 In this episode of the BFR Better for Results podcast, we sit down and talk with Dr. Milo Wolf, exercise scientist and founder of Wolf Coaching, an online coaching platform. He has an interest in strength training with a particular interest in range of motion. We nerd out about the potential relevancy of lengthened partials, explanatory models for lengthened partials, as well as dive into volume and the minimal amount needed to get both health and aesthetic benefits with respect to resistance exercise. 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. And I am very excited to sit down and talk today with Milo Wolf. Sorry, I just butchered that. But I'm really excited because we talked on the podcast about the potential relevancy of training at longer lengths in prior episodes. And right now in the fitness community, there is a very contentious debate regarding the reasons why. I think that we can pretty much establish that longer length training in general is probably something that is going to give a good benefit to your exercise routine. But the underlying reasons or why is kind of what's been contentious in the fitness community. But at the end of the day, if you don't exercise, it doesn't really matter in the first place. But I'm excited to have Milo on here to go through some of his work and question his perspective and come out with common ground and ways to move forward so everybody can continue to exercise and get those gains. So welcome on the podcast, Milo. Appreciate your time. Hey, man. Thank you for having me. I just want to mention that you did in fact not butch my name at the time you mentioned it. So in English, Milo in German or French, Milo, it doesn't really matter. You got it just right. Although I will say, hey, I think we're both doctors. So just please give me the appeal to authority here. Okay, Dr. Dr. Wolf. There we go. There we go. So yeah, like, let's just first start out. How did you get into exercise? You're a competitive bodybuilder, much like me in my decades ago past. How did you get into exercise science? What fascinated you about the area that you're currently exploring right now in your doctoral work? For sure. So, hey, man, started lifting when I was 14, gradually started reading more about it. And the science behind it specifically, I remember reading blogs like string theory or straw by science now back when I was 15, 16. And then when it came time to decide what I wanted to study, nothing quite had the same appeal as sports science since I'd already been doing it in my spare time anyways. And that kind of extended into not just lifting myself, but starting to coach people even when I was only 17 years old. And so I went and studied sports science for my undergrad in the UK, finished my undergraduate degree. And as I was finishing, I had to decide what are my next steps. I had been coaching for a few years already, and coaching was bringing us money, but I wasn't 100% sure that I could make it financially at the time with just online coaching. So I was exploring different avenues for their studies, whether it made sense to, on the one hand, online coaches don't really need a high degree of academic achievement necessarily, right to like plenty of good online coaches out there with only an undergrad or less than that even. So part of me didn't feel like doing for those studies. But then, and that was partly fueled by in my undergrad didn't really learn a ton about lifting specifically. And I think that's the case for most exercise science undergraduates or majors that they find, I mean, it's cool for overall sport science, basic understanding of physiology and by mechanics, but much past that, you don't really learn much with regards to lifting. And so I spoke to a few people and they actually recommended I apply for a PhD. And so I went straight from undergrad to a PhD. The reason I applied to do PhD on range of motion specifically is kind of two or three fold. One, just around the time I was applying for a PhD, there was a systematic review by Brad Schoenfeld and Gurgic in 2020 that looked at the effects of range of motion on hypertrophy and kind of summarized the data at that point. And there were only six studies and specifically only two studies in the upper body. And so clearly there seemed to be a lack of data and a lack of clarity, especially in the upper body. And so I said, yeah, if there's not enough data here, yes, good thing to do would be to do my PhD on this topic and provide more data. Another thing was I was working for renaissance prioritization at the time and one of their big tennis that they reached much more at the time, a bit less so at this point, was that a full range of motion was best for hypertrophy. And in my own training as a result, I was predominantly using full range of motion based on my understanding that the evidence was clearly in favor of this. And so I both had a personal coaching interest in the component of range of motion during lifting. And I also had, as I said, noticed that there was a lack of data on range of motion, which eventually led me to make a proposal on range of motion. And as of recently finishing my PhD on range of motion. So as of a few months ago, defending my PhD successfully, I'm now Dr. Michael Wolf. And yeah, I've been surprised to find out some of the stuff that we did eventually find out during the PhD. As I said, my bias coming into the PhD was pro for range of motion, if anything. And so I was taken back a little bit when certain findings emerged. So yeah, I think, would you say even before we get into this, that if you're strengthening through a full range of motion, that's probably efficacious, right? Like you're going to get a result. We're pretty much talking about, could you potentially maximize your muscle gains by training at longer muscle lengths? Yes. We're talking about a difference of like five or 10% in hypertrophy, maybe a bit more if we're comparing like the most shortened training to the most length in training. But if we're comparing full range of motion to more length in training, like length in partials or what have