Essentials: Optimal Protocols to Build Strength & Grow Muscles | Dr. Andy Galpin

Key Takeaway

Build a simple full-body strength routine you can repeat for at least six weeks: choose 3-5 compound movements covering upper-body push/pull, a lower-body pattern, and rotation; perform 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps with 3-5 minutes of rest; and add roughly 3-5% load weekly when form stays solid. The key is not finding perfect exercises—it is training consistently, with high intent, and progressing gradually.

Episode Overview

Dr. Andy Galpin explains how strength and hypertrophy training support longevity, neuromuscular health, function, and performance—not merely appearance. He distinguishes training for force production from training for muscle size, then outlines the variables that matter most: consistency, progressive overload, exercise selection, effort, volume, frequency, and individualization.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Essentials: Optimal Protocols to Build Strength & Grow Muscles | Dr. Andy Galpin from Huberman Lab. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin. Today, we're talking about strength and hypertrophy. And so right out the gate, I just want to ask you, why should people think about and train for strength and hypertrophy? Not just for people that want to get bigger biceps, et cetera, but that have other goals, longevity goals, and health goals unrelated to what most people associate with hypertrophy.

So what are the benefits of training for strength and hypertrophy for the everyday person, for the athlete, for the recreational exerciser, and so on? One of the major disservices we've done in this field is convince people that things like strength training are for athletes or for growing bigger muscles. And cardiovascular training are for things like fat loss and heart health. And that is a tremendous disservice because it puts a lot of unnecessary barriers and leads to a lot of false assumptions and therefore poor actions. We could do 100 episodes on the benefits of exercise, and we could run all the way from mood and focus, cognitive tasks, to a better immune function.

You'll get less colds, you'll fight them off more effectively, to mortality. So some of the strongest predictors of how long and how well you will live are exercise. However, there are independent benefits that come from just endurance training, and there are independent benefits that come from strength training. And so to just give you one categorically, the way that you want to think about this is resistance exercise and strength training is the number one tool to combat neuromuscular aging. You cannot get that through any other form of exercise besides heavy overload strength training.

If you want to be alive and you want to live by yourself, you have to be able to engage in human movement. If you have any dysfunction in the neuromuscular system there, then you're not gonna be able to do that. And again, as I mentioned, the only way to preserve that or fight that loss of aging is to strength train. So people will tend to hear numbers like you lose about 1% of muscle size per year after age about 40, and that's true. However, what they don't realize is you lose about two to 4% of your strength per year.

So the loss of strength is almost double that the loss of muscle mass with aging. Muscle power is more like eight to 10% per year. And so we can very clearly see the problem you're going to have with aging is not going to be preservation of muscle, although that is incredibly important. It's going to be very specifically preservation of muscle power and strength. And why that really matters is your ability to, again, stand up and move, your ability to catch yourself from a fall, your ability to feel confident doing a movement.

That is a function of muscle power more than it is muscle size. And so functionality is really what we wanna be, right? You want to be able to do whatever you want to do physically and feel confident in doing that as you age. That's going to only be obtained through strength training. So is it appropriate to say that training for strength and hypertrophy is also a way to keep your nervous system healthy and young? Absolutely. It is the only exercise route we have for that. The wonderful thing about strength training is you don't actually have to start at a young age.

In fact, I was reading a paper this morning because of our previous conversation. It was in over age 90. So these are folks 90 plus, and they saw improvements like 30 to 170% in things like muscle size and hypertrophy over a very short period of time. I think it was 12 weeks. The reason I like to mention that is because if you are listening and you are 50 and you're like, oh shit, I haven't been strength training, you're not toast. Like you should absolutely start now.

You're gonna be able to get to a fantastic spot very quickly. If you would, please remind us what strength and hypertrophy are in terms of the specific adaptation they represent. What I mean by that is when somebody is training for strength, what are they really training for? Obviously it means the ability to move more weight, but I know that it includes a number of other things as well. And when one is training for hypertrophy for the growth of muscle fibers, what does that represent? Because I think if people understand that, they will far better understand the methods and protocols that are going to be best for strength and hypertrophy.

