. When you, on each exercise you do, and then it becomes a question, okay, well now how many times a week do I need to train that muscle? Right? And again, it's going to depend on the individual. Everybody has a different life, a different amount of stress, and a different availability with training frequency. We don't have, in my opinion, a really robust literature base to lean on. What we do know is that three times a week is better than one time a week per muscle group. But we don't really have good evidence that three times a week is better than twice a week. So if you're training your hamstrings and you want to maximize muscle growth in your hamstrings, the recommendation that I think I would provide is maybe two to three exercises, two to three times per week, doing three to four sets per exercise that you choose. Now, hamstrings is just one exercise, right? So most people have a goal that is a bit more ambitious than just maximizing muscle growth in my hamstrings. So that's where I guess we get some complexity within a training routine. Because, you know, we want to train multiple muscle groups, right? And we want to grow in many different areas. And that's where I think for some individuals, not everybody, there has to be some compromise. Because maybe someone says, well, I only have 30 minutes twice a week, right? So how does that person approach training compared to the person that spends two hours in the gym a day? And maybe if, if you only had 30 minutes twice a week, I would say, well, you're probably going to want to train full body, right chest, quads, hamstrings, back, biceps, triceps, and maybe you're going to do one to two sets per exercise, two or near failure twice a week. Now, is this as ideal as the previous example with just the hamstrings? Probably not. But will it still cause growth? I think so. Right. Even if you're training with lower volume, and even if your program isn't, quote, optimal or maximized, it'll still bring you in the right direction. And over time, I think you can still reach the end point of going from an untrained muscle to a grown muscle. It's probably just going to take a little bit longer if you're only doing one to two sets or exercises a few times per week. Does that, does that make sense?
- [42:43]
Louisa Nicola
It does make sense. And it's most likely probably the reason as to why a lot of people just choose not to train. It just seems so difficult. Um, okay, so I also want to ask you about strength in terms of measuring strength. And why do we always use grip strength as a proxy?
- [43:01]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
That's a really good question. So why are we using grip strength as a. As a proxy for overall strength and as the indicator as to why we should or should not engage in resistance training? I wrote a paper on this a few years ago, probably five or six years ago, and the reason I wrote the paper is I had published a lot of other papers recommending that people need to engage in resistance exercise because it's associated with more favorable health outcomes. And I wrote a series of papers where I used grip strength as my example. And a few years later, as I had developed my thinking in graduate school, I realized, wait a second, I'm telling people grip strength is associated with better health outcomes, therefore you should lift weights. Now, I still think you should lift weights, but I don't necessarily think grip strength is what should inform that decision. The reason we use grip strength is because it's easy to measure. It's not a complex skill, it doesn't require practice. And the people that are running very large scale research can drive around the country and have thousands of people measure their grip strength very easily. But I think in the context of making a recommendation for what people should actually do, it shouldn't be the base. And I looked into grip strength and I wanted to learn more about grip strength. And I actually came up with this hypothesis called the human baseline hypothesis, because when you look at what determines your grip strength, the number one determinant is your birth weight. And then when you look at other things that influence your grip strength, it is the mother's nutrition while the child is in the womb, and then it's some of the different factors during development, so your nutrition and your level of activity as you're developing and particularly when you're going through puberty. So all of these things have a much larger impact on your grip strength than actually lifting weights as an adult. And that led to the human baseline hypothesis, which is an interesting and intriguing idea that I. This is one's kind of tough, but try to follow. I propose that it's better to be strong than to become strong. And it's, it's basically the suggestion that early in life I think physical activity is really important because if you're strong, independent of resistance training, that's easier to maintain throughout your entire life. It's different than compensatory adaptation. Right. So you could be a weak person and train and become strong, but if you become strong as someone that was just naturally strong, you work to get there, and someone didn't do any work to get there. Now, eventually, as we age, we're going to become more sedentary. The person that became strong is going to lose adaptation, but the person that was naturally strong is going to have an easier time maintaining that metric. Right. So it's. We, we're still working on this idea, but we've published a few different papers on this idea. It doesn't minimize the importance of resistance training. I think it highlights the importance of, of training when you're young and when you're developing and the importance of, you know, nutrition at different aspects in life to try to become a more robust human, if that makes sense. But yeah, it sounds controversial on the surface. It's better to be strong than to become, become strong.