you, we're talking about like five to maybe up to 15% hypertrophy difference, not a whole lot. So when you did your meta analysis on the range of motion, the full total effect was slightly in favor of full range of motion versus partial range of motion. So again, you know, even even getting into the nuance, right, where you subgroup and everything, we still are fully in support of a full range of motion, but we'll get into now the potential reasons why longer length training may be beneficial. So I think the best way for me conceptually to introduce this topic would be why. Like why would a muscle at longer lengths undergo potentially similar or greater growth than a muscle that is at a moderate or a shorter length? Sure. So I'm going to give you the unsatisfactory answer of we don't fully know. Now, just to clarify, we have quite a compelling body of evidence at this point that length and training is generally better than shortened training when it comes to hypertrophy. I'm talking about now about eight or nine studies comparing four range of motion to partial range of motion, nine studies comparing partial range of motion at different muscle lengths, and five studies comparing isometric contractions at shorter or longer muscle lengths. Very consistently across these 20 to 25 studies now, we do see that length and training is better for hypertrophy. Let me dig into that a little bit. One thing we see is that length and training is specifically hypertrophies, proximal areas of a muscle, a closer to the origin point, about the same as more shortened training, sometimes a little bit more, but typically about the same. With more distal areas, so closer to the insertion point of a muscle, that is where length and training typically causes a lot more hypertrophy than a lot more is relative. I mean, some more hypertrophy than shortened training. And so it seems as though there's a regional hypertrophy effect of more length and training on hypertrophy. Now, another mechanism by which more length and training leads to more hypertrophy and likelihood, at least when comparing length and partials, such as doing partial reps in that length and position to doing a full range of motion, is that if you end a set, when you can't get another partial rep, you're technically ending the set closer or past full range of motion failure, right? For most exercises, when you're ending a set because you can't do another length and partial, you've actually gone past full range of motion failure. And so on a set per set basis, that likely makes that set more stimulating. We don't have a ton of data and again, unsatisfactory on training past failure and hypertrophy. But the data we do have on how close to failure you train and how much hypertrophy you see per set, does seem to suggest that the closer to failure you go on a given set, the more hypertrophy you tend to see. And so it's possible and potentially even likely that even going past failure, you do see some additional hypertrophy versus just going to failure. So that's playing a role. But like I just mentioned, we do see more distal hypertrophy specifically. So there is a regional hypertrophy component. Now with training to failure versus training further from failure, we don't typically see any regional hypertrophy response, right? And so I'm inclined to say that it's not just the fact that you're training past full range of motion failure at play. Otherwise, we wouldn't see a regional hypertrophy response necessarily. It's unlikely, at least. And so something else has to be at play. It could be a variety of things this stage. I'm inclined to say that it's not a single mechanism, because ultimately, physiology we're often dealing with complex systems that have often redundant mechanisms and other things in place. I think the biggest mistake one can make at this stage, I can mention some more potential mechanisms. Passive tension is certainly one of them. Total tension is one of them. Differences in activation in different areas of muscle might contribute. For example, there's been a recent line of research by Waka Haare and colleagues looking at the association between activation as measured by transverse relaxation MRI and longitudinal hypertrophy, and specifically looking at regional hypertrophy, suggesting that, hey, if we measure hypertrophy up front and we see activation upfront, and we see that during given exercise, certain areas of a muscle are more activated as measured by this method than in other exercises, we do typically see that that correlates to growth across 12 weeks, we'll have you. So there are a variety of mechanisms potentially at play. What I will strongly urge against at this stage is trying to pin it down to one mechanism or trying to prematurely argue that we know for sure what's going on here. Ultimately, I'm sure we'll get into this later, the data that is being drawn upon when it comes to quote unquote, stretch me in hypertrophy, and you'll notice up until now, I haven't actually used this term. And the reason why is that this term is a different thing from length and training in likelihood. We're dealing with very different durations of exposure, differences in position between stretching and lifting, very different intensities as well. So there's a lot of things that are different. Moreover, a lot of the stretch me hypertrophy data simply stems from single fiber data, which is often in animal models and often not in in vivo models. So there are a number of limitations in trying to generalize the mechanisms that we reasonably understand with regards to stretch me hypertrophy, when it comes to length and training, ultimately to have any clarity over these mechanisms, we would actually need to conduct a study comparing, for example, length and partial to four inch motion, and actually measure some of these things, some of these mechanisms that we've seen at play with stretch me hypertrophy, the same sample, while also see more hypertrophy. Ultimately, when dealing with any applied question, right, the question of, is length and training better than four range of motion training for