 In this episode of the BFR Better for Results podcast, we sit down and talk with Dr. Samuel Buckner of the University of South Florida, who's an assistant professor of exercise science. We talk about volume. How much volume does Instagram blow up the volume debate? What actually does the evidence say about volume? And we of course talk about his work in blood flow restriction, spitballing some ideas for clinical studies, and much, much more. I hope you enjoy the episode. What's up, what's up, what's up, what's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the BFR Better for Results podcast. As you just heard, my voice just crackled. That's okay. I'm human. I'm here today with Dr. Samuel Buckner of the University of South Florida. And I am extremely excited to talk to him because I know he has thoughts about the latest and greatest fitness trends. He's doing research in that area. He recently published a paper called the dose response relationship between resistance training volume and muscle hypertrophy. There are still doubts. It's a very interesting title. I'm looking forward to the episode. Welcome to the podcast and the video cast. For those watching on YouTube. Right on, thanks for having me. So just briefly for those that are not familiar with your work, who are you? Why did you get interested in extra science and more particularly strength training? Yeah, so I grew up doing gymnastics and I can recall back in high school, all I like to do was work out, lift weights, go train. And when it came time to pick a degree when you're filling out the college applications, I picked athletic training because I was like, oh, I want to train athletes. That sounds cool. And then I got to college and I was a semester into my athletic training degree. And I realized it was wrapping ankles, treating injuries and not training athletes like I thought it was. Somewhere along the way I discovered like kinesiology, exercise physiology and got a little bit in the strength and conditioning. I ended up becoming a strength coach and I was an intern strength coach for a year at Florida Atlantic University. And I enjoyed being a coach but I also realized that that environment really wasn't for me. And the director of the program at Florida Atlantic walked into the gym one day and said, hey, you should come get a master's degree. So I kind of fell into a master's degree somewhat reluctantly. Got a master's in exercise physiology where for a large portion of that I ran a body composition line. So I did a lot of underwater weighing, a lot of bod pods and those sorts of things. I still had no interest in research, like not even a little bit. I didn't think it was fun, it didn't seem cool. And I ended up being persuaded to go to an academic conference. And I remember sitting in the conference and I was watching a presentation on like creatine, protein. It was sponsored by GNC. And I thought to myself, I think I can do what these guys are doing. And that started, I guess, my journey to getting a PhD, which it took me to many different places actually. I finally settled at University of Mississippi working with Jeremy Leneke who I know you're familiar with. Why did you settle on Ole Miss? Well, I had a previous experience. So I started my PhD at University of Nebraska. We were doing kind of supplement research, some muscle growth stuff as well. But me and my mentor just weren't a good fit. We had difference, I guess, my style of learning and his style of mentorship. It didn't go well together at all. And I quit at the end of my first year of my PhD. And I thought I was done, honestly. I went back to Florida. I was an adjunct instructor at Florida Leneke University. So I was teaching courses, I was working as a trainer. And Mike Zordos was at FAU at the time. He's still at FAU. And he was friends with Jeremy Leneke who had just finished his PhD. And he said, hey, why don't you come to the conference, meet Jeremy, and maybe it'd be a good fit for a PhD for you. So we met, we hung out a little bit, we got to know each other. Because at that point I had learned it's very important to have a good relationship with your mentor because you have to be able to question them, you have to be able to, you know, education at that level is like push and pull. And we worked well together because he would push me a lot and he would shoot down my ideas, but he'd also be open to me shooting ideas his way. And sometimes I'd be right, sometimes I was wrong, but that process is so good for learning. When you have a bad idea, you learn a lot from that bad idea. And for me, it was just the mentor fit. It was the right one at the right time. And, you know, he was studying blood flow restriction. He was known for that in fact, which I had no interest in. Like I had heard about blood flow restriction probably a few years prior during my master's degree. And it seems so counterintuitive to me. And I remember thinking to myself, well, who's gonna put these bands on their arms or legs and actually train? So to me, it was funny that I ended up doing a lot of research on blood flow restriction during my PhD. And, you know, learned a lot about the technique. I still do blood flow restriction research, of course. But to me it was always funny because I thought it was the silliest thing when I first read about it. And then I ended up, you know, doing a large amount of research on BFR. So yeah, it was ultimately, I wanted to study skeleton muscle growth and adaptation. How much can muscles grow? What makes muscles grow? Looking at different variations or training manipulations and how they impact growth of a muscle. And BFR allowed me to do that because BFR is a technique that grows muscle. So ultimately it was a means to an end for me to refine my skills of imaging older sounding muscle, measuring growth. And he was an amazing mentor. You know, his ability to challenge and to push you to be a better scientist and be a better thinker, which was so valuable to me and still is. So before we kind of move on into more of your recent work, your past work on blood flow restriction, obviously this being the BFR Better for Results podcast can include blood flow restriction, cannot, but of course you're well published in the space. What are some of the main takeaways from a muscle physiology perspective that you've walked away from with specifically the use of blood flow restriction and what are important questions that you feel still exist? I mean, still, this is a brand new area science-wise, but questions that you are personally interested in based on your interest in muscle physiology. Yeah, so a lot of the work we did during my PhD and sometime after was on methodological approaches to BFR. So what cuffs to use, what pressures to use? Do you need to use high pressure? Should you be using a lower pressure? How does pressure compare between different devices? So I feel like a lot of the work we did, there's still no standardization, but I think people can pick up a device and maybe apply the pressure in a more informed way than they could say four or five years ago. So I think a lot of the work we did was beneficial in helping people to apply a more homogeneous stimulus across their participants as opposed to an absolute pressure. From a research perspective, you're saying? From a research perspective, and then hopefully they can take that in individuals like yourself, I hope that research is helpful in understanding, if I use a high pressure with this device or a low pressure, what differences can I expect? I know his lab has focused a lot on the perceptual responses as of late. So they're still working on understanding and maybe finding easier ways to implement the technique. I think a lot of people are scared by the technique because it seems too complex. At the end of the day, I think you need to apply a mild pressure really to get the initial stimulus. And I'm probably currently more interested from just a gym perspective. My work is less clinical or it has tended to be less clinical over the past five or six years. And the latest study that we did was looking at, I think this idea was interesting. It didn't quite work out, but we are interested in teasing out the metabolic versus mechanical portion. And what we did is we tried to decrease the, not the mechanical aspect, but the total time under tension with a high load. So we basically had people do four sets of three repetitions, which is not gonna make you grow. It's not enough volume, you're not close enough to failure. So we put cuffs on the individuals and flooded the cuffs for three minutes. And we tried to make those three reps, even though the first three reps of the set, we tried to make those reps like the last three reps. So like you're doing three reps, but we want that to be like the last three reps of your set. Practically, that doesn't do much for anybody. But physiologically, to me, it was interesting because in my mind, there was no application where you need BFR with a high load. But I was interested in could you pre-fatigue the muscle and with very low volume get the same growth as a higher volume protocol. So I think my current endeavors of BFR are a little out there. And they're more physiological in nature, less practical in understanding the, like if there's this meter of making the muscle grow where we have to fatigue the muscle with a certain amount of volume, how can BFR change the amount of volume we need to do with different training loads? Does that make sense? Oh, it makes perfect sense. I mean, for me, ultimately how I like to think of how muscles grow is really relating it to the muscle fiber level in terms of the force velocity curve and how effort will be somewhat of a surrogate for muscle activation. And as you mentioned before, like especially at low loads, we need to fatigue the muscle in order to get the muscle contraction velocity slow enough so we get the adequate actinomycin overlap to thus produce mechanical tension, which again, curious your thoughts. But for me, I think that that can help, that model helps explain a lot, maybe not all, but a lot of the