Do Muscles Compete for Growth?

Moving on to the main course of today.

A new study.

I do love looking at training studies.

And this one wanted to investigate if muscles compete for growth.

And a funny little thing about this study is that the idea for it was initiated or born from other results they had had in their lab.

So in this lab, which I forgot to check which it was, I think...

the old Jeremy Lanneke was in on it.

They did a couple of different studies.

And in one study where people did bicep training, they saw some really fine results.

Then they did another study where people did bicep training and some other stuff, some leg training, and they saw pretty bad bicep training results.

So it kind of birthed the idea, well, was it the leg training that hampered the bicep training? Why not do a proper study on it? Because I mean, you can't there are drawbacks to comparing results between different studies because many factors might have been changed so you need to do like a comparison side by side to control more variables and that's what they decided to do and they gather up a bunch of individuals as far as bicep studies goes although we did mention a big one like one week ago or whatever it was But 105 untrained individuals, mostly bro-dettes, 60% bro-dettes, 40% bros, they were assigned to one out of three groups.

One bicep training group that was to be only doing bicep training.

One group that were to do bicep training plus the so-called competing muscle growth training, so they were to also train their quads to see if that would detract from the bicep growth.

And then one control group doing no training.

This is one case where maybe that wouldn't have been entirely necessary, but I don't know.

These groups they were to train for six weeks doing three workout sessions per week the bicep training would consist of two sets of bicep curls to failure every workout and those who also did quad training would add four sets of leg extensions to failure and the control group were to do no training they just did the tests beforehand so measuring muscle thickness of the biceps and the quads and testing their dumbbell bicep curl one rep max Now, the details of the training, that was a bit weird.

I looked and I tried to find it, but they didn't explicitly state what type of bicep curl they did.

But I'm assuming it was dumbbell curls because I think they tested the strength in that.

And they also trained one arm, only one arm.

And this was not one of those, you know, studies where they train one arm in one of the groups and the other in the other one, because, I mean, that's not a possibility in this one, as they would also train the quads to see if that detracted.

So everyone just trained one arm, the dominant arm, which is, that's already weird.

And then moving on, the bicep training was done with 30% of their one rep max, which is not a lot.

If you can curl a 20 kilo dumbbell for your one rep max, then you would be using six kilos in this training study.

I mean, we're talking about being able to do maybe 60 or 70 reps with that, which is weird.

And they didn't progress in weight over the six weeks, only in reps.