hypertrophy? The first place once you look is the applied results. When we measure hypertrophy across a variety of muscle groups, across a variety of circumstances, across a variety of modalities, even from length and partials to children, partials for four range of motion to length and partials from as a metric contractions of different muscle lengths. What do we actually see in terms of hypertrophy? Because ultimately, that's the outcome we care about. It's very important eventually to understand mechanisms behind it. But equally, if we see that it's a repeatable phenomenon in the applied sense, I think that answers a lot of questions for us already. There's so many places that my mind goes here. I think the first thing that we need to define terminology, because I think that, and I'm so happy that I'm not in this area, BFR, blood flow restriction is my thing. I don't have to deal with a lot of the nuances here, but I do find it fascinating. I do think that just following a lot of different people and being friends with them too and just having these discussions over beers, virtually right now, of course, that we just need to have a set terminology that everybody can work off of. So you mentioned before, you mentioned longitudinal growth. So we should define what's your definition of longitudinal growth, because there's some camps that say that longitudinal growth would over time expire, because at some point, you can't you can't add more to a muscle, because you're fixed with your origin and your insertion. Origin is just the point of the muscle that's closer to the skeleton, axial skeletons of the chest or whatever. And then the insertion is the point that's further away for terminology. So if we're getting more hypertrophy on the insertion area, then that means that that muscle is undergoing more regional growth, so the area of that distally. And so from my understanding, when we tend to do more lengthened exercise, as you said, we tend to see more a proportion of additional growth in the the distal area of the muscle, right? An interesting point that you made before we get back to what your definition of stretch mediated hypertrophy is, because I think that's really important to discover. You made a good point that I actually haven't thought about, which is if you take because you're using much less range of motion, you can potentially accumulate relatively more volume at a length and partial position because your your standard of failure is different, because it's not full range, it's not it's partial. So I do think that that's interesting because you could dose if mechanical tension is the primary driver, maybe not the exclusive driver, but the primary driver, then that could create more mechanical tension at that, you know, in that muscle. Would you agree? Yes. Yes. Cool. So at least I think we hit on all the terminology, but stretch mediated hypertrophy. So what is your definition of stretch mediated hypertrophy? And I will give you a secondary question to that, which is what I think about, which is kind of what I already prefaced, which is at some point, right? If stretch mediated hypertrophy increases longitudinal growth. So when we talk about for the listeners or the viewers, longitudinal growth just means that the muscle fiber in general will get longer, right? The sarcomeres inside of the muscle cell will get well, you'll continue to grow, right? But at some point that expires. So my question is, and this is the thing that keeps me up at night where it's like, at some point that adaptation has to stop at some point. So then is there at that point a benefit to length and partials when we know that there's the potential for longer muscle length training to actually induce greater amounts of fatigue? So a kind of a two part question. Sure. So let me touch on that in a few parts, I suppose. The first is that I do think we need to draw a distinction between stretch mediated hypertrophy and additional hypertrophy stemming from lifting in a length and position. Stretch mediated hypertrophy as a term has been around for decades. It's stemmed a lot from stretching data in animals conducted over the last 50 plus years. That is not necessarily what is going on here. And to say that stretch mediated hypertrophy is a phenomenon and the mechanisms involved are necessarily what is occurring here. It's a pretty big leap of faith. So stretch mediated hypertrophy, I guess we can simply define as the hypertrophy stemming from stretching a muscle to its limits for a certain duration and what have you, right? So the question of does stretch mediated hypertrophy apply here comes down to how much of a duration is there as a requirement for it to occur? Do we think it occurs in humans? And do we think that it's the mechanism of play or the single mechanism play here? So the first thing I want to caution against is not assuming that stretch mediated hypertrophy and the additional hypertrophy we see stemming from lifting length and positions during lifting are the same. I think that's kind of tantamount to a false equivalence fallacy or at the very least it requires a lot of evidence to justify that leap of faith, right? So I think generally the issues I see and kind of I guess touch on the fatigue thing first. I haven't seen much data directly looking at shoulder muscle length training and lower muscle length training and measuring fatigue. There's been a few but there hasn't been a ton of data there. To my knowledge I've done about five studies total now across four of those studies, the ones that I've read most closely. There's not a hugely consistent trend in the fatigue that you see from for example 4-inch of motion training versus shortened training. There is one study comparing length and versus shortened decentrics that seems to suggest that more length and decentrics are more fatiguing. Now with any study of this kind and I think this also applies to the trained failure research by the way, novelty is going to be a factor. I suspect that a lot of that difference in fatigue if there is one would probably subside with time. I don't know how much but I