Question to You Guys: What Do You THINK is the Main Driver for Muscle Growth?

If they’re working for you then there’s your answer.

Lee Boyce posted a “Tip” article on here about DB rows. Pulling the DB to your hip hits the lats better than just pulling the weight up. The weight moves in an arc.

I get your point, but Dorian was going beyond failure in his “normal” training so which would cause a ton of fatigue and you also have to wonder how “easy” his sets were when he was backing off. Paul isn’t advocating for forced reps and intensity techniques on every set, and in my case I deload every 5th week. You need some form of fatigue management for sure but you also shouldn’t need multiple weeks of deloaded training in every mesocycle, which is essentially what you would be doing if the first week or two are 3-4RIR.

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Arm path is going to dictate what area of the back is getting worked. Not “sensation”. It doesn’t mean they are mutually exclusive but “feeling” something isn’t always indicative of it producing a high amount of proper output in a movement.

For example, wide grip chins or lat pulldowns are common hailed as great “lat movements”. They aren’t. It doesn’t mean people won’t feel them in their lats but if you’re trying to bias the lats rather than the upperback (teres major, rhomboids, etc) then using an arm path where it slides close into your side from in front of the body is going to hit the lats better.

This heart rate thing is getting out of wack!

All and every cardiac rehabilitation centers around the fact of the heart being a muscle which needs a certain stimulus/training!
Everything done in excess causes problems in our biology!
Questioning the maths of raising your heart rate and possibly “wearing out” that heart muscle is nonesense! Let’s assume you never “train” that muscle: You would run into countless health problems causing death before your heart might ever come to its “biochemical” death!
-such as coronary artery disease, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, certain cancers, obesity, high blood pressure, and depression.

Same goes for ageing without muscular training!!!

  • skeletal changes, obesity in men due to an increase in estrogen and so on…endless list!

Progressive overload is surely ONE driver of gainz, provided you recover and prepare yourself for the overload, I see no complications outweighing the possible gainz, be it in sports therapy and rehabilitation or in high performance sports!
All “sports training” should be planned in meso-, macro- and micro-cycles! In lifting we call it “deloading” or “cycles”, Marathons/Triathlons, Tennis and Rugby matches, take what you want: if not “cycled” you are steering right into havoc!
( the mother of using growth hormones for physical activities: the ability to shift those barriers, at least until you die from complication accompanied by these drugs)

Watched Meadows’ latest video, he does say they shift emphasis towards the rhomboids and traps, but still hit the lats of course.

There’s a caveat here - yes, I do feel them in my lats, and I know I do them in a way that works. Extended ROM, very controlled negative, stretch at the bottom, no torso swing.
BUT, as I said, I’ve also moved to them once the dumbbells in my gym got too light, they’re heavier than the rows I was doing previously, it’s entirely possible they’re not as good as DB/BB rows specifically for lats, and I’m simply getting better results due to heavier weight instead of exercise mechanics.

That’s why I asked Paul what’s his tought. I’m keeping my exercises list very minimal and wanted to tweak it a bit, currently my main movements are snatch deadlifts, front squats, squats, bench (with a close-ish grip) and strict BTN press (standing, starting each rep from the traps).
Out of these, snatch deadlifts, front squats and BTN press are taxing on the upper back. The rest of back work is made of Meadows rows, pullups (bodyweight) and weighted chinups.

That post caught my attention, I do want something more specifically for lats to push in the 8-10 rep range and might consider dropping either Meadows rows or pullups. More biased towards pullups honestly, the supinated grip pulldown sounds interesting as a replacement

Ok Dude, have it your way.

On the HR thing I agree completely. There’s many ways to blast that to hell but easiest way is comparison to a person who performs strenuous activity 3 days a week vs someone who doesn’t. Blood pressure, resting HR, endurance etc it’s proven that lowering BP prolongs life. I’m assuming the dr who said this prefers lowering BP via medications and increased revenue from more ppl having to see him for meds.

It’s like saying your eyelids only have some many blinks in them so don’t blink all the time…

Oh come on, don’t be a crybaby.

You can’t draw any conclusions from what Dorian said there except that you can’t train all out every week of the year, and nobody is arguing against that. Plus what worked for one elite bodybuilder might be far from optimal for 99% of the rest of the population, deloading for more than a week is pretty much unheard of because it simply isn’t necessary for the vast majority of people.

But here is the question: if 3-4 reps short of failure is optimal for hypertrophy and volume is the primary driver of gains (Israetel’s training model involves adding sets each week) then why ever go beyond 3-4 reps short of failure? Just add more sets for progressive overload. The way I see it, it looks like the first week or two of a mesocycle in this style of training is basically a waste of time, and then the week before the deload you are overdoing it because not only will you be doing more sets than the rest of the mesocycle but you will also be pushing to failure or one rep short.