At its core, you've basically described it. When we talk about strength, we're talking about an actual function. So can you create more force across a muscle or muscle groups or our total movement? When we talk about hypertrophy, now we're specifically referring to just an increase in size. There's no actual mention of function. So a muscle can grow larger without actually technically being stronger. However, there is a strong relationship between strength and hypertrophy. So a lot of the times in the general public, in the lay conversations, we sort of lump those two things in as the same thing.

And so we have to recognize people who are new to training or people even who are intermediately trained, there is a huge overlap between strength and hypertrophy. Once you get past that though, they become disentangled. There's a lot of confusion, right? Because people think, man, either these are the same thing or if I wanna get stronger, I have to get bigger, which is not the case at all. If you wanna get stronger and you don't wanna add muscle for any reason, personal preference on aesthetics, it is quite easy to get stronger and not add much muscle mass either.

And so differentiating these two things is one of them is simply a measure of size and the other one is a measure of force. So those are really the similarities and distinctions between strength and hypertrophy. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 just launched their newest formulation called AG1 Pro. And right now you can get an extra 20% off your first subscription. AG1 takes the clinically backed AG1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins, minerals, probiotics and adaptogens and adds three important new ingredients, creatine monohydrate, calcium HMB and zinc carnosine.

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I continue to take it and back it here on the podcast because it is an excellent formula. And it's now even better with the AG1 Pro formula. For a limited time, you can get an extra 20% off your first subscription to AG1 Pro by going to drinkag1.com slash Huberman and using the code back to routine. So that's with the numeral two, back numeral two routine. Just go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman. So what are the essential components of an effective strength and hypertrophy protocol? Okay, so what I would like to actually do is walk you through both of those because as we mentioned before, they overlap.

And so I wanna hit those concepts right now. These are, as you say, these are the non-negotiables that have to happen in any training program. And I'm referring to these in the strength and hypertrophy conversation, but these are true of power development, speed development, muscular endurance, any other thing. These are things that just have to happen for any training program to work. My frequent collaborator, Dan Garner, will constantly say, consistency beats intensity. The literature will show you very clearly adherence is the number one predictor of physical fitness outcome.

So we wanna do something that you will engage in, you'll put effort into, and you'll be able to repeat consistently over time. So that's number one. The second one is, and this is a major reason that people don't hit their fitness goals. In fact, I would argue, outside of not doing it, the number one mistake they make is progressive overload. So I'm gonna walk you through exactly how much you should be increasing your sets and reps and weight, et cetera, per week, per month, later. But that's the biggest thing.

You have got to have some sort of overload. That's what's gonna cause adaptation to continue to cause stress. If you want to see these gains in strength and hypertrophy, you really need to progressively overload. So that's concept number two. The third one here is going to be individualization. And this is where we can get into things like personal preference, equipment availability. You have kettlebells or dumbbells, or you only have bands, or you have none of that. These are all smaller details, but that's an important component.

The last one I really wanna get into is picking the appropriate target. And you run some testing and figure out where your biggest limitations are. That's gonna help you identify where you need to go. So if you can do all those things, you're going to be in a good spot to balance specificity and variation. So if you wanna make sure you grow your biceps, you better make sure your biceps are working. Having said that, if you over-rely on specificity, you're going to increase the likelihood of overuse injuries, which is going to come back and actually hamper consistency over time.

So this is when hedging towards specificity is important, but too much can cause a problem. If you go the other direction, and you go too much variation, so imagine you're just sort of doing all kinds of different exercises every time you work out. That's actually not enough stimuli directly on the muscle or muscle groups or movement pattern, if you're wanting to learn a new movement, to get you very far. And so this is a classic problem of I'm doing a lot of work, but I don't have a very clear direction.

I lack specificity, so I'm working, but I'm not seeing a lot of improvements. And this is like in the business world, et cetera, this is like doing a whole bunch of different things means you get nothing really done. Those are the concepts we absolutely have to hit. The methods that we choose run across a handful of variables, and we call these things modifiable variables, because as you modify them, or you make different choices within these variables, you get different outcomes or adaptations. So the way that I like to say this is exercises do not determine adaptation.