think that's a gap in literature with both trained failure and with most studies of fatigue from a distance training, one intervention which is another. And so because of the lack of consistency in those four studies and even in fact a recent study comparing for example a leg press and leg extension with different ranges of motion involved where one condition was essentially training at lower muscle lengths than the other and did not see more fatigue. So there's been some studies but it hasn't been super direct and there's not a great deal of consistency there. So I don't think we should treat that as though that were something that's strongly established just yet. Like for example if you're comparing just shortened partials to lengthened partials in both cases there's a good chance that you would be able to go past a range of motion failure depending on the exercise. I'm not sure we can argue necessarily that there's something more inherently fatiguing once acclimation has occurred of lengthened training. But just to kind of run down a few of the assumptions that are being made when we're trying to translate this data from mostly animal mechanistic data from single fiber studies typically to humans in the context of length and resistance training there's just a number of assumptions to go into it. The first is assuming that findings from scenarios like immobilization and limb lengthening surgery generalize to humans. Again most of these procedures are exclusively performed in animals. So the assumption that the adaptations to limb lengthening surgery or to immobilization are the same as the adaptations you get from spending an extra 10 seconds per session in the lengthened position strikes me as a pretty big leap of faith. Likewise the assumption that findings from animal research in general just generalize to humans is problematic. For example there's the assumption that an increase in fascic length is always an increase of well rather an addition of sarcomasin series versus a lengthening of each already existing sarcomere and in fact some of the most direct evidence we have in humans in vivo as opposed to single fiber research in animals suggests that actually it may not be that we're adding sarcomeres it may simply be that existing sarcomeres are being lengthened so just becoming longer throughout training. So there's a lot of things that I have reservations with. There's also the assumption that so for reference if you're a bit confused as to where law is coming from I would recommend reading Chris Bisley's article on stretch media hypertrophy which focuses on a lot of the underpinnings of what he believes is happening with lengthened training I think and essentially there's just a list of assumptions or sort of leaps of faith from animal research to human research. I can go through them if you like but it's I'm not exaggerating. I mean I'm so again like you know I'm very familiar with Chris and Paul Carter's you know podcast stuff just I mean I had Paul on the podcast before and I will say you know there's a couple of questions that I have where it's for example like you mentioned the lengthening of the sarcomere right where if you know like I try to relate everything to an acute or subacute so over a couple of weeks stimulus and how the body ultimately adapts to become more efficient right so for example like I'll give you the most pertinent example for the BFR like with the vascular system like so the vascular system after a bout of exercise stressful exercise can increase in stiffness and that increase in stiffness can then change in terms of getting that artery you know for example a little bit bigger and then or the vasodilatory capacity gets a little bit bigger and then the artery gets bigger over time and then it kind of resets so when I think of the example that you gave regarding the sarcomere you know and lengthen how then do you as an exercise scientist go about the results that occur from the type of adaptation which would be when we typically see lengthened or we see sarcomere change or as you said before you know a fascicle length that's the to my you know looking at some of the sources that Chris has given in his article you know that has in review articles the couple that I saw that has been the underlying assumption and you're right to say that it's an assumption but my question then goes okay well if we see the sarcomeres lengthen how does then that change that length tension relationship because we do see a shift in the length tension relationship so in my mind the addition of sarcomeres in series from a lengthened partial position right and at some point as I said before it makes conceptual sense that it's finite right you can only add so many but that then would explain nicely right now whether that's true or not but that would explain the right word shift of the length tension relationship and basically say okay well what would the longer sarcomere lengths do because you mentioned before too like there are conflicting evidence like even there there's no change in the length tension curve some do show so there is inconsistencies but what does appeal to me from the model is at least barring assumptions or you know translational data from the animals it does attempt to try to explain what's going on with muscle growth because right now I think the fitness industry is plagued with complexity and and it's almost intimidating for somebody like I had a client who was asking me like I just want him to exercise and he's asking me about all the different types of contract I'm like dude just go to the gym and work out hard so I just think that a lot of this stuff too is is creating another barrier but it's interesting for us to discuss so I'm interested in hearing kind of your thoughts about what I said and you know at the end of the day I think both camps are interested in helping people move better and and getting people active but I'm interested in just hearing your you know your thoughts on what I said regarding you know the the length and and sarcomeres and stuff for sure so theoretically a change in a number of sarcomeres