How to Train For Strength VS Size (Science Explained)

Foreign. What's going on, everybody? And welcome back to the Built With Science podcast. You're here with your host, as always, of course, me, myself and I, that is Max Coleman, AKA Coleman et al. And as is tradition, sitting directly in front of me, approximately 1400 miles away, is the one, the only Daniel Plotkin, AKA doesn't pretend to know more than he does. Plotkin, AKA Danny Boy. Today we're going to be talking about strength and hypertrophy. Unusual for us to talk about strength, but we're basically talking about it in the context of how training for strength is different than training for hypertrophy. We're going to talk about the big pillars, the most important things for both adaptations. We're going to talk about how they're different, we're going to talk about how they're the same, and we're going to talk about at the very end how you can set up training to hopefully elicit both, to get kind of the boast of the best of both worlds, while acknowledging that you're not going to be theoretically optimal in either one. But before we get there, oh, and we're also going to talk about using the big three, the squat, the bench and the deadlift within a hypertrophy based program. If, if you should do it and if you're going to do it, how we recommend going about doing so. So before we get there, Danny Boy, why don't you go ahead and define strength and hypertrophy for us?

Yeah, so this is actually a tougher question than it may seem at face value. But to put it very simply, I think strength is just increasing your ability to produce force in a specific task and hypertrophy is just making your muscles bigger. So it's pretty.

Some sound very complex to me based on, based on the way you say it. I think that's an important, the strength thing is incredibly important to acknowledge. I think you gave an incredibly safe definition for, and a very accurate one for what strength is. But I think a lot of people kind of mischaracterize strength. Not necessarily mischaracterize it, but they have an incredibly narrow, narrow definition of what it means to increase strength. Usually people mean like increasing and the amount of weight that you're able to do for like 1 to 5 reps on any given particular exercise. But like Danny Boy said, it's really just increasing the amount of force you're able to produce on any given task. And that could be saying like, that could be the same thing as saying, like, I'm able to produce more force on a 20 rep set of something, I did technically get stronger in the 20 rep range. But for the purposes of this conversation and to keep things moving along, we are going to refer to it as, I think, what's often referred to as basic strength, which is just getting Stronger in the 1 to 3 ish rep range in specific exercises. And then, of course, hypertrophy training. Not much to define there. This is the Built With Science podcast that is our wheelhouse. Right. There's another important thing to point out that anytime Danny boy and I start talking about something that doesn't have to do with training to get jacked, we're somewhat out of our wheelhouse. So if we say anything egregiously incorrect with respect to how to train to get as strong as possible, please, Derek, Ben, Avery, boys of Data Driven Strength, feel free to reach out to us and tell us how stupid and wrong we are. I would love to it. And anyone else, of course. Okay. And then of course, now that we've gotten the definition of strength and upper trivia out of the way, defining the methodologies by which you go about training is very simple. Strength training is just training to increase the amount of force we're able to produce on the given task. Hypertrophy training is just training designed to get as jacked as possible. Both of them, both training for strength and training for hypertrophy fall under the somewhat umbrella term of resistance training. Right. And it's very important to acknowledge that even on like a relatively hypertrophy focused program, you're going to be getting stronger, and on a relatively strength focused program, you are going to be getting bigger as well. Just performing resistance training of any kind is very likely to increase both strength and hypertrophy. But how can you go about designing them to maximize one or the other? Right. So I think we can go ahead and talk about the most impact and most important factors for increasing strength. Unless there's something else that you want to talk about beforehand.

