Take-home message: Dietary protein is your body’s principle source of amino acids.

Protein is
generally digested in the stomach, subsequently absorbed in the intestine and then transported in
the blood to the liver

Take-home message: Enzymes are proteins that speed up or slow down chemical reactions and
processes in the body

Take-home messages: Your body has an amino acid pool in the blood and the fluids in your cells
that it uses to temporarily store amino acids so that your tissues can take up the amino acids it
needs even if they weren’t consumed shortly beforehand. The amino acid pool allows your body
considerable leeway with regard to the need for nutrient timing.

Take-home message: Creatinine levels correlate roughly with muscle mass. As such, strength
trained individuals often have elevated creatinine levels. Many doctors erroneously interpret this as
a sign of inflammation, kidney malfunction or muscle trauma.

Take-home message: 3-methylhistidine levels in your urine are a rough marker of protein
catabolism in your body. You will encounter this marker in research on muscle damage and protein
losses.

On a final note, there’s nothing inherently wrong or unhealthy about consuming more protein than
your body can use to build muscle. The excess will simply be used as energy. Even highly excessive
protein intakes consumed for months on end generally do not affect your health negatively and
that includes your kidney health.

Take-home messages
• There is normally no advantage to consuming more than 0.82 g/lb (1.8 g/kg) per day of protein.
This already includes a mark-up, since most research finds no more benefits after 0.64 g/lb. •
Optimal protein intake decreases with training age, because your body becomes more efficient at
preventing protein breakdown resulting from training and less protein is needed for the increasingly
smaller amount of muscle that is built after each training session.

To be safe, it is advisable to keep your protein intake in each meal above the leucine threshold.
Based on the research of Stuart Phillips, who is arguably the world’s leading researcher on protein
intake, that means you should consume a minimum of 0.3 g/kg protein in each meal and each meal
should have a complete amino acid profile. For protein sources high in leucine like egg protein and
dairy, you can probably get away with just 0.24 g/kg.

The 2 prototypes of slow and fast protein are the 2 major protein fractions of cow milk: casein and
whey protein. Other than differing significantly in amino acid composition, whey protein is soluble in
milk, so it remains in liquid form and passes quickly through your stomach, hence having a fast
digestion and being named a ‘fast protein’. Caseins, on the other hand, are not milk soluble and will
clot in your stomach, delaying the amino acid delivery to your intestines. Hence casein is a ‘slow
protein’.
While it’s true that faster proteins result in higher spikes of muscle protein synthesis (MPS), they
don’t stimulate MPS for as long as slower proteins do. So while there are significant differences in
the concentration of amino acids in the blood over time (see illustration below), the total amount of
net protein build-up is ultimately generally similar for whey and casein proteins. Most studies that
suggested whey is superior to casein simply did not measure MPS for a sufficient duration, which
biased the results in favor of faster proteins.

In conclusion, the idea that faster proteins, like hydrolyzed proteins and whey, are better for
bodybuilding than slower proteins, like casein, is nothing but supplement company marketing. The
truth is often exactly the opposite for young individuals.

Due to the synergy between amino acids, pure EAA and BCAA mixtures don’t stimulate protein
balance as well as complete amino acid profiles.
The same applies on levels higher up in the food matrix.
We already saw that micellar casein and whole milk proteins are better at stimulating cumulative
muscle protein balance over time than whey.
Blends of protein tend to promote greater protein balance than pure whey, even when the blend
contains soy, which in isolation performs very poorly (discussed below).
One level further up, we see that whole milk tends to stimulate greater protein synthesis than
skimmed milk, indicating that other substances than just the protein in milk promote MPS.

As such, the evidence and evolutionary theory suggest that good old actual milk consumption rather
than processed protein powders is the most reliable and effective way to stimulate both protein
synthesis as well as reduce protein breakdown. Nature provided you with a package deal of whey
and casein in highly absorable form: take advantage of it.
In contrast to milk, many plants have a food matrix that negatively affects protein quality. Plant
foods contain many anti-nutrients as part of their evolutionary defence against being eaten. These
substances in the food matrix of plants make their protein difficult to use for the human body.
Wheat and soy in particular are poorly capable of stimulating muscle protein balance, even when
they provide high amounts of essential amino acids. In general, vegetarian diets are inferior to
omnivorous diets from a bodybuilding perspective and require more meticulous
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management of protein quality to compensate for this. Rice, hemp and pea protein seem to provide
relatively usable amino acids. Taking their amino acid composition into account, this means it’s
advisable for vegetarians to choose pea protein powder or a blend of pea and rice protein powders
if they’re going to supplement protein powder.

The following table Moderate quality Low quality

provides a guideline of
protein quality
categories. In short,
 whole foods generally
reign supreme as
anabolic fuel for
bodybuilders. If you do
decide to supplement
protein for whatever
reason, a protein blend
is best, e.g. whole milk
protein, a mix of whey
with 50-80% micellar
casein, a pea-rice
protein blend (for
vegetarians). High
quality

Whole dairy Pea protein Soy protein

Meats Rice protein Other vegetarian protein

sources

Fish Hemp protein

Boiled/baked eggs Whey protein

Poultry Hydrolyzed protein

Milk protein

Casein protein

Conclusion
Gold-standard research shows that when you are already consuming enough protein in each meal
and across the day (~1.8 g/kg/d), there is no metablic, thermic or body composition benefit to
increasing your protein intake further. How much fat you gain or lose is primarily dictated by
energy balance, not by protein intake, since protein can be easily used as fuel by the
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body or even stored as fat. The explanation for the questionable Antonio studies is most likely
simply that the subjects overreported their energy and protein intakes because they literally
couldn’t stomach the extreme protein intakes they were required to consume

Practical appliations for protein intake

Consume a minimum of ~1.8 g/kg of protein every day, possibly more for hard training novice
men, mixed athletes, drug users and vegeterians; possibly less for women, advanced trainees, people
that don’t follow an optimized program design and obese individuals. It doesn’t matter whether
you’re in an energy surplus or deficit.
Protein supplementation is generally not advisable in comparison to whole foods when it comes
to stimulating muscle protein balance. Animal protein sources are preferable to plant protein
sources.
Make sure each meal contains a complete amino acid profile and hits the leucine threshold.
Protein needs to be factored into your total daily energy intake just like carbohydrates and fat.
Meal frequency per se does not generally have any considerable effect on total protein b +
alance or energy expenditure, but the protein distribution across the day does.

Carbs

So how then do you measure someone’s carb tolerance?

Without extensive bloodwork, the test Menno has found most useful is assessing someone’s energy
level and hunger after eating a high vs. low carb meal. After a high carb meal, carb tolerant
individuals should experience a stable dose-response appetite suppression and increase/maintenance
of mental energy level after a high carb meal. Carb intolerant individuals generally get a strong ‘carb
knock-out’ after which they get hungry again not long after.
Everything needs to be the same during the testing, including the satiety index of the high fat and
high carb foods (Menno likes to use bread and eggs; the satiety index will be discussed in greater detail
in the topic on ad libitum dieting), but also the time of day, the timing in relation to exercise, etc.
Since this is a subjective test with many confounders, you want to be wary of reading too much into
the data. Carb hyper-responsiveness is rare and generally accompanied by a very clear result in
favor of carbs. For example, carb hyperresponders may complain they can’t sleep after eating a high
carb meal because they’re too energized. Carb intolerance is much more common, but most people
fall in neither category and will not show a clear trend in their results in favor of either
macronutrient. Based on Menno’s experience and the literature, approximately 80% of people have
a neutral carb response, 15% has carb intolerance and 5% responds favorably to high carb diets. It is
worth noting that in sedentary, overweight individuals, carb intolerance is much more common,
since exercise greatly improves insulin sensitivity.
Due to the subjectivity of the test and the strict lifestyle control required to meaningfully test this,
you probably don’t want to test all your clients. During a cut, there is often little point in testing
anyway, as you don’t have the calories to make large adjustments to the carb:fat ratio without
either going unhealthily low in carbohydrates or going into ketosis (reviewed in its own course topic).

Instead, you can roughly estimate someone’s carb tolerance based on the following guidelines.
 The higher someone’s body fat percentage, the lower their carb tolerance, generally. If
someone’s overweight, it’s unlikely they’ll respond very well to a high carb diet.
Women are unlikely to be carb intolerant, due to their superior glucose and insulin metabolism.
As mentioned above, note that this does not imply they are carb hyperresponders, which is still a
very rare trait in women. (See the topic on gender differences for further details and references.)
o Women with polycystic ovary syndrome or similar conditions that result in amenorrhea are an
exception to the rule and almost always have very poor carb tolerance.
Older individuals tend to be more prone to carb intolerance, though differences generally only
become significant at a truly elderly age (65+), depending on how healthy, lean and active they are.
(See the course topic on the effects of age.)
Carb hyperresponsiveness is often noticeable from someone’s dietary records, food preferences
and activity level, the latter of which fluctuates strongly based on their previous carb intake. For
example, carb hyperresponders may complain they can’t sleep after a high carb meal eaten at night
because they’re too energetic.
People on androgenic-anabolic steroids are far more likely to be carb hyperresponders. (See the
course topic on AAS.)

So, for bodybuilding purposes, it doesn’t matter if the carbs in your diet come from simple or
complex sources as long as the total amount is the same.

To understand why simple and complex carbs are equally fattening, we have to look into the
digestion of carbohydrates. (Spoiler: the short version is that all carbohydrates have the same
metabolic fate.)

Take-home message: Practically all absorbable dietary starches and disaccharides are ultimately
hydrolyzed completely by specific glycosidases to their constituent monosaccharide units.
Monosaccharides, together with small amounts of remaining disaccharides, can then be absorbed
by the intestinal mucosal cells

So you don’t need to worry about the glycemic index. Your body already has this well under control
if you’re healthy. It is only when you’re not healthy and these homeostatic mechanisms do not
function properly, that the GI of your food becomes relevant.

Conclusion
For your body composition, it doesn’t matter if a carb is classified as simple or complex or if it
has a high or low glycemic or insulin load or index. Only the total amount of carbs in your diet
matters and this only matters because carbs contain calories.
For your health, the source of carbs is generally only relevant if you’re unhealthy. If you’re
already healthy, it generally doesn’t matter.
The sugar content and the insulin index of foods is normally irrelevant for bodybuilders. What
matters is what else is in the food.
In conclusion, carbs may reduce protein breakdown a little when all you consume is those carbs,
but if you already consume protein, carbs have little or no additive effect.

The reason you don’t need carbs on top of the protein is that carbohydrates only reduce protein
breakdown, not increase synthesis. And this effect is mediated by insulin with a very low ceiling
effect. You only need a little bit of inslin. Since protein is insulinogenic just like carbs are, you
already have high enough insulin levels if you’re consuming protein.

Take-home message: Insulin is required for glucose to be rapidly transported into muscle cells.

In sum, insulin is required for glucose to be transported into muscle cells. So maximum glycogen
synthesis and storage of energy for your muscles to use during your workouts requires insulin
production. Since carbohydrate consumption stimulates insulin production, it has been theorized
that you need to consume a lot of carbohydrates post-workout to help rebuild your glycogen
stores.
Fortunately, your body stores a lot of glycogen, as running out of glycogen is like running out of gas
on the highway: you’re screwed. So you have to perform an absurd amount of volume to really
deplete glycogen stores with weight training. A full-body workout consisting of 9 exercises for 3
sets each at 80% 1 RM only depletes about a third of the body’s glycogen and 9 sets for a specific
muscle result in 36% depletion in that muscle (Roy & Tarnopolsky, 1998). Glycogen depletion in the
literature after strength training, even in competitive bodybuilders, is practically never more than
40%.

So how come the myth you need carbs in your shakes is so prevalent? There are many reasons.
Supplement companies want you to believe you need carbs, because carbs are extremely cheap
to manufacture. For example, basically all ‘weight gainer’ products are just sugar sold at a ridiculous
price.
Many people read the carb-only research without realizing that protein makes the carbs
redundant.
The literature advocating carbs for endurance athletes can easily be misinterpreted by people only
reading the abstracts.
Many myths perpetuate themselves, with everyone spreading the word simply because everyone
else is also spreading the word. *insert sound of bleating sheep here*
Many professional bodybuilders inject insulin post-workout. This requires the consumption of a
large amount of carbs to avoid going hypoglycemic. Without exogenous insulin and steroids, this is
more likely to result in fat than muscle gain.

Conclusion
You do not need to consume any carbohydrates after your training sessions. When a practical dose
of protein is consumed (20+ g), carbs do not have any additive effect on protein balance. Protein
stimultes enough insulin production to make carbs superfluous. You don’t have to avoid carbs, but
adding sugar to your post-workout shake is, well, just like adding sugar to any other meal.
In conclusion, dietary carbohydrate intake generally does not affect strength training performance.
Carbohydrate requirements significantly increase when more endurance oriented anaerobic
activities are also performed, however.

In conclusion, given the same total energy and protein intake, carbohydrates most likely do not
increase muscle growth or strength development more than fats for strength trainees.

What does fiber do in the body?

Ingesting fibers that can hold water and create viscous solutions within the gastrointestinal tract
causes a number of effects, including:
delayed (slowed) emptying of food from the stomach;
reduced mixing of gastrointestinal contents with digestive enzymes;
reduced enzyme function;
decreased nutrient diffusion rates (and thus delayed nutrient absorption), which attenuate the
blood glucose response;
altered small intestine transit time.
Take-home message: Dietary fiber keeps your blood sugar levels in check.

Take-home message: Dietary fiber is generally good for your blood cholesterol profile and thereby
your cardiovascular health

Take-home message: Fermentable fibers that fuel the growth of probiotics generally improve your
digestive tract’s functioning and thereby your overall health

Take-home message: If you want a real detox diet rather than most of the pseudoscientific crap
that is popular these days, eat more plants.

Recommended fiber intakes

The following table provides recommended fiber intakes based on several official institutes. In short,
it’s 38 g for men; 25 g for women. These recommendations are for non-strength training individuals,
so for strength trainees, these values are best seen as an absolute minimum for optimal health,
assuming no digestive pathologies are present.
If this seems like a lot of fiber compared to the abysmally unhealthy modern Western diet, consider
that many hunter-gatherer cultures habitually consumed fiber intakes upwards of 100 grams with
estimates of average daily fiber intakes of 46 g and 86 g. This is in line with estimates of 40-80 g/d
fiber in Australian Aboriginals and a whopping 150-225 g/d fiber in a hunter-forager group in the
northern Chihuahuan Desert. “Analysis of vegetable foods consumed by foragers in this century and
evaluation of archaic native American coproliths suggest that ancestral human fiber intake exceeded
100 g/d (Eaton 1990). Rural Chinese consume up to 77 g/d (Campbell and Chen 1994), rural
Africans up to 120 g/d (Burkitt 1983)”. (Source)
As long as no food intolerances are present, this should have a notably beneficial effect on your
digestion, health, appetite and metabolism. The above conditions are big ifs though, as you’ll learn
about in the topic on food choices and health.
Practical applications
A high protein intake generally makes carbohydrates redundant for muscle growth and
performance.
Carbohydrates generally offer no long term advantage over dietary fat for fat loss or the
prevention of fat gain.
Carbohydrate requirements are effectively zero for bodybuilders engaging in strength training or
low intensity cardio as their only modalities of activity. For most sports and high intensity interval
training, carbohydrate requirements rapidly increase.
The only type of carbohydrate with distinct benefits for your energy expenditure and satiety in
particular, not to mention your overall health, is dietary fiber. The recommended minimum fiber
intake is 25 g for women and 38 g for men.

Fat

Practical applications
A dietary fat intake upwards of 40% of total energy intake for women and 40% of resting energy
expenditure for men, together with a liberal cholesterol intake, may confer long term anabolic benefits
by optimizing anabolic hormone functioning, assuming no carb hyperresponsiveness.
A roughly equal balance of saturated, mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated fat is likely optimal for
hormonal functioning.
The poly-unsaturated fat intake should have an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio below 4:1 to reap many
benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, e.g. low chronic inflammation, high muscle protein synthesis and a high
thermic effect of food.

Conclusion on energy balance

In conclusion, when determining the effects of any diet on your weight and body composition,
always keep total energy balance over time in mind, not just acute substrate metabolism. The law of
physics cannot be bent.

In conclusion, it is most likely impossible to trick your metabolism into believing you’re at a higher
body fat percentage or in more positive energy balance than you actually are. The increase in
energy expenditure during even massive carbohydrate overfeeding is only a few percent and leptin
levels respond not mainly to acute energy balance but rather to cumulative energy balance over
time and your total fat mass. As such, a refeed often results in the best case scenario of pausing
your fat loss and can easily result in significant fat gain

Yo-yo dieting & set-point theory

Yo-yo dieting is the phenomenon that most people cannot maintain their weight loss in the long
term and it just ‘seems to bounce back up like a yo-yo’. A related phenomeon is that of the ‘body
fat set-point’, the idea that your body has a genetic body fat percentage or level of fat mass that it
will always strive to get back to. It should be clear by now that neither phenomenon is the result of
metabolic damage. The explanation is far less insidious.
Yoyo-dieting in sedentary individuals is simply the result of a decreased metabolism from the muscle
loss during dieting and a lack of lifestyle change, not ‘metabolic damage’ or any set-point. When
someone goes ‘off the diet’ and goes back to the energy intake that got them fat in the first place,
their now decreased metabolism actually causes them to end up with more fat mass, since it takes a
while before muscle mass has recovered from the diet in the absence of exercise. This is why it’s so
hard to achieve lasting fat loss without strength training.