and sort of resting sarcomere length and so forth all of that could have a an impact on the length tension relationship of the whole muscle right the important thing is and this was noted in a review paper by Brugelli and Crone and back in 2007 is that the mechanism that is responsible for the shift in optimum length isn't even readily agreed upon yet so therein lies yet another assumption that it's necessarily this that's underlying this and again it I know you mentioned complexity and I think that's partly what my quorum sometimes is about with this model is that it is essentially reliant upon a series of assumptions that at present cannot be substantiated it just can't and so rather than looking at the most direct outcomes aka muscle hypertrophy in these studies that we directly measure to build a model around tenuous and very indirect evidence to major seems like creating more complexity where there doesn't need to be for the time being I think the most important thing going forwards for the research is to actually measure some of these things within a range of motion study right actually measure some of these mechanisms to see what's at play like you know if we see more hypertrophy in the length and condition is this also then paralleled by this specific mechanism occurring and there have been a few of these but equally the interesting thing I've seen is that even in studies where there isn't necessarily increasing vascular length there might still be more hypertrophy in this area and so when you do measure vascular length it's not even clear that that's the thing the adaptation that's at play when it comes to increasing hypertrophy and that's consistent you know as much as increases in vascular length aren't consistent in the data there's studies where they don't find an increase in vascular length in the range of motion data the increase in hypertrophy at especially more proximal at more distal area sorry is very consistent and so it just seems premature to me to assume that an increase in vascular length is the mechanism of play and as a result that in more advanced trainees or anyone who's been exposed to length and positions for a while we don't see any additional hypertrophy in fact that's currently what we're studying and trying to figure out is okay in more advanced people do we see a greater hypertrophy when training with length and partials versus of range of motion I think that ultimately I would rather have more clarity around which populations might this not apply to then build to my eyes in my view pretty tenuous model of what might be going on and I think that more applied evidence alongside some mechanistic data which by the way is not easy to measure most labs can't or lack of tools but I think that would be the way to push things forward I just take issue with the sheer number of assumptions that go into this specific model yeah I mean it's I think for you know breaking apart that since you had a chance to to read it um you know what Chris is saying to my interpretation is there we have to which you kind of touched upon earlier we have to separate what the difference between a stretch so completely passive tension and so passive tension just means that there's no muscle activation that's happening whatsoever this is purely a stretch of the muscle and in turn the sarcomeres that make up the muscle fiber that make up the fascicle that may you know all this other stuff so you're getting a full stretch and it's it's it that is a stretching force then there's the contraction mediated growth which is the force that is from the actin and myosin overlap that's pulling the muscle fiber together that ultimately will create radial growth so cross-sectional area or at least transverse growth so I think from my understanding what the model is saying is that it's very difficult right now to completely compare a length and partial where there's active so there's there's contraction mediated and stretch mediated stimulus occurring versus you know the reason why he goes to the static stretching literature is basically saying all right there's no active tension whatsoever so at least we can see what is the the driver of this so I guess for you know I understand why there's hesitancy in um in assuming that the animal literature is going to translate to humans what I do know just treating a geneticist as a as a client of mine is she's saying she said that that mice are very very very good at being able to translate to human research so from that understanding just communication looking at anything that's done in mice could provide at least a less tenuous stretch uh no pun intended um but uh I guess for me it's just trying to figure out all right well so if that model if that model is there and we can't necessarily assume that that all growth is going to be due to you know some sort of stretch slash whatever my whole thought process goes to then well certain muscles may be more responsive to that than others right because if the if the sarcomere length is such that it never actually reaches the point where passive tension occurs well then there is going to be no additional stretch mediated stimulus in a length in position so do you have thoughts on that because that's a big tenon of Chris's model is that if you have a muscle who's who doesn't their sarcomere length doesn't reach the descending limb then it doesn't matter where you particularly strength train them then it goes back to neuromechanical matching which I know you're going to comment on at some point because that's a common criticism from what I've been gathering as well yeah so let me touch on your mechanical matching first again it comes down to a lack of evidence with regards to musculoskeletal hypertrophy right some of this has been evidenced in for example respiratory and postural muscles but again we're talking about circumstances quite different from resistance training close to muscular failure where presumably even if there are slight differences in leverage there would still be a recruitment of all muscle groups responsible for that joint function right it just seems like