So you can't simply go, I wanna get stronger, therefore, I'm going to choose these exercises. That's not how it works. What determines adaptation is the execution of the exercises. So a deadlift is my favorite example. A deadlift is a common example that people think of when they wanna choose a lower body strength exercise. But a deadlift will not increase your strength unless you're executing it in the proper fashion. I'm not even talking about technique here. I'm talking about these modifiable variables. The same thing for power exercises.

We'll commonly see mistakes of doing activities like a box jump, which is great. People think, oh, I'm gonna improve my power, which we know is extremely highly correlated to activities of daily living, and particularly living unassisted as you age, right, is reduction of power. So they'll do an activity like a box jump. What they're failing to realize is unless you do it powerfully, you won't actually increase power. So the way that we manipulate these variables is everything to determining the adaptation you get or, again, don't get.

So that being said, let's jump right into speed and power. At the onset, there's this three-to-five concept. I didn't develop the three-to-five. It's just an easy way to help you remember one concept that will run true across all these things. So three-to-five refers to three-to-five days per week. Pick three-to-five exercises, and you're gonna do three-to-five repetitions per set. You'll do three-to-five sets, and you'll rest three-to-five minutes between each set. If you do that and you execute any of the exercises that you choose at a high intent, and that part is critical.

So if you land on that, that allows you to run the gamut from as little as three days a week, you're doing three exercises, you're gonna do three sets of three, which is a very, very low volume. It's a very low amount of days, easy to handle, all the way to five sets of five of five exercises five days a week. So it's, again, it's just one sample. That's something easy to remember and is quite effective for a very long time. And this has been tested quite extensively in both the coaching realms as well as the scientific realms to be quite productive and easy to follow and grasp.

If you do that, all you need to do is slightly increase the load or the volume, but mostly the load over time. And the number we wanna look for there is something like a three-to-five percent increase per week. When you say three-to-five, that's three-to-five work sets, correct? Yep. Is there a way that you could lay out for us optimal repetition cadences for strength specifically versus hypertrophy specifically, and then migrate toward the middle in terms of rep cadences that would satisfy the desire to have a bit of both?

Yeah, so when you're talking about strength versus hypertrophy, remember, strength is movement. Hypertrophy is muscle size. That's the key to your answer here. So when you're trying to get stronger, what you're effectively trying to do is get better at producing a certain amount of force through movement, okay? Now, force is mass times acceleration. So what's the mass in the bar multiplied by how well I can accelerate it? Intentionally going slower is only reducing acceleration, right? So it's hard to argue that going slower is going to improve strength because you're simply reducing acceleration.

So you need to practice lifting heavier at a faster rate. Hypertrophy is not that. The goal here is not a functional outcome. It is what is needed to cause the most amount of hypertrophy. And when you get to hypertrophy then, your optimal cadence is up to you. You can do any combination. In fact, you could do it the same exact cadence that you did your strength training with and get the same adaptations as hypertrophy if you modify the other variables appropriately, right? As long as you hit the concepts I talked about earlier, whether you wanna do 3-1-1, 3-2-3, 3-3-3, triphasic, this is just a method choice.

That doesn't mean they're irrelevant. There are subtle changes within them. It's just 80-20 rule, right? So 80% of the benefit is gonna be from the concept. 20% is this small thing. If you're super into this field or you actually wanna work with a qualified, certified coach or something, there's lots of reasons to play with this. If you're just on your own here and running this thing, 3-1-1 is fine, 3-1-2. do totally fine, anything like that. You really just wanna make sure that in the strength side of the equation, you're under control and you can add enough load to stimulate strength and not get hurt with an acute trauma, right?

On the hypertrophy side, you're just wanting to load enough to where you can hit volume because you gotta put a lot on there. So if you wanna go lighter, if you wanna go slower, fine. If you go slower in your repetition, so maybe even like a five-second eccentric, a two-second pause, a three-second rise. That's great. You can actually then stimulate the same amount of hypertrophy and either do it with less weight or do it with less repetitions. So it's a variable you can play with if you're like, hey, I don't have enough weights at my house or I only have a kettlebell or a dumbbell.

How am I going to stimulate hypertrophy? Your only option is really doing more reps. Well, eventually that train runs pretty shallow. Okay, here's the thing you can play with. Maybe just add time under tension, that's what we're calling, right? Just do slower repetitions, go longer ones and hold it. So it's a variable that we use to individualize programs rather than something that you should really be focused on as like a core aspect that's gonna be driving whether or not your program works. It's just a tool we can play with in the what-if scenarios.