CaThese data would suggest you can build up to 4 times as much muscle in a high energy surplus as
you can when eating at maintenance. A 30% deficit will reduce muscle growth potential to just over
4% of that. In other words, you may be able to build 24 times as much muscle when bulking hard as
when you are cutting hard. lories

Regardless of the specific numbers, which we’ll get back to in a bit, the take-home message is that
you should always have phases in your diet where you are in an anabolic state and phases where
you are in a catabolic state. As you’ve seen in the section on human metabolism, you naturally go
through periods of net fat storage and fat loss every day. In the course topic on nutrient timing we
will go into advanced strategies to maximize body recomposition. For now

though, the take-home message is that hanging around the middle in terms of net energy balance is
often a waste of time. You can progress this way, but you cannot maximize progress. In other
words, trying to recomp while staying near your maintenance energy intake is not optimal for long
term body recomposition. In fact, advanced trainees may not progress at all anymore this way.
As such, the bodybuilding practice of having cutting and bulking cycles where you prioritize fat loss
or muscle growth, respectively, has scientific merit

The next question is: which one do you pick? Should you cut or bulk?
The answer depends on the person’s body fat percentage and overall health. This determines the
person’s nutrient partitioning and therefore how effective bulking is. If bulking is only going to result
in fat gain, you are better off cutting first.
We’ve already seen several factors that explain why nutrient partitioning is worse in people with a
higher body fat percentage.
Chronic inflammation.
Poorer carb tolerance.
Lower androgenic anabolic hormone and growth factor levels, particularly in men, along with
increased cortisol [1, 2, 3, 4; see data on growth hormone in the graph below]. There is a negative
dose-response relation between body fat percentage and fertility if your BMI is over 18.5. For a 21
year old, that corresponds to a body fat percentage of just 10.7% for untrained men and 21.5% for
women (see the course topic on estimating body fat percentage).
Lower diet induced thermogenesis (see section on TEF below).
It’s a huge misconception that health and anabolism are entirely distinct things. Many things that
benefit your health will also benefit your ability to build muscle and strength. It is not surprise then
that a very low body fat percentage is almost just as suboptimal for nutrient partitioning as a high
body fat percentage. We’ve already seen this as well: a low body fat percentage decreases anabolic
hormone production in both genders. So there’s a sweet spot in terms of body fat percentage

The optimal body fat percentage range for nutrient partitioning seems to be around 9-15% for men
and 14-25% for women. If a woman loses her period at a certain body fat percentage, that generally
corresponds with the lower limit of the optimal range.

The upper end of the range for both genders is roughly the point where they start getting a gut. For
a muscular man that means he should never lose all his ab definition. Abdominal fat storage is
accompanied by visceral fat accumulation, which rapidly increases the negative effects of a higher
body fat percentage on nutrient partitioning. Women have a lot more leeway than men in terms of
adding fat due to their greater metabolic health and different sex hormone regulation. Women’s fat
storage will generally result in more feminine curves before turning into a gut.

If a person is not within this range, the first step for long term body recomposition progress is
getting to that range. Within the optimal range, the decision whether to cut or bulk is simply a
practical and psychological question.

Cutting
There’s a reason there are no fat fitness models. Even if you have a chest so massive it puts
Schwarzenegger’s to shame, if your gut sticks out further than your chest, the image is ruined. So
whether you just want to see Richard and the twins again without a mirror, get ‘toned’ or want to
get so shredded you can count the striations in your glutes, you’ll need to get lean. Since cutting
isn’t nearly as much fun as bulking, you don’t just want to be lean. You want to be lean now.
Unfortunately, your body does not share your enthusiasm for rapid fat loss. It much prefers to have
some reserve fuel sources hanging around, so you’ll have to put your body under stress to make it
dump the fat. As with any type of stress, too little won’t cause any adaptation and too much can
(literally) kill you, so to transform your body into your ideal physique, knowing the optimal amount
of stress is paramount.

The traditional advice has always been to take it easy, but this has more to do with psychology than
physiology and this isn’t the type of ‘moderation is key’ course. We don’t care about what people
think is obsessive or what’s difficult in terms of self control: we’re just interseted in the
mathematical optimum is. The simplest optimum is a maximum, so a first intuitive answer may be
‘as fast as possible’, e.g. just get in your required daily protein and crash-diet to get it over with as
fast as possible. For a trainee of 180 lb, that would mean you could theoretically cut on 600 calories
a day.
You know what your body thinks of that idea? It will think world hunger has finally caught up to us
and death by famine is imminent. Your body will start fighting for its life. Your body is so effective at
this that at some point, lowering your calories further will not increase weight loss at all

How can cutting your calories in half for half a year not result in additional weight loss? Muscle loss
and a suppressed metabolism, i.e. decreased energy expenditure.

Cutting puts your body in stress mode: it preserves energy and stimulates you to find food pronto. A
decrease in anabolic hormone production is normal during contest prep, but too much will of
course obstruct your progress. Your metabolism will decrease and altered nutrient partitioning will
cause your body to feed more on your lean body mass.

As a result of the body’s adaptive processes that try to maintain energy homeostasis, progressively
greater energy deficits results in less and less additional fat loss.

Setting calories
Lecture
Note that you should always think of weight change as a percentage of body weight change and
energy balance as a percentage of maintenance energy intake. This finetunes the diet to the
individual’s bodyweight and metabolism. Many one-size-fits-all diets fail, because they set calories at
some predetermined level without taking into account the individual’s weight or metabolism. This is
also why the often heard recommendations of cutting on a 500 calorie deficit or losing 1 to 2
pounds a week are arbitrary at best. These numbers may work as averages of averages for some
populations of people who are otherwise clueless on how to design a diet, but as general laws they
suck. 2 Pounds a week is extremely drastic for a female Bikini competitor yet slow for many obese
men. Likewise, a 500 calorie deficit achieves very different results on a person with a maintenance
intake of 2000 calories compared to a person Bayesianbodybuilding.com
10
with a 4000 calorie maintenance intake. Same story for bulking. Therefore, you should always think
of weight change as a percentage of body weight change and calculate your energy surplus or deficit
as a percentage of your maintenance energy intake.

Here’s a more detailed guideline table with the optimal deficit and rate of weight loss as a function
of body fat percentage. Note the ranges instead of single numbers. As per the lecture, the person’s
overall program quality, training status and lifestyle factors determine where in the

range the optimum lies, barring extreme circumstances that would broaden the ranges even
further. Also note that the weekly weight loss guideline is a maximum, as the less weight you lose
given a certain amount of fat loss, the better(!)

As an additional guideline, even in the worst case scenario you should not see muscle loss of more
than 25% of weight loss, as not even competitive bodybuilders typically lose more muscle than that
during contest prep

Bulking
The effect of energy balance on protein balance in a deficit and surplus is significantly asymmetric as
you’ve seen. A given energy deficit, say 15%, has a stronger negative effect on muscle growth than
that same energy surplus would have as a positive effect on muscle growth.
In fact, astute readers will already have observed in the course topic on protein intake that several
studies found no significantly beneficial effect of energy intake on muscle growth at all (even though
it sometimes did positively affect nitrogen balance).

So not only is the popular nihilist idea that you can’t build muscle in a deficit completely wrong (see
course topic on understanding muscle growth), the whole idea that energy balance affects your rate
of muscle growth can be questioned. Sure, you often lose muscle is the energy deficit is excessive
and you can force muscle growth by overeating significantly, but in either case the p-ratio is
terrible. In the practical ranges of caloric intake, the effect of energy on muscle growth and strength
development is quite slim.

That said, in Menno’s experience with his clients, the effect of energy balance on protein balance
becomes more relevant at the advanced level. As it becomes increasingly difficult to signal the body
to build further muscle mass, many advanced trainees simply stop gaining any appreciable amount
of muscle mass while cutting or staying at maintenance. Bulking becomes required for muscle
growth and the effect of positive energy balance on strength development is clearly noticeable in
many advanced trainees. Even in novice and especially my intermediate level clients there seem to
be greater rates of muscle and strength gains when bulking than when cutting.

So a different approach to bulking compared to cutting is advisable. Specifically, you should keep
pushing calories up as high as they can while only allowing for minimal fat gain AKA lean bulking.
We’ll get to measuring body composition progress later in the course, but for now you should know
that if you have some measure of how much fat someone has, that measure should barely or not
increase each week of bulking.

This roughly corresponds to the following weight gain rates and energy balances.

These are hefty amounts of weight gain compared to most evidence based fitness professionals’
recommendations, but on an optimized program from this course, you should be able to
approximate them. Anything that will decrease results, like below average genetics or training less
than optimally, will correspondingly decrease the optimal rate of weight gain.
It cannot be stressed enough how important it during a bulk to look at someone’s progress relative
to their genetics (covered later in the course in more detail). Due to the significant variance in genetic
potential for muscle growth between individuals, different people will be able to achieve significantly
varying rates of lean weight gain.

Here are some more concrete guidelines on how to adjust the energy surplus.
If someone’s already above the expected weight gain rate, strength development is good and
they’re not gaining any fat, it’s unlikely a natural trainee will benefit from a further increase in
calories.
 If someone’s progress isn’t better than expected and they’re not gaining fat yet, don’t be afraid
to push caloric intake up to the point that they gain some fat over time. The minimal amount of fat
gain you can achieve is generally the sweet spot for a bulk.
If someone is consistently gaining more than a little fat week to week, decrease energy intake to
avoid needless fat gain.

Estimating basal metabolic rate

As per the lecture, a good formula to estimate basal metabolic rate (BMR) based on lean body mass
(LBM) is the Katch-McArdle formula:

BMR = 370 + 21.6 x LBM

Estimating body fat percentage

For the decision whether to bulk or cut and the most accurate prediction of optimal caloric intake
you need to know someone’s body fat percentage.
When the person is untrained, you can use the formula from Deurenberg et al. (1991).

BF% = 1.2 x BMI + 0.23 x age - 10.8 x sex – 5.4

Where sex = 1 for men and sex = 0 for women

This formula supports that at an equivalent level of leanness, women have 10.8% more body fat
than men. So a man with 10% body fat looks about as lean as a woman with 20.8% body fat

Setting activity level

When calculating someone’s optimal caloric intake, you need to know the person’s activity level.
Based on extensive experimentation in his PT Client Application Form with several activity level
questionnaires, Menno has settled on the following question to inquire about person’s activity level..
Activity level
Please mark one of the fields below or delete the rest.
Sedentary (e.g. office job)
Somewhat active (e.g. you walk your dog several times a day or you commute by bicycle)
Active (e.g. full-time PT, literally on your feet most of the day)
Very active (e.g. involved in manual labor)

You should not blindly accept what a client fills in here. Many people tend to overestimate their
physical activity level because they confuse stress (‘mental activity’) with physical activity. Even if you
were mentally occupied the whole day, if you were sitting during the period, your activity level was
still sedentary
It’s good practice to compare your clients’ selected activity levels against their occupations and
other things they told you to see if and how much you need to adjust their self-reported activity
level. When in doubt, round down the activity factor.

The thermic effect of food (TEF) is the proportion of food’s energy intake that your body burns to
metabolize the food. It’s also called diet induced thermogenesis (DIT).

In humans, the variance in TEF is more modest: up to 25% based on body fat percentage,
carbohydrate tolerance and food type. That is still very significant, however, so if you want to
accurately predict a client’s energy balance, you should estimate TEF based on the following factors.

Body fat percentage and carbohydrate tolerance

The thermic effect of fats is lower in overweight people [2]. The TEF of dietary fat is close to zero
in overweight individuals, but in lean individuals it can rise all the way to ~15%. In the course topic
on refeeds you already saw a study where 50% overfeeding led to a 7.9% increase in energy
expenditure regardless of whether the energy came from fat or carbohydrate in lean individuals:
only in the overweight individuals did fat not have the same thermic effect as carbohydrate. The
decreased thermic effect is linked to lower rates of fat oxidation in overweight individuals. This
again goes to show how dysfunctional it is to be overweight and why getting lean should always be a
priority before bulking. When you’re overweight, the body has tons of energy available in the form
of fat, but it refuses to use that fuel (to some extent: of course the body almost always has some
amount of fat oxidation). The thermic effect of carbohydrate also tends to be lower in people with
insulin resistance, as they have more trouble taking up glucose from the blood.

So it’s a myth that fats strictly have a lower thermic effect than carbs: it depends on the the
person’s body fat percentage and carbohydrate tolerance. For lean individuals there is generally no
significant difference: fats and carbs both then have a TEF of ~15%.Protein’s TEF is not greatly
aSince the TEF of protein is higher than that of fats and carbs, it is tempting to conclude that the
more protein you have in your diet, the higher your diet’s TEF. Yet you’d be wrong. These
differences in TEF only apply when you are consuming the macronutrients in isolation. In practice,
this is of course rarely the case.
Mixed meals tend to have a relatively constant TEF that is not simply equal to the weighted sum of
the TEF of the meal’s macronutrients: it is generally higher. In lean individuals, the TEF of a mixed
meal is around 25%. So mixed meals often have a TEF that’s even higher than pure protein.
Moreover, the TEF of mixed meals consisting of processed foods is lower than that of whole foods.
Whole-grain bread with cheddar cheese has a TEF of 19.9%, whereas white bread with ffected by a
person’s level of leanness or carbohydrate tolerance and remains steady at ~20%.

A person eating an IIFYM-style maintenance diet of processed food could thus go into a 9.2% deficit
simply by filling his or her macros with less processed foods. Processed foods make it far easier for
the body to harvest energy from food. And it’s quite ironic the researchers chose bread and cheese
in the above study, since both are inherently processed foods. Unfortunately, we don’t have
research to see how major the differences are for foods where energy harvest may be much harder,
like fibrous vegetables.
For fats in particular, the type of fat also greatly affects their TEF. Medium-chain triglycerides in
particular have a higher thermic effect than most other fats. These metabolic differences are not
trivial: in some research the difference in TEF is 3-fold. Omega-3 fatty acids can also increase the
thermic effect of a meal by 51.3%.
These differences in TEF can have a significant impact on your body composition. MCTs can
increase fat loss compared to other fats and monounsaturated fat increases fat loss compared to
saturated fat at the same caloric intake.

Conclusion
Assuming mixed meal compositions, TEF generally varies from 10 to 25%. The low end is for
overweight people eating an average diet. The higher end is for lean strength trainees eating a high
protein diet with plenty of unsaturated fats or MCTs from whole foods, a high volume of food and
lots of fiber. So to set calories accurately, you have to take these factors into account and estimate
a person’s TEF

Application
Here’s a summary of how to determine energy intake. Note that any percentage can be
mathematically written as a factor, e.g. 20% deficit = 0.8 energy balance factor, 10% TEF = 1.1 TEF
factor.
1. Katch McArdle BMR = 370 + (21.6 x LBM in kg)
1..1 LBM = BW x (1 - BF% / 100)
2. Conservatively estimate the daily life physical activity level using the table below.

3. Estimate TEF in between 1.1 and 1.25 based on diet quality and BF%.
4. REE = BMR x PA x TEF
5. RT EE = 0.1 kcal/kg/min
6. Training day EE = REE + RT EE x TEF = (BMR x PA + RT EE) x TEF
7. Determine the optimal energy balance factor (EBF) based on BF% and training status.
8. Average total daily energy intake = EE x EBF
It’s important to understand the above math. However, once you do, there’s no need to do it all by
hand, so here’s a calculator to do the math for you

By now you should have all the knowledge you need to set a person’s daily average macros. A
major error that you should avoid is using macro splits. It makes no sense whatsoever to describe a
diet in terms of 20/40/40% fats/carbs/protein or anything along these lines. This would imply that
macronutrient requirements vary proportional to caloric expenditure, i.e. you would need less
protein in a deficit but more if you switch from resistance to endurance training. So never use
macro percentages or ratios.
Instead, do the following.
1. Calculate the optimal caloric intake.
2. Calculate the person’s minimum carbohydrate requirement for maximal performance, if any.
3. Determine the desirability of dietary ketosis. When ketosis is not desirable, it’s advisable to keep
the carbohydrate intake above 100 g per day.
4. Allocate carbohydrate and fat intakes based on the above, going with a ~40+% fat intake when
calories are abundant.

irregular meal pattern is not just a lifestyle concern. The regularity of your meal pattern has
important physiological effects. By definition, an irregular meal pattern has

you eating at times when your circadian rhythm is not adapted to digest nutrients. This causes
disruption of postprandial metabolism, i.e. how your body reacts to food. This disruption from an
irregular eating pattern includes all of the following.
• Higher fasting total and LDL (‘bad’) cholesterol. A cross-sectional study found decreased LDL
cholesterol levels though.
• Decreased postprandial insulin sensitivity. When you eat at a time your body is not accustomed
to, you produce more insulin than normally.
• A disruption in the circadian rhythm of your appetite leading to more hunger [2].
• A disruption in the circadian rhythm of cortisol production and an increase in total cortisol
production across the day.
• Higher blood pressure.
• A lower thermic effect of food (TEF) [2] as a result of decreased insulin sensitivity. When you eat
at irregular times, your body burns less of it. In this study the thermic effect of food decreased
almost 50% during the 2 week transition from a regular to an irregular meal pattern. That means if
your TEF is normally on the high end of 25%, an irregular meal pattern could drop that cose to
12.5% and thereby decrease your total daily energy expenditure by 12.5%.
Overall, most research indicates that whether you eat breakfast or not, as long as you do it
consitently, has no special effect on your body composition.

Interim conclusion
Intermittent morning fasting generally does not have any different effects on your body composition
than a diet with regular breakfast consumption (but see the section below).

Alternate day fasting, on the other hand, may actually improve muscle retention, but in strength
training and lean individuals, instead of true alternate day fasting, periods of protein sparing
modified fasting (PSMF) offer a safer alternative. A PSMF is a period where the regular meal
frequency is preserved, but the meals are reduced to the optimal protein intake with a minimal
intake of the other macros. The PSMF is a highly successful medical practice for obese individuals
with few complications, in contrast to what many lay individuals who have never tried it often argue
(more on this in the compliance topic). However, a PSMF cannot be sustained without excessive
muscle loss in leaner individuals. By implementing short PSMF periods, such as on your rest days
(more on this later), you can achieve rapid fat loss and the benefits of fasting without excess muscle
loss.

In conclusion, if you are active in the morning, you may be able to significantly increase your energy
expenditure by having an early breakfast. Intermittent morning fasting can thus needlessly impair
energy expenditure in active individuals.

Breakfast: the most important meal of the day... if you’re carb intolerant
Other than having a high activity level, there is another consideration when deciding whether
intermittent morning fasting is right for someone: their carb tolerance.
Intermittent fasting can be harmful for individuals with poor carb tolerance, because glucose
tolerance and muscle insulin sensitivity are higher in the morning than later in the day.
Corresponding with the circadian rhythm of glucose tolerance, in type 2 diabetics, not having

breakfast impairs insulin production throughout the rest of the day, causing greater increases in
blood sugar after lunch and dinner (postprandial hyperglycemia) than when breakfast was
consumed [2]. In other words, a big breakfast improves glycemic control in type II diabetics

Intermittent fasting’s negative effects on carb tolerance can impair not just your health but also fat
loss. Type 2 diabetics, both men and women, lose more weight and achieve better health outcomes
when eating only breakfast and lunch than when eating 6 meals a day. This suggests they may still
benefit from intermittent fasting, just not in the mornings. (However, intermittent evening fasting is
difficult to combine with optimal nutrient timing practices, as we’ll see in the next course topics.)
Intermittent fasting’s negative effect on insulin-glucose dynamics is not just a concern for type 2
diabetics, because the negative effects of intermittent fasting and poor carb tolerance go both ways.
Poor carb tolerance can make intermittent fasting problematic, but intermittent morning fasting can
in itself cause poor carb tolerance even in healthy individuals. Specifically, in the Bath Breakfast
Project blood sugar levels remained more stable in the later part of the day in the group having an
early breakfast and in Kobayashi’s study blood sugar levels were also on average higher.
Ironically, intermittent fasting zealots tend to name improved insulin sensitivity as a major benefit.
This is only true in uncontrolled settings where fasting causes fat loss, which then improves insulin
sensitivity. The overall literature on fasting and insulin sensitivity is not very favorable. Intermittent
fasting is generally bad or neutral for insulin sensitivity.
Intermittent fasting’s negative effects in individuals with poor carb tolerance are not just theoretical.
Overweight women lose more fat if they have a big breakfast instead of a big dinner. This finding is
supported by a long term prospective cohort study.

