Brad Schoenfeld

So this paper I'm talking about today, and I'll link it below if you do want to go and nerd out, was published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology in April, 2026.

A couple of the big names on that paper were Alan Aragon and Brad Schoenfeld.

I'm not sure I said that right, probably hashed it.

But if you've read any of the papers in this space, those names will be familiar to you.

Then Piniero and colleagues, 2024.

Brad Schoenfeld's group.

Same journal, in a paper titled, I promise you, throwing cold water on muscle growth.

Eight studies on muscle size.

More is better sometimes if you can recover from it, but less than that is also beneficial.

Like in the Brad Schoenfeld method analysis, people who were doing up to four sets a week were getting i think it was it was roughly 60 percent of the gains that the people who would like getting who were doing 10 sets a week so for every set that you do you're basically going to get kind of diminishing returns but you can still get a solid stimulus and make progress if you're doing four really hard sets per muscle group per week um but more will probably yield better results assuming you're not going over what your body's capable of.

And then obviously getting enough protein in, getting enough calories in, being in a slight surplus, all of those things are important.

But depending on how much training you've done previously, you can still build muscle whilst you're on a deficit and whilst you're dropping fat if necessary.

Um, I think it was published.

P- my friend Brad Schoenfeld throws me these studies before they're published-

[laughs]

... and says, "Don't talk about it."

And I, I also think there's a, a g- genetic element to soft tissue strength.

Hmm.

I have friends that if they had strong soft tissue, they could've b- become world-class-

Hmm

Excuse me.

And what I mean by that is that You love reading the textbooks that Brad Schoenfeld puts out about muscular hypertrophy.

You don't like to train it, but you love to read it.

That's fine.

So I think it's useful, before we kind of talk about this particular model, I think it's useful to start by asking the question of what these models are all trying to do.

Um, and I think the best way of doing that is to go back to the original, um, kind of metabolic stress model in the early 1990s, uh, and then talk a little bit about how that was then integrated into, um, a hypertrophy research, uh, kind of literature, largely through the efforts of Brad Schoenfeld, but you know, kind of it dates back before that point.

Um, and then maybe then mention again Menno's model and what that, uh, kind of tried to do as well.

And I think that would be useful context to try and understand what it is that we're actually talking about here because, um, a lot of the time, I think when this topic gets discussed, people make assumptions about what is being discussed and what-

There's a twenty twenty-four study on single set training.

Uh, Herman with two Ns, he was the lead author, and Brad Schoenfeld, Milo Wolfe were the co-authors.

And it was done in trained lifters who averaged over four years of experience.

And people cite this as a finding of body recomp.