So for the person starting out, would you recommend they pick three to five exercises and stick with those so that they can get their skill and movement and positioning and breathing, all that really dialed in and then start to experiment by varying one or two of those exercises over time? That's great. If you look at the conjugate model, so these are the strongest power lifters as a collective group that ever existed. What they're very good at is they keep almost the exact same weekly structure but they make a very small change in exercise variation.

So for example, say Wednesday is bench day, right? They're going to always bench on Wednesdays but maybe this week they're gonna do close grip bench and then maybe next week it's gonna be maybe a special type of barbell and then maybe the week after that it's they'll change the range of motion a little bit. So it's actually the exact same exercise where they're making a very small variation and that change alone allows them to do enough specificity but also gives them enough variation to where it's not the exact same stimuli in the exact same spot over and over and over.

And that's what allows that group to train very, very, very heavy, very consistently and not have to worry about too much planning for periodization and other stuff like that. They get their back off by making small variations in exercise. I will say a major mistake folks do make is they change their exercises entirely way too often. If I were to have to pick one or the other, I would say don't change anything on your exercises for six weeks. Probably realistic maybe even 10 to 12 weeks and then you can make some changes.

It's going to take you three weeks generally to figure out the groove of the exercise, to figure out how well you can load it, what's too much to where you woke up unbelievably sore, that was a train wreck, how much do I load it at, what position, how long is this going to take? It's going to take you three or so weeks and then you can really start pushing there. So changing it before that or in that timeframe is you're not going to be able to progressively overload because you're just not going to know exactly where you're at on all the exercises.

So it's very important to create standardization within them and then see some progress in a movement or a muscle group, whatever you're going for and then make some changes. So before we dive into our discussion about hypertrophy, can we just get a brief recap of the general parameters for an excellent power and strength training program? Okay, let me hit you with these rapid fire and then you can maybe come ask questions along that. Remember those modifiable variables. So let's go through them in order and then what they mean specifically for power versus strength.

So modifiable variable number one is called choice. So which exercises do I select for strength? In general for power or speed or strength, we want to select compound movements. What I mean by that is when we think about, again, strength training, we tend to think about bodybuilding concepts. We go to the gym and we do things like I got to make sure I get my chest today and I got to make sure I get my hamstrings. Now you're selecting exercises based on a muscle you want to work.

For strength development and power, we want to think about movements rather than individual muscle groups. So there should be things like I need to train explosive hip extension, which is like a vertical jump or something like that. I want to train pushing or pulling movements. I want to train rotation, which is a whole area we haven't gotten into, which is very important for overall health and wellness and longevity. So we want to select big movements by the muscle, the movement patterns that we want to introduce.

And we just want to select a reasonable balance between these. I don't care what the exact ratio is. You just don't want to go an entire six months without doing anything in this rotational area or an entire eight to 10 weeks without doing something that's a lower body hinge. So any number of examples there. So just think about the rough movement patterns, upper and lower, push and pull, and then some sort of rotation. That puts you in a pretty good spot. If you're using three by five method and you're going to pick as little as three exercises, just pick one from each one of those groups.

So that's exercise choice, our first variable. The next one is exercise order. So because that everything driving power and strength is quality based, you want to do these at the beginning of your workout. You would not want to do anything fatiguing before this. So no cardiovascular training, no other repetition to failure stuff. If you do those before and now you're slower, all you've done is practice getting slower. You also need to do them when you're very fresh because they are the most neurologically demanding. They're complicated.

They tend to have multiple steps and they're often in multiple planes and coordination is a difficult thing. And if you're trying to do all that at maximum speed, your nervous system needs to be tremendously fresh. And so any amount of fatigue here is only going to compromise results. The next one after that is volume. The general number we're going to look at here is something like three to 20 sets. Total per workout. Per workout, but that would be like 20 would be a little bit of a special case.

The last one is frequency. And we've already sort of indirectly talked about that where frequency can be as high as you'd like in this area. It really depends on your recovery. If you're really truly pushing maximum strength, you probably do need a few days to recover. Last little piece here is progression. How do I progress over time? So I mentioned this earlier, but just want to fill this gap right back in before we head over to hypertrophy, which is three to 5% increase per week of intensity in general.