stimulus that the muscles use to be able to grow. I think Greg Knuckles on a podcast was relating kind of the arguments about muscle hypertrophy to more of like a philosophical debate where it could be sufficient, but not necessarily like absolutely necessary to grow muscle. I think it's a sufficient stimulus. I think that's an interesting way to think about it. So with the application of BFR and heavy loads, taking that lens, for me, it's almost a barometer of how somebody understands how muscles grow in the first place. When they say, oh, like BFR and heavy loads, will that give me a better benefit? But my question to you is someone that's studying this and particularly have used it in some sort of combination with heavy loads is why would we want to use a stimulus where we have the gold standard for muscle mass and muscle strength, which is heavy loads, why would we wanna reduce the juice or basically reduce the volume that we can accomplish with a gold standard type approach by using something like BFR, which is just gonna make something more uncomfortable? Like is there a potential in any world, do you see the addition of BFR either during the rest periods, during the set to be any sort of therapeutic or enable additional growth? So specifically in combination with high loads? In combination with high loads, yes. Talking about, and let's qualify this at 70 plus percent of the one remax. Yeah, currently I don't think there's any utility there. And that's what we try to do. We tried, we took 70% of one RM and then we made it suboptimal. So we made it so it wouldn't grow your muscle and then we tried to make up for that by applying pressure, didn't work. And we've had talks in the lab, some of my students are like, I think we can refine it. I think we can make the protocol better with a few tweaks, whether it's more pressure or apply the cuff for a longer period of time before we begin contraction. And they might be right. We might be able to get that to work, but I'm just not interested enough right now to run the study. But yeah, Matt Jesse in his dissertation, I think explained some of this pretty well when he discussed muscle contraction disturbs blood flow. And when you go light enough with the external load, there's not enough mechanical compression to compress the vasculature. So essentially it's very hard to fatigue. With 70% of one RM, the mechanical compression of the vascular is such that you're going to fatigue within eight to 12 reps. Well, if you had BFR, what are you gonna do? I think you're still gonna fatigue in a somewhat, I don't know how much of a repetition reduction it would be, but it may not even be a whole lot. And the reason I don't think it may not be a whole lot is because when you contract your muscle, right, that's gonna push blood back out. And with such a high force contraction, you're almost counteracting the BFR, I think. And I'm thinking on the spot here, but it's good. That's what I want you to do. That's why we have these discussions because I got more in the tank because I have thoughts you mentioned before, before we pivot back to this about mild pressure. And that's, I think, something in the industry that I think we've now started to gravitate more toward mild pressure than higher pressures. But what I was referring to with regards to the heavy loads would be, like we do have acute studies that look at repetitions to fatigue with the addition of BFR either during the exercise itself or during the rest period. And we tend to see, in my thinking on the spot here, about a one to two repetition reduction in reps to fatigue. So there is some fatiguing stimulus that's happening with the restriction of blood flow. And partially, I personally think with such low repetitions, it's likely due to discomfort and just not wanting to deal with the pressure that you're exerting, the backward flow, which I, again, agree with, on your body. And I will say, I have a personal experience with heavy lifting with BFR because I've done almost all of the protocols that exist because I wanna know how practical it is. Perceptually, you probably can't see it, but I have a collapsed valve on my left forearm because I was doing a six week series of BFR with bicep curls. And for me as a physical therapist and educator of trying to get the, what I would consider the safest, but hopefully most optimal application of BFR, I just don't see a theoretical rationale. And I have the battle scars to show that there's a potential influence on the vascular system to the application of BFR with heavy lifting. But I did like the paper that you did and I understood what you were trying to, what you're trying to do. It's just interesting cause you see people then pick it up and they're like, oh, well, if BFR is good with a low load, then certainly it must be just as good with a higher load. And that's where I think the disconnect in thought processes kind of happen with that. Is there anything in this space that projects that are either ongoing or you're certain areas of BFR that you're looking to explore a little bit more? I know you mentioned you're not that interested in heavy lifting pairing it with BFR. Is there any other sort of area you don't have to talk about your projects that you currently are doing for whatever reason? I personally always love talking about my projects even if they're not published, but I don't know if that's an academia thing or just me trying to just be as transparent as possible cause some people like sharing their work that they're doing, some people don't. I don't know, but yeah. Usually it depends on the study and maybe how controversial the study is going to be. And then the hopes of getting a fair and blinded review process. These things are getting more and more blurred, especially with preprints. Right now we have a huge training study going on which is taking the bulk of our attention. And in addition to that, we're doing a muscle size and strength cross-sectional study. But we talked previously off camera about maybe doing some comparison of different devices because we've recently acquired some of the different BFR devices and I want to implement them in research cause they're much easier to use. Now we use the Hockenson machine and that is such a pain. You got to stay close to the cart. The hose always pops out. So it's been probably one of the most researched devices and utilized devices and I'm starting to distance myself from it. So we want to compare as many devices as we can get our hands on to see how different pressures apply or how high and low pressures look between these devices as far as repetitions performed, perceptual cues, all of these sorts of things. I think that'd be a great study. And I think we're about a year away from that just because this training study is such a huge undertaking for us. No, listen, again, not talking about the training study I'm familiar with what you're doing. I think that's going to be insane to review that data for what you're doing. And yeah, like for me, I am very much a willing and able to help with some of the different devices cause I think that without, again, spinning too much into the BFR world cause there's one more area to do I want to talk about and hear your thoughts on but that as more and more of these devices are getting into the marketplace and we don't necessarily, we basically underappreciate that the way that a device is constructed can impact the acute physiological stimulus that it's giving to the person. And for me as somebody who's taught with almost all of the devices that are commercially available, the major commercially available devices, they all feel somewhat different, right? And whether or not that's the presence of auto regulation so the pressure adjusts according to the phase of contraction, whether it's the bladder type so all the different ways in which it acts as a tourniquet or it doesn't and the shape, the width, your lab, Jeremy's lab previously, I think that might have been before your time talking about the, I mean, you did I think you might have been on some of the papers that were looking at, you know, preference on like cuff width on the legs in the upper body and I tend to agree with everything that's been said there. So there are different feels and if BFR as you mentioned is something that works, I think we can firmly say that it works, how it works up for debate, although I tend to relate everything to regular strength training and fit it in so it's not as mystical but then all of a sudden you have all these cuffs coming out and so if you're a clinician and a lot of my audience is our physical therapists or certainly well-educated personal trainers and you're using this with people you wanna know, hey, how can I, how can I ensure an adequate stimulus minus taking something to volitional fatigue, right? We know that that's probably gonna work but how comfortable it is, the efficacy, these are all questions that as more and more devices are coming on we need answers. And that's why hooking up with researchers such as yourself to be able to help answer some of these questions are so important not from a research perspective yet, it's great but also like a practical implementation. So it's gonna be interesting to see kind of where this goes because my own research has kind of showed that depending on the device that you use it does impact the physiological stimulus and that unfortunately is being oversaw in a lot of these research papers because BFR is hot as you know, right? So like, oh, I'm gonna get funded, I'm gonna do a BFR paper but then they're misapplying the limb algorithms so they're actually, it goes crazy and crazy and crazy. So you see a modern paper use a pressure based on the study from 2011 that used arm circumference in a different cuff that was a different size and a different material. So I still see that a lot. I'm glad that it frustrates you to the same degree as me because it's like, it's so frustrating and that's kind of where I wanna pivot into the last little bit on BFR before we go into your more recent paper where it's the pressure, the role