All in all, the evidence demonstrates that intermittent fasting is generally not a good idea for
individuals with indications of poor carb tolerance, particularly overweight women and type 2
diabetics. For these individuals, the conventional wisdom to eat a large breakfast seems to be
sound advice. That said, intense exercise is so good at improving insulin sensitivity that in exercising
individuals the relevance of the greater insulin sensitivity in the morning is very slight. As such, a
high training frequency can make intermittent fasting more tolerable. And to emphasize: lean,
strength trained individuals with normal carb tolerance don’t need to have an early breakfast for
normal glucose control and should have no problems with intermittent fasting.

While evidence for physiologically harmful effects of intermittent fasting per se in women is lacking,
it is prudent to be more wary of intolerance to fasting in women and to advise shorter fasting
durations to women than to men.

Conclusion
If intermittent fasting got you out of the bro-age of eating 6 meals a day, carrying around protein
powder and Tupperware containers wherever you went, intermittent fasting will feel like the holy
grail of easy dieting. However, for people used to a regular 3-meals-a-day diet, intermittent fasting
can be difficult to adjust to. Objectively, the physiological responses to intermittent morning fasting
and having an early breakfast are not large. There are no intrinsic metabolic differences up to fasting
periods of at least 20 hours, though at that point muscle growth may be adversely affected.
Intermittent fasting can be slightly detrimental to someone’s insulin sensitivity and it has the
potential to seriously limit spontaneous physical activity and mental energy levels. Hunger levels are
generally not affected, but compliance is worse in many people, especially women and individuals
with poor carb tolerance.
The table below summarizes when intermittent morning fasting is suitable for a person. These
criteria generally make intermittent fasting particularly suitable for male office workers and
particularly unsuitable for in-gym personal trainers and overweight women.

Alternate day fasting has a better track record in research, but it is not recommended for lean or
strength training individuals. Instead, when alterante day fasting is desired, periods of PSMFing are
advisable to create a large but short term energy deficit while preserving muscle mass (or growth).

Conclusion
Most research suggests that meal frequency per se does not affect energy expenditure or protein
balance and it thus does not matter over how many meals a day you distribute your macros.
However, the limited research we have suggests that 2 meals a day may not suffice for maximal
results during strength training, at least not when cutting. Additionally, The Meal Frequency Project
shows that 3 meals a day may be superior to 6 meals a day, at least when bulking. As such, meal
frequencies of 3 – 5 meals a day are recommended for optimal body recomposition.

Conclusion
Energy intake and macros are far from all that matters in a diet and can’t be considered strictly
more important than nutrient timing. CRPT, the timing of your protein intake over the day, may be
important in itself. There is still much that needs clarification by future research, but all current
evidence points in the direction that you should consume a significant amount of your daily protein
intake later in the day.
Take home message: Consume at least a single meal with a good portion of protein (i.e. above the
leucine threshold) in the hours before going to sleep to fuel overnight anabolism.

Moreover, as we’ll see in the course topic on sleep, consuming a high carbohydrate meal in the
hours before going to bed can improve sleep quality by i.a. promoting melatonin production.
So given that consuming a relatively high amount of carbohydrate pre-bed likely benefits mood,
compliance and fat loss all at the same time, there is no reason not to implement carbohydrate
timing in most diets. This means the evening meal(s) should typically contain more carbohydrate
than the morning meal(s), unless exercise, especially endurance exercise, is performed in the
morning.

this study mainly just shows that the timing of fat is not ás important and this study cannot tell us
anything about the timing of fat intake per se.

Combining fats and carbs?

In the above sections you learned that carbohydrates and fat may have better nutrient partitioning
at different times of day. Upon realizing this, some people take this to extremes and suggest we
should never combine fats and carbs in the same meal. Should you? Based on the course contents
thus far, you should be able to answer this.
The answer is you should absolutely not completely separate carbs and fats from each other in your
meals. Dissocating carbs from fats in your meals does not result in greater fat loss than consuming
all 3 macronutrients within each meal. There are in fact several good reasons why you want to
combine all 3 macronutrients in each meal.
As you learned in the course topic on protein, certain whole foods like milk can have synergistic
nutrient compositions that make the whole food more effective at increasing protein balance than
you would expect from its macronutrient composition.
As you learned in the course topic on human metabolism, balanced meals increase your
metabolism (DIT) more than you would expect based on their macronutrient composition.
Plus, we have the evolutionary argument. Many whole foods have all 3 macronutrients. Not
metabolizing such foods optimally would be a hugely disadvantageous trait that should be eliminated
from the gene pool via natural selection.

So nutrient timing isn’t a matter of excluding certain macros at certain times of day. It’s about the
ratios. Circadian rhythm carbohydrate timing doesn’t require you to completely avoid carbs in the
morning and save all your carbs for the later part of the day. It’s about the macro ratios in your
meals and the distribution of your macros across the day.
 The take-home message of the lecture is that you want to synchronize your protein intake with
your anabolic window to maximize muscle protein synthesis (MPS) values.

This study also shows once again that carbohydrate consumption post-workout does not improve
results when post-workout protein is already consumed.

In either case the practical application is generally that it’s good to consume a relatively large
amount of protein in the later part of the day

So when you are training in a fasted state, your body has a weaker signal for muscle growth. From
an evolutionary point of view, it’s not adaptive to ramp up protein synthesis greatly when there’s
not enough protein available to cover all bodily needs

In short, pre-workout protein consumption is likely required to maximize muscle protein synthesis
and thereby growth during and immediately after a training session.

During fasted exercise, protein balance is often negative because protein breakdown rates increase
and synthesis rates decrease for several reasons [2].
Exercise results in muscle damage and muscle protein breakdown.
Amino acids may be used as fuel (oxidation), to form glucose (gluconeogenesis) for glycogen
resynthesis or to maintain acid-based regulation.
Muscle anabolic signaling decreases. (See section above on mTOR.)

As such, strength training itself is acutely catabolic, so protein is required to maintain a net anabolic
state during exercise.

In short, pre-workout protein consumption can help to both increase protein synthesis and to
decrease protein breakdown in your muscles, resulting in greater growth

In reality, energy expenditure is lower during fasted exercise. Pre-workout protein consumption
increases energy expenditure in the form of post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) compared to
placebo, even post-workout nutrition is provided in both situations

In conclusion, the claim that fasted training is superior for fat loss is highly dubious. Fed training is
likely superior for fat loss as a result of greater energy expenditure and better nutrient partitioning

Conclusion and application

While the available data is limited both in terms of design and methodology, the available evidence
strongly suggests that fasted training will compromise protein balance and its resulting muscle
growth and strength development. As such, it is advisable to ensure a high amount of amino acids in
the blood (hyperaminoacidemia) in the period from the start of each training session until the post-
workout meal.
The graphs below provide reference points on how long amino acid levels stay elevated in the
blood after different meals (postprandial hyperaminoacidemia). As you can see, postprandial
hyperaminoacidemia may only last around 3 hours after the consumption of skimmed milk or a
whey protein shake, but it lasts over 6 hours after consumption of a steak, casein protein or whole
milk.

As a guideline, hard training individuals should consume at least 0.3 g/kg of whole food based
protein and a few grams of carbohydrate within 6 hours of strength training. More advanced
trainees, trainees with lower training frequencies and fasted trainees will likely benefit from more.
Women generally don’t suffer as much from fasted training as men due to their lower protein
breakdown and oxidation during exercise (see the course topic on gender differences).

Anabolic window nutrient timing application

The central principle of anabolic window nutrient timing is very simple: you want to synchronize
your protein intake with the anabolic window. Remember that the ‘anabolic window’ is a period of
delayed muscle fullness: during this period the ceiling effect of protein synthesis is higher. So you
want to make use of this and provide enough protein to maximize muscle protein synthesis
throughout this ‘window of potential’.
Specifically, you want to synchronize blood hyperaminoacidemia with the time-course of the ceiling
of muscle protein synthesis: your blood should have enough amino acids at any point in time after a
training session to maximize MPS. The exact timing necessity depends on the size of the meals,
since with larger meals the timing becomes less important due to the longer presence of nutrients
in the blood (postprandial hyperaminoacidemia) and a longer refractory response to protein.

To sync your nutrient timing with your anabolic windows, you have to stop thinking in terms of
calendar days. Instead, think in terms of anabolic windows across the week. Each workout triggers
an anabolic window: specifically, every time you stimulate a muscle group, you create a ‘window
potential’ for that muscle group. This means that, when your anabolic window is long enough, if you
train in the evening, you want to increase your protein intake not just post-workout but also the
next morning. So just grouping your nutrition plan into ‘training days’ and ‘rest days’ does not
always suffice. You want to think in terms of periods in- and outside the anabolic window,
regardless of which day these periods overlap with.

Since energy intake and certain fatty acids in particular can work synergistically with protein to
increase protein synthesis, it is advisable to also synchronize your total energy intake with the
anabolic window.

Workout nutrition is likely practically irrelevant for untrained individuals that start strength training
at least 3 days per week, since the anabolic window in untrained individuals can last over 72 hours
after even a cardio workout. As long as at least 3 meals a day are consumed spread across the day
with sufficient protein to exceed the leucine threshold (=> 0.4 g/kg), the exact timing of the meals in
relation to training sessions is not very important.

See the graphs below for data of the specific time course of MPS. In terms of practical application,
you can think of these as levels of protein/energy intake over time that maximize muscle growth
with the exception that you want your protein/energy intake to take place a bit earlier in time to
allow for the nutrients to reach the blood. As per the topic on fasted training, if you’re fasted,
consuming a meal post-workout is too late to maximize post-workout protein synthesis, because it
takes a while before the amino acids are available to be taken up by your muscles from the blood

Novice trainees
As you get more advanced, it becomes more and more important to sandwich your training
sessions with meals to make sure protein balance is elevated maximally throughout the anabolic
window period. Based on the mixed literature finding benefits of pre/-post workout protein
supplementation in novice level trainees and that it is safe to say myofibrillar protein synthesis rates
should still remain elevated for at least 24 hours post-workout, the daily protein distribution need
not be finetuned yet in novice level trainees. However, protein timing becomes relevant within a
matter of weeks. After the first few weeks of strength training, trainees are advised to sandwich
their training sessions with a 6 hour inter-meal interval at most

Example:
12:00 h: lunch
15:00 – 16:00 h: strength training session
18:00 h: dinner
Note: How to determine someone’s training status will be discussed in detail in the course topic on
customized program design.

Intermediate trainees
Intermediate level trainees should pay close attention to their daily protein distribution. Myofibrillar
protein synthesis levels may still be elevated 29 hours after a training session in strength trained
individuals if sufficient volume was performed, but peak MPS levels occur within hours after the
training session (see graph below)

Given the time it takes for nutrients to reach muscle cells, pre- or post-workout nutrition should be
provided with ~2 hours, in addition to sandwiching the training session within a 6 hour inter-meal
interval. The immediate post-workout period should overlap with hyperaminoacidemia from at
least 0.6 g/kg protein

Advanced trainees
Based on the research in bodybuilders from Mori and Cribb & Hayes, advanced trainees are advised
to sandwich their workouts within a 5 hour inter-meal interval in addition to providing pre- or
post-workout protein within a single hour of the training session. The immediate post-workout
period should overlap with hyperaminoacidemia from at least 0.6 g/kg protein.
Now that you have all the pieces of the nutrient timing puzzle, over the next 2 weeks we’ll go into
several case studies of macro calculations with the implementation of nutrient timing.

Mechanisms of muscle growth

Muscle hypertrophy occurs when enough biomechanical tension is applied to the muscle fibers that
their structural integrity is compromised. As an adaptive response to this stress, the muscle fibers
undergo changes in their structure. This remodeling process can include an increase in the size of
the muscle.
Here’s a the ultra CliffsNotes on how muscle grows.
1. When you put tension on a muscle, its muscle fibers deform and trigger chemical activity
(mechanotransduction).
2. The muscle fibers release growth factors like insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) and myokines
like IL-6 to signal the need for repair (myogenic signaling).
3. The mTOR master enzyme integrates all the signals for muscle growth, such as amino acid
availability and the presence of growth factors, and then translates this information for your genes
(translation initiation).
4. Your genes are located within muscle cell nuclei that function as command centers in their region
of a muscle fiber. They contain the blueprint to create new proteins (protein synthesis).
5. Nearby satellite cells are activated, they divide and their formed daughter cells fuse to the
disrupted muscle fibers to donate their nuclei to the muscle cells and enlarge them (myonuclear
addition) and aid in the creation of more new muscle proteins.

In conclusion, while it would be premature to dismiss the role of anabolic hormone levels during the
post-workout period as broscience altogether, if systemic factors like acute post-workout anabolic
hormone elevations play a direct role in muscle growth, it is small compared to the local effects like
mechanical tension. A small benefit may be derived though by performing heavy compound
exercises directly before other exercises. Since it is generally prudent to perform heavy lower body
compound exercises before upper body isolation work anyway, for reasons we’ll get into in the
course topic on exercise ordering, this is an advisable programming practice.

Now here’s the kicker: the second component, neural adaptation, is highly specific. Your nervous
system becomes better at performing the specific movement you’re doing with little transfer to
other activities. Here are some examples.
Partial range of motion strength training makes you stronger specifically in the part of motion
you’re training with only ~15% transfer to the rest of the movement. That’s why you see many guys
in the gym that can quarter squat a ton, yet when they have to go ass-to-grass, they have to strip off
literally the majority of the weight.
The optimal training methods for 1 to 10 meter sprints are significantly different from 30 meter
sprints, though both are already extremely short distances.
There is very little relation between different measures of core strength, even though it’s the
same set of muscle groups (abs, back, etc.) performing a similar task (stabilizing the torso).
Unpublished research from Osaka University of Health and Sport Sciences found that there is no
significant relation between trunk stability (i.e. planks) and trunk flexion (i.e. crunches). Other
unpublished research from Saeterbakken et al. in Norway found that the relations between core
strength, core stability and core endurance were “non-existing to medium” (data below).
The lack of carry-over of many forms of exercise to other exercises may be hard to grasp for some
people. Part of the reason for this is that our language is fundamentally flawed to understand
biomechanics. We talk about strength and power as traits, when they are in fact skills. Strictly
speaking, a person cannot be strong or be powerful. A Powerlifter isn’t strong: a Powerlifter has a
strong bench press, deadlift and squat. Nor is an Olympic Weightlifter powerful: a weightliftes has a
powerful Clean & Jerk and Snatch

Since the nervous system is highly movement specific in its function, that leaves muscle size as the
main component of functional capacity. Muscle size is the only true trait that increases force
production capacity without any limitation of movement specificity. If you make a muscle bigger, it
will increase your ability to generate force during every movement that that muscle is involved in.

Secondly, the other thing bodybuilders excel at, which is achieving a low body fat percentage, is
also strongly linked to performance during many movements. Given the same muscle mass, the
lower your fat mass and thereby your total bodyweight, the higher your relative strength. This is
particularly important during weightbearing activities, which basically includes all ground sports.

As a final example of the non-specific benefits of bodybuilding for performance, consider training
for jumping performance. Many ‘functional trainers’ have argued that you should train quarter
squats to improve your jump, because this is a movement that resembles actual jumping. However,
full squats build more muscle and lead to greater increases in jumping performance than quarter
squats.

Key take-home messages

Muscle growth is part of the adaptation process your body goes through after muscle tissue has
undergone significant stress, starting with recovery (repairing damaged muscle tissue) and ending
with supercompensation (building new muscle tissue). As such, adaptation is not something to
avoid. It is the very goal of training.
Muscle growth is primarily a local/regional/intrinsic process. Muscles grow independently of each
other based on factors occurring within that very muscle.
The primary type of stress inducing muscle growth is mechanical tension on the muscle fibers.
Muscle damage, metabolic stress and exercise induced anabolic hormone elevations have been
postulated to play a role as well, but their supporting evidence is much less compelling.
Strength is influenced by muscle size but also by several other factors, chiefly:
o biomechanical factors, such as the muscle’s pennation angle and the positions of its tendons that
influence the muscle’s leverage;
o neural factors, such as inter- and intramuscular coordination of muscle (fibers) and the speed of
motor unit contractions (rate coding) that optimize how the tension produced by your muscle
fibers is translated into movement;
o metabolic factors, such as calcium metabolism. In practice, however, within an individual, total
muscle mass and strength training performance are highly correlated.

Conclusion: no cardio?
Since for fat loss cardio training is no more effective than eating equivalently fewer calories and
cardio also has the cost of interfering with your strength training, cardio is normally best avoided in
optimized training programs.

However, cardio is sometimes a necessary evil, specifically for physique contest preparation. In
order to reach contest shape without cardio, some individuals have to decrease their energy intake
to the point that 2 problems arise:
1. Hunger.
2. Nutrient deficiencies, at the micro- as well as the macro level.
Both problems can be counteracted of course.
In the course topic on ad libitum dieting you’ll learn how to manage hunger. Suffice to say here,
most people should never have to experience regular hunger when cutting in an optimized
program.
In the course topics on micronutrition and health science you’ll learn how to cover all nutritional
needs.
Macros, however, remain a problem. Protein intake cannot be compromised on under any
circumstance. Carbohydrate intake often can, but ketosis may not be desirable. Fat intake can be
compromised on in the short term, but over the course of weeks or months this will most likely
impair the competitor’s results and health. In my experience, women generally lose their menstrual
cycle earlier on the traditional bro diets with almost no fat.
Since most people will be left with at least some issues at very low energy intakes, Menno generally
recommends that women do not decrease their energy intake below ~1500 calories on training
days and men don’t go below ~2000 kcal. Beyond this point, the costs of cardio may be less than
the costs of further decreases in energy intake. To make this decision, the following tables are
useful as guidelines to see how many calories are burned with cardio exercise. Note that these
values are total energy expenditure, not above basal (see the course topic on carbohydrates).