And you can do upwards of about 5% increase in volume per week over time. And I generally recommend running that for at longest eight weeks, but probably most realistically, you want to go about five weeks or so and then have some sort of a deload or back off week. If you do that, you're generally going to be a pretty good spot. One last little thing, I don't think we did justice, is intention. And the reason I want to go back to this now is because we've talked a lot about specific loads you have to hit.

And that's generally the case. But if intention is there, you can fudge those numbers in terms of how much load goes on the bar. In fact, you can get as low as no load on the bar. A great example here is like a plank exercise. So you can do a plank in which you get in a position and you simply contract the least amount necessary to hold the position. Also, you can contract as hard as possible, pulling your scapula down and back, squeezing your core, squeezing your quads, squeezing your glutes.

That is actually going to still help strength production because you're attempting to contract very, very hard, even though, quote unquote, the load is the same. That thing extends to weight on the bar. So you could theoretically see large improvements in strength at 50% of your 100 max if you're contracting as hard as possible. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing therapy for a long time. And while it's not always easy, every time I do a therapy session, I come away feeling better and knowing that the time was well spent.

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If you would like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. Okay, let's talk about hypertrophy. What are the ways that people can induce hypertrophy? Probably a better way to think about that question is really, what stimuli do I need to give the muscle to induce hypertrophy? Now, there are hormonal factors that are important, there are nutritional factors, but just to stick with the context of training. This is really gonna frame a lot of our answers, and as you'll see, it's one of the reasons why I call hypertrophy training kind of idiot-proof in terms of programming.

Now, the work is hard, difficult, and all that, but the precision needed is a lot less than what we saw in power and strength, and so if you note there, it's very important that you do it in this style, with this intent, and within these parameters, and if you're outside these parameters, it's not gonna be it. Hypertrophy has a very broad range in terms of your actual applications, and this is why you have, and will continue to see, countless styles of training that all work. So if we look at the classic dogma, we have to basically challenge the muscle to need to come back, in this case, specifically bigger, and the nutrients need to be there to support that growth.

So all you have to do there to not fail is to make sure the training's hard enough, and it's gonna work. The only wrong combination here is infrequent and low intensity and low volume. That's it. As long as one of those three variables is high, you're gonna get there, which is why crafting your program, which is best for you, is actually fairly simple when it comes to hypertrophy. You just have to make sure you do the work. I actually think that it's important that you do some number of combination of what we call bilateral and unilateral exercises.

So bilateral being, think about it like a squat, where bi meaning two, lateral, you have two feet on the ground moving in sequence here. Unilateral is one. So this could be something as simple as a rear foot elevated split squat. It could be a single leg leg press, or single leg curl. It could be a pistol squat. Something where the individual limb is moving one at a time. Also very important for making sure, for hypertrophy's sake, you're not getting any imbalances as you progress, especially through months and years of training.

So make sure you're doing a little bit of a combination. Whether you wanna pick specific implements. That's really a methods question and a preference question, and then it is concepts. So dumbbell, great. Kettlebell, fine. Barbell, awesome. Band, doesn't matter. None of these things are as important because all you're trying to do is create a certain insult in the tissue, and the implement is just whichever one you feel best doing it. Because of the way that people move differently, their anthropometrics and their biomechanics, and even their technique, the same exact exercise will not necessarily work the same exact muscle groups for multiple people.

So if you and I both went and did a back squat, if you did it a little bit more of what we call a high bar squat, so this is the bar is literally sitting up higher up on your neck. You're keeping your back more vertical, and because in order to do that, you shift your knees much further past your toes, keeping of course your whole foot on the ground in good position. That's going to generally put more of an emphasis on the knee joint. And so that's not a bad thing.

You tend to see a little bit more work in the quads there, a little bit less work in the spinal rectus and back because you're actually not supporting the weight horizontally, which is a much more difficult position. It's vertically stacked. If I were to do it in the classic low bar squat, which is again lowering the bar further down my back towards more like my shoulder blades, I'd probably take a little bit of a wider stance. And when I squat, I drive my glutes back further away from the midline.