of pressure. Now, I want you to agree or disagree and provide rationales for the following statement, okay? And again, this is all completely off the cuff here, no pun intended. The pressure that's applied during BFR exercise is mostly relevant for the resting period or the period between muscle contractions than it is for during the muscle contraction itself. I think I've thought about this quite a bit. I wouldn't say it's this or that. I would say it's probably more important during the rest for me than the contraction, simply because you're shooting blood back through during the contraction. So you're overcoming that pressure during the contraction. During the rest, you're pooling the blood. So I think that's why you start, your first set of BFR is typically your easiest. Your second set, you pull that blood metabolites, it was stuck below the cuff. So I kinda look at it and I'm supposed to answer yes or no. Your second set, I believe you start in a more fatigued state than your first set. And that kind of carries across, if you're doing four sets, it carries across your four sets of exercise. Whereas if you did that free flow, you would have had these bouts of recovery in between. And I think that's why with lower loads, you're able to accomplish the fatigue necessary to grow the muscle with a lower volume. And I think that'd be the quick summary of BFR for me. What are your thoughts? No, I tend to wholly agree. So this is where my head goes as a clinician and as a researcher second. We already know that if you use a BFR cuff that's capable of restriction, right? And by restriction, I mean arterial restriction and using a single chamber bladder system that the higher the pressure, the more uncomfortable it gets, the greater the physiologic response and everything in between. And the adherence in terms of my own experience tends to drop off when we get, you know, 80% of the limb occlusion or arterial occlusion pressure. And so where my head goes is, is that if you look at some of the research that looks at does intramuscular occlusion of the small microcapillaries within the muscle, where does that happen in the relative percent of one rep max? And in my research, it happens as early as 20% and as high as 40 to 45% of the one rep max. So with that being said, you know you have intramuscular occlusion that's happening during a contraction. So then it goes back to, okay, well with light loads, we can, we know that with or without BFR and light loads and quantifying as, you know, I would say on the low, low end kind of the work that, you know, Jeremy and I think you might've been on the 15% of the one rep max, like that would be on the very, very, very low end. But typically what I think about is 20 to 30%. We can still get a fatiguing stimulus. But when we start to get super light, there's no intramuscular occlusion occurring even without BFR, because it's just such a light weight. Like you can do it pretty much indefinitely. So I tend to think that the pressure is a vehicle to just keep those metabolites and some blood, right? But we know that there is going to be blood that's going to push past the cuff. I mean, they showed that even at 100% in one of the studies, leg extension, singer, 2018, 2019, whatever. So that was like, you're getting, you're still getting some venous flow there. So then my mind just goes back to, well, we just want to trap the metabolites and have them exert their fatiguing effects. And I 100% agree with you that we don't need very high pressures to do so. And the vast, vast, vast majority of circumstances. So therefore it's interesting where, okay, if we both mutually agree that it's for the rest period, then my next question is, well, what about resting BFR where you're now using a load that's 20 to 30% and you have a cuff that's capable of quick inflation. And so you're trapping those metabolites, but now you're reducing the intra-exercise physiologic stimulus, but you're still able to fatigue the muscles because you're trapping those metabolites. And I think that that to me, there was one study that was published in frontiers and physiology that was looking at that. But I haven't seen, there's another one, Suga or one of the Japanese researchers has showed that there is some effect of an intermittent or resting on certainly metabolite accumulation. But that's where my head goes because what if we can make BFR more tolerable? But right now the limitation is we need accessible technology that we can quickly inflate and quickly deflate. And I think that that's the barrier right now for widespread adoption of this type of technology. Because if we use a load that's relatively heavy enough, we trap them metabolites, boom, we're getting the effects of BFR without a lot of the associated discomfort. And so for me as a clinician, that's where my head goes with all the pressure. And then if we don't need a lot of pressure, then okay, when do we apply the pressure? So I mean, that's kind of where my head goes. And that's where I'm really excited. We talked offline about this, like I'm really not super interested in the clinical applications of BFR, believe it or not, because I think we know that it works. So if you have somebody where your goal is I need to improve muscle mass, I need to improve muscle strength, or I need to improve some function, typically in physical therapy, it's all three and their load compromised, right? BFR is going to work. I'm more interested in how can we make it work just as effectively, but now reduce some of the barriers to long-term adherence? Yeah. So maybe I gave you some ideas, you know? Yeah, I mean, I'll make two comments. First one, back to when you were talking about the lowest external load, that was mine and Matt Jesse's dissertation. So 15% caused growth in the lower body, regardless of the application of BFR when training the failure, problem was you have to do like 90 reps per set. In the upper body, the load was insufficient for muscle growth and adding BFR couldn't make up for that. So it's kind of the inverse of the study we're talking about earlier, can BFR make up for too low volume with high load training? It can't, and then it also couldn't make up for too light of a weight where you could do the reps indefinitely. At least that's what my dissertation showed in the bicep curl. So it worked 15% was sufficient in the lower body was insufficient in the upper body. But I like that idea you had and we can talk offline because I think the Hockenson might be designed to actually implement a study like that, at least maybe an initial study comparing the perceptual experience during exercise of inflating just during the rest versus the entire time. So yeah, we can talk about that more after the podcast. Yeah, no, listen, I mean that's, it just gets the juices going when you kind of obviously have passion about an area and you're thinking about it a lot because that's what I just think about it a lot and how we can help more people but reduce the barrier. I think you mentioned before too the device characteristics and features, understanding how we can apply research to practice and really look at these devices and say do they do what they're supposed to do? Because right now there's devices that are saying, oh, we get all the benefits of BFR but now we're safer but we're not giving the exact same stimulus. And so it's just trying to separate some of the marketing from the science so I appreciate your perspectives and your work maybe upcoming work in this as well. Any last comments on BFR before we pivot to the juice, the meat and potatoes, the steak? Let's get to the steak. All right, well, so let's contextualize this. I think in social media right now there is this huge thought, not pervasive but it's a very pervasive thought. Let's just put it that way, we need a lot more volume to grow as we become more and more trained. And we need a certain amount of volume meaning sets times reps or however you wanna quantify volume, more is better typically. And so your recent paper that again talked about it was entitled the dose response relationship between resistance training volume and muscle hypertrophy, there are still doubts kind of touches upon where we may be at in the current body of literature. So in an effort to try to translate some of the research to practice, let's hear some of your thoughts about do we need a lot of volume? Do we need maybe less than is currently recommended? What has your investigation into this area of strength training resulted in? Yeah, maybe I'll tell a story when I first became skeptical of this because I think it shows where my thinking began. For me, it was during my PhD. And during my PhD, the dose response relationship for volume paper from the Schoenfeld I had just come out and I was new to research. I was doing research in the biceps studying muscle growth and one thing that stuck out to me at the time it was resistance trained people and they did no direct biceps training. You know, they relied on the lat pull down and the seated cable roll to grow their biceps. And again, I was a new researcher and I read that paper and I remember saying to my mentor at the time, I said their biceps grew more than our untrained people doing biceps curls for eight weeks. And I was like, can that happen? And to me, it just meant like, I'm not gonna put a lot of stock in this data because this seems like, you know, trained people giving up, when you take a group of people, when you recruit them, I would argue most times they're doing bicep curls in their training. And for myself, I just didn't think I could stop doing bicep curls, do lat pull down and seated cable row and grow my biceps. So at the time, all the research I had done up to that point was in the biceps. So I knew what bicep growth looked like. Now, a few years later, I started studying the quads and doing lower body studies, measuring quadricep growth. And I revisited that volume paper because it always bothered me like, trained people getting more growth than untrained people, not directly training a muscle group. And I looked at the quadriceps growth