Yeah, I think we can sort of mention, sort of brief overview, very simple overview of the underlying physiology that goes into creating new muscle tissue versus creating strength. So I think when we're talking about new muscle tissue, you have various ways to go about, you know, tackling this question, but you can sort of really pan out and say, all right, it's any anabolic signaling that causes new tissue to get added. So here our focus is how do we get the right signaling to get new tissue? When you talk about strength, you care about new tissue, but you want that new tissue to be situated in A way that makes you more likely to be able to produce force at a given task, while also wanting to make the nervous system better, more efficient at actually performing that task. So while there's definitely overlap there where you want the nervous system to be very good at taxing tissue in order to create the anabolic signaling and a bunch of, you know, double sided arrows in either, either direction, one of them is very focused on, all right, whatever is necessary to create that signaling cascade for more tissue wherever it's situated. Because we don't care about strength is what we want for hypertrophy. And on the other side of the coin, we want all the things that impact that force so as the main outcome we care about. So we don't want to add tissue in a way that is not going to facilitate an increase in strength, and we don't want the nervous system to be worrying about things in order to get an outcome that's not related to strength. So to put like an example on this, you could have a situation where you have reciprocal inhibition, where it's one muscle on the opposite side of, let's say the elbow, the tricep, that's preventing the bicep from producing as much fat force as it can. You're going to have a situation where you're not going to be able to curl as much because the tricep is preventing your bicep from actually curling. But from a hypertrophy standpoint, you could have the same amount of hypertrophy because your bicep itself is still overcoming the same amount of resistance. So less weight in your hand because the tricep is opposing the bicep. But from the biceps perspective, there's no difference. And therefore the anabolic signaling associated with that would probably be fairly similar. So there's ways that you could train by, you know, things that power lifters talk about, like holding heavier weights and stopping that reciprocal inhibition that we might care a lot more about from a strength standpoint, but wouldn't necessarily care about from our perturbee standpoint. And we won't get into those nitty gritty details there. I just wanted to sort of give some underlying, sort of overview of which adaptations we care about and how they would lead to each road.

Yeah, I think to give another example on the opposite end. So instead of a neural example, like a morphological example or a structural example, and feel free to tell me how stupid I am for how incorrect this is. But like a morphological or structural adaptation that we care about for hypertrophy. Right. For getting jacked we don't really care where that jackness is coming from. So, like, for instance, let's say sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is a thing that's occurring, and it's very common. That's great for us. I don't care where that new tissue is coming from. I don't care if it's in the contractile elements of a muscle or if it's in the goop holding the contractile elements together. I just want to be more jacked. If I want to be stronger. My sarcoplasm getting a lot larger and my myofibril staying around the same size is not gonna help me a whole lot. Right. So that's just an opposite end of the spectrum example of, like, a morphological adaptation we care about for hypertrophy that we don't care so much about strength to counter your neural adaptation. We care about strength that we don't care about for hypertrophy. All good?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's obviously controversy about, like, the extent to which and whether it occurs and so on, but just as a sort of, you know, thought experiment, for sure that's the case. So, yeah.

Oh, thank God. Do not tell me I'm wrong on camera, bro. I will not handle it well. Okay. I think that's. That's a good generalized overview of the things that are important for hypertrophy. Structural adaptations are really all we care about. I mean, there's. There. We obviously have some concern for neural adaptations and that we want to get good at lifting weights so that we can then further stimulate ourselves to tell our brain to grow more tissue. And obviously, we kind of want more. And then for strength, we want both structural changes specific to the areas in which our producing force to allow for more strength in the long run. And we care about actually getting better at the lifts themselves from a neural adaptation standpoint. Now, I think now we can talk about the most important factors in a training program to increase strength, specifically. Cool.

Yep.

All right.

Perfect.

And we have them under three general categories. Right. We have the specificity to the movement, rep, range, and range of motion that you want to be stronger in. Right. We have the percentage of 1 RM just means how much weight total are we actually putting on the bar or whatever implement we're using. And then, of course, the third one is improving technical proficiency, so getting better at actually executing the movement. Do you want to break any one of those three down any further? Is there anything you want to say about any of those?

Yeah, I think you could probably have some back and forth on each one. And that might be insightful for sort of thinking about these. So for specificity of the movement, obviously, if you're trying to get better at a squat, do a good amount of squatting and you could even so, I, I sort of break down specificity into two categories. I think of specificity as in the movement specificity, and I think of it as adaptive specificity. So what adaptations do I need to get in order to get better at something, and what thing do I need to do in order to get better at something that's almost very close to that exact thing? So when most people think of specificity, they think of the movement specificity, something that resembles the task you're trying to get better at. And they kind of neglect, to some extent, at least in their mind, adaptive specificity. So what adaptations do I want to elicit in order to get better at that task? So one might even argue that doing. There's a point of diminishing returns where the amount of squats that you do is not going to help you anymore. But doing a different variation of a squat would be more important for a strength athlete that is similar enough to a regular barbell squat or whatever. Let's say low bar is their regular lift that they really want to get better at. They might do some high bar in order to get some, you know, neural variation that allows them to sort of get really comfortable with the squat pattern in general, and that could sort of raise all boats. But from a hypertrophy standpoint, you don't necessarily care to be peripherally around a movement pattern. You're trying to stimulate muscles, so you care more about, like, which muscles are working at different ranges of motion and so on to get, to get the most anabolic signaling. So I think that is sort of a decent way to sort of think about specificity from a strength standpoint. And then percent of one rm, obviously, you know, if you're trying to get maximally strong, you want to be closer to your 1 RM for at least part of your training. So if you never get good at the skill of grinding a 1 RM, then you get underneath an actual load that's close to the 1 RM, and you're just not used to that task. There are some anomalies that can sort of get away with this, but for the most part, you want to practice getting pretty close to your one rep max as you sort of peak for a competition.