a stretch no pun intended to ascribe all of the findings that we have in the range of motion and muscle length data to neuromechanical matching and to ignore the most direct data so to come back to the assumption that a muscle only benefits from more length in training if in that length in position quote unquote it also experiences passive tension right if it extends into that descending limb now muscle groups like the biceps and triceps that I know Chris has mentioned do not experience this in a lot of these studies by and large still do see more hypertrophy in these studies when being trained at length in positions so that doesn't seem to pan out to me and to come back to the tension I wouldn't call it reductionism but I guess focus on tension as the mechanism at play for hypertrophy and more specifically in this case for passive tension in the case of length in training one of the studies for example comparing length in partials to full range of motion by go to in colleagues in the triceps did for example measure some potential mechanisms of hypertrophy being greater in one condition versus the other and one thing they saw for example is that when doing length in partials there was greater muscle the oxygenation which isn't the most isn't the most robust mechanism for hypertrophy as I'm sure you know from bfr research like usually it doesn't really do much but there was also greater blood lactate concentrations when performing length in partials versus range of motion and the role of lactate in hypertrophy to touch on rodent research or sort of more mechanistic research does seem somewhat promising right so if we for example see more lactate when doing length in partials versus when using a full range of motion then that could feasibly be a mechanism for more hypertrophy the reason I don't mention this you know and chat it from rooftops is because we're dealing with one study and the mechanism that isn't well established and that's the same reason why by the way I'm always tentative in mentioning this might be the mechanism to play or that might be and that's the reason also why I'm quite skeptical of this model because the sheer number of assumptions that is built in to me seems too large to consider meaningful and especially if it's going to make predictions that run directly diametrically opposite what we're seeing in the applied research then it seems to me that it might not be correct yeah I mean so I'll I'll just hit you back with you know you saying lactate because because I know that's that people say that as well so I don't know if you've gotten a chance to to read this recent paper and again it keeps on going on my list and then I keep on pushing it back pushing it back but it's called resistance training in humans and mechanical overload in rodents do not elevate muscle protein lactylation and basically the gist of this research was shut was from their conclusions in relating the mechanistic rodent to the human was that lactate does not have a predictive ability to explain the muscle hypertrophy now again I don't have a dog in this fight nor do I really care but the reason why I think about this stuff is because there is this you know uncertainty around the different mechanisms so I think rightfully so I think of anything I tend to agree with with you know Greg Knuckles and his assumption or his assertion that like maybe muscle damage is not as relevant but maybe there might be a role of metabolic stress and surely mechanical tension is likely the primary but not exclusive and I think he does a good job in the recent data-driven podcast of talking about mechanical tension being sufficient but not necessary relating it to a philosophical discussion but those are the type the study that I just pointed out which again personally haven't gotten a chance to read other than the abstract just because I'm drowning in BFR stuff just kind of goes to say we probably don't even know like you know like there's just so much that we don't know and I think this circles back to my original point which is if you're listening to this you're probably very enthusiastic about exercise and so keep at it but these discussions that we're having in the public arena are you know I fear are like obfuscating the importance of just being active and and using exercise both aerobic can't forget aerobic and resistance exercise as vehicles to improve your health and so that unless you have any other comments regarding length and partials I want to pivot to volume because you talked about in your in your work the importance of volume or relatively speaking for getting some benefits in muscle growth maintenance of strength and and whatever do you have any lasting comments on the length and partial discussion I don't think so I would say we probably just come from different epistemic positions where I think the more reasonable position that I try to take is looking at the applied data and looking at the mechanism second and especially not overly focusing on trying to build a model around indirect mechanistic data whereas I think they're trying there the other camp let's put the put it that way are trying to build a model which I think is good scientific practice in general but you just want to make sure that you have sufficient data at first that's it cool yeah I mean listen the takeaway from this is if you decide to do length and partials in your training you're probably going to get a benefit right whatever drives that benefit that's for the scientists to discuss but the applied setting is such that you will get equivalent potentially greater muscle growth than if you are training at certainly shorter muscle length so we're doing a bicep curl here versus at the end and maybe you know full range of motion training right would you say that that would be a sufficient summation yep that's a very conservative but honest representation of that I'd say perfect I love to hear that all right so let's just we got we got like 10 minutes left I want you to just talk about your work in volume and trying to create some recommendations for the everyday Joe and Jane who want to