and it was 0.7 centimeters. And, you know, we had just done a few studies in untrained individuals training the lower body and they were growing 0.2 centimeters. You know, untrained people are supposed to grow more. So in my head, I'm like, whoa, that's a tremendous amount of growth from doing high volume. Maybe it's possible, maybe it's not. It just, it was such an impressive number to me. And then I, you know, the final catalyst to writing this paper was in two weeks' time span on social media, I saw at least a dozen posts of people saying, you need to rest longer between your exercise sets because it leads to more hypertrophy. And I had read this paper that they were talking about. It was from the same research group and the long rest group in that paper also grew the rectus femoris, I believe it was, grew 0.7 centimeters. Again, tremendous growth. And just to give people an idea, you know, pull out a tape measure, you know, the little ones you use for clothing and look at a centimeter and that's, I mean, that's nearly a centimeter muscle thickness. My experience with muscle growth is that it's very slow and in eight to 12 week time periods, you can accumulate enough to measure it. But 0.7 to me is just a, it's a huge number. When people sign up for our training studies, they say, am I gonna grow? I say, yeah, I believe you will grow from signing up for our studies. But I say, you're not gonna look in the mirror and know you grew. I'll be able to tell you you grew when I look at the ultrasound data because over eight weeks, you typically don't grow enough to look in the mirror and go, oh wow, check that out. I believe, and I could be wrong, I believe if you grew 0.7 centimeters, you're gonna look in the mirror and go, holy cow. Right, because your clothes are gonna be much tighter because, I mean, that much muscle size across an entire muscle belly, that's a lot of growth, in my opinion. So before I just cut you off, when you're measuring ultrasound, okay, contextualize for the listeners, viewers, what are you looking at and what can you actually measure during an ultrasound assessment? Yeah, so in all the studies I'm referencing, they measured muscle thickness utilizing V-mobile ultrasound. And we created a figure in the paper to help people visualize this. So we show how it's measured. So basically, you hold the ultrasound probe against the muscle belly. So if I held the ultrasound probe against my bicep, I would see the muscle fat interface at the top. I'd see the muscle bone interface at the bottom. You basically measure straight up from the bone to the muscle fat interface, and that's muscle thickness. And, you know, I think these studies are possible, but when I read them, I'm just, when I see growth that is four to five times what other studies are seeing, I put very little stock in those studies until they're replicated, right? So for me, we wrote this paper because everyone was telling people for hypertrophy, you need to rest for a long time. Why? Because if you rest longer, you're gonna get more volume. And, you know, I think there's a bias and I call it the evidence-based industry. I think the evidence-based industry has a volume bias. And I think this was, you know, I was listening to a podcast by Revive Stronger and I like that podcast. I enjoy that podcast. And they were reviewing that new 52 set paper. You know the 52 set paper? Yeah. So the 52 set paper had individuals do 52 sets towards the end of the training program, right? Last two weeks, I think. The last two weeks, yes. And when I was listening to the individuals discuss that paper, they said some people are saying that this isn't growth, this could be inflammation and swelling. And they said on more than one time, they said these people clearly have a bias and an agenda. And I thought to myself, and I even comment on YouTube, it's unfortunate that people that disagree are being written off as having an agenda and a bias. It's completely reasonable to suspect that doing 52 sets, even if you're trained, will cause swelling and inflammation. So to clarify, right? Just to be clear, I think I know what you're saying, but you're saying that because, so people are saying, hey, they grew more. And then other people are saying, hey, well, actually it might be swelling that is the result because I think they took the measurements on the 72 hours post. So you're just saying that we shouldn't, you shouldn't dismiss somebody that might be offering a valid criticism of a methodological potential shortcoming in their design. Absolutely. And I think we should, I'm getting ahead of myself, but that 52 set paper, there were no statistical differences between the conditions, right? A trend. There was a trend. Now, here's what I was talking to somebody on the way to this podcast. And I said, if the data were the opposite, if there was a trend leaning towards lower volume, it wasn't statistically significant, but it was close. You wouldn't have all these podcasts talking about a trend in the data because it's for whatever reason, it always, it's always volume is better, volume is better. So, and then to dismiss any criticism against over-interpreting, maybe it's over-interpreting, maybe it's not. But anyway, there's definitely a discussion to be had, right? And I think it's also important to think about this. In that 52 set paper, they were doing nine sets of leg press per training session, followed by nine sets of squat and eight sets of knee extension is eight or nine per exercise, right? So, if you're going to do 52 sets, at least diversify it in an exercise. And here's the example I use, Nick. This is the first time I'm gonna try this on a podcast. I don't know if this analogy is gonna really land, but this is how I explain it to my students. There's obviously a point at which doing an exercise is not gonna yield additional growth, right? Because we're not designed to grow infinitely. Certainly there's not a limitless ability to grow a muscle in a 24-hour period. So, I compare it to a frozen pizza, right? You take a frozen pizza out of the freezer and it takes 30 minutes to cook that pizza, right? And this also shows you how we treat volume and training studies. The volume-acquainted people will say, well, you can take that pizza out and cook it for 10 minutes on Monday, put it back in the freezer, take it on Wednesday, cook it for 10 minutes, put it back in the freezer, take it on Friday and cook the pizza for 10 more minutes. At the end of that, you're not gonna have a cooked pizza. You've cooked it for an insufficient time every time you took it out of the freezer, right? It takes 30 minutes. So, however many exercise sets, that's how many it takes to cook the pizza. Now, you could take the pizza out and put it in for 60 minutes, what are you gonna have? You have a burnt pizza. So, there has to be a point, and maybe that completely flopped. But that's how I teach volume to my students. There's a point. No, no, it makes sense. No, it makes total sense. I mean, there's an area of diminishing potentially, not harmful, but area where it's almost like, I think again, like the hormesis effect. It's like, you wanna go, you wanna go, but then doing more is not necessarily gonna be better. Yeah. So, in that study, I just, I can't think of a good rationale for why nine sets of any exercises is necessary, right? We can't infinitely increase muscle protein synthesis, right? I mean, it was suggested that there's no swung in inflammation because the individuals are trained. And I would like to see a citation for a study that's done that amount of volume and looked at swung and inflammation. I think that's a really reasonable explanation. And to write that off as bias and agenda is really unfortunate. So, yeah, there has to be a point in which doing another exercise set is not yielding more growth. And if you wanna do 52 sets, at least pick a variety of exercises because I think there's an argument for doing more exercises for a muscle group, right? You wanna go in and just do knee extensions. If you wanna train your quads, you're gonna do a variety of exercises. You're gonna do enough sets on that exercise to fatigue and activate the motor units involved in that movement. But once you've done that, additional sets is just gonna give you additional fatigue and delay recovery. And I absolutely think that's what happened in that study. And I think it's very plausible that they have swung, that they have edema. And keep in mind, there's no statistically significant differences. Also, if you look at the NS paper with the 52 sets, if you look at their figure in how they quantified muscle CSA and I've tried to engage with the evidence-based communicators on their social media to explain this, the CSA in those papers, it was pieced together on PowerPoint. So you take a snapshot and you drag the image over to PowerPoint and you pieced together the CSA. When you do that, in my experience, I've tried it before, you get a lot of error. And when you have a lot of error, your ability to detect things is very limited and you need a control group to know how much error you had in your study. So there's several things we could critique on this paper before we run screaming from the mountain tops. There's no such thing as junk volume. Well, if you're basing it off this one study, we need to pump the brakes a little bit. But back to the paper that we wrote, because we actually wrote this paper before the NS paper came out. Oh, wow. Yeah, we wrote it long before that paper was published. And for me, like I said, it was inspired by people on social media telling individuals they need to rest for a long time to maximize muscle growth. And I think there's several lines of reasoning that suggests that's not true. Look at blood flow restriction. What does blood flow restriction do? It reduces training volume. Does it do it at the expense of muscle growth? Not to my knowledge, right? So if you reduce your rest periods during high load training, as long as you remain within a hypertrophic range, I see no reason to suspect that muscle growth is gonna be compromised, right? And if we're basing it on that data from the Schoenfeld paper that looked at three minutes rest versus one minutes rest. Again, the growth is just, it's in my perspective and from my experience, measuring muscle growth, it's tremendously high. Another thing I found interesting and we kind of mentioned it in the paper, the 0.7 centimeters of growth in the long rest condition in the rest period paper is of the same magnitude in the high volume condition in the volume paper. So it's interesting that I think it's 27 sets per week with long rest. You'll did the same growth as, how much was it in the high volume group? 