>> Yeah, I've always noticed that there are certain muscle groups that are very easy to isolate when under load and those are almost always the same muscle groups that are easy to contract very hard without any load whatsoever. >> Bingo. That's actually really insightful. You can use this heuristic of if you can contract your lats just standing here, you're probably going to contract them very well when you lift.

If you can't, you can probably assume about the same thing's going to happen. So yeah, you'll know. The lats are actually really interesting because they tend to be one of the more difficult muscle groups to learn how to activate. So if you're in your journey and you're just like, I have no idea and you can look up like a lat pose.

So how do you like, how do you puff your lats up? How do you show it? And if you do that and you're like, wow, there's no movement here, just recognize that's extremely common and that it's probably going to take you many, many, many months of trying before you start to see some movements and probably even a few years before you really start to see activation.

So you're not some sort of like specific, like special genetic anomaly. It's very, very common. It's uncommon to not be able to activate your biceps, right? Everyone can do that. But if you're just like, man, I can't get this here. I'm just going to stop doing it. Do not do that.

Just keep at it and just keep concentrating and thinking about that muscle group. It will take some time. But it's very common to have challenges activating lats. Yeah. I've noticed that many of the muscle groups that were responsible for a large fraction of the work in the various sports that I played as a young child are muscles that are very easy for me to selectively isolate and induce hypertrophy in.

I suppose I'm one of those mutants where my lats happen to be one such of those muscle groups. I think that's because I swam a lot when I was a kid. Literally going to ask me a swimmer. Yeah. It's like a telltale sign. Yeah. Every kid in my town swam and played soccer.

There you go. And then later I skateboarded and did some boxing and things of that sort. You generally hear that answer is you either were a swimmer or you were a wrestler. So it's like that pulling and pull toward you is thousands of repetitions allowed you to get very good at contracting.

But because I also played soccer and skateboarding, but I didn't do any baseball, basketball or anything, muscle groups like deltoids are very challenging to activate and isolate. So I do think that early development is superimposed on a genetic template that sort of predicts which muscle groups are going to be easier or harder to isolate and train.

It's also a very good case for why it's important to do as many different athletic activities as you can in your youth. Yeah. And if you do skateboard, definitely learn to ride switch because every skateboarder I know has one leg that's larger than the other and one calf that's larger than the other.

And actually for that matter, people that do martial arts that don't learn to, if they're not southpaw, if they don't learn to switch up and do their work southpaw, you see the same thing. I mean, you're building an asymmetry into the system and it's not just muscular, it's neural.

Oh, for sure. It's strongly neural. Yeah. So yeah, kids, parents, get your kids doing a bunch of different things. I suppose gymnastics would probably be the best sport all around in terms of movement in multiple planes and activating all the different muscle groups. Yes and no. There's a lot of benefit, no question about it.

There's a lot of other things though that it has limited ability. So almost everything in, not like gymnastics is great, but almost everything in that is pre-planned, which is a major downfall, right? So the joy of skating is there's so much proprioceptive input that you have to make decisions very quickly in small windows.

Now you have a little bit of that when you're flipping in the air and you have to land, but you, gymnastics, gymnasts tend to have a very specific routine that they're working on and they work on that routine for years. So skateboarding for me was transportation. It was freedom and it didn't require any coaches or parental oversight.

Yeah, yeah. Ball sports have the beauty of reaction and things like that. So all of them are wonderful. Yeah. Good to do a lot of them. You've established that 10 really to 20 sets per week is the kind of bounds for maintaining and initiating hypertrophy. Yep. If I were to like flag one of them, I would say 15 to 20 is the sets that you want to get working now.

It gets complicated when you ask, well, how many reps per set do I have to get to? Okay. Well, we also can complicate that by repetition type and tempo. Just sort of let all that go for now and just think if you're getting close to that range, you're in the spot and all you have to do now is balance two things, recovery and continued training.

Okay. So if you're somewhere in this 10 to 20 working sets range and you're in a position where you can continue to do that, you're not so sore and so damaged and beat up that you can't maintain that volume for, you know, eight weeks at a time or at least six weeks at a time, then I'd probably say either the style of repetitions, the amount of repetitions per set you're doing are too much.

The volume is getting to you. However, if you're not seeing adaptations, then I'd say maybe the repetitions aren't enough. And so that's the kind of game you're running. Now there could be plenty of other factors. Intensity. Of course. Yeah, intensity, intent, and then of course the other things, sleep, nutrition, et cetera.

All these other things that go into our visible stressor category that we always analyze. This sort of brings up this idea of responders and non-responders. So we get this one a ton. So why is it some people, my gym buddy, my roommate, we go to sleep at the same time, we're on the same nutrition plan, we work out together, she triples in muscle size and I don't have like no gain whatsoever.

Well there's a lot of work that we're trying to do to identify the molecular mechanisms behind responders and non-responders because they clearly exist. In fact, this is one of the reasons why every paper I basically will ever publish again if I, you know, if I do, always reports individual person data.

So rather than group averages, you get to see, you know, if there's 10 subjects in it, you get to see how each of the 10 responded. Because the group average can get confusing, what you really want to see is how many actually people got better, how many got worse, how many maybe changed and if so.

So we'll always report those individual data because when you go to train, you're you, you're not the group average. That's very important to know. So if you do that, you can see a beautiful line of these hyper-responders, the bell curve in the middle of the normal responders and those folks who like through any training study just won't get any better.

If you can tease out what you can't, but let's say in science you could tease out all the extra factors, total stress load, hydration, sleep, etc. What you often see is non-responders a lot of the time, it's not that they have a physiological inability, it's just that they need a different protocol.

And a lot of times it's they just need more volume. So if they can handle that and they're not excessively beat up, just give them more volume and they tend to see a lot of breakthroughs. And you see the same thing with plateaus. So typically it's sort of just like, okay, the routine you're on, you've been on it for too long.

We need to either go to the other end of the hypertrophy spectrum for intensity, which means like if you've been in the like 60 to 70% of your one repetition max range, maybe we actually need to go heavier. Take our repetitions down, maybe even our total volume down and go heavier.

Try that. A great way to break through plateaus of grand if all the other boxes are checked. The other one is do the opposite, which is like, okay, we're going to go higher. We're going to go set to 20, set to 25, very high repetition range and really get after it.

Not to do as much damage because you don't tend to get as sore from those really high repetition ranges. You'll get more sore from the lower repetition, higher intensity range than you will typically the other ones and see if we can bust through some plateaus there. So it just generally means you need to do something a little bit different than your training partner.