Strategies to reduce the interference effect

When you decided that cardio is the lesser evil compared to a further reduction in calories,
strategic programming is needed. Fortunately, we have several ways to implement cardio with
minimal interference effect. Always keep in mind that the goal of cardio is simply to expend energy,
not to get fatigued or to develop endurance, on the contrary in fact.

Modality
Just like muscle growth itself, the interference effect is mostly a local process (see the course topic
on strength training adaptations). For example, treadmill running after strength training reduced
lower body strength development by 42% in one study, but there was no significant effect on upper
body strength development.
So if you have certain muscle groups that don’t need to become bigger, it’s best to choose a form
of cardio that relies primarily on these muscle groups.
For example, Men’s Physique competitors wear board shorts on stage, so they may be able to
compromise on their thigh and glute development and perform bike ergometer cardio. Bikini
competitors generally don’t need to maximize muscle growth in their backs or arms, so upper body
rowing can be a suitable form of cardio.
Some of the interference effect is central in nature though, so doing cardio for your less important
muscle groups does not absolve the rest of your body from the interference effect entirely. In
Kikuchi et al. (2016)’s study, bicycle ergometer interval training on the same day as an arm workout
reduced biceps growth and strength development by over 30% in effect size. Lower body cardio
could interfere with upper body strength training central mechanisms such as central fatigue,
competition for recovery resources and hormonal effects.
In addition to which muscle groups are exercised, there are a few more considerations for the
optimal cardio modality.

Muscle damage: Forms of cardio that involve eccentric muscle actions result in more muscle
damage than purely concentric cardio modalities. Since muscle damage can impair strength training
performance, concentric-only forms of cardio like the bike ergometer are prefered.
Injury risk: Cardio modalities that involve high impact forces come with greater stress for your
connective tissue and a resulting greater injury risk. So while jump rope training may make you feel
like Rocky, it’s probably not worth doing during contest prep when your recovery capacity is
already being taxed greatly.
Temperature: Cold water immersion can increase your appetite [2], as you may have
experienced yourself some time. This means swimming in cold water is generally not a good idea as
cardio for fat loss.
Somewhat ironically given its popularity, since jogging has both a high injury risk and great potential
for muscle damage, running induces a significantly worse interference effect than other forms of
cardio.
Conversely, ergometer cardio does little muscle damage, involves no impact forces, burns a good
deal of calories and has an excellent track record in the literature, so this is often a good cardio
modality. Other suitable options include stairwalking, cross-training, skiing machines and rowing.

Volume: frequency & duration

Unsurprisingly, the longer your cardio sessions, the worse the interference, as you move further
away from the strength end of the strength-endurance continuum. The interference effect for
cardio sessions below 20 minutes is generally small.
Some psychological research also indicates that 20 minutes is about as long as most people can
keep their attention on something without becoming overly bored, hence that duration for TED
Presentations, so when possible, it’s advisable to prescribe cardio sessions of no more than 20
minutes.
Similarly unsurprisingly, the more total cardio you do, the bigger the total interference, so don’t
perform more cardio than necessary.
If you have to perform a high volume of cardio, it’s generally a good idea to spread it out over many
sessions. As long as your cardio sessions are sufficiently short that they don’t require much, if any,
endurance adaptations to take place, you will minimize the interference effect.
Timing
Another strategy to reduce the interference effect is to separate the cardio from your strength
training. You basically do not want any overlap between the anabolic window periods of the cardio
session and your strength training for that muscle.
In practice, the more time in between cardio and strength training for any muscle group, the better,
but as a guideline, aim for at least 6 hours.
When you have to perform cardio and strength training for a muscle on the same day, the question
becomes: do you want to perform the cardio before or after your strength training? If you perform
the cardio first, the substrate depletion, neuromuscular fatigue and in particular the muscle damage
can negatively affect your strength training and thereby exacerbate the interference effect by
directly interfering with your strength training performance. However, performing the cardio after
your strength training may also make the effect of the training session even more endurance
oriented, as you’ll be performing endurance training in a glycogen depleted state. So before or after?
Both. If you spread the

cardio around your workout, your pre-workout cardio can serve as a warm-up for the strength
training. Don’t overdo it: when you get to the point of it becoming endurance training, save the
remainder of the cardio for after the strength training. By splitting up the cardio session into 2
parts, you can achieve the same total work output while reducing the endurance adaptations, as
neither session should be sufficient to require significant endurance training adaptations.

Intensity: HIIT vs. LISS

High intensity interval training (HIIT) is cardio 2.0. Since making its way into the fitness world, the
picture of cardio as jogging has been replaced by repeated sprinting and activities we used to think
of as Strongman training. We are bombarded with pictures of ‘sprinting vs. running’, showing an
emaciated long distance runner alongside a sprinter that could win a bodybuilding contest. But is
this comparison between HIIT and steady state cardio justified? Is HIIT the preferred form of cardio
to get lean?

It’s quite evident that sprinters are considerably more muscular than long distance runners. Not
only that, they’re usually leaner too. Case closed: to look like a sprinter, do HIIT, right?
Wrong. The entire idea that HIIT resembles the training of a sprinter is extremely misguided. The
training practices of elite level sprinters are comparable to those of other strength and power
athletes like Olympic weightlifters and powerlifters: short, high intensity exercise followed by long
rest periods.
The popular Tabata protocol has 20 seconds of sprinting followed by 10 seconds of walking.
Olympic level sprinters run the 100 meters in less than 10 seconds and can easily rest 5 minutes in
between sprints. (Anything up to 4 minutes of rest is generally defined in science as HIIT).
If you do the math, the sprinter’s relative rest period is over 60 times as long as the person
performing HIIT. Since there is a huge difference in muscular and metabolic demands between
sprinting for even 5 and 15 seconds, you basically can’t even compare HIIT and Olympic sprinting.
The metabolism of repeated sprint training has been extensively investigated and it is much closer
to team based sports like soccer than it is to strength or power training. The first sprint is highly
explosive and relies almost entirely on anaerobic (‘without oxygen’) energy production. Across
repeated sprints, this rapidly transitions to the metabolism of endurance training with decreases in
power output up to 73% after 10 sprints.
The same has been found in sprinting during bicycling. All-out sprints and HIIT produce significantly
different metabolic effects.
So when you do HIIT, you’re not training like a sprinter. You’re training like a soccer player.
So will HIIT make you look like a soccer player? Numerous studies have researched the effects of
HIIT on your body composition. The media has picked out (and often misrepresented) a few as ‘the
revolutionary new way to lose fat in a fraction of the time’.

However, the literature as a whole shows that both fat loss and muscle hypertrophy are similar
between steady state cardio and HIIT: most studies find that no muscle hypertrophy occurs beyond
the novice level and minimal fat loss occurs. HIIT is just not that different from steady state cardio
for the body.
In terms of the interference effect, HIIT actually tends to be the worst of both worlds compared to
strength training and cardio. If cardio is kept to a sufficiently low intensity, you minimize the
interference effect, because no endurance adaptations are required in the first place then. With
HIIT, this is not possible.
To illustrate HIIT’s great potential for strength interference, de Souza et al. (2014) compared the
effects of strength training twice a week with and without the addition of HIIT sprint training. The
pure strength training group gained over 17% in size in all their major muscle fiber types. However,
in the group that also performed HIIT there was no significant increase in muscle mass at all. The
researchers also looked at a group only performing HIIT and again there was no increase in muscle
mass. The most striking aspect of this study is that the participants were healthy, untrained men.
You’d expect them to grow no matter what.
As an additional argument for low intensity cardio, in some research steady state cardio is more
effective for fat loss. This is not surprising, because steady state cardio simply tends to burn more
calories than HIIT, because it can be maintained for a much longer duration. Since energy
expenditure is the primary purpose of cardio for fat loss, this is another huge advantage for low
intensity steady state cardio (LISS). (Of course, HIIT does have the advantage of being more time-
effective.)
Now, you may have heard that HIIT ‘stokes the metabolic fire’ and elevates your metabolism for
days after your training session. These are unfortunately wild exaggerations. The increase in
metabolism after training called excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) for even
extreme cardio protocols lasts 3 to 24 hours and comprises just 6 to 15% of the net total oxygen
cost of the exercise session. In other words, a paltry amount of calories. Even strength training
sessions of 50 to 60 sets (!) don’t cause more EPOC than the equivalent of 114 calories.

Interestingly, in contrast to the hype, in research most people perceive HIIT as less enjoyable than
steady state cardio. In Menno’s experience, people that prefer HIIT are often better off putting that
energy in their strength training, possibly increasing their training frequency (see the course topic
on training frequency).
It’s worth noting that some evidence suggests very long cardio sessions (over an hour) can
subconsciously reduce your non-exercise physical activity level and thereby your total daily energy
expenditure. However, to the extent that this occurs in humans at all, it is likely not relevant at the
volumes of cardio recommended in this course.
In conclusion, low intensity cardio has a greater potential for energy expenditure, is generally better
tolerated psychologically over the long term and it can minimize the interference effect, whereas
HIIT will generally result in significant interference. HIIT sessions are thus often better replaced
with more strength training sessions or low intensity cardio. The interference effect of LISS can be
minimized by keeping the cardio below the threshold of significant fatigue. Some cues for this are as
follows.
You should still be able to breathe through your nose.
 You should be able to maintain the pace indefinitely.

Conclusion
Whether to implement cardio depends on the practical feasibility of eating less and its costs –
hunger and nutrient deficiency – compared to the time and effort of cardio and the magnitude of its
interference effect. Remember that the goal of cardio for fat loss is simply to increase energy
expenditure, nót to improve your endurance.
To burn a good amount of energy while minimizing the interference effect, pick a concentric-only
and low impact cardio modality that exercises relatively unimportant muscle groups and plan in a
minimum amount of low intensity steady state cardio as far away from your strength training as
possible.

Training status
For one, the more advanced you are, the higher your optimal training volume.

Advanced trainees are more resistant to muscle damage and neuromuscular fatigue. Advanced
trainees also show a blunted hormonal-anabolic response to a given training volume. As a result, a
higher training stress is required to stimulate further training adaptations. Low volume training
often works well in beginners, but many studies show that a single set, even if taken to complete
failure, results in very little or even zero further muscle growth in more advanced individuals.

In untrained individuals, maximum muscle growth seems to be attained for the majority of

people by just 9 sets a week. In more advanced trainees, however, it’s clear that the benefits extend
well beyond this range. In the overall literature, there are significant benefits for muscle growth up
to at least 10 sets per week per muscle group.

More is not always better

Secondly, there are diminishing returns to training volume [2, 3]. Every additional set you do results
in an increasingly smaller additional benefit for your progress. This principle is illustrated in the 2
graphs below.

Contrary to popular belief, these data also show that the optimal training volume for strength
development and muscle growth is very similar. After the lectures on strength training adaptations,
this should not come as a surprise to you anymore. Strength and size are strongly correlated, at
least within natural trainees.
Not only are there diminishing returns to your training volume, at some point additional volume
becomes detrimental. You will exceed your body’s capacity to recover from the training stress and
your body becomes incapable of adapting before your next training session: you overtrain. As such,
there is an optimum training volume compared to which, doing less or more both result in less
results [2]. The U-shaped optimum curve to training volume is
With all the above in mind, we can now get to concrete recommendations on how to set your
training volume and intensity. We will first deal with these variables at a more abstract level before
we zoom in on how this looks in terms of individual workouts, just like we did with the
macronutrients for nutritional program design.

conclusion
In trained individuals, there is a trend towards greater muscle growth or strength development of
the higher training frequency group in most studies, amongst other benefits like muscle activation,
fat loss and health.
The superior results of the higher frequency groups often don’t reach statistical significance, but this
is to be expected because of serious methodological limitations that result in low statistical power.
Moreover, all studies controlled for training volume, which means that the key benefit of a higher
training frequency – being able to perform more work because your muscles are less fatigued – is
not accounted for in the research.

The answer is that more developed muscles are not only more resistant to damage, they also
recover faster. There are 2 primary mechanisms by which strength trained muscles have a greater
regenerative potential.
1. Larger muscles have more satellite cells and show greater satellite cell and other myogenic cell
activity. (If you don’t know why satellite cells increase recovery potential, revisit the course topic
on adaptations to strength training and how muscle grows.)
2. Strength training results in angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels. These new blood
vessels increase blood flow to your muscles, allowing faster delivery of nutrients and removal of
waste products. The result is an increased ability of your skeletal muscles to remodel themselves
after being damaged during exercise, i.e. the muscles recover faster.
The effect of training frequency on recovery capacity
The discussed research findings so far may come as a surprise to people that have been nocebo’ed
to hell by the overtraining fairy and told to believe that training frequency should be limited for the
sake of your recovery.
In fact, there are several mechanisms by which training more often increases your body’s ability to
recover.

1. Exercise quality
Spreading a given training volume over more days increases the quality of that work, because you’ll
spend less of your training time in an already fatigued state.
Just after your warm-up, your nervous system is still fresh and metabolic waste has yet to
accumulate in your blood. Your body is in a perfect state to adapt to anything you throw at it. As
rigorous training commences, lactate production causes acidosis in your blood as a byproduct of
not having enough oxygen to fuel energy demands.

The breakdown of muscle protein floods your blood with ammonia to levels actually exceeding
those of liver disease patients, actually causing some degree of brain toxicity and various
neurological disturbances. Muscle fibers and their connective tissue tear and become inflamed from
the tension of contracting against maximal resistance.
This fatigued state is not conducive to your exercise technique and recovery capacity.
2. Sleep quality
Strength training significantly improves sleep quality. The more often you train, the better your
sleep quality over time. Even high intensity training close before bedtime generally doesn’t adversely
affect sleep quality, though many people think and subjectively report that it does.

3. Active recovery
A higher training frequency is effectively a form of active recovery. More training equals more blood
flow and a greater rate of tissue turn-over.
And the improved recovery capacity isn’t just theoretical. Several studies have investigated the
effect of training frequency on recovery capacity.

Let’s make sure that got through. Daily, heavy, high volume training was well over twice as
effective as the typical upper-lower splits you see everywhere online.

Interim conclusion
Overtraining is extremely overrated as a result of poor interpretations of the literature and the
simple reluctance of people wanting to work hard. Higher frequency training improves your
recovery capacity by making you more resistant against fatigue, by virtue of the repeated bout
effect, by improving your sleep quality and by improving the quality of your work because you spend
less time training in a fatigued state

Summary on training frequency

Research from protein metabolism, recovery after strength training and studies that compared
strength and muscle gains between groups with different training frequencies all converge on the
same conclusion: the more advanced you are, the higher the optimal training frequency per muscle
group.
As you get more advanced, your anabolic window shortens, there is less protein breakdown during
training and you become more resistant to muscle damage and neuromuscular fatigue. This means
you can tolerate more total and more frequent exercise. Increasing your training frequency is an
ideal way to achieve both at the same time, while simultaneously improving your recovery capacity
to recover from the higher training stress.

The best of both worlds is achieved by systematic customization. In this week we’ll upgrade your
client assessment skills so you can systematically prescribe individualized training programs. There
are several evidence-based ways to achieve this, but before we get into the practical
implementation, we first have to discuss genetics

So if you have a client with huge joints, broad shoulders, a square face and massive hands, you may
have found a future Olympian.
As an objective guideline to classify someone’s frame size, you can look at someone’s wrist and
ankle size and use those as a proxy for the person’s total frame size. The following reference data
from the US National Library of Medicine can be used for wrist size.
Women
Height under 5'2"
o Small = wrist size less than 5.5"

o Medium = wrist size 5.5" to 5.75"

o Large = wrist size over 5.75"

Height 5'2" to 5' 5"
o Small = wrist size less than 6"

o Medium = wrist size 6" to 6.25"

o Large = wrist size over 6.25"

Height over 5' 5"
o Small = wrist size less than 6.25"

o Medium = wrist size 6.25" to 6.5"

o Large = wrist size over 6.5"

Men
Height over 5' 5"
o Small = wrist size 5.5" to 6.5"

o Medium = wrist size 6.5" to 7.5"

o Large = wrist size over 7.5

For ankle size, we have the research from Karakas & Bozkir (2007). Note that overweight individuals
may have inflated ankle sizes: fat should not be mistaken for good genetic potential to build muscle
mass.

Ankle females: 21.9 +- 1.3 cm (8.6”)

Ankle males: 23.5 +- 1.5 cm (9.3”)
3. The 2D:4D ratio
This one is less intuitive. The shorter your index finger and the longer your ring finger, the higher
your prenatal exposure to testosterone. Most people have ring fingers that are slightly longer than
their index fingers, men especially.

Astute readers will note that Menno specifically ask for his client’s right hand in his intake form.
There is some evidence that the right hand is a better predictor of prenatal testosterone exposure
than the left.

Tip: A picture of your client’s hand will not only tell you what his or her 2D:4D ratio is. The hand is a
good place to assess a person’s skeletal frame size due to the extremely high amount of bones in
the hand. It will also tell you something about the client’s lifestyle: look for the presence of a
wedding ring, calluses and nail grooming
4. The fullness of your muscle bellies
Longer muscles have more mass potential than shorter ones. They are literally longer after all. As a
proxy, flex one of your elbows to 90° and see how many fingers you can put in between your
elbow and your biceps. 0 is amazing, 4 is terrible.

5. Your birth weight

There’s a reason the ancient warrior Spartans threw away frail babies. The bigger you are as a baby,
the more muscular you’re likely to become as an adult. Fortunately though, it’s a myth that being
large as a baby predisposes you to obesity.

As a reference, the average Caucasian newborn weighs 7.5 lb (3.4 kg) and anything under 5.5 lb (2.5
kg) is considered clinically underweight. Detailed reference data for infant weights of both genders
can be found in the National Center for Health Statistics below.

6. Racial phenotype
Politically incorrect as you may find it, skin color is a great proxy for someone’s genetic capacity to
build muscle. In general, you can distinguish between the following phenotypes in order of genetic
potential to tolerate exercise and build muscle: Black > Caucasian > Asian [2]. This also correlates
with the factors discussed above like skeletal frame size, muscle belly length, hormone levels and
vaApplication
Now that you’ve assessed your client’s genetic potential, how do you apply this? You adjust the
training stress based on the expected amount of muscle mass that can be built. A genetic freak will
generally tolerate a higher exercise volume than your typical ‘hardgainer’, even if only because their
connective tissue can simply take more of a beating.
Set volume is the easiest variable to customize without requiring you to redesign the whole
program. It’s advisable to be conservative with the adjustments until you’ve accumulated a lot of
experience as a coach. Adjusting the sets per exercise by +/- 2 per training session is generally
sufficient. rious metabolic differences, like the degree of metabolic adaptivity.