42 sets, I think in the 135 paper. But even if it's just simply interesting to me that 27 sets per week yielded 0.7. And I think it was 40 some sets per week in the other study also yielded 0.7 with 90 seconds. 45 weekly sets. Yeah, 45 weekly sets with 90 seconds rest yielded the same growth as 27 sets with three minutes rest. And again, it's dangerous to compare across studies but I think it just highlights, okay, this data is showing a lot of growth. Maybe we just need to approach it with caution until we have replication. And yeah, I think- That won't work on social media though, man. That doesn't- That doesn't, having a healthy dose of skepticism rarely works on social media. It doesn't get clicks. So you're not gonna get, you're not gonna get the engagement because people just wanna be, they wanna just, I can only relate, because again, I don't teach strength training. I can only relate this to the BFR. People don't really care. Most people, right? I think my listeners and the people that are watching this will care. But the vast majority of the populations don't care about a principles-based approach. They don't care about understanding why this may happen and the explanatory mechanisms as to why that happens. They just want a protocol. They just wanna be told, this is what I have to do, this amount of rest, this volume, et cetera. Instead of trying to think and critically analyze. And I think that skill is very difficult to harness when you're talking about Instagram posts or even on YouTube. And although YouTube might have a little bit more of a platform, I don't follow YouTube that much, more Instagram. But it really unfortunately, that nuance is lost on a lot of people. It isn't, I've learned some, or I've come to the conclusion recently that the evidence-based influencers, the PhDs in the social media space, when they post in my area of research, I engage, cause I'm interested, I love this stuff. But what I've learned is they don't post to have a debate or have a discussion. They post for likes and clicks. I get ignored in the comments. And again, this is not me complaining about being ignored in the comments, but it's interesting that, I think these people are my peers and they wanna engage in some healthy discussion because that's how science works. But every time I try to, you just get ignored or they dunk on you because they have followers and they can say whatever they want. So yeah, the whole blending of social media and science is a really interesting thing. And I think the most popular paper, the most red paper of the year isn't the most scientifically influential paper of the year. It's the paper that has a scientist with the most followers on it. And I think 10 or 20 years ago, PhDs emerged to challenge the fitness industry. I think this was something that happened. It was something that needed to happen. But the industry is smart. The industry adapts, right? So I think what we have happening now is the industry learned, well, to compete, we need PhDs. So I think the newest iteration of the industry are individuals with PhDs, but they're still the industry. They're still here to garner whatever it is that the industry is trying to achieve, which I think is financial incentive. I don't know, but I do think it's harmful to science when, if you do research for clicks, right? And this is where, it's having a good discussion with James Steele because James Steele was one of the proponents for, you know, preprints. The purpose of a preprint was to post your paper on a server and get feedback from- Nobody does that. But what it's become because of the, I call it the evidence-based industry, they don't want to wait a year to make a post about a paper they just wrote. They need content today, right? So the preprint process was intended to be a mechanism to refine your work, but it's become a mechanism instead to get instant gratification on social media for things you've done. And is that problematic? I mean, I think it is when there's 20 podcasts on a paper that isn't peer reviewed and may never be published. Like the one that's doing the rounds now is that full meta regression on proximity to failure and hypertrophy. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but there was a big podcast that was done, that I was listening to, that was kind of using that as a vehicle to critique the effective reps model and things like that. But that hasn't been officially published. That has just been gone through the preprint process. And it's being taken as gospel. Now, I will respond to you that as somebody who has published a preprint and as somebody who has used that information to make a social media post, for example, my area and the way that I wanted to do that was, I'm seeing the, I preprinted the beneath the cuff paper. So looking at the different cuff characteristics. And I did that because it was like, I didn't know how long it was gonna be stuck in peer review purgatory. And I wanted to get that information out cause I started to see researchers misapplying things like Dr. Lenneke's, the algorithms that you've been using but applying it to a cuff that doesn't occlude and all these things. But I will say that in general, I do see a lot more preprints that are now getting taken as, oh my gosh, this is like, this is the gospel. And it hasn't really gone through peer review, peer reviews being another topic. Hopefully you get a reviewer that actually is cares about the topic and wants to constructively criticize. But I will say too, I haven't gotten, we have, I've had four or five papers that I've put on preprint. One of them is a hypertrophy rep range paper that I thought was gonna have a significant chatter base, nothing, echo chambers. I haven't had any sort of feedback on any of the work that I've done on a preprint. So maybe the work that I'm doing, nobody gives a shit about, which is totally fine. But those are kind of my experiences with preprints and listening to what you were saying too about all of a sudden this being the definitive version of science. And I think this opens up a huge Pandora's box because then you talk about the quality of peer review, you talk about the time it takes, you talk about all these other different variables that can impact when a piece of research gets actually visible and published in a journal. Yeah, it takes a long time. And whenever I work on a paper of my students, they said, well, when will this get published? I said, could be three months, could be three years. And certainly it's frustrating. It's not a perfect process. But more than 80% of the time, I am so thankful for it because like, ooh, I almost sent that paper out saying this, I was wrong. And it protects the world from my ideas and vice versa. So I do think it serves a really important function when done correctly. Part of the, I think people believe there's a crisis with peer review. Part of it's probably my generation that doesn't wanna do something for free. Once all the attention and glory, and once peer review is, I mean, I try to review as many papers as I published, because people are doing that for me. But I think there's more and more of this mindset that we need to be compensated for everything we do. And there are some good arguments but I do find it interesting how it's almost like we close a book on a paper. Like, if I got to talk about my preprints, we can talk about five papers right now that are under review or I'm writing. I don't count them as publications yet. I need to get the hardest part of science is getting through the peer review process and getting published. I think it's a really valuable part of it. But yeah, the merging or the clashing of social media and science has become more and more interesting to me because I think more and more people are getting their PhDs for the sole purpose of elevating themselves in social media. And when I got my PhD, Nick, I didn't do a podcast for two years. The reason is because I didn't feel like an expert. I needed to prove to myself that I could run a lab, that I could produce research without my mentor holding my hand. And not that my, I mean, you work with a team, right? So you're kind of untested on your own. Do you have any original ideas, right? So I was, I never wanted to open my mouth. And probably after a few years of working with students and feeling like I had earned because when you have a PhD, I think you have more impact. So there's greater weight on what you say. So you have to be more cautious. But I think- I don't think you do, you do. I mean, I think that that's, I think the important thing is that the general population recognizes a PhD equals expert. Yeah. I don't think the general population realizes that just because you have a PhD doesn't mean you're an expert. I think that there is the, I mean, so many different avenues to get a PhD these days with all of these different, you mentioned before, mentorship, right? Like there's virtual PhDs. There's part-time, there's so many different versions. And I think that when you have someone such as yourself who takes their career very seriously and gives significant weight to what you're saying, I think that there's a lot of people that that are getting a PhD as easy as possible, not going through, I'm assuming the late nights in the lab, certainly the late nights writing manuscripts, like getting all of your thoughts together, collaboration, going to conference, all these other things. And yet they have this PhD behind their name. So now