The world of strength training science has slowed over the past several years, without a BIG step forward since Booth and collogues showed that load (the amount of resistance you put on a muscle) is the primary determinant of hypertrophy way back in 1988. Heck, some people reading this may not have even been alive then! Everyone wants to know in an applied sense what the next "big" training method is going to be to help them bust into an entirely different level of strength and muscle building, and it seems that it has been found … at least in part.
Now, the research I am about to describe was based on endurance training, but hang on for the punch line because it could very well revolutionize your workouts. It turns out that the top endurance runners and cyclists have been doing this for some time. What they do is instead of saying lets maximize each workout for speed and/or max volume from a power point of view, they say lets maximize the stimulus the body receives so that it adapts in the most dramatic way possible. To do this they actually train hard (really hard) on low glycogen and consume good amounts (25 grams or so) of whey protein after workouts. Through this they are actually able to accomplish several things:
- First, the low glycogen training seems to cause a significant increase in specific transporters for fatty acid oxidation.
- And second, it seems to selectively hypertrophy the muscles of interest (pretty cool if you are a cyclist and want big, strong legs but with less of an upper body to pull up hills).
The culmination of this work actually has just come out in the journal, Medicine Sports and the Science of Exercise. If you study the article, what you will see is that the low glycogen group did less total work over the three week period than the high/normal glycogen group, but the low glycogen group actually performed better in the tests at the end when they were allowed to recover for the final tests and had normal glycogen!
So how can this improve my workouts in the gym? Recent research is saying it’s not about how much work you do, but in how strong of a signal you send to your specific organs (in this case muscles) to adapt. And in many cases, it may mean putting your body in a physiological state that is not optimal for high power outputs and performance during training, but actually in a worse state and training at lower power outputs (though mentally they will be hard because you feel like crap) because the response of the muscle will be maximized.
Now how this translates from endurance athletes to weightlifters is not quite known from the research, but you can hypothesize that it you could get similar results by using the following protocol: a short warm-up for the muscles of interest to get blood flow going to those muscles, then a very short series (like 1 - 2 sets) of high load sets (max 10 reps) to momentary failure, followed by the whey protein (plus some carbohydrates if you are interested in training later that day). This type of a workout does two things to maximize protein synthesis (building of new muscle).
It maximizes the load on the muscle over a short time period (per the Booth research mentioned above). It also maximally stimulates the mammalian target of the rapamyacin (mTOR) pathway, the definitive pathway of protein synthesis because mTOR responds to how much stress is put on the muscle, not how much total work over a set amount of time that you do. We know that mTOR stays activated for several hours, so your next training session would be later in the day and be similar in composition. Each workout you would try to increase the load in those specific one to two sets to momentary failure (so either an extra rep, or more weight on the bar).
These workouts are not very long, perhaps 10 – 15 minutes in total, and if you have a training partner you can actually do one to two forced reps at the end of the single set. A sample workout would look like this:
Morning:
Warm-up two to three minutes of overhead squats for a full body warm-up.
Smith Machine Squat – Three sets of increasing load so that on the fourth set, you are able to just get out eight repetitions with a final two repetitions with help from your workout partner (here we use the Smith Machine for safety reasons).
Lat Pull Downs – Two warm-up sets to a third set of about eight repetitions to failure with two forced repetitions at the end.
Bench Press – Again, two warm-up sets to a third set of about eight repetitions to failure with two forced repetitions at the end.
Dips – To failure at eight to ten repetitions.
Bicep curls – To failure at eight to ten repetitions.
That is it! Drink some whey protein and go about your day, returning in the evening time to repeat your morning workout. This type of routine done four times per week in double day format is one example of using the newest science to drive results!
Matthew Johnson – Is a nutritionist and exercise physiologist with a degree in nutritional sciences and toxicology and a certificate in dietetics. He is currently finishing his Doctorate at UC Berkeley in exercise physiology. Matthew consults with companies and athletes from local to international caliber. Matt can be reached at matthewjohnson@mklaboratory.com