Training status
Genetic potential is not the only variable to take into account when individualizing someone’s
program. In fact, it is a relatively unimportant one that we have practical data for compared to
someone’s training status. We’ve seen how both diet and training program design should change as
someone gets more advanced. But what constitutes ‘advanced’? In the following lecture we’ll discuss
how to precisely determine someone’s training status.

In conclusion, to determine someone’s training status, you should relate the individual’s level of
strength and muscle mass to their genetic potentials. The closer someone is to their genetic
limitations, the more advanced they are.

The following calculator can help serve as a guideline of how advanced someone is by comparing
their level of muscularity to several reference standards from the scientific literature. Note how
genetic potential is assessed on a per-muscle basis: for example, it it typical for men who have been
training like traditional bros to have relatively underdeveloped posterior delts, hamstrings, glutes
and calves and have highly advanced pecs and arms.
You can also use Menno’s PT Intake Form for your own clients, provided you leave the
BayesianBodybuilding.com marking on it.

The following calculator can help serve as a guideline of how advanced someone is by comparing
their level of muscularity to several reference standards from the scientific literature. Note how
genetic potential is assessed on a per-muscle basis: for example, it it typical for men who have been
training like traditional bros to have relatively underdeveloped posterior delts, hamstrings, glutes
and calves and have highly advanced pecs and arms.
You can also use Menno’s PT Intake Form for your own clients, provided you leave the
BayesianBodybuilding.com marking on it.

Muscle-specific hypertrophy
To know how to best train a muscle, you have to first understand its physical structure, specifically
its fiber type composition. This information helps you select the optimal training volume for that
muscle group.
Many lifters don’t specifically tailor these loading parameters to individual muscles. For example,
they’ll dedicate 4-6 weeks to “hypertrophy” and perform every exercise in the 8-12 rep range.
That’s a mistake. Optimal hypertrophy training is muscle specific, because muscle growth is in itself
by and large a muscle specific process.

Each muscle has a different fiber type composition. Some muscles are fast twitch dominant while
others are slow twitch dominant

Muscle fiber type composition is largely genetically determined and has very important muscle-
specific training implications. Fast twitch fibers are better suited for heavy lifting, whereas slow
twitch fibers are better suited to lighter, longer sets.
Also, fast twitch muscle fibers have significantly greater growth potential, up to 100% more than
slow twitch fibers in some research. Even in untrained individuals, they’re normally over 20% larger,
and it’s not uncommon for them to be over twice as large. However, the slow twitch fibers should
not be neglected. In competitive bodybuilders, equal hypertrophy of both fiber types has been
found. In contrast, powerlifters, and Olympic weightlifters show preferential hypertrophy of the
type II fibers. For maximum muscle growth, you want to maximize growth in all muscle fiber types.

The fiber type composition of each muscle varies per individual, but as with most physiological
characteristics, people don’t differ that much. In the general population, differences in percentage of
slow twitch muscle fibers are normally above 5% but usually below 10%. So, you probably aren’t
that special in this regard, even though your momma said you were.
In contrast to what you may expect, exercise has only a limited capacity to convert muscle fiber
types and the change that occurs is similar for endurance and strength training. Exercise generally
turns both type I and type IIb fibers into type IIa fibers, with other conversions being rare.
Weightlifters, powerlifters, bodybuilders and sedentary populations differ less than 5%

regarding the percentage of slow twitch fibers in their muscles, so it’s unlikely that you need to take
fiber conversion into account with your training after you’ve passed the novice level.

Application
In the previous week we determined the optimal training intensity, but we never touched on how
many reps per set you should do. In the following lecture you’ll find out why. The Bayesian
Bodybuilding muscle-specific hypertrophy method is a novel intensity system that does not involve
the traditional fixed repetition or intensity x repetition prescriptions.

To recap, the logic for the muscle-specific hypertrophy method is as follows.

1. Your muscle fiber type composition influences how many reps you can do at any intensity. The
more slow twitch dominant a muscle group is, the more reps it can do at any intensity.
2. How many reps you do per set tends to influence the relative muscle growth of slow- vs. fast
twitch fibers [2, 3]. The more reps you do per set, the greater the relative increase in slow twitch
muscle fibers compared to the fast twitch muscle fibers, especially during isolation exercises. Note:
the English literature on this is conflicting, but the Russian literature is clear as you can see in the
table below.

As such, it follows that more slow twitch muscle groups have a higher optimum volume than more
fast twitch muscle groups. Implementing test sessions so that you can prescribe an intensity for
each exercise without a repetition number allows you to autoregulate the volume of each exercise
in a way that’s specific to the individual’s muscle fiber type compostion and maximize muscle
growth across all muscle fibers. Maximum muscle growth in all fibers instead of just the fast twitch
muscle fibers is a key reason why bodybuilders tend to be bigger than Powerlifters and Olympic
Weightlifters.

Here’s another example of how this works. Suppose you have an advanced male trainee that trains
3 times per week. Given that the optimal weekly training frequency for an advanced individual is
generally 3+, this means this individual is effectively doing 3 full-body workouts in any week. You’ll
probably want to create a different workout for each session, as we’ll get into later, so this person
has a 3-split with sessions A, B and C (or whatever you want to label them). In the first week, you
do a test session for each workout where the trainee finds his 1RM for each exercise and performs
his remaining number of planned sets with a lower percentage of that weight. You want to do the
same number of sets here as you’re going to do in the rest of the program, because otherwise you
confound the test results by fatigue. The test sessions should be done in the exact same order with
the same exercises as the regular program will be done. Suppose during session A the squat 1RM
comes out as 455 lbs. As an advanced trainee, let’s say you’ve determined these squats should be
done at an 85% intensity. In week 2, during the same squat session of session A, you then prescribe
a weight of 455 * 0.85 = ~390 lbs. He then does as many reps as possible with that weight (or goes
however close to failure you want him to go, as we’ll go into later). However many reps he
achieves is then a marker of his optimal volume. You’ll get different training volumes for each
exercise, in line with the different fiber compositions of the different musculatures involved in the
different exercises.
The details will all become clearer later and there are many ways to implement this method, but for
now you should understand the logic behind it and how you can autoregulate the training volume
prescription of each muscle group with this method.
Often, you don’t get very surprising numbers. Most people can do 6 – 10 reps with 80% of their
1RM, for example. However, occasionally you get uncommon results and it’s exactly in these
individuals that the muscle-specific hypertrophy method shines. There are 2 profiles that stand out
in my experience.

The very slow twitch dominant woman that grows better in response to high rep training – as many
as 20-30 reps even for compound exercises – than traditional strength training. This tends to scare
coaches and they are then inclined to think the testing must have gone wrong, so they lower the
rep targets. Don’t. This is often exactly the person that will benefit greatly from the muscle-specific
hypertrophy method.
2. The prototypical strength-power athlete, often male with great genetic potential, that thrives on
very low rep work and just burns out or gets injured doing a lot of volume.
A common objection to the muscle-specific hypertrophy method is that only advanced trainees can
reliably find their 1RM. That’s nonsense. It’s a classic example of ‘pussy lab coats’ training harder
than the ‘guys in the trenches’. 1RM testing in untrained individuals is done all the time

in research and there is a substantial literature that indicates 1RMs can reliably be found for pretty
much all exercises even in entirely untrained individuals. In fact, 1RM testing is much easier in
untrained individuals, psychologically speaking. As you learned in the course topic on the optimal
training intensity, more advanced trainees can recruit their muscles more effectively. As a result,
1RM attempts are much more mentally demanding for advanced lifters than untrained individuals.

4. Work capacity
Another way to customize someone’s program is by looking at the person’s work capacity. Work
in exercise science is the same as that in physics: it’s a measure of the energy it took to move an
object with a certain force over a certain distance in a certain amount of time. In the case of weight
training, it’s a measure of energy expenditure during the lifting of the weight. More simply, within
the practical scenario of a series of training sets for an exercise, your work capacity scales linearly
with the amount of repetitions you do across all sets.
For example, if a person does 4 sets of squats to failure with her 12RM and the repetitions go like
12, 12, 11, 11, that shows great work capacity. Most individuals lose repetitions across every set
when they train close to failure. If someone’s repetitions go like 12, 6, 3, 2, that means work
capacity is low.

You can quantify work capacity precisely by calculating a measure like the average percentage
repetition drop-off per set. A common fatigue index used in the scientific literature is the Sforzo and
Touey (1996) formula:
Note that if the weight is constant across sets, this formula can be simplified to the percentage drop
in repetitions from the first to the final set, e.g. going from 10 to 2 repetitions equals a fatigue index
of -80%.
In practice as a coach, work capacity is something you should over time learn to eyeball. As a rough
rule of thumb, not taking into account age, gender and training status, if the repetitions per set
don’t drop more than 20% across multiple sets (e.g. 10, 9, 9, 8), work capacity is high. If repetitions
drop 80% or more (e.g. 10, 5, 3, 2), work capacity is low. In my experience, many

In terms of application, people with a better work capacity generally have a higher optimal volume
level. Various reasons can increase work capacity and practically all of them predispose an individual
towards being able to tolerate more training volume.
For example, as you’ve seen in the section on muscle-specific hypertrophy, muscle groups with a
more slow twitch fiber type composition generally react better to a higher training volume. They
also have a higher work capacity. We’ll see that this is also the case for the sex difference in fatigue
resistance and androgenic-anabolic steroid usage.
So when you see during the first sessions that a client has high work capacity, it can be worth
experimenting with a higher training volume to see how much more they can tolerate.
Interindividual variability is very large for work capacity, so it’s advisable to be conservative with

the adjustments. As a general guideline, don’t increase training volume more than a set per body
part per training session.

5. Diet
We’ve touched on this previously in the course. The more anabolic someone’s diet, the higher the
potential for muscle growth and the better someone’s recovery capacity. This includes nutrient
timing and thereby nutrient partitioning, the inflammatory index, whether sufficient macro- and
micronutrients are being consumed, energy balance, food choices, everything. Energy balance is in
practice the most crucial factor though, because it means that people will tolerate a higher training
volume when bulking than when cutting.
So in a deficit, the total training stress should be reduced. This can be achieved by i.a. modifying
intensity, training frequency, proximity to failure or training volume. In my experience and based on
the literature, a 20 – 33% reduction in volume is appropriate during a cut compared to during a
bulk.

In practice though, while training stress can almost always be increased when someone transitions
to a bulk, sometimes it’s not needed to reduce the training stress when transitioning to a cut.
During a prolonged cut, if good progress has been made, it’s not uncommon for someone to have
become advanced enough to handle the same training volume in an energy deficit. Menno often
prefers keeping the training stress constant during the start of the cut to avoid suggesting to the
client: “Welcome to cutting. Prepare for your training sessions to suck.”

In short, The Limit Factor criterion removes almost all unstable exercises from the bodybuilder's
exercise menu. Standing on an unstable surface tends to make the stabilizing muscles the limiting
factor in the exercise.
The Limit Factor principle also applies to using highly unstable objects as weights. Single-arm barbell
overhead presses suck for shoulder training because your forearms and shoulder stabilizers will
limit your delts from being maximally stimulated.

Fortunately, we can implement a set of objective criteria to qualitatively rate exercises

The greater the range of motion of an exercise for a joint, the better it is for the active movers of that joint,
overlooking the other criteria.
We all know that, ideally, the bar should touch the chest when we bench press and shallow quarter
squats are only done by frat kids in between sets of curls, but few people realize that the ROM
principle is actually applicable for all exercises.

Conclusion: hypertrophy
Partial reps do not seem to have any advantage over full reps to stimulate muscle growth. Full reps
stimulate muscle activity over the entire muscle’s length. They also stretch the muscle under high
tension. Exercise selection and accommodating the resistance curve to your strength curve are
generally superior methods of adding variety to bodybuilding training than partial reps (discussed
later).
Conclusion: strength
Including partial reps can be beneficial in advanced trainees to strengthen parts of a movement as
per the specificity principle. Geared powerlifters in particular can benefit from strengthening their
lock-out due to the lack of passive assistance they get from knee wraps, squat & deadlift suits and
bench shirts at the end of these exercises.
Novices are better off building a good strength base by sticking to full ROM training, because they
are not developed enough to require ROM-specific training.
Conclusion: power Bayesianbodybuilding.com
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Partial reps for many exercises allow for greater power production, which can benefit power
development. Just as for strength training, these benefits are greater for more advanced trainees.
In short, full ROM training should be the default for practically anyone, barring injuries. It results in
more strength, more growth, more flexibility and less connective tissue stress.
For almost every pulling or pushing movement, whatever implement you're gripping (bar, dumbbell,
cable handle) should touch your body at some point during the exercise. That includes pull-ups,
rows, and overhead presses.
The ROM principle also dictates that the optimal grip for most exercises is near shoulder width.
The way most human bodies are built, right around shoulder width offers the greatest ROM for
pushing and pulling movement patterns, unless your hands actually become an interference to the
ROM, like during the military press, in which case your hands have to move slightly outward.
In short, cutting down the ROM on an exercise demands a damn good reason. And for the record,
"a shorter ROM lets me go heavier, and that gives me an ego-boner," is a damn silly reason.

The "core" is structured to stabilize the spine, not move it.

The human spine is very well adapted to compression forces, but shear and rotary forces can easily
damage it. Spinal movement, especially flexion, is unnecessary for bodybuilders. Don’t round or
twist your back under load: keep it flat or arched and straight. Anatomical position is generally the
optimal position for force transfer and minimal connective tissue stress.

Closed chain exercises allow your body's structure to determine which joints move and how much,
which takes stress off of the joints and lets the muscles do the work instead. This finding has been
replicated many times and is hugely underrated. Closed chain exercises tend to be better for your
joints and your muscles. For example:
Closed chain exercise results in more synchronized quadriceps activation than open chain
exercise. This is important for knee health.
Squats result in greater quadriceps and hamstring muscle activity than leg presses at the same
relative intensity throughout pretty much the entire ROM.
Squats are also better than the leg press at increasing jumping performance and probably at
increasing knee extension force (over 3 times greater improvement).
Push-ups build bench press just as well as actual bench pressing. Since SAID favored the bench
press group, this suggests push-ups are more effective overall strength builders than the bench
press. (If you don’t know what SAID is, revisit the course topic on ‘understanding muscle growth’.)
They’re also infinitely more shoulder friendly due to the ability of the shoulder blades to move
freely instead of being pinned against the bench.
Closed chain exercises are more effective than open chain exercises at increasing functional
performance during knee rehabilitation. In general, closed chain exercises are preferred during
rehab, in part because of their superior tissue stress distribution.
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 Closed chain exercises developed throwing performance and shoulder strength and power
better than open chain exercises in NCAA Division I Softball Players. They also developed the
bench press equally well as the open chain group. This is particularly significant, because throwing
and bench pressing are both open chain exercises, so SAID again favored the open chain group.
5) Dynamic Contraction
Exercises that consist of an eccentric and a concentric phase are superior to exercises that are purely
isometric, concentric, or eccentric, overlooking the other criteria

6) Strength Curve = Resistance Curve

The closer the resistance curve of an exercise approximates your strength curve, the better the exercise,
overlooking the other criteria.
If an exercise's strength and resistance curves don't match, some muscles involved in the lift will
remain understimulated. You know how you usually fail exercises at the same point?
That’s the sticking point. (The scientific definition of the sticking point is literally the point of the
movement at which you fail a repetition.)

Accommodating resistance Bayesianbodybuilding.com

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An actual, useful solution would be to use accommodating resistance. As the name suggests
accommodating resistance makes the resistance curve match your strength curve. It quite literally
accommodates your strength curve. Perfect accommodating resistance generally requires training
with isokinetic or eccentric-emphasized machines that are unavailable in public gyms. Fortunately,
powerlifting bands and chains are much more available and they also work great. Bench pressing
with bands actually builds more bench press strength than without them.
Accommodating resistance outperforms regular constant resistance training in many studies for
both strength development and bodybuilding [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. A key mechanism for this is that muscles
are generally over 20% stronger when lengthening than when shortening (see the eccentric
overloading section of the advanced training techniques course topic). So increasing the resistance
during the lengthening phase allows you to produce more force, perform more work and achieve
greater levels of muscle activity.

7) Microloadability
The more precisely an exercise's resistance can be determined and increased, the better the exercise,
overlooking the other criteria.

8) Unilateral > Bilateral

All else equal, exercises involving only one limb are superior to those involving both limbs.

9) Terminal Consistency
Exercises with a delimited endpoint are preferable over those with a variable endpoint, overlooking the other
criteria.

Here are some example violations of the Terminal Consistency principle.

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- Varying the distance you step forward during lunges (or backwards for reverse lunges) when you
become more fatigued or when you use your other leg.
- Raising up your legs during pull-ups to turn it into an inverted row.
- Having your feet slide away during push-ups or glute bridges.

Exercise selection: practical application

Now that you've made it through the list, it's time to see the rules at work. Let's apply the exercise
selection criteria to a few basic movements.
To refresh your memory, here are the 9 principles again.
1. The Limit Factor
2. Compoundedness
3. ROM
4. Tissue Stress Distribution
5. Dynamic Contraction
6. Resistance Curve = Strength Curve
7. Microloadability
8. Unilateral > Bilateral
9. Terminal Consistency

Exercise variety
Now that we’ve covered how to select between different exercises for the same muscle group, the
next question is: how many exercises should we select per muscle group?
To answer this question, you first need to understand functional differentiation.

In short, it’s clear that different heads of a muscle with different functions can be preferentially
activated in line with their muscle function. Evidence also strongly suggests you can even
preferentially activate different muscle fibers within parts of a muscle with the same function.
On to the million dollar question: Does regional muscle activation also result in regional muscle
growth?

On to the million dollar question: Does regional muscle activation also result in regional muscle
growth?
Exactly as you’d expect based on how muscles grow, the regional differences in muscle activation
correspond with the pattern of subsequent muscle growth within the muscle [2, 3; illustrated
below]. The muscle fibers that are activated and trained more, grow more.

In short, certain exercises stimulate certain fibers of a muscle more than others. This regional
muscle activation pattern corresponds with the subsequent regional muscle damage and regional
muscle growth.
The presence of functional differentiation and regional muscle growth have led the broscience
culture to conclude that you should do 10 different variants of the chest press and biceps curl in
their program (or glute exercises, for women) to make sure they fully stimulate every single muscle
fiber.
This isn’t strictly necessary though. Not nearly every muscle fiber has its own neural drive. Many
motor neurons innervate many different muscle fibers at the same time, up to thousands in muscles
where fine motor control is not required. After all, many muscle fibers are so close to each other
that they practically have the same function.