all of a sudden they're taken seriously. And there was a couple of PhDs where I'm like, what are you saying? But again, that's the problem with social media. It's like clicks versus what's actually practical. And that's part of the reason why I have you on here because I want to dispel some of the bullshit that is there because at the end of the day, listen, I love blood flow restriction. I love strength training. But, and I love talking about the volume debate, right? And we'll briefly, hopefully talk about length and partial because I think that's another fascinating area of work that's being done. But we have an obesity overweight crisis. People don't exercise in general. So it's like, are we really serving the society? If we're scientists and we're supposed to be publishing research and we're supposed to be disseminating evidence-based information, is it really serving society to create more barriers to exercise than there already exists without any of this nuance? I tend to think we over-complicate things because people need new content to post, right? So I think a lot of it exists for that very purpose. And I do think we make training so hard to approach for a lot of people by over-complicating it with big words. And then on one hand, we say, oh, not a whole lot matters, just get in the gym. And then on the other hand, we say, if you're training this way, you're missing out on gains. We're not even consistent within what we communicate to people. I've noticed that. It's like one thing, one week, and then a different message the next week. And it's like, what is it? And in my classroom, I'm probably incredibly boring because my students ask, well, what about this versus this? I said at the end of the day, they're probably pretty similar. You look at any advanced technique, it's just a different way to reach the same endpoint, drop sets, myoreps, long rest, short rest. A number of sets to failure is gonna get you that same endpoint of fatiguing and activating the musculature, which is gonna make the muscle grow. So there's so many ways to get there. And it is interesting how there's different seasons where something's trending. So right now, it's lengthened partials for whatever reason, right? And when I first heard about that idea, one of my students went up in class and I said, huh, that's interesting. What's the rationale? He's like, I don't know, tighten? I was like, really? And it's just, it's taken off from there and maybe it's because we need something to talk about. But for this particular technique, we're now telling people, because I've heard it on, I can't tell you how many podcasts I've heard it, that you might be missing out on gains if you're doing full range of motion. Now, does the evidence support that conclusion? The review paper that statement comes from had three papers that compared lengthened partials to full range of motion. Three papers that allegedly compared that. You look at the first one, it's by Goto. And Goto did, I believe, is a tricep extension. I think it was like five people. It was, I think it was a small sample size, but I wrote this down so I don't mess it up. The Goto paper, yeah, eight week tricep program, training three times a week. One group did full range of motion from zero degrees to 120. And the partials did 45 to 90 degrees, just the middle part of the range of motion. The middle part led to 49% increase in CSA over eight weeks time. The full range of motion led to 28% increase in tricep CSA over eight weeks time. I made a comment on social media. I said, 49%. This doesn't happen, like 49%. And I tried to engage with the person that was talking about this paper and they clearly weren't gonna have a discussion because I just wanted to get to the bottom of like, how is 49% growth possible in eight weeks? When you look at tricep CSA, I believe the average growth should be around 6% to 8%. So starting, the starting point for me is, how did we get 49% increase? And part of me thinks it might be error because they estimated tricep CSA from a combination of arm circumference and muscle thickness. So I would like to honestly just see the muscle thickness data to see like, maybe it would tell a more clear story if we didn't add in circumference. You know, we know from other studies that circumference can't always predict growth. For example, your muscle thickness could increase with no change in your arm circumference. How is that possible? Because the change in muscle thickness is so small and maybe your precision to measure your arm circumference isn't as refined. So you're not gonna capture that on a circumference measurement, but you can on an ultrasound measurement. Does that make sense? So, but 49% increase in tricep CSA, that's remarkable. The other problem with that study is it was the middle range of motion that was superior. That's not a length and partial, right? But this study is being used as evidence that a length and partial is superior to full range of motion. There's so like, I would say like, when I talk about with my students, I say we need to be careful with this paper because I'm not aware that 49% growth should be possible over eight weeks. Therefore, we didn't have a control group so we don't know the error of the measurement. And it seems like there's probably something going on here. But even if we were going to use it for evidence, it was the middle range of motion, not the length and partial. The second study in the paper, I think was Pedroza. Pedroza, I wrote this down too, 45 untrained women doing bilateral knee extension. Full range of motion was 100 degrees to 30 degrees. The long muscle lengths was 100 degrees to 65 degrees. 60% of one around, both groups did three to six sets of seven repetitions. The long muscle lengths was better for the rectus femoris, but not the vastus lateralis. When I read this paper, I was talking to my student, Enrique. I said, Enrique, what do you think might be an issue with this paper? He said, well, they did the same number of reps. He's like, we made the same mistake in the BFR literature. We used to say BFR was his period of low-low training because they weren't training to failure. They're doing matched repetitions. So when we read the Pedroza paper, it leaves a possibility that long muscle lengths are better for one muscle group. But you have to acknowledge that they didn't train to failure and it's very possible that long muscle lengths are more fatiguing. There's less overlap between your active amnias. And so presumably, I would think, or based on no good mechanism for long muscle lengths, I would assume that the long muscle lengths were probably closer to failure and maybe that's why they had a little bit better growth. Third paper in that meta-analysis was the Warcowson paper, which had like an explosive leg press protocol. And neither group saw any growth. So that whole meta-analysis, and to be fair, I think the meta-analysis has written a lot tamer than what's been communicated on social media, right? When I read the paper, I'm like, oh, it's not like telling us stop training for range of motion. It's simply saying there's a possibility, right? But what I've gotten from social media lately is stop training for range of motion and start prioritizing length and partials. Now, if it's based on these three papers, I would be hard pressed to make that recommendation. And I think the person that's pushing a lot of this is basing it on some of the isometric data, right? Some of the data that didn't directly compare these things, but it's the recommendation I'm taking issue with is full range of motion versus a lengthened partial. And I simply do not think we have enough evidence. There's been one study that came out from Watalo Casiano, who's at Ole Miss now? And it was in the calf musculature and the lengthened partials or the beginning range of motion seemed to be a little bit better for the calves. But I tend to think the calves is a different muscle group. The calves are very hard to fatigue. We did a calf training study in my lab with BFR and we got no calf growth in the knee at all. So I talked to Watalo and Watalo has done range of motion research and he seems less compelled that long muscle lengths are anything special. So I appreciate his insight, but there's just not, when I look at the body of literature, there's not what's being communicated and I don't understand why it's being communicated the way that it is. I think we need to have a lot of caution and I think we need to be open to other possibilities. Now I think about it because I'm always writing papers in my head and if you do a bicep curl, this is where I feel the muscle squeeze. Here, and you can try this. You don't feel a whole lot. So I find it hard to believe. That was just a time for me to flex. Yeah. Now I regret touching it. We're also kind of being, what's the word here? It's like A or B, it's better, it's not better. But there's other things. You're being binary. Yeah, we're dichotomous. We're being dichotomous with this. There might be things about full range of motion that we're just not measuring in these studies. So why tell people that full range of motion you might be spending less time in the anabolic portion of the lift? And what is the anabolic portion of the lift? What does this mean? Well, this is where I kind of wanna talk. So, you know, there is the, well, what have you encountered as explanatory mechanisms as to why a length in partial might be better than a full range of motion exercise? Yeah, in the review paper that's been going around, I believe the proposed mechanisms are increased passive tension. And I think they might mention, let me see if I graded deoxygenation. I think these are the, yeah, those are the two that I've kind of, that I've seen, but I guess it goes back to then zooming in a little bit more. And when we zoom in a little bit more, what I have seen in my understanding is that there are a lot of assumptions that are being made. The main one is obviously what you just commented on, basically over assuming what the current body of evidence is saying. But even if you move past