In fact, as a general rule, if you take the midline of your body, the thing that moves the farthest away from that midline is likely to be the thing that's activating the most. So in the case of the front squat, you're not generally going to be using your glutes as much if you're in that, or not even front squat, just that high bar squat where you're very, very vertical. Your knees are going to be moving very far over your toes, which is fantastic. Therefore, it's a little bit more knee dominant, as can we say it.

The other version here, you can't keep your shins really close to vertical. You move your butt backwards. You're going to have to then lean forward with your torso, which means it'll be more low back, more glutes, and a little bit less knee. Now that's a general statement. It's not necessarily always true, but as a guideline there, that is one exact exercise where you may be going, man, I'm trying to improve this clear weakness I have in my quads. I can't even leg extension my body weight.

I have a significant problem there. So maybe in your particular case, if I'm hammering you, or you're hammering yourself in a squat exercise, and you're wondering why your quads aren't getting any stronger, or growing in any size, it may be because of the style of the movement. So I may need to go, Andrew, all right, look, squats, in general, if you look at the research, are an excellent exercise for quad development. But for you, they're not. Because of the way you stand, or just because of neural activation, it doesn't matter.

So I need to take you to a machine and isolate that muscle group so we can make sure we see development in that. So if you're trying to grow a specific body part, area, individual muscle, it's very important that you're actually seeing progress there. And don't worry about, well, in the textbook, the bench press is supposed to be good for your pec. Because if you're not actually moving the right position, or it depends on the angle in which your sternum actually sits in your body, a bench press may actually be doing very little for your pec, and you may need to adjust to, say, an incline bench, or a decline bench, or a pec fly.

So machines can be fantastic at letting you isolate without having to worry about things like stability, your low back position, getting hurt, where's your neck at. You can really concentrate on just the movement, concentrate on the muscle, and let everything else kind of go away, and ensure you're getting training in that specific area. What about exercise order? You get to play a couple of games here. When we talked about strength and power, I basically said stick to the big movements, most complicated and compound movements first.

You don't have to do that with hypertrophy. You can do this in a couple of ways. You can do the thing you're just simply most interested in first. you can do this thing called pre-fatigue. So say you're going to do a back day, you could go in and do nothing but isolated biceps as your very first exercise, and then roll into your pulling movements because what you'll see is during most pulling activities, the biceps are a secondary or tertiary muscle group. But you've pre-fatigued them, you've guaranteed that muscle of most interest got its most training in, and everything else is secondary.

So you can start if you want with single joint movements, you can start with isolation stuff, or you can start with compound stuff. Either way, it just really comes down to preference and what you're specifically trying to develop. Now this also goes back to the exercise choice question, right, because it's sort of the same thing, right? Like which one am I choosing? And where I wanted to cap this was the exercise splits. And so we just sort of talked about am I doing body part splits?

And I know a question I get a lot here is, well, which ones should I package together? I'm not really concerned with it. All you should worry about is how many times per week, and in fact, total volume you achieve on a muscle group per week. And it doesn't really matter how those things are folded in. It's really a personal preference issue. One mistake that we see here commonly is grossly underappreciating that the legs are not a muscle group, right? So the legs have a whole bunch of muscle groups in them.

So we see a classic split like I'll do shoulders and chest Monday. And then I'll do biceps and forearms Tuesday. And then legs Wednesday, or whatever. And then back to upper body. And then you're like, wait a minute. You have four days dedicated to the upper body and one for quote unquote legs. I hope you can see the imbalance that's going to happen there over time is you're going to do far more upper body than you are lower body, and that's not appropriate. So you just wanna think about your lower body like you would do.

If you're gonna do body part splits, then include those things as well. And don't just chunk everything in as legs once a week. If you wanna do that, that's actually okay. But that day has to be very, very challenging. And you probably should do quite a bit of volume there. Because you're almost surely not going to hit the total weekly volume needed to optimize muscle growth if you're literally only doing once a week of your quote unquote legs. Along those lines, let's talk volume. How much volume does each muscle group need per week in order to generate, and for that matter, maintain hypertrophy?