Plus, there’s a problem with excess variety in your exercise selection. You don’t get truly strong at
any of the exercises you’re doing. This threshold effect has to be weighed against the benefit of
stimulating every single muscle fiber optimally

Anecdotally, plenty of oldschool lifters, Powerlifters and Olympic Weightlifters have gotten big and
strong with extremely limited exercise variety, often nothing more than the barbell lifts. If we
compare their results to those of the bro bodybuilding culture, it doesn’t appear that the modern
trend towards greater exericse variety has noticeably improved muscular development.
Fortunately the empirical sciences can provide a more objective and quantitative perspective on the
benefits of exercise variety for muscle growth and strength development

-5
0
5
10
15
20
VL
VM
VI
RF
C
CICE
CIVE
-5
0
5
10
15
20
VL
VM
VI
RF
C
VICE
VIVE
Conclusions
Exercise variety is likely necessary to maximize muscle hypertrophy in the long run, but it is easy
to overdo it and exercise variety often doesn’t need to be immediate: switching between different
exercises over time is likely just as efficient and more practical from a programming perspective
than trying to spread your training volume
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over a ton of different exercises. Keep your focus on the progression of a solid core exercise
selection before worrying
As a result of the above, more advanced trainees benefit more from exercise variety than
beginners. For one, they simply have more volume to allocate. Additionally, they have less need to
focus on exercise technique. Thirdly, advanced trainees are by definition closer to their genetic
limits of muscle hypertrophy, so regional growth becomes far more important.
Exercise variety should be proportional to the amount of muscle functions a muscle has,
regardless of whether the exercises are compound/isolation or single/multi-joint exercises. In other
words, you can largely forget about the whole isolation vs. compound exercise debate. It is
meaningless. You should be thinking in terms of training all of a muscle’s major functions.

The following table provides a guideline of the minimum amount of exercises that are required to
maximize muscle hypertrophy in all major muscle groups

Counting training volume

We’ve covered how to select between different exercises for the same muscle group and how to
determine how much variety is needed. The next in program design is how to count your training
volume. When does an exercise count towards the volume of that muscle group? If your optimal
volume for the hamstrings is 10 sets per week, do 5 sets of leg curls and 5 sets of squats suffice? I’d
say no, but 5 sets of deadlifts and 5 sets of leg curls would definitely suffice.
A useful guideline is to use EMG research as a reference. If an exercise yields 80% of MVIC
(maximal voluntary isometric contraction) muscle activation, the exercise counts as 80% for that
muscle group.

Ideally, you should also take other factors into account that determine neuromuscular fatigue and
muscle hypertrophy, such as metabolic stress, muscle damage and ROM.
However, in practice this can make program design needlessly complicated. Here’s a useful decision
tree to use if you’ve already vetted your exercise selection using the 9 principles you learned here.
 All agonists count 100%, except if there’s no noticeable neuromuscular fatigue after the exercise
in that muscle group: then they count 50%.
Antagonist stabilizers count 0%.
All stabilizers and dynamic stabilizers count 50%. Round up to 100% if there’s noticeable
neuromuscular fatigue after the exercise in that muscle. Don’t count them if there’s not.

What is noticeable neuromuscular fatigue? The pump and burn and subjective muscle activation are
rough markers that are of some use, as we’ll discuss in the next topic this week, but in principle you
can simply define it as a loss of strength in that muscle after performing the exercise. No loss of
performance means no neuromuscular fatigue.
Here are 2 examples with these guidelines.

The barbell overhead/Military press

Agonists
Anterior deltoid: 100% of course
Lateral deltoid: 100% of course
Upper chest: 50% for lack of obvious fatigue, depending on technique
Middle traps: 50% for lack of obvious fatigue
Lower traps: 50% for lack of obvious fatigue
Triceps: technically the long head is a dynamic stabilizer here, but neuromuscular fatigue is
obvious, so you can simply count the whole triceps as 100%

(Dynamic) stabilizers
Upper traps: 100% due to obvious fatigue
Short head of biceps: 0% given antagonist function of the biceps and lack of obvious fatigue

Note: I wouldn’t bother counting your training volume for the serratus anterior or levator scapulae
or in general muscle groups that aren’t readily visible on your physique.
The barbell back squat
Agonists
Quads: 100% of course
Glutes: 100% of course
Soleus: 100%, sometimes 50% with hip dominant technique

Dynamic stabilizers
Hamstrings: given their lack of EMG activity, I count them as 0% or at best 50% with very hip
dominant fatigue
Gastrocs: 0%, sometimes 50% with very knee dominant technique

Stabilizers
Erector spinae: 100% because of obvious fatigue
Antagonist stabilizers
Obliques and abs: 50% because of obvious fatigue (if you’re counting core work

Closing words
By now, you've hopefully absorbed enough to start making more deliberate and intelligent exercise
choices. As with the optimizing of all training parameters, exercise selection should be a systematic
process based on objective criteria.
It's tempting to do the convenient and comfortable exercises, or the ones that make you feel like a
badass, but those feelings are short-lived. We know that the "fun stuff" isn't always the useful stuff,
and vice versa. The physique you build from smart training should be the walking billboard to your
dedication to the iron.
Menno always tells his clients, "Do you want to look good for the one hour you're inside the gym or
for the 23 hours you're outside of it?" So put the time into analyzing your exercise selection, do the
hard work and earn the results.
When you’ve had some time to think about this week’s materials and applied them to a few
exercises, you’ll get a reference sheet of exercises that score well on the exercise selection criteria.

In turn, higher force outputs when training with an explosive tempo can increase anabolic signaling
in a muscle, at least during isokinetic eccentric contractions

So there are clear mechanisms for increased muscle growth during explosive free-weight exercise:
increased mechanical tension and increased metabolic stress

All in all, it is quite clear that an explosive repetition tempo benefits high intensity strength and
power development. For muscle growth, the trend is in the same direction, but the research is less
convincing. The reason for the lack of greater muscle hypertrophy in some of the research may be
because of the lack of greater muscle activity during simple isolation exercises. The actual
recruitment and exhaustion of muscle fibers is ultimately all that matters, not time under tension or
total work.
It is probable then that during exercises like full squats and bench presses, an explosive tempo will
result in greater growth, because here this can increase muscle activity via the stretch-shortening
cycle and compensatory acceleration training. The importance of these mechanisms is supported by
the finding that when training the bench press and squat with a constant repetition speed (as
opposed to explosively pushing through your sticking points), training faster no longer develops
greater strength. Isotonic machines keep the force constant throughout the movement, making the
use of CAT impossible.
And there’s an additional mechanism by which training with a fast rep tempo could increase muscle
growth. Training for strength and power can increase your nervous system’s ability to recruit
motor units. This results in higher levels of muscle activity during training. As such, it is likely that
the greater strength and power increases when training with an explosive tempo will over the long
run translate into increased muscle growth.

Given the potential benefits, an explosive training tempo should be the default repetition tempo for
most strength trainees. The research is clear for overall tempo and the concentric phase of
resistance exercise.

A final interesting thing worth mentioning is that training with a slower eccentric may reduce IGF-1
production. As you’ve learned, the relevance of acute anabolic hormone elevations is questionable,
but since IGF-1 directly links mechanotransduction to mTOR activity after resistance training, it
could be an indication of inferior muscle growth. Other hormones are generally unaffected, though
the increased work during explosive training can increase cortisol production to mobilize energy.

Practical application
Training with an explosive concentric movement allows you to perform more work and develop
more power and strength. Making use of the stretch-shortening cycle and compensatory
acceleration training to overcome sticking points can also increase muscle activity, metabolic stress,
mechanical tension and IGF-1 production, particularly during free weight exercises. These
advantages are likely to result in greater muscle hypertrophy over the long run, but the benefit will
probably be small based on the current research.
These benefits seem to apply specifically to the concentric phase of movement; for the eccentric
phase the research is more ambiguous. As such, more control of the movement is advisable for
bodybuilding type training during eccentric muscle contractions. This makes sense in the light of
accommodating resistance training. Since you are stronger during the eccentric phase of movement,
slowing down the movement here allows you to effectively reduce your strength to match the
resistance, resulting in high levels of mechanical tension during the entire exercise. To benefit from
controlled eccentrics but also the stretch-shortening cycle, you can implement what Menno calls
Accommodating Tempo Training (ATT). ATT instructs that repetition speed should be explosive
during difficult portions of an exercise and more controlled during easier portions of an exercise.
During the difficult portions and particularly the sticking point, compensatory acceleration training
should be implemented and you should take advantage of the stretch-shortening cycle.
For example, during the bench press, starting at the top of the movement, you slowly lower the
weight to your chest. A good cue is that ‘you should be able to pause the movement during any
part of the eccentric phase’. During the very last part of the eccentric, you accelerate the descent
to potentiate the stretch-shortening cycle. As soon as the bar reaches your chest, you then
explosively push it up past the sticking point. Once you’re passed the sticking point, you can more
gently push the weight out to full lock-out. (This example assumes the sticking point is just above
the chest, as it is for most people during the bench press.)
ATT is difficult to coach, however, particularly online. For simplicity’s sake, you may simply want to
instruct your clients to simply focus on performance and not worry about the exact movement
cadence, certainly not count it. An alternative instruction is to let clients perform

the concentric phase with the intent of maximal performance and the eccentric phase with more
control, enough to be able to pause the movement at any point.
When instructing your clients, beware of the difference between explosive movement and maximal
performance. For men there is often very little difference. However, for women a maximally
explosive tempo often does not result in maximal performance as you’ve learned in the course
topic on gender differences. Since most people are intuitively very good at maximizing performance
when they don’t have to think about anything else, it is generally preferable to instruct people to
think of maximal performance rather than being explosive.
Injuries pose an exception to the above recommendations. When injured or when injury risk is
high, training with a controlled tempo is an effective method to avoid aggravating the injury while
still stimulating the target musculature. We’ll get back to this in the course topic on injuries.

6 PRINCIPLES OF EXERCISE ORDERING

Exercise order is an often overlooked aspect of program design. Even in research papers you often
see seemingly random sequences of exercises in a program. From the strength sports camp we get
some vague guidelines along the lines of ‘always train the most technical exercises first’ and while
there is certainly truth to that, it should certainly not constitute a universal rule.
You should take into account at least 5 factors before you decide which exercises go first in your
programs. These factors are discussed roughly in order of importance. So the first principles tend
to take priority over the latter ones, but you will have to weigh the costs and benefits of each when
they conflict.

That’s the condition your body is in when you’re training a muscle as an afterthought in a heavy
training session. So put your most important exercises first. If a Bikini competitor has quads that are
too large, don’t start off her session with high volume squats just because ‘squats should go first’.
On the other hand, you should be skeptical of your clients’ ideas about which muscle groups are
most important. For one thing, in the majority of cases their ideas are false. Every guy thinks their
‘upper chest is lacking’, for example, and you’ll almost never hear someone who thinks their non-
mirror-muscles are lacking. You can perform a more objective assessment with the relative
muscular development ratios you’ve learned in the course topic on customized program design.
More importantly, for the natural male bodybuilder that isn’t limited by time, there is no need to
specialize in any particular body part. You can after all maximize hypertrophy in all muscle groups at
the same time.
It’s good to keep in mind that the worse adaptation to exercises performed later in your workouts
is largely the result of fatigue. As such, the detrimental effect on later exercises is worse if you
employ short rest intervals. If there is enough time for full recovery in between all exercises of the
same muscle groups, performance won’t be affected much and it may not matter how you order
your exercises. This is, however, a largely theoretical scenario for trainees beyond the novice level,
since full recovery from serious training can take many minutes, if it occurs at all.

In conclusion, putting compound exercises before isolation exercises of the same muscle group is a
good guideline. You should thus have a really good reason to pre-fatigue a muscle.

So given equal priority:

Compound exercises should generally be done before isolation exercises.
More technical exercises, like squats, should generally be done before simpler exercises, like
biceps curls.
 Lower body exercises should generally be done before upper body exercises.

4. Paired sets, not supersets

Supersets and co.
Just like with circuit training, the main benefit of supersets and varieties is that you can save time.
This is not a trivial benefit. You can easily cut your session length in half or less by stringing
exercises together. And given a fixed amount of time, you’ll be able to do more work if you string
exercises together. So if time is limited, supersets can allow you to do more work in the time you
have and thus make better progress.

Another major benefit is that it allows you to prioritize multiple exercises and allow more balanced
physique and strength development. As discussed above, the exercises you perform first are the
ones that will progress most.

That supersetting decreases work capacity is almost self-evident to most people who actually lift
and to most strength coaches. However, research finds that work capacity is generally unaffected
by supersets. This is likely due to lack of statistical power, having mainly women and novices in the
sample and not requiring the subjects to push (close) to actual failure to allow work-matched study
designs. As you’ve learned in the topic on rest intervals, these factors all influence how much rest is
required to sustain repetition performance over sets, i.e. work capacity.

Paired sets
Fortunately, there is a very simple solution to the problem of impaired work capacity during
supersets. You allow some rest in between all sets, even those of different exercises. That turns the
superset into what is often called a paired set (though different people use the definitions
differently). Paired sets apply the same principle of stringing exercises together, but now you rest
between all sets, not just between supersets. This still allows you to save time and prioritize
multiple exercises without any downside. So pairing up the exercises in your programs is highly
recommended when gym logistics allow this.

5. Make smart use of antagonist supersets

There is an exception where supersets tend to have an advantage over paired sets: antagonist
supersets. These are supersets where you train 2 movements that involve opposite muscle
functions, like biceps curls and triceps pushdowns or leg extensions and leg curls.

The effects of antagonist supersets

When you perform a set of bench presses right before you do a set of seated rows, lat and even
biceps activity increase and you can perform more reps during the seated row.

Application
So how do you apply antagonist supersets? Often, you don’t. The benefit is dubious and likely small
when it comes to long term muscle growth. This benefit often doesn’t weigh up against the
impracticality of having to pair up 2 explosive exercises of opposing muscle groups and having to do
them within seconds of each other.
However, if you happen to see an easy opportunity to program in antagonist supersets, do it. Make
sure the exercises are performed explosively and exercise the more fast-twitch muscle groups first.
At the very least, you’ll save time. Plus, most people love advanced training techniques.

6. Start heavy
Another consideration is independent of the exercise that you’re doing. Higher repetition sets
generally induce more fatigue than lower rep sets. In part simply because of their higher volume but
also because of their greater metabolic stress, neuromuscular fatigue and the loss of power across
sets are larger after high rep work than after high intensity sets.
So to maximize total training volume per session, you generally want to do your heavier work first,
all else being equal.

Summary
The earlier in a workout you perform an exercise, the more it will progress. So put your most
important exercises first.
When you do compound and isolation work for the same body part in the same session, doing
the compound work first will maximize total work capacity.
Training more complex muscle groups before simpler ones tends to maximize total work
capacity. This means more technical exercises and lower body exercises should be done before
simpler and upper body exercises.
Supersetting or circuit training without rest between sets can save time, but these methods are
not needed and can be detrimental to your work capacity. To reap the same benefits without any
risk, employ paired sets instead.
Antagonist supersets are the exception to the rule of avoiding supersets. When practical,
employ them and put the more fast-twitch muscle groups first.
Higher rep sets induce more neuromuscular and metabolic fatigue than heavy, low rep work, so
perform your high intensity work before your higher rep sets to maximize work capacity in the
training session.

Lecture on the effects of inter-set rest interval length on strength and muscle hypertrophy
Recommended reading: The effect of inter-set rest intervals on resistance exercise induced muscle
hypertrophy by Menno Henselmans and Brad Schoenfeld 2014
lecture
Recommended reading
Additional notes
 A follow-up study that Menno collaborated on with Brad Schoenfeld shows that 3 minute rest
intervals result in greater strength and size gains than 1 minute rest periods in trained men when
total work is not equated, i.e. the longer rest allows you to perform more work.
In support of this, when total work is equated, resting only 30 seconds with 20RM loads is just
as effective for muscle growth (but not strength) as resting 3 minutes with 8RM loads.
Another study shows that resting only a single minute compared to 5 minutes between sets of
leg extensions blunts anabolic signaling and acute myofibrillar protein synthesis in the muscle cells in
spite of higher metabolic stress in the short-rest group.
With very low intensity training (40% of 1RM), shorter rest periods (30 s vs. 2.5 min) may not
be as detrimental for muscle growth or strength development. However, the longer rest periods
allowed for a significantly higher amount of total work to be completed (i.e. more reps per session)
and the effect sizes for muscle growth were in favor of the longer rest interval group by 21-60%,
suggesting the study was statistically underpowered to detect the greater growth rate from the
longer rest periods.
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The different rest intervals produced similar acute increases in growth hormone and IGF-1 levels,
suggesting a similar level of metabolic stress.
During antagonist supersets, it seems you can get by with shorter rest periods and still get the
same amount of volume in. However, this comes at the expense of greater neuromuscular fatigue.
The fatigue is probably the reason why performance can be sustained with shorter rest, since
fatigue is crucial for the performance enhancing effect of antagonist supersets. See the course topic
on exercise order for a full review on antagonist supersets.
If you have no feeling at all yet on how to autoregulate your rest intervals, start with 2+ minute
rest periods for isolation work and 3+ minute rest periods for compound exercises.
During autoregulated rest intervals to full recovery, people tend to rest excessively long. Mental
recovery (RPE) after a hard set can take longer than the actual recovery in physical performance. So
when time is limited, you should program in fixed rest intervals or actively work at reducing your
rest periods. This will be mentally challenging at first, but your work capacity will improve over
time.

Active recovery
When you’ve determined your rest intervals, the next question is: what should I do within these
rest periods? Here active recovery comes in. The idea is that by staying active, like by doing light
exercise, stretching or just moving around, you can speed up your recovery by increasing blood
flow and the removal of metabolic waste products.
Indeed, in some research, active recovery in the form of light exercise for the fatigued muscle
groups helps speed up the removal of lactate during the training and thereby increases
performance. The active recovery has to involve the fatigued musculature: simply walking around
does not improve the rate of recovery of your upper body muscles significantly.
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What is periodization and why should we bother with it?