hit the gym but don't necessarily have or think they need all of this time to be spent in the gym to get the benefits that we just talked about for sure so look if you have kind of two extremes on the one hand people think you need to be in the gym for a long time to see any benefit and oftentimes they don't go into the gym at all because they think oh I only have half an hour or 45 minutes I can't get a benefit the truth is with as few as like five sets per muscle per week or even fewer in some cases you can still see some muscle growth you can still see some strength gains and so just because you don't have much time don't let that put you off not going through the gym and in fact the first set you do is the most meaningful each additional set reaps or yields a little bit less muscle growth so we're talking about diminishing returns whenever we're talking about the good optimal volume you might be roughly doubling your time in the gym or like a 20 to 40 increase in hypertrophy sometimes which to some people means the world right if you're stepping on stage and you're trying to be the most jacked yeah you might want to spend that double the time in the gym to get those extra 20 40 percent for a lot of people if you can get you know 60 70 of the growth with a couple hours in the gym a week or a little bit more like that's really solid and it's a really solid use of your time for someone who's busy and just wants to get the health and aesthetic benefits so that's the first thing if you're busy try just doing as few as five sets a week and doing a two failure ideally if you're trying to maximize time efficiency because as you take set closer to failure you will see a greater stimulus for hypertrophy so if you're busy take each set to failure generally pick more time efficient exercises like stack loaded machines or dumbbells things you don't have to load or set up potentially use some drop sets or some my reps both of which have been shown to reduce training time while potentially roughly preserving stimulus it's not probably perfect but it's doing a decent job and you will just spend less time in the gym and the final technique I recommend would be antagonist paired supersets or essentially just supersetting any two exercises that don't really seem to interfere with each other for example you could superset a calf raise and like a ladder raise because neither of those is going to interfere with the other but you might not want to superset a squat and deadlift however you might specifically want to superset things that are antagonistic so movements or motions that are opposite to each other for example a bicep curl where you're flexing the elbow and a cable pushdown where you're extending the elbow because you're essentially working the opposite motion there's a very little likelihood of overlap or interference in performance and there might even be some potential performance enhancement through that technique so if you're busy do that however we're going to be talking about high volume now there have been to my count about six studies now comparing more moderate volumes of about 10 to 20 sets a week to more extreme volumes of 25 or more sets a week with the highest volume study thus far peaking at an average of 37 sets a week for just your quadriceps so that's a 37 sets a week of squats leg press and leg extension combined that's a lot of volume that's that had participants on average spend about 90 sorry but three hours in the gym for their quads alone per week so if you did that for like five or six muscle groups you would be at 15 to 18 hours already that's a pretty solid part-time job so for a lot of people not realistic to do that much volume however here's the kind of deal in these six studies we have comparing 10 to 20 sets to like 25 or more sets in four of those we do see more hypertrophy with higher volumes and so it might just be the case that just like taking a set closer to failure produces more hypertrophy doing more volume just doing more sets up to a certain amount but that amount remains relatively on the tournament at this point also yields more hypertrophy there are limitations to these studies right like muscle swelling might play a role that was literally what I was going at like I read some of these studies and it it waiting three days and again I have to relate everything to the BFR literature because that's really where I'm well versed they did a higher frequency BFR training program where they're basically doing one to two extra one to two times per day and one of these groups saw that it actually took 24 days up to 24 days for some of the strength to create that supercompensation effect and muscle growth is something that again like when you're creating like when you're in the last week or so of that 52 set study and then you're going to wait what would they did swelling measurement 72 hours after something like that like there is a hundred percent chance of swelling that's still going to remain probably for a week right so that's where it's it's interesting that people take very strong positions on either end of the spectrum when we already know that you you basically mentioned my biggest hole like as somebody who reads the literature as as very interested without a dog in the fight it's like you have to be familiar with everything that's going on in order to make an educated you know a guess as to the efficacy of that and plus the biggest thing you just mentioned is the ecological validity of spending three hours in the gym like come on yeah absolutely I agree and look the muscle swelling thing is far from an open and shut case I think there may or may not be some degree of muscle swelling still around I think the important thing there is when they were measuring when they were measuring hypertrophy that they had been building up to that volume for about 14 weeks so it wasn't really a novel stimulus anymore right like for two weeks at the end they were doing 52 sets or two weeks before that they were doing about I think 46 sets and they were really just gradually building up from 22 sets all the way to 52 sets over 14 