Right, so the kind of minimum number we're gonna look for here is 10 working sets. Per week. Correct. Per muscle group. Correct, so 10 would be sort of the minimum number you wanna get to. The more realistic number that most people, especially if you're advanced, or even intermediate, is more like 15 to 20 working sets per week. Now if you're very well trained, you probably wanna even push more towards like 25. And in fact, past that, there's just not a lot of research. If you went in and you did three sets of 10, three sets of 10 repetitions.

Correct. You're already at three. You did that three days a week, you're at your nine. That's almost 10. If you also just went to the gym one day a week, you did three sets of 10, and you did three exercises, you're at nine working sets. You're basically done. So achieving 10 sets per week per muscle group, and now we're not even talking about indirect activation of a secondary, so you're going to hit 10 fairly easy. Extension to that, hitting 20 is actually still not that hard.

However, if you're not seeing adaptations, then I'd say maybe the repetitions aren't enough. So if you're gonna do a set of 25, and you finish it and you're like, ooh, yeah, that was kinda starting to get hard at the end. That's not going to be enough. If you're gonna do a set of five or six, and the same sort of expression comes out of your mouth, that's not gonna be enough. So in that case, it doesn't matter your rep range if you're not getting somewhat close to failure.

Again, it doesn't need to be complete failure. A good number to think about is like minus two, which is what we call reps in reserve, which is sort of like I got within two or so reps of failure, and then I stop. You have a lot of room to play here. You also have a lot of room to adapt based on your circumstances. God, I'm short on time today. Typically, my workout takes me 60 minutes for this plan I have. I've only got 35 today. What do I do?

If you're training for a push feed, you need to make sure you hit that total volume. So in this particular case, lower the load, lower the rest intervals, and just get to the burn and get going as much as you can. If you're training for strength, I would rather you cut your volume in half. Get those few repetitions done at that high load and just don't do very many sets today. That's a better result. So the goal that you're going after is going to determine what we call chaos management, which is that thing like that, running out of time today, my time is short, or you didn't even think my time was short, something got cut off, I'm not feeling it today, I'm in a hotel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which is life, right?

That's gonna be 10 to 50% of your workouts is gonna be chaos management. I'd like to ask about frequency, but I'd like to frame it a little bit differently than that. I'd like to ask about total workout duration, which dovetails with frequency, because if one is hitting the appropriate number of sets per week, and one is combining different muscle groups on the same days, well then workouts are going to be a very different duration than if one is doing a different body part each day, for instance.

I feel like any discussion about frequency has to be within the context of workout duration and vice versa. If you are a lifting junkie, and you're very consistent in your schedule, I'm actually okay with body parts, but most people are not that. The concern there is if you say are isolating and waiting to do your glutes on one day of the week, and something happens on that day, you might go another 13 days now before training, between workouts, and that's really difficult to maintain. The frequency won't be high enough, unless the load and volume on that one day is astronomically high.

It's just not gonna happen. So while if you look at the research, frequency in terms of how many days per week doesn't matter that much, as long as the total load and failure are equivalent. Practically, it's a challenge. So it's hard because life gets in the way for most people, especially if you have kids and a job and all these things are there. So I actually prefer doing something more like three days a week of total body, and if something happens, you've just missed that body part for 48 hours, 72 hours.

I like that a little better for most people, not because it's more effective, but just because it's a little bit more resilient to life, and you can get there. If you wanted to actually do a little bit of a combination, so if you wanted to do like two days a week of whole body, and then two days a week of a little bit of a body part split, then you're actually sort of hedging against all risks there as long as you get to that total number there.

Now, there is actually some evidence in a couple of ways that maybe a little bit more frequently is a little bit better, but the difficulty is now we're going back to the practicality question of like how many people really can train just their strength training six days a week? Well, that doesn't count any of their long duration stuff, it doesn't, how their high heart rate, their flexibility, their, okay. It's just really, really, really hard to get all that stuff in. So it is, it tends to be easier on folks in terms of execution and long term adherence, in my opinion, to get that volume accomplished in a little bit more frequent patterns, but not once a week.

So I like to kind of have it right there for most people, again, not because it is technically quote, unquote, more effective, but because you're less likely to fail to progress because of skipping a workout, something popping up. Great, well, thank you for that very informative answer. This was incredibly informative. Thank you so very much.