Periodization is simply the organization of your training program over time. If your program is the
same every week in terms of its parameters (volume, intensity, etc.), you have no periodization. If
someone's just messing around in the gym, that would constitute random periodization.
A beginner does not require any form of periodization, because a beginner on an optimized
program should be able to continually increase the resistance without decreasing the training
volume. It is simply mathematically implausible that any form of periodization can improve upon
linear increases in weight. Most beginners training 3x per week can add 2.5 kg / 5 lb to the bar
every session. To progress faster than this with a periodized training program would require that
person to add upwards of 10 kg / 20 lb to the bar all at once. (Hint: it doesn’t work.)
And indeed, research has overall found no significant benefits of any type of periodization compared
to no periodization when both groups of beginners push for progress.(the references are in your
recommended reading).
At some point, linearly increasing the weight will reduce volume, i.e. if you just keep trying to
increase the weight, you won't be able to sustain your reps per set anymore. This is when
periodization becomes necessary and research starts finding benefits.
As such, it follows that the need for periodization is determined by your increment, the smallest
amount of resistance you can add to an exercise. If your cable stack moves up like 47, 54, 61, 68,
etc. the increment is 7. The smaller the increment, the less periodization you need. Periodization is
needed because the increment is too large of a leap in strength for your body to adapt to in a single
session.
Since the rate of adaptation diminishes as you get more advanced, it now takes multiple bouts of
adaptation to become sufficiently stronger to make that leap in performance.

Periodization also allows you to incorporate high intensity and high volume work. Your connective
tissue and probably even your psyche/time allowance will not allow you to get enough work in for
optimal hypertrophy with over 90% of your 1 RM.

As you learned, it is physically impossible to become bigger without becoming stronger (though the
reverse is possible). So any program that does not increase your strength is unlikely to result in
appreciable muscle hypertrophy beyond the novice level.

Types of periodization
When discussing periodization, it’s helpful to think in terms of cycles of your program instead of
calendar days across the week with e.g. ‘Monday is chest day’.
A microcycle is one workout; a single training session.
A mesocycle is equal to the number of days it takes you to complete all microcycles in it. So a
program with a weekly training frequency of 4 and 2 different sessions (A and B) will have 2
mesocycles each week. The first week’s sessions are then 1A, 1B, 2A and 2B in that order.
A macrocycle is the total length of a program. This is mostly relevant for athletes with an in-
season and an off-season or strength athletes with competition dates throughout the season.
Bodybuilders don’t have this, hence the term ‘program hopping’ for when bodybuilders try to copy
this practice without results.

These terms are helpful, because they allow you to think in terms of time in a relevant way for
strength training programming. Just like with nutrition, you should not restrict your thinking to
calendar days. If session A was planned for Monday but you couldn’t train that day, just do it on
Tuesday and move up the entire program. It makes zero sense to skip a microcycle in the program
because you happened not to perform it on the same calendar day as last week.
Now that you understand what periodization is and why it’s needed, watch the following lecture
about the application of muscle confusion, linear periodization and undulating periodization.

Linear Periodization
Linear periodization is applicable on a macro- but not on a micro- or meso level, since the optimal
training volume and intensity don’t change in a matter of days or weeks. These variables only have
to be manipulated over periods of months as the neuromuscular system becomes more efficient
and more resistant to fatigue. (If you don’t understand this, revisit the topic on optimal program
parameters.)
Linear Periodization may also be useful for strength athletes to peak for an event, but for
bodybuilders it is an outdated and debunked periodization model. Even a simple linear
autoregulated progression model beats Linear Periodization. (We’ll get to autoregulation later on.)
These same critiques also make block periodization redundant for bodybuilders.

Undulating periodization
For mesocycle level manipulation of training intensity and volume, we have undulating periodization.
Dual (e.g. upper/lower with a 'hypertrophy' and a 'strength' session) or triple undulating progression
plans (e.g. ‘power’ on Monday, ‘strength’ on Wednesday and ‘hypertrophy’ on Friday) are usually as
complex as it gets for bodybuilding. Strength athletes will require ever more complex forms of
periodization, since they are required to keep their primary exercise selection the same. A
bodybuilder has more leeway in this regard and can replace stagnant exercises when highly complex
periodization would become necessary to induce further progress. In fact, this is preferable for
muscle growth due to the regional activation of muscle tissue.
Undulating periodization allows you to induce different training stimuli and thus different stressors
that you need to recover from across a mesocycle. As such, it is an effective form of fatigue
management. Experienced strength trainees gain more strength on the same program with daily
undulating periodization than with either linear or reverse linear periodization or without any
periodization [2, 3, 4]. Note the emphasis on strength trained individuals. Untrained and novice
level strength trainees generally do just as well sticking to a consistent training intensity without
undulating periodization. For muscle growth, the literature is less clear, but the trend is in the same
direction and it’s likely that over the long

run greater strength will translate into greater muscle growth due to greater muscle activation and
higher mechanical tension. See the tables below for a literature overview of daily undulating
periodization (UP) compared to no periodization (NP) and linear periodization (LP) in strength
trained individuals. The difference between DUP and WUP is in whether training intensity and
volume varied across training days or only across weeks

Whichever type of periodization you employ, it should be exercise specific, just like many other
aspects of programming we’ve discussed. A good program will thus incorporate various forms of
periodization. For example, an advanced lifter may be squatting with a triple undulating progression
model while just having introduced a new type of leg curl that is still progressing without any
periodization

Cybernetic periodization
Another type of periodization is cybernetic periodization. Its definition has become blurred over
time; many people use this term interchangeably with ‘autoregulation,’ meaning that it’s a form of
flexible periodization that allows program modifications based on how you feel during any workout.
For example, when feeling poorly going into a workout, you may opt to make this a light training
day even though it was planned as a heavy workout.
This form of cybernetic periodization is, however, not autoregulation by definition. Very conscious
decision making is required, which is not true autoregulation.

Autoregulation
True autoregulation is a form of programming that automatically regulates a certain process, like
fatigue. You can think of autoregulation as a system or a ruleset instead of a fixed prescription.
For example, a non-autoregulated program might have the following workout: ‘Perform 5 sets of 8
reps with 75% of your 1 RM in the squat with a 2 minute rest interval’. An autoregulated variant of
this workout is: ‘Perform sets of 8 reps with 75% of your 1 RM in the squat with a 2 minute rest
interval until your repetition speed decreases to the point that you experience the sticking point’.
The amount of sets and training volume is thereby autoregulated by the person’s work capacity.
(See the course topic on repetition tempo for the usefulness of using bar speed to monitor
proximity to failure.)
Other examples of true autoregulation have already been discussed in this course, such as the
muscle-specific hypertrophy method (autoregulates training program volume on a muscle-specific
basis) and autoregulated rest intervals (autoregulates inter-set rest intervals).
Autoregulation is an incredibly useful programming method, because it automatically individualizes
the training program. As you’ve seen in the course topic on individualized program design, there is
huge interindividual variability in many aspects of fitness. People differ significantly in how many reps
they can do at a certain training intensity, how much rest they need for full recovery, how fast they
can gain strength, etc. Autoregulating these factors in the program is thus preferable to the
traditional fixed program prescriptions, which require arbitrary decisions, relying on averages or
predicting future performance with improbable accuracy.
For example, many one-size-fits-all Powerlifting programs base the training of the next month on
the person’s current 1 RMs. On a certain day, the program may call for 6 reps at 85% of 1 RM.
Most people can’t do that with a true 85% intensity, but because this is based on last month’s
strength, this is the program’s way of planning progression. Now, what if on this particular day you
can’t reach anywhere near 6 reps because your diet has been less

than ideal? And what if yesterday you could have done it but the program called for a light workout?
Many coaches that have tested these programs are aware of these problems, so they often plan for
little progression to ensure almost everyone can achieve the program’s planned rate of progress.
However, this inherently also requires that almost everyone will make less progress than they could
have on a more individualized, autoregulated program.
Distinguishing between true autoregulation , cybernetic periodization and making ad hoc, on-the-fly
programming decisions based on how you feel is important. True autoregulation is a highly useful
programming concept. If you can autoregulate any process, that is almost always preferable over
trying to plan it in advance or making arbitrary decisions because it automatically individualizes the
program.
However, the usefulness of cybernetic periodization is far more debatable. Contrast to popular
belief, motivation to train is not correlated with actual performance in either professional or
amateur athletes. The fundamental idea that your subjective feelings truly represent your physical
readiness to perform or level of recovery is flawed in several ways as we’ll discuss in the following
lecture.

Benchmarking & Progression Models

Now that you understand how and when to use undulating periodization, there’s the question of
how to implement a specific type of progression model. There are tons of ways to do this, but as
previously discussed, the most successful progression models focus on increasing the actual
resistance of the exercise.
A second feature of successful progress models is that they have a benchmark. You need a
reference point to know if you’re getting stronger when linear increases in weight become
impossible. That’s your benchmark: a strictly defined measure of progress. A benchmark can
In several other studies, however, active recovery within a training session doesn’t improve
recovery within or after the training and it can easily increase the perceived effort of the training
(RPEs).
Overdoing the active recovery will even, unsurprisingly, decrease your performance compared to
passive recovery [2].
So how do you find the sweet spot intensity for active recovery? Since perceived effort tends to
increase before objective performance markers actually show a worsening of performance, you can
go by feel here. The active recovery should not be strenuous or effortful, so if after a heavy set of
squats, you feel like you’re about to pass out, just sit down. If you feel like you’re more at risk of
getting cold or you’ve got an extreme muscle pump, move around more and try some (very) light
exercise of the fatigued body parts to recover from the metabolic stress.
For other time-efficient use of your rest intervals, see the course topic on exercise ordering about
how to pair up exercises.

take many forms, but usually you’re looking at measures closely related to RMs and training volume
to make sure you progress in strength and not just endurance. Examples:
total training tonnage (reps x sets x weight)
your 8 RM
your 3 RM at 2 reps to failure
total reps
estimated 1RM

Here are some examples of failure due to not having a benchmark.

Getting stuck on a certain weight because you have no system that tells you when to change the
weight.
Continuously increasing the weight while your reps per set keep decreasing and 3 weeks later
you find out your 10 RM hasn’t changed at all.
Progressing in weight with 5x5 without monitoring the rest interval. A month later you spend an
hour on those 5 sets, because you’re no longer doing 5x5 @ 80% 1 RM but you’re using your 5
RM.
Progressing in the 10-rep squat without monitoring your inter-rep rest interval. Your 10 RM
barely increases, because you’re just resting longer and longer in between reps.
As a powerlifter, training your deadlift for sets of 5 without resetting the weight each rep. Your
deadlift bounce technique improves greatly, but you don’t get much stronger getting dead weight off
the floor (which should always be a powerlifter’s benchmark for the deadlift).

Here are some examples of viable progression models.

You progress linearly in weight.
You progress within a certain rep range, adding weight when you hit the upper end of that rep
range.
 You progress in total reps with a fixed rest interval, adding weight when you’ve hit your total
rep target.

You progress in a reverse pyramid scheme, adding weight when you’ve hit your rep target during
every set.
You progress with a myo-rep protocol, adding weight when you’ve hit your target number of
effective reps.
You progress in a cluster set protocol, adding weight when you’ve performed your target
number of clusters with a given weight.

Deloading & Overtraining

Another highly misunderstood topic is the deload, a period where training stress is decreased to
prevent or recover from overtraining. A very common application of the deload is having one out
of every 4 weeks be a week where the training weights and volume are greatly reduced.
If you understood all the course contents so far, you should already be very skeptical of the need
for deloads (especially the arbitrary kind) for the following reasons:
Muscle fatigue is largely a local process. Fatigue in your biceps does not affect your squat. It
makes no sense to stop squatting because your biceps isn’t recovered or your chest is sore.
You can handle a higher training volume than most people think.
You generally recover from even extreme training protocols within 72 hours if you’re no longer
a beginner.

Moreover, to my knowledge, not a single scientific study has ever found increased muscle mass
after a period of detraining. In the best case scenario, deloading does not result in immediate
muscle loss. Fortunately, significant muscle atrophy only manifests in a week or even several weeks
in non-advanced lifters.
With this in mind, you may now be asking, “does overtraining even exist?” Before we answer that
question, it helps to understand exactly what fatigue is.
What is fatigue?
Muscle fatigue in exercise science is defined as a temporary decrease in maximum force production
capacity due to changes within the neuromuscular system that occur in response to muscle use.
Basically, muscles lose functionality when they are heavily used. In practice, you can readily observe
fatigue as a loss of strength after stressful exercise.
Both training volume and training intensity contribute to neuromuscular fatigue.

Neuromuscular fatigue can have two origins: central and peripheral, as illustrated below.

As such, central fatigue is still largely a theoretical concept at the moment, especially in the context
of strength training, whereas peripheral fatigue is a well established phenomenon.

With what we know about peripheral fatigue, current research can already explain 80 – 90% of
neuromuscular fatigue, i.e. force loss during voluntary muscle contraction. Since peripheral fatigue
has clear, tangible mechanisms to explain fatigue and central fatigue is still a largely theoretical
concept, this makes the relevance of central fatigue for strength training questionable. Which
brings us back to…

Overtraining
Back to our question: does overtraining exist? Yes, it does. However, there is no universally
accepted definition of overtraining yet and we don’t know how it occurs. What we do know

is that overtraining is exceedingly rare and generally not just the result of training but rather high
psychological stress, like that of competing.

Importantly, in science, true overtraining syndrome is usually a term reserved for a period of weeks
or months of severe psychological problems, utter lack of motivation to train and significantly
impaired performance. It’s not just ‘feeling a bit tired’. More short term decreases in performance
are sometimes called overreaching, though it’s actually unclear if overtraining is simply a more
advanced form of overreaching.

Due to the lack of a specific operational definition of overtraining, many people are inclined to think
along the lines of: “Oh hey, I’m not that motivated to train this week. I must be overtraining.” This
is a cop-out, because the most fundamental symptom and the single necessary and universally
agreed upon condition for overtraining of any kind is reduced performance. Overtraining occurs
when you chronically dip below the point of recovery in the GAS-cycle. So by definition, any
strength gains during that period invariably exclude the diagnosis of overtraining.
Let me reiterate that. If you are gaining strength, you are not overtraining.

On the other hand, many people have great fluctuations in their performance over time and it has
become bro-lore that ‘you have good and bad days’, suggesting there’s a significant variability in
your strength across days. That’s nonsense. Any such variability can be explained and people that
experience these fluctuations simply don’t have a good program. In my clients, I rarely see moments
where they don’t progress as planned and I see almost zero inexplicable variations in strength.
Randomness is, after all, simply variation that is not yet explained. As such, overtraining is an
unlikely diagnosis just because things aren’t going as planned.
So when is someone at risk for overtraining? There are actually 2 kinds of overtraining.

1. Volume overtraining. And we’re not talking about a few sets of squats a couple times a week
here. We’re talking about doubling your distance running volume to 109 miles (175 km) a week
within a month, military training or cycling of 2-3 hours a day and high intensity rowing for 3 hours
a day.
2. Intensity-volume overtraining. Though volume is rarely a concern during strength training in
comparison to the above, very high intensities greatly increase the recovery demand. Again, we’re
talking extremes to reach overtraining, like performing 10 squat 1 RM attempts every day for 2
weeks straight.
Note that in the case of intensity-volume overtraining, both the intensity and the volume need to be
high. Advanced powerlifters can make excellent progress while training their 1RM every day
followed by 5 sets of 3 reps at 80% of 1RM for over a month.
Let me put the prevalence of overtraining in perspective. Menno has coached hundreds of trainees
over the years and pushes many of them to their limits. In this group, no more than a handful of
people may have genuinely experienced overtraining, defined as performance impairment for over a
week.

Menno has also experienced with extreme volume training over in 2016. For ~2 months each, he
trained with a daily set volume of 10, 8, 6 and 4. Doing 10 sets for each muscle every day resulted
in loss of performance but no other signs of overtraining; 8 sets resulted in strength maintenance; 6
sets still allowed progression but no more than 4 sets.
The true order of overtraining is generally as follows:
1. Your mind will give out. Don’t buy into that “the mind is strong, but the flesh is weak” crap.
That’s a metaphor from the Bible based on the quote, “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” It
actually means that we find it difficult to resist temptation, to do what is right instead of what our
feelings tempt us to do. And that’s exactly what will happen when things get tough. You’ll start
looking for excuses, shortcuts, and the magic pill. That’s weakness talking and the first step to
becoming strong is to realize that you’re weak. Remember the lectures about mental vs. physical
fatigue.
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2. Your connective tissue degrades. Muscle is more plastic and heals faster than your tendons and
ligaments, so with heavy training, overuse injuries tend to pop up in your joints long before the
actual muscle tissue starts limiting you.
3. You actually become overtrained.

Autoregulatory Volume Training

While overtraining is exceedingly rare, occasional overreaching is a realistic problem. Every training
session where performance did not increase, as measured by your benchmark and assuming
everything else was in check, is an indication of undertraining or overreaching. In the kind of
programs designed based on this course, undertraining is unlikely in the short term, so overreaching
is plausible. (Note that, ‘assuming everything else was in check’ is a major contingency, as discussed
previously.)
Often, these moments of overreaching are not due to an excessive training stress. After all, if the
training stress was simply too much to recover from for the body in the allotted recovery period, it
would logically not result in progress at any time point and over time, the trainee would become
overtrained. Rather, the occasional overreached sessions are commonly due to under-recovery.
Recovery capacity can be compromised by deviating from the diet, sleeping less well, having more
stress, etc. than is normally the case in the person’s lifestyle.
To deal with fluctuations in recovery capacity and prevent overreaching, I often employ
Autoregulated Volume Training (AVT) as explained in the following lecture.