- [46:55]
Louisa Nicola
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Like getting kids active from a young age, getting them lifting weights. I think many people fear lifting weights. I know many women still fear lifting weights, scared that they're going to become a bodybuilder, which is ludicrous. And then I guess teenagers also, you know, parents of teenagers also scared that their child may stunt their growth from exercise. So there's. There's still a lot of misinformation out there. There's still a lot of myths. And my last question for you before we wrap up was actually around myths and social media. Is there any out there that you think is so wild that catches on like fire? That is a, a complete, a complete myth. And that is untrue.
- [47:46]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
So resistance training myths that are wildfire on social media. I think there's a lot. So it's like what, whatever week we would talk, I would probably give you a different one, the first myth. And these are going to be myths, very niche to my area. For one volume, we, I think social media influencers in their resistance training space oversaw the Importance of volume, tremendously. The example is the recent 52 sets paper that's going to turn more people away from exercise, I think, than anything. Right. The daunting task of doing 52 working sets per week, which is hours and hours of exercise for just one muscle group. When you think about it physiologically, I don't think it makes sense that you would need that much. But even just practically, I don't think it equates for me. And especially as you become more trained, when you know that the amount of the growth you can get is less and less anyways. So if you can do this extreme amount of volume, what could you accomplish from doing it? So I think I'm working on some different papers and we have a few studies going on that I think are going to help with that conversation. But people like myself, I will comment on social media, but I'm not a social media influencer, so it doesn't matter how qualified I am, I don't get responded to in the comments. And then it's. It's a very interesting dynamic of how things are communicated. You know, the other most wildfire thing that's taken off lately is training at long muscle lengths. So a paper came out and it suggested that you gain more growth from training at a long muscle length compared to a short muscle length. So the bottom of the bicep compared to the top of a bicep curl, it would say that just train at the bottom part of the range of motion, you're going to get more growth. And so there was a few key people with, with PhDs, right, that were kind of promoting this and telling people, you need to train this way. And they made it to some of the biggest podcasts and YouTubers made content together, collaborated. And the scientific community is like, what are we doing here? You know, the data is so premature. And I think a lot of the fads and the trends that you see on social media are exactly that. And I think we're also living in a time where the science is being exploited because it gives you credibility. Right? So I made a post probably a couple weeks ago, and it basically said PhDs. I believe PhDs were kind of the answer for the fitness industry 10 to 20 years ago. But the industry adapts and the industry learns because the industry is smart. So I believe in my area, the newest iteration of the industry are getting PhDs, but then on social media, they are still very much the industry. They're selling you something, they're trying to get clicks, they're trying to get interaction by being extreme and suggesting extreme things. And I think it's, it's gotten worse over the past year, I think, and it makes my job as a scientist more difficult because I have to try to brush my way through a lot more nonsense to get a reasonable message out to people.
- [51:50]
Louisa Nicola
So those are, I can imagine how, I can imagine how incredibly frustrating that is. I see that often too. It's like 10 years of, you know, academic research and going to a university and doing your undergraduate, your postgraduate, your more postgraduate than your clinical experience experience and this and that. And then somebody on Instagram just puts out one, one thing that is more than likely misinformation and it just spreads. And I often ask myself, even if they look, you know, qualified, I often ask myself, do you understand the precursors to that statement? Do you understand like the biochemistry behind what you just said? And more often than not, many people don't. And that's, I think the, the cream ends up rising to the top eventually. That's what I'm hoping. But I loved having this conversation with you, Sam. I think we can definitely get you back for a second one. Only because I did not get to ask you about your biomodal ultrasound and how you assess skeletal muscle. I'm very excited about that. I use emgs as a neurophysiologist, so super excited to get into that with you. But look, if you're not on Instagram too much, I know you've got an account. I'm going to link it and I'll, I'll put up some of your university academic papers as well. But is there anywhere else that you hang out?
- [53:06]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
Yeah, right now it's, it's mostly Instagram. I have a research gate profile. I don't think anyone uses that. But yeah, I'm trying to become a little bit more active because I, I think I have a lot of things to say and you know, I, I want to share different ideas and so yeah, Instagram would be the best place to find me. And then of course email through the university. You can always reach me if you have more Acade related questions.
- [53:33]
Louisa Nicola
Thank you, Sam Bakna, for being part of the Neuro Experience podcast.
- [53:36]
Dr. Samuel Buckner
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
- [53:38]
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