weeks in total and so it wasn't really a novel stimulus and you do see generally that the repeat about effect can be pretty powerful in especially with 14 weeks if they're gradually adding volume and a lot of their sets weren't taken to failure which at least in unacclimated subjects is another thing that increases muscle damage and inflammation swelling therefore I think it's a relatively difficult question to answer whether or not in that specific study or higher volume studies in general muscle swelling is playing a meaningful role I think it may be playing a role but I suspect there is still positive effect of higher volumes I think the sheer number of studies in which the effect is seen I'm skeptical it's merely an artifact of muscle swelling oh no I tend to agree I mean I think Greg also made a good point about the proximity of the you know molecular machinery when you start to because this is kind of where I want to end on which is the the maximum possible growth that you can have and you ultimately need to create the you know you need to create the muscle right and so if you have such a big muscle it creates inefficiencies associated with the with the whole molecular protein synthesis cascade so interesting for the potential role and the stimulus that that the pump may have if it does who knows but I guess let's end on this question where why do you think people stop growing muscle right I know it's just the I know it's just let's just let's just throw it up there I think people think that they're that muscle grows indefinitely and this is a very complex problem or at least hypothesized as a very complex problem but what do you think are you know one or two of the things that pop into your head as to why people ultimately stop growing muscle and even if they do stop growing muscle why it's important to keep training and that is a hard question I mean more so the first part the second part is really easy it's like okay well let's keep training because good for health and to prevent in the long-term sarcopenia or the age-related muscle wasting disease essentially so as you get too old losing your muscles no good thing because then you get very frail and prone to injury and stuff like that but as to how or why people stop growing essentially I don't really know man I think I kind of think it's a battle against time to an extent like at some point you're turning 40 to 60 and things start kind of turning against you a little bit and certainly at that point you're not growing an additional muscle I think that that is part of it I think you don't necessarily stop growing muscle but I think the increase becomes so slow that it is nigh unmeasurable and at which point you can't really tell if you're going muscle anymore and I think to a lot of people that's discouraging and they stop putting the same effort and intensity into the training which might lead to those small and barely appreciable increases in muscle size but I think that if you do want to keep seeing muscle growth and by seeing I mean believing more so because you can't really see it anymore you need to still apply a high level of effort which is I think where a lot of the battle lies for more advanced training is it's like you're not seeing the same gains you once did you're not putting on 10-15 pounds of muscle a year anymore you're putting on a pound maybe if that and you gotta do that for 10 years in a row to see any appreciable change that's going to take some volume I agree I also think you mentioned aging too we know that anabolic resistance increases as you get older just generally and it's somewhat combated by resistance exercise overall but that create that anabolic resistance just means that it's harder to maintain a net protein balance so elevation of your muscle protein synthesis for long enough to allow your muscle to synthesize new muscle tissue so there's so many things I find that really fascinating and you know Dr. Lenneke who's you know wrote written you know he's also interested in muscle size and strength and how that potentially is diverging I don't know if you're familiar with his you know work but he had a paper in sports medicine that was talking about why we reach a plateau and it's it or it's I just think that's fascinating because we kind of circle back and this is where we'll end which is you know ultimately we know that resistance exercise is something that everybody should do twice a week you don't need the insane volumes that's that some of these fitness influencers are pushing to to get the benefit for your health and even aesthetics because as you mentioned before you can grow with with low to moderate volumes in the gym for the vast vast majority of people but at some point the benefits are going to become so small that we need to then create this messaging that is you know hey it it's still beneficial for your health this is the best thing that we can do overall is do some resistance exercise and do some cardio right agree to whole horribly so thank you so much for for coming on this is your chance now to plug anything and everything that you got going on what are you know upcoming you know events for you programs you're running whatever uh plug and play for sure so you can find me the place I'm most active is on youtube at wolf coaching trying to put out some good information there you can find my instagram at wolf coach that's my last name and coach finally for my research you can find that if you just type in milo wolf and research gate and for my website you can find that at wolf coaching calm I'll also be speaking in mexico alongside uh the good doctor Nicholas rolnik right here uh in guajara just nick but yeah I know that's going to be a lot of fun I'm really going to be looking forward to that same but yeah you can find me there um and that's me done cool well thank you again so much very interesting conversation we'll have to have you on at some point in the future to discuss or maybe your research in this area um but yeah thank you so much and that's the episode guys tune in next time 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