that and you say, okay, well, what tends to happen in a lengthened contraction, right? You tend to see distal hypertrophy of where you're going, more so than proximal or middle. So it's preferentially stressed distally. Fine, okay. Well, that's fine and dandy, but my next thing is, okay, go a little bit further. Well, what's happening at the muscle fiber level that could potentially increase the hypertrophic stimulus at a lengthened position? So then you need to think, okay, well, well then what will augment the potential stress at longer muscle lengths? Well, if it truly is some passive tension, well then how do you activate the pass or how do you get that passive tension? And for me, it's like, all right, well then you go back to the length tension relationship. If a muscle doesn't have the sarcomeres reach the descending limb, then you're contracting and you're not getting any sort of passive tension at the range of motion because it's literally the tightened molecule is not able to further add to the tension that that muscle fiber is experiencing. So if you just play with that and that's not even including the assumptions of sarcomere genesis that happens for that as an explanatory mechanism, but then you say, at some point, at some point we can't add more muscle fiber for a given area, like we only, we go from an origin to an insertion, that's it. It's not like we go from origin to a secondary and we create new things. So then it's like, okay, if length and partials are beneficial, that's great, but at some point that benefit has to run out. I don't, I just, from what we, and that's just from what we know about sarcomere genesis or increases in fascial length and the training status of these individuals. So there's so many assumptions that are going into this that it's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's like, I mean, like you go back to the same thing we talked about earlier, which is just increasing complexity for the sake of increasing complexity, but then who is that serving? That's serving the social media post that you're gonna get, the clicks you're gonna get, and who is that not serving? The everyday Joe and Jane who are now hearing on the news or hearing in other, other, through other fitness people or whatever in their circle that you have to perform exercise a certain way with a certain rest period, with all of these other things that then get back to the point of we're creating a barrier. Are we creating a barrier? How is that helping society in general? And that's where my beef comes in with this whole length and partial stick is so many oversights. And it's just like these definitive statements for from some people where it's just like, like even if that is so, who is that helping? Well, I think I have no problem if they wanna say I believe this is better based on my experience and my interpretation of this research. But what I don't like is we now know this based on this, this and this and these eight studies. And it's like, stop, we need to go over these eight studies you're claiming support this, right? In a very authoritative way. It's like, I think people can believe that like the partials are better and maybe they have a reason to, but I don't think we can pretend that we have sufficient evidence to make these recommendations. And I suspect that the data isn't gonna turn out that way. Like I, there's an ongoing study and I just, I don't see a strong rationale to suspect that the differences are gonna be there based on my understanding of how muscle works. And there's, when I tried to bring up the Godo paper, which I think we can both agree it's not evidence for length of partials. That's a middle range of motion. I said, you know, based on my experience measuring muscle this number seems really high. And I was just told, you're appealing to authority. I was told as appealing to authority. I was like, no, I'm sharing my experience because it's helping you. I'm trying to help you understand why I think this. You know what I mean? I don't care to ever be called doctor. I never mentioned it. I'm wrong more than I'm right. And, you know, my mentor put me in my place in enough times where I'm, I try to be cautious. I try to be gracious and kind of people. You know, when I read the Pedroza paper I had a similar experience because of Pedroza paper, which is probably one of the more compelling papers. But like we said, they didn't train a failure. At least we don't know how close to failure they train. So we don't know how homogenous the stimulus was. But I, if you look at figure three in the Pedroza paper and maybe you're tech, I can pop up figure three. It's just like, you look at that data and it looks like it's all over the place. Some groups are losing a little bit of muscle, but then the long muscle length is growing in some cases like 28%. Again, this is a lot of growth. So for when I see that, I often think maybe we have swelling. If you're doing something very new and very novel, I don't think you can take a study that did four sets of exercise and show that there's no swelling 48 hours after as evidence that this new protocol didn't cause people to swell or have inflammation in a way that's not present during other exercise protocols. So, you know, I think the current state of this evidence is very weak. I think it's potential that it pans out this way. I don't suspect that length and partials are superior to training with full range of motion. And I think we need more robust study designs with larger sample sizes. And I think we need multiple labs examining this because I think if we have one research group, I don't think it's gonna, you know, I just think you need diversity of experience working on a research question. One other thing I'll add, and you kind of mentioned it, you know, you talked about distal growth or proximal growth. This isn't another reason why we need control groups. And I'll explain. When I measure muscle thickness, and I promise I'm not putting up my arm because I think it's big. If I measure muscle thickness in the middle of my bicep, I have pretty good reliability. If I measure muscle thickness at the top of my bicep, I have tremendously, tremendously less reliability because there's a lot more connected tissue there and the image is not clear. So as you measure proximal and distal on these muscle sites, I believe it becomes more important to have a control group so you can interpret your data in the context of your error of the measurement. And, you know, if your only differences are at these proximal and distal sites, then I'm gonna wonder, okay, was your error just greater at these sites because they're harder to image? Because in my experience, they are harder to image. So I think that's another thing. If we're not implementing control groups, we're gonna be even more limited in our ability to interpret this data. Now, it's gonna, if the data comes out and shows what's been discussed, it's gonna be overblown in the industry, in the evidence-based industry because it's already happened with no new data, right? So, you know, science is a very slow-moving and cautious process where different experts have different opinions. You know, one thing, again, I was discussing with somebody earlier, it's very interesting to me, and this is just something I've noticed for the last few years. There's no diversity of opinion in the evidence-based industry. And I think that's well illustrated by the fact that everyone made a post about three minutes of rest. You need to rest long for hypertrophy. You know, I have a different thought. And if I go to an academic conference, you're gonna find a diversity of opinions on these topics. What exists on social media is whatever the most popular thought with the most following is the thought you get from every communicator. And I wonder if it's, you know, if let's agree with the person with the most follows, maybe we'll get a repost and our stuff will go viral and we'll grow. You'd be surprised. There's definitely people that think like that. But I definitely think, I hope it changes in the future, but I don't see the same diversity of opinion in the communication of resistance exercise science on social media that actually exists within science. I think you get kind of one group that almost controls the ideas. And those are the people that communicate resistance exercise, let's say they're in the nutrition space. Well, they just side with the person that's the most popular person because you're gonna not get much pushback on that. So what you actually end up with is very little diversity of thought in the resistance exercise space, in my opinion. That's what I've kind of witnessed over the past several years. No, I mean, I think it's important for me. So I've had people on this podcast that have very differing views. And I do that for my own curiosity just so I can create a more diverse, hate to use the same word, you just use a bit more diverse, more fluid model in my head about how strength training works. But unfortunately, the byproduct is that it's an echo chamber. And besides that echo chamber, you then start to see, because guess who are reading these posts or viewing these posts? It's usually the general population. It's a very small percentage of overall practitioners and providers. And unfortunately, when you increase the complexity and you start to say, this is how you do it, like I'll give you my personal example. Like I was always of the thought that you have to train four to five times a week in order to maximize the benefits because more volume is gonna be better and that allows you to grow more. And ultimately what ended up happening is I just kept on getting injured. I kept on getting like more overuse injuries and felt like crap and everything. And then you realize that it actually, yeah, there's a role of volume, whatever nebulous role that is, but it's ultimately individualized to how much you can recover from as a person which goes back to principle based versus protocol based. And you basically say, okay, well I've actually settled upon doing a couple of full body workouts