When a guy answers your question by telling you to buy his book, and the book doesn’t even answer the question, and he concedes that there is no scientific evidence to neither confirm not deny either position in this debate, then how does that look? I’m not trying to say that I believe beyond any doubt that Paul Carter is 100% correct in every detail of training, but based on the available evidence there isn’t much you can say against him. I do a little bit more volume than what he advises for pressing movements, you could say about 15 sets a week for chest and triceps, but that’s because I have found what works for me and I also don’t have a dedicated “back day” because I train for powerlifting, so 2 hard upper body days a week is not unreasonable.

That’s literally what they did in the study that Mike helped fund. And what it showed was zero growth by the end of the six weeks.

I believe I linked another study that showed there was no remodeling that occurred when a set was trained using that style of effort compared to a set where metabolic stress did occur. In the former, no growth, in the latter…a lot.

As far as what Dorian said, I also believe in intensity (effort) cycling in order to create new stimulus which in turn creates a need for adaption. You can’t train all out using the same movements and intensity techniques all the time. The body is resilient at adaptation.

This is why noobs and novice guys just need to focus on getting stronger without that stuff. Where as one moves into a more advanced stage, it’s kind of impossible to continue to grow without pushing the effort envelope. I don’t make the rules, I just live by them.

Today’s training -

Chest press machine - 50% set
Incline db side laterals - cluster set
Free Motion Incline Press - 2 sets of 8
PBN - 2 sets (6,12)
Triceps machine with added bands - 1 quadruple drop set

That’s it.

Listen to Dorian talk from the 25 min to 30 min mark.
142- Spirituality, Psychedelics and Coping with Retirement with Dorian Yates - YouTube to 30

Mike Mentzer is an underrated source for high intensity training. Imo older beaten up lifters should lean towards his methods more if wanting to run high intensity. His training was more low impact and tempode. I love dorians methods though just blasting going balls to the walls.

Edit: also mike built a world class physique. I’m not familiar with gear but I know they weren’t running in the 70s nearly what guys in 90s to present ran.

I’m ready to see what Paul puts out in his new book on these regards to high intensity training.

Remember, 3-4 reps short of failure is a place to start. Week by week you go harder, just like Yates talks about.

Pushing too close to failure at the beginning of a mesocycle is going to cause excessive muscle damage (too much recovery cost and minor increase in hypertrophy) as well as the fact that it will limit progressive overload because you won’t be able to go far. For example, if in week 1 you do your first work set for 10 at RPE10 or even fail the last rep then by week 4 you might only be doing 5 on the first set and the following sets will either be too few reps to really stimulate hypertrophy or you will have to reduce weight which means not progressively overloading. Of course it doesn’t have to be this way, it would just require a different structure in terms of volume, frequency, and progression to make it work.

Bill Pearl claimed the Mentzer brothers didn’t train HIT all year round but kept that quiet. He also claimed they were insanely strong, especially Ray. These guys were genetic freaks and would have developed incredible physiques copying Arnold’s high volume routines. And that’s not a pop at HIT, as that was my first foray into weight training.

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What a joke.

So how would you go about programming a training cycle nowadays? Of course without getting into minute details. How would the first week of a mesocycle differ from the last? Changes from one mesocycle to the next?

This is purely theoretical. If you haven’t been training at all in the weeks before the beginning of the mesocycle the yes, but otherwise it’s not so straightforward.

Exactly.

wave loading or just start lighter

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I mostly agree with this except nothing hits my lats like behind the neck lat pull downs.

Dorian’s definition of failure is RPE 11. His “back off” weeks were probably RPE 9-10.

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Then you’re doing your lat training wrong.

The first week is a break in week, not much different than already talked about. figuring out movement selection, focusing on technique, etc. With 2-3 sets of each movement being performed.

That might go on for 10-12 days or so. Then the next week there’s a drop in volume and each set is taken to a failure point that either leaves 0 reps in the tank (true failure) or to form failure, i.e. squats, rack deads, etc. Anything that has a high degree of neural output due to the need for internal bracing/stability.

There’s 2-3 weeks of that, straight sets to failure. Then you’d switch to 50% sets, or drop sets, or double r/p sets for a few weeks all depending. All focusing on breaking rep PR’s. Then you run that until full adaption has occurred. At that point you take a break and decide on what you want to focus on for the next training cycle.

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Week 1 is often less work than the deload.

But some of those week 5s are straight out fucked up. Here ya go: a set at RPE 9 or 10 then 6 back off sets with just 10% less weight. Then another compound for 4 sets lol The preceeding weeks have done SFA to prepare you for this.