And you probably don't want to spend too much time really far away from it either. Like, you don't want to be doing all, most of the work that you do in like the 30 rep range if your primary goal is getting as strong as you possibly can, for sure.

And I think that's something that is interesting that I would always lean toward, even though we don't necessarily know exactly what's under the hood when we do something like that. So you could make a very weak argument that like, tissue is tissue and as long as I practice the movement to some extent, I'm going to be just fine. But there are, there's always a black box of things that we don't know what's happening. So could it be the force transmission? What's going on with the rigidity of even like the mice and heads or like the composition of the, of the light chains. But like, there's so many things that we don't know that I would rather veer on the side of. If there's no upside to being so high in reps and my goal is strength, I'm going to stay in the low to moderate rep range because there might be tons of adaptations that I'm not aware of that are being facilitated by being in that sort of lowish rep range. But from a sort of practical standpoint, you also don't want to spend way too much time close to your very max because obviously, you know, joint things and just psychologically getting under the bar when there's something that heavy just doesn't allow you to get as much practice in and so on. So you could definitely think of sort of the middle ground situation that most powerlifters fall in, where they do a good amount of practice at that, you know, five or three to six rep range, fairly close to failure, but definitely not two failures. So the majority of training is probably two, three reps shy of. And then when they get closer and closer to competition, they get more and more specific to that sort of grindy style.

Yeah, I mean, there's a reason most powerlifters consider like sets of 12 cardio, because they just don't spend a lot of time going far above 10, even when they're very far away from competition. And I think that's like an understandable thing. I mean, given that we know muscle can grow from a very, very wide spectrum of rep ranges, might as well stick relatively close to the rep ranges we really care about if we know that we're going to build the same amount of tissue from that that we would a much higher one. So I think if you're playing it safe and you really care about strength more than anything else, I don't see a really strong reason to go far above 10, certainly not a strong reason to go far above 15 on sets, even when you're months and months away from competition. Though I'm sure some actual strength enthusiast could tell me why that's such a silly take to have. Anything you want to say about technical proficiency before we move on to what, let's be honest, we all actually care about?

Yeah, I think I covered that kind of with like the squat thing. So yeah, I think we're good.

Sweet. Okay, so just to recapitulate, as it were, the most important things for increasing strength with respect to training, we definitely want to be specific, but not overly specific to the movement we are trying to improve. And that includes not only the movement but the rep range specifically that we're working in, meaning percent of 1 RM. And of course the range of motion that you want to be stronger in as well. If you are alignment, you really care about being able to produce force here to here. And if you can do that, you're probably good. You obviously care about full extension. But if you're able to get through your sticking point, no problem. That's important. And the same thing goes for power lifters. Right? And then of course, improving technical persistency is just getting better at the actual thing that you're trying to do, the movement that you're trying to do with respect to neural adaptations. Okay. By the way guys, if you're like me and want to maximize the time and effort you spend in the gym.

And with your diet, then you need.

To use a plan backed by the latest science. We have got an army of over 100,000 members who are getting into the best shape of their lives using our science based training and nutrition methods. To join today, just head over to builtwithscience.com and take my quiz to find the best program for you and your body. Most important factors for increasing hypertrophy. We also have three general pillars here that we can break down a little bit further. The first being proximity to failure. This does not mean that you have to train to failure. I'm sorry to all the Mike Mentzer zealots out there. You do not have to train to failure. Even though it is one of the pillars, we mean proximity to failure. So as long as you are somewhere between, let's call it zero and even five reps away from failure, probably closer to the zero to three area, one to three area, you're probably chicken that box. No problem. Right? And then of course volume we want to make sure that we're doing enough and enough sets in the gym to stimulate the anabolic signaling that Danny boy was discussing earlier, which is, generally speaking, somewhere between 12 