per week at what you would consider probably a lower volume, like two, two to three sets max per, I mean, you've seen my workouts on social and my story, like I don't do much volume, but I'm also tracking over time, am I progressively overloading? And I think that it gets back to the conversation that we had earlier, whereas people just wanna be told what to do. And so the people that are in the position of being social media influencers who may or may not have a PhD are engagement farming and creating an environment that is not open to intellectual discussion because at the end of the day, you're then either appealing to authority or you're being an asshole. And having comments like that that you're making on the YouTube and just being ignored is basically typically, what the status quo is of social media, which is just super frustrating and just annoying. In an effort to wrap this up, we talked about volume, we talked about length and partials. So if you're gonna give somebody a recommendation in terms of strength training based on your current understanding of volume, what is your recommendation for that person in terms of their load, in terms of how intense they're supposed to work out, in terms of the rest, right? Everything that you can give in a three to five minute spiel. Okay, that's a tough one. I will say we typically talk about volume as X amount of weekly sets, 20, 25, 42, 45, 52 weekly sets. I tend to think about it a little bit differently. I think of it on a per exercise basis. On a per exercise basis, I see little value to going beyond three or four sets per exercise, right? That's why the 52 set paper never made sense to me. Why are we doing nine sets on one exercise? The pizza's cooked, take it out of the oven. So, you know, and I actually asked this on one of my final exams to my students because I don't know the answer. So three to four sets per exercise, then, okay, how many variations do we need? I mean, different exercises hit muscles and fatigue muscles differently. So it's reasonable to suspect, and I think James still actually has a paper on exercise variation. How many variations of an exercise do we need to maximize growth in a muscle per training session? Maybe two to three exercises for a muscle group, you know, that hit the muscle in different ways. And then you have to say, well, okay, what frequency? It probably depends on your recovery and everything else you have going on in your life. Two to three times per week, two to three sets, or three to four sets per exercise, two to three exercises. So I've never done that math for how many weekly sets that is, but it's probably what some literature would consider a moderate volume, maybe some literature would consider it a high volume. So not anti-high volume, right? I just think some of the volume literature probably is measuring swelling instead of growth because the growth to me looks too high. So I don't think you need five working sets per exercise and I don't think you need 45 weekly sets. I think you can stop three or four sets per exercise, do three or four exercises per training session two to three times a week. Does that recommendation make sense? Yeah, no, I mean, I think that we just need to simplify all the clutter and I think you did a good job. You did a good job of that. What about rest periods and intensity? And by intensity I'm referring to load. Does load matter? Where, how hard are you working during these sets? What is your thoughts? Yeah, I think we need three or four sets, two or near failure. I think people get caught up on failure so often and you'll see so much content made on do you need to train to failure? You just need to be two or near or close to it. You need sufficient activation and fatigue and we know we can accomplish that with, you mentioned it, 15% in one study but 15% you're probably borderline too low of a training load. So 20 to 30% all the way up to 70, 75% there's some studies that get away with 80 but I don't think 80 works on every exercise it depends on the exercise you're doing but as long as you remain eight to 12 reps but I think eight, sometimes when we do research and people are only getting eight reps for each set I have less confidence and I'm gonna get a non heterogeneous growth response meaning I have more confidence if they're closer to 12 than eight and I don't think that's a wide held opinion I think that's probably just a me opinion in research, you want to maximize the possibility that your participants are going to grow so you wanna grow stimulus. So if they're like borderline to squeezing out that eight threat, sometimes I have a little bit less confidence in the hypertrophic potential. So yeah, I think loads is low as 20, 30% all the way up to 70, 75% three or four sets per exercise two or near failure if you're going to grow, I think that'll do it. Regardless of the rest period you take, what, what are you? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, so rest, where rest plays into that you know, if you take shorter rests it might be necessary to decrease the weight on the bar and so this is how I view it if you take one minute rest and you only get five reps on set two well then you need more rest or you need less weight. Now people that advocate for volume being the primary driver are going to say well, if you decrease the weight to remain in a hypertrophic range, you sacrifice gains. I don't think that's true. And I think there's multiple lines of evidence that would support that one of them being blood flow restriction one of them being lower loads to failure. So if high load training works and low load training works then why not decreasing the load and why would decreasing the load and remaining in a hypertrophic rep range no longer facilitate growth. And that's where I think I've seen conflicting ideology or conflicting narratives in the communication of science space when a focus of a study is volume typically I feel like the bias is towards the group that does higher volume but when you do nearly the same manipulation but it's now perceived as an advanced technique like drop sets, like my reps all of a sudden it's good for growth, right? So it's just, it's funny to me that if a focus of intervention is volume then the group that gets less volume is not going to be ideal. But if we pitch it differently we don't pitch it as a volume reducer but we pitch it as an advanced training technique I feel like our bias is well now it's a good thing. And I had some discussion with Paul, he pushed back a little bit on a post I made and we had some good discussion. He said we just need to make up for it with additional sets and he said some of those drop set papers are just comparing to lower volumes in general which might be true but in general I think drop sets and these sorts of things that manipulate rest are just ways to reach the same endpoint. I view muscle growth as you're starting here you have to get to here which is fatiguing and activating the majority of the fibers in the movement and you can get there drop sets you can get there with my reps you can get there with an insert your advanced technique low loads, high loads, short rest periods, long rest periods as long as you get to that point of activating and fatiguing the majority of the muscle involved in the movement I think your growth is going to be remarkably similar. Just label everything in advanced technique and then it's all good. I think so. Yeah, well, good marketing and sometimes when I mean how you're training the gym I come up with new stupid names for something we're doing I said let's just call this and publish a paper and I'm of course joking, right? But it's just sometimes how things work when you perceive it as advanced all of a sudden it's the new cool thing. So where can people find you any last parting words for the audience as we finish this little podcast? I'm at Samuel Buckner on Instagram. I'm not really active on Twitter and I don't think Facebook's still a thing. So at Samuel Buckner. Oh it is as long as you're like above 55, 60, yeah. It's hot. My parents they get like 88 comments like a family picture and it's crazy I think sometimes I have a phone call with my mom and she's like you never respond to that thing I sent you and I'm like did you send it on Facebook mom? And you have to remember to go check it. But yeah, at Samuel Buckner on Instagram that's probably the best place to follow me. I need to start posting more. Most of what I put up is our new papers and an occasional thought on a paper these sorts of things. But I'm gonna try to be a bit more active. One thing I've learned is that sometimes if you don't speak up no one's going to. I used to think I need to be patient and publish a paper on it. But I've learned even publishing a paper on it if you're not on the side that's popular to be talked about it won't be talked about. So I'm probably becoming more pessimistic but I'm a genuinely happy person and I really enjoy what I do. I think it's so fun to study muscle growth and talk about these things. I think I'm driven by just the passion to learn more about this stuff and be humble along the way every step of the way. So yeah, I hope people if they do follow me they find that content valuable. Yeah, definitely follow Dr. Buckner. He's definitely refreshing in terms of the skepticism. And I think that that's really important to have because at the end of the day, we just need to keep moving and muscle growth is fascinating from the aesthetic perspective but also the metabolic perspective and addressing a lot of the health crises that we're having at least in the United States and really worldwide. And that's why I'm interested in muscle growth. So I really appreciate all the thoughts that you shared today. Reach out to him on Instagram, Samuel Buckner. And until next time, that's the episode. And that was today's episode of the BFR Better for Results podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, I would love if you subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you're watching or listening on. I really appreciate the support.