AVT is a programming method in which you only plan the weight and number of repetitions of the
first set, e.g. 260 pounds for 8 reps, for a multiple set exercise. This first set is your ‘benchmark
set’. The subsequent sets are ‘volume sets’. They’re performed with the same weight and proximity
to failure, but you do not plan how many repetitions you’re going to do in advance. In fact, you
don’t even need to count your reps in these sets.
The purpose of AVT is to autoregulate training volume based on the difficulty of the first set. The
more neuromuscular fatigue the first set induces, the lower the total volume for that session will
be. If the first set had you bust out your tomato face to grind through the sticking point in the squat
and left you feeling so lightheaded you wondered how you even managed to rerack the bar
afterwards, then you will naturally perform fewer reps in the

subsequent sets. In contrast, if the first set had you progress as planned with more left in the tank,
then you will naturally perform more reps in the subsequent sets.
The result is that AVT normalizes the training stress over time to prevent overreaching yet also
ensure a sufficient training stimulus.
Importantly, AVT is implemented at an exercise-specific level, which is highly preferable to the
more common regulation of training volume at the whole body level. As you’ve learned in the
course topics on the physiology of strength training adaptations, structural balance theory and what
neuromuscular fatigue really is, muscle fatigue is largely a local process and it makes no sense to
take it easy on your biceps curls today because your quads haven’t recovered yet.
Here’s a simple example of AVT. Let’s say we’ve got a novice lifter who can still put 5 pounds on
the bar every squat session and perform 8 reps with that. He squats on Monday (because screw
national bench press day) and Friday (because screw ‘early weekend’) with a volume of 3 sets. Last
Friday he performed 200 pounds x 8, 7, 6 reps. Next Monday he was feeling frisky because he got
laid for the first time in months and had slept like a baby that weekend. So he was very well
recovered, he hit 205 pounds x 8 reps with ease and he managed to do 8 reps in the 2 subsequent
sets as well. On Friday that week he was mildly sleep deprived and more stressed from the work
week, so he hadn’t recovered that well and it took everything he had to hit 210 pounds x 8 reps. In
the subsequent sets he only managed 3 reps, which is fine, because the near-failure squat set
induced a lot of fatigue already.
Note how AVT ties in with benchmarking, progression models, the interindividual variability in
work capacity and the autoregulated rest intervals discussed in this course.
Another benefit of AVT is that individuals learn to mentally break free from the constraints of
performing each set while counting the repetitions, mentally as well as physically. This allows you to
focus more on your exercise technique.

Physically, AVT can also increase force production throughout the set. During exercise with a
defined endpoint, like a certain number of repetitions that you want to achieve, you will naturally
pace yourself by holding back during the early part of the exercise. This is good for endurance and
the achievement of the goal you have in mind in terms of quantity, but when you don’t need to hit
any specific performance goal, it can detract from the quality of the exercise in terms of muscle
activation, exercise technique and force production.
One obvious caveat to the use of AVT is that it only works for serious, motivated strength trainees
that have no problem pushing themselves and won't see not counting their reps as an excuse to
slack off. If your idea of training intensely is experiencing difficulty reading Shape magazine during
your leg extension set, AVT is not for you.
In sum, AVT normalizes the training stress of your program over time by autoregulating the training
volume of your subsequent 'volume sets' based on the difficulty of your first 'benchmark set'. Not
having rep targets during your volume sets allows you to focus on your exercise technique,
improves force production and can help reduce performance anxiety to make your workouts more
enjoyable.

Reactive deloading
Sometimes, AVT is not enough to prevent overreaching from occurring. This is when deloads are
applicable. A deload is a reduction in weight to reduce the training stress. Sometimes the word
deload is also used to refer to a more general reduction in training stress, like a reduction in
training volume by reducing the amount of training sets.

Traditional deloading
A traditional implementation of deloading is to take each 4th week of your program off from the
gym or to reduce the weight in this week. This is commonly seen in Powerlifting programs
employing block periodization. Traditional deloading methods vary in the degree of deloading,
ranging from no training at all to only a reduction in the number of sets, and in the duration of
deloading, ranging from single workouts to a full week. But by and large, they have 2 aspects in
common: the deloads are arbitrary and proactive. Bayesianbodybuilding.com
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The arbitrariness and proactivity of this type of deloading is that it’s planned in advance at a set date
or time in the program. At best, it’s an educated guess about when overreaching is likely to occur,
but in practice it often just comes down to one-size-fits-all programming in an attempt to make the
program look fancy and sophisticated without more than abstract theory as its rationale. You can’t
accurately predict in advance when an individual will experience higher stress in their life, sleep less
well or deviate from their diet,. Overreaching in any program can occur at many different time
points for different people, if it occurs at all.

Autoregulated deloading: reactive deloading

Autoregulation can solve the problem of the interindividual variability in the necessity of deloads.
The Bayesian Bodybuilding method employs an autoregulated form of deloading called reactive
deloading. As the name suggests, a reactive deload is not scheduled ahead of time. Just like AVT,
reactive deloading is only applied to the affected exercise(s) in a single training session.
Specifically, a reactive deload is implemented whenever a trainee does not progress as planned for
that exercise and it is deemed likely that this was due overreaching, not an external factor. These
factors reduce performance but not recovery status, like simple lack of focus during the set or a
circadian rhythm disturbance.
Several factors determine whether reactive deloading is warranted for an exercise in your training
program. (See the course topic on exercise selection for more detailed definitions of these criteria).
Compoundedness: The more muscle mass and the more joints involved in an exercise, the
higher the total and central neural stress and thus the higher the potential need for deloads.
Isolation exercises generally don’t require much deloading.
Terminal consistency: Exercises that score poorly on this principle have an inherently higher
variability in performance. As such, there is a decreased probability that lack of progress is due to
overreaching. Therefore, reactive deloads are not needed as much.

Microloadability: The larger the increment, the less likely the need for reactive deloading is. If the
increment is too large a jump in weight to realistically achieve on a regular basis, reactive deloading
will cause you to enter a cycle of perpetual deloading and result in undertraining.
Recovery capacity variability: The more variable someone’s rate of recovery, the greater the
need for reactive deloading. If someone has a very irregular recovery capacity due to, for example, a
variable sleep pattern or circadian rhythm, due to poor diet adherence or due to concurrent sport-
specific training, there is a greater need for reactive deloading. Reactive deloading will then take
care of underrecovery. For someone with a very stable lifestyle and good recovery capacity, it is
more likely that a plateau signals the need for more fundamental program change than a mere
reactive deload.

Based on the above factors, bilateral deadlift exercises usually benefit from reactive deloading, since
they have excellent microloadability and terminal consistency and they’re very compounded and
neurally taxing. An example of an exercise that rarely requires a reactive deload is the delt lateral
raise. It generally has abysmal microloadability, it’s an isolation exercise (sort of), it induces very
little muscle damage or central fatigue and it has mediocre terminal consistency.
When you’ve established that reactive deloading is useful for an exercise in your program and a
plateau occurs in any workout, you implement a reactive deload as follows. You replace your
remaining sets with low rep, explosive technique work: 1 to 5 reps per set at 60 - 70% of 1 RM
(roughly equal to a weight you could do 12-20 reps with). This type of speed work allows you to
reach high muscle activation levels, perform a decent amount of work and work on your technique
while only inducing a minimal amount of neuromuscular fatigue. It’s important to realize that to
reap these benefits without the cost of high further fatigue, it has to stay speed work. If your
movement velocity decreases noticeably at all during any set, you are going far too heavy and only
digging yourself deeper into your recovery hole.
In the presence of more severe fatigue, it is better to deload reactively by 100%, i.e. by skipping all
subsequent sets altogether. Speed work is appropriate if you only just missed the

last rep needed to progress as planned or you feel like you could have hit your planned number of
reps if your technique was a bit better. When you didn’t come close to your planned performance,
when your trained muscles were still extremely sore or when you experienced pain, speed work
may still be too much and you’re better off just moving on to the next exercise.
Let’s look at some examples. Say an advanced bodybuilder is planned to perform 350 pounds for 5
reps in the squat this workout, which would be a new best in the program. He’s already
implementing AVT and undulating periodization with a training volume of 4 sets and progress is
generally consistent, so reactive deloading is implemented for the squat. First work set, he manages
only 4 instead of 5 reps. Since he likely hadn’t recovered sufficiently yet, he reactively deloads to
prevent overreaching: for his remaining sets he drops the weight to 250 pounds and performs 3
more sets of 3 as speed work.
Example 2: Say that same bodybuilder does Bayesian flys later in the same training session. Here too
he doesn’t progress as planned, but since flys have an inherently higher variance in their
performance and they’re not a very centrally taxing exercise, he doesn’t implement a reactive
deload and performs his remaining sets as planned (possibly with AVT).
In sum, reactive deloading allows you to program deloads in your program in a systematic but
individualized manner so that you reduce your training stress only if/when needed. These reloads
are also specific to the muscle groups that actually need it, in contrast to proactively and arbitrarily
scheduling a whole-body deload in your program when you guesstimate it may be needed.

Practical Application
To put everything together, here’s a guide with a set of concrete progression guidelines you can
send to your paying clients. They include autoregulated progression models, including reactive
deloading, for straight sets and sets across, undulating periodization and cluster sets. While you can
send these directly to your clients and tell the client which models to use for what exercise, you
should in principle think of these as examples. Don’t limit yourself to just these models. There are
many more viable progression models.

Whenever a plateau occurs twice at a similar benchmark, such as getting stuck on 300 lb x 8 reps in
the squat twice in a row, there is cause for a larger training program adjustment. Continuing on a
program that is evidently not resulting in the desired progression is foolish.

Step one is to check if lifestyle factors were the cause of the plateau. If the trainee was sleeping
worse than otherwise during a week or had stressful deadlines coming up, that may well have been
the cause of any plateaus during this period. As such, the key here is lifestyle management and
possibly reducing the training stress temporarily a la reactive deloading.
If there were no obvious lifestyle factors that could explain the plateaus, it is likely that the program
is no longer optimal for the individual. Now you should look at whether the rate of progression is
decreasing for just that one exercise or also for several other exercises involving that muscle group.
If multiple exercises for a muscle group are stalling, you probably need to update the program
parameters for that muscle group by increasing its training stress (volume being the easiest change)
or frequency.
If it is only that single exercise, it is often more appropriate to update only the exercise’s
progression model by either increasing the exercise’s training intensity (intensification) or by
implementing undulating periodization.
However, when an exercise ends up with a progression model that is notably more advanced than
that of other exercises, you may instead want to replace the exercise. There are diminishing
returns to progression on any exercise and not everyone responds as well to the same exercises.
For example, you generally don’t want to let anyone but an advanced trainee use triple undulating
progression.
As always, common sense and coaching experience are vital to making the right decisions to
facilitate continued progression. Whatever you do, always let progression be your first and
foremost marker of the need for program updates.

PROGRESSION GUIDELINES
To cause your body to adapt, it must receive a progressively intense training stimulus (progressive
overload). Your program has the following progression schemes to cause continued adaptation. The
progression scheme for each exercise is listed in your log.
Don’t overthink these guidelines. They may look complicated at first, but they are fairly
straightforward once you understand the principles at work, namely striving for continued
progressive overload. Bayesianbodybuilding.com
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Linearly Progressive
This is linear progression in weight on your first work set. During your first work set, you stick to
the optimum number of reps that was determined during your test sessions (the rep target). Every
session you hit your rep target, you add the exercise’s increment to your next session’s first work
set weight.
Note that only your first work set of the exercise is used as benchmark of progress. How many
reps you perform in any subsequent sets does not influence whether or not you add more weight
to the exercise next session.
Example: Your bench press has 3 sets with AVT, a rep target of 11 and an increment of 2.5 kg. Last
session you did 120x11, 8, 7. Next session you do 122.5x11x3. The session after you do 125x11x3,
etc.
Reactive deloading
If you could not hit your rep target during your first work set, replace any remaining sets with low
rep, explosive technique work: 3-5 reps per set at 60-70% of 1 RM (roughly equal to a weight you
could do 12-20 reps with). This is speed work. If your movement speed slows down at all during
any set, you are going far too heavy.
You don’t have to log the speed work, but be sure to mark the whole entry of this exercise’s
session red in your spreadsheet (select the cell, select Font Color and select a red color).
Bayesianbodybuilding.com
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How to change a cell’s font color in Excel.
In your next training session of the affected exercise, go back to the weight you previously managed
for the planned number of reps (i.e. your rep target).
Example: Your squats have 4 sets with AVT, a rep target of 7 and an increment of 5 lb. Last session
you did 345x7,5,4,3. This session you go for 350x7x4, but you only manage 6 reps during the first
set. So for the remaining 3 sets, you do speed work. You conservatively estimate that you could do
at least 12 reps with 250, so you do 250x3x3 as a reactive deload. You note down 350x6 in your
log and next session you go back to 345x7x3 before retrying 350x7x3.
If you’re interested in the rationale behind reactive deload compared to more traditional deloading
methods, read this article.
Autoregulated progression
If, after performing the planned number of reps with the planned weight during set 1, you think
you’ll be able to perform that number of reps again with a higher weight in subsequent sets, go for
it. As long as you think you can keep hitting your rep target, keep increasing the weight to progress
as fast as you can.
You only have to log the top weight you hit your rep target with. Bayesianbodybuilding.com
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Example: Your Romanian deadlifts have a rep target of 6, 4 sets with AVT and an increment of 1 kg.
Last session you did for 180x6x4, so this session you are scheduled to do 181x6x4. Set 1 turns out
to be easy. You estimate that you could do 182.5x6, so you do. You still didn’t come anywhere
near failure, so in your third set you go for 190x6. That took everything you got, so in set 4, you
stick with 190. You note down 190x6x4.
Summary
As long as you keep hitting your rep target for an exercise in its first work set, Linearly Progressive
comes down to linearly increasing the weight every session by the increment. If you don’t hit your
rep target in your first work set, implement a reactive deload. If you can make faster progress than
1 increment per session, go for it. Bayesianbodybuilding.com
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Rep Range Progression
Rep Range Progression is similar to Linearly Progressive in that your first set is your progression
benchmark and your goal over time is to perform your rep target with more and more weight.
However, during Rep Range Progression, consistent linear weight progression over time is not
expected. When you don’t hit your rep target in any session, there is no reactive deload and you
continue training as normal with the same weight. Then in the next session, you plan to come
closer to your rep target in reps with that weight.
So you progress either in weight or in reps. If you hit your rep target in your first work set, you
increase the weight by the increment next session. If you don’t hit your rep target yet, you stick
with the same weight next session and aim to hit your rep target then or at least perform more
reps with that weight than last session.
Ideally, you of course hit your rep target every every session. In this case, there is no difference
between Linearly Progressive and Rep Range Progression.
Autoregulated Progression
Just like during Linearly Progressive, if you’re confident can progress in weight faster than a single
increment per session, go for it.
Example for Bayesian curls with a rep target of 15, 3 sets, and an increment of 1 kg:
Session 1: 20x15, 13, 11
Session 2: 21x15, 15, 14
Session 3: 22x15, 23x15,13 (autoregulated progress as above to progress faster than planned)
Session 4: 24x13, 10, 8
Session 5: 24x14, 10, 9
Session 6: 24x15, 13, 12
Session 7: 25x10, 9, 8
Session 8: 25x12, 9, 7
Session 9: 25x15, 11, 9
Session 10: 26x10, 8, 7 Bayesianbodybuilding.com
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etc.
Plateaus
If you get stuck on the same weight x reps for 2 sessions in a row, increase the weight by the
increment next session as a ‘plateau breaker’. After that, go back down an increment and try to
increase your reps again. Repeat if needed.
Example for Bayesian curls with a rep target of 15, 1 set, and an increment of 1 kg:
15x15
16x10
16x10 (plateau)
17x7
16x11
16x15
17x9
17x9 (plateau)
18x6
17x10
etc.
Summary
Rep Range Progression comes down to trying to hit your rep target with continuously more weight
in your first work set. In sessions after you hit your rep target, you increase the weight by the
increment (or you already increase the weight within the same session if you think you can still hit
your rep target then). In sessions after you didn’t hit your rep target, you work up in reps until you
do. If you plateau, implement a plateau breaking session before trying to increase your reps again.
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Undulating Periodization
This is equal to 2 alternating, independent Linearly Progressive schemes. So you alternate training
sessions with a lower and a higher rep target progression track. These 2 tracks function exactly like
2 independent Linearly Progressive schemes.
Example sessions progression for the overhead press with a 2.5 kg increment, 4 sets with AVT and rep
targets of 8 and 3 with color coding to illustrate the alternating rep targets: 60x8x4, 70x3x4, 62.5x8x4,
72.5x3x4, 65x8x4, 75x3x4 Bayesianbodybuilding.com
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Undulating Rep Range Progression
Analogous to Undulating Periodization in relation to Linearly Progressive, Undulating Rep Range
Progression is equal to 2 alternating, independent rep range progression schemes. So you alternate
between sessions with a lower and a higher rep target for the exercise in question.
Example sessions progression for chin-ups with a 5 lb increment, a set volume of 4 and Undulating Rep
Range progression with rep targets of 8 and 12 with color coding to illustrate the alternating rep targets:
10x8x4, 20x3x4, 10x12x4, 20x4x4, 15x8x4, 20x6x4, 15x12x4, 20x8x4, 20x9x4, 25x6x4
Bayesianbodybuilding.com
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Set-rep Range Progression
This is progression in reps across sets. Set-rep Range Progression functions like Rep Range
progression except that you now have to reach the rep target in all sets instead of only in your first
set and you’re adhering to a fixed rest interval by using a timer/stopwatch/phone.
Example Set-rep Range Progression during squats with a 10 lb increment, a rep target of 3 and 9 sets:
300x3x9
310x3x9
320x3x9
330x3x9
etc.
Reactive deloading
If you fail to hit the rep target during any set, you stop the exercise and continue with the same
weight next session until you’ve completed the rep target during every set.
Be strict with your rest intervals. If you cheat by resting longer and longer than planned, you’re only
making fake progress.
Example Set-rep Range Progression during squats with a 10 lb increment, a rep target of 3 and 9 sets:
300x3x9
310x3x7, 310x2
310x3x9
320x3x3, 320x1
320x3x6, 320x2
320x3x9
330x3x8, 330x1
330x3x9
340x3x4, 340x2
etc. Bayesianbodybuilding.com
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Autoregulated progression
If you’re confident that you can reach the rep target during every set with a higher weight than
planned, go for it.
Example Set-rep Range Progression during deadlifts with a 10 lb increment, a rep target of 3 and 9 sets:
300x3x9
310x3x3 (easy), 320x3x2 (still easy), 330x3x4
340x3x9
etc.
Summary
Set-rep Range Progression comes down to trying to hit your rep target in all your sets while
employing a strictly timed rest interval. When you’ve hit your rep target in all sets with a certain
weight, you increase the weight by the increment. If you don’t hit your rep target in any set, skip
your remaining sets and try to hit your rep target in more sets next session.
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Clustered Linearly Progressive
This is Linearly Progressive periodization with an intra-set rest interval (cluster sets): you rest not
just in between sets but also in between clusters. A cluster is a series of reps. The notation is as
follows.
[weight] x [reps in cluster] x [number of clusters] x [number of sets] ([intra-set rest-interval)]
For example, 80x3x5x4 (30 s) means 4 sets of 15 reps per set with a weight of 80. Each set consists
of 5 clusters of 3 reps with 30 seconds of rest in between each cluster. So each set looks like this.
80x3
30 seconds rest
80x3
30 seconds rest
etc. until you reach 15 reps.
Second example: 200x1x10x3 (5 deep breaths) during squats means you perform 3 sets of 10 reps
with 5 deep breaths in between every rep.