Like, what's it look like in terms of, let's say, 12 weeks? Like, how much lean tissue are they gaining? Like, how much fat are they losing? Like, is it noticeable? You know, from like a visual standpoint, not just like a scientific word measuring it, which is totally cool, by the way.

Yeah.

So I'm going to go out on a limb here.

I guess two things.

One, we have several studies comparing being in a surplus to being at maintenance for hypertrophy.

There's about four to six studies on this topic now.

Most of these studies don't really find a difference.

gotta stop you right there because the dex is just lying to you no offense but it's just people lose their minds over it man that's it's a real thing yep

For sure.

So yeah, that's kind of the, the long story short there.

We don't want to do a ton of higher rep work, 'cause then we can be compromising a more important variable that is proximity to failure, but we wanna include some.

So as a rough heuristic, what I recommend, if someone has, like, really limited time to train, mostly train in that 4 to 12 rep range.

Because we wanna make sure that the training you do get in is close enough to failure that you're not just wasting what little time you spend in the gym.

However, if you're, like, working out, let's say, three days a week or more or something, then I think start paying attention to, all right, let me make sure I'm getting the benefits of higher reps for those slow twitch muscle fibers as well.

And at that point, I would say, like, roughly speaking, maybe 80% of your training should be in that kind of like 4 to 12 or let's say even 4 to 15 rep range, and then the remaining 20% should be in excess of like, let's say 12 reps.

That kinda checks out.

Mm-hmm.

Then you repeat that process of dropping the weight and doing a set close to failure or to failure for a set number of mini sets.

The idea behind the drop set is that you hit close to failure on that first initial set where you're kind of unfatigued, let's call it.

By the end of the set, via traditional, you know, theories of motor unit recruitment, for example, Henneman's size principle, the idea is that as you perform more reps, your body has to recruit more and more motor units and muscle fibers to keep lifting the weight.

So some muscle fibers might get fatigued, and so you have to tap other ones in to keep lifting the weight.

The idea is that by the end of a set close to or to failure, you've recruited all muscle fibers that you could, and therefore that set is kind of becoming maximally effective or as effective as it could be because you've act- kind of targeted, recruited, and stimulated each muscle fiber available.

The idea of a drop set is to take that concept a bit further.

It's easy.

But like do you have different rules if you've got, you know, someone that's beginner, intermediate, advanced? Like, how do you make those determinations in how often people should be training?

100%.

So one downstream consequence of that like 11 set rule, let's call it, is that how often you train a muscle should also depend on how many sets you're doing, right? So we can kind of break things down by, one, what your goal is, and two, how long you've been lifting for.

So the maximizer, let's call them, like the advanced trainee who really wants to just put on as much muscle as possible, you probably do wanna train most muscles like two to four times a week, maybe more if you really wanted to like spec into a full body approach, just to be able to spread that high volume you're doing across the week into the maximally efficient setup.

Then for people who just wanna make gains, like let's say they're more in the quar- sort of like five to 10 sets per week per muscle ballpark, which is enough to make like some gains, right? Like you're building muscle, but you're not spending that much time in the gym.

Let's say you're in the gym for a total of like two hours a week, right? If you're doing only five to 10 sets per week per muscle, you can get away with training it once or twice a week, and you'll likely like basically maximize growth.

So that means that if you're just wanting to see some growth and you're not really training with high volumes to begin with, honestly, just training each muscle once or twice a week is just fine.

I'm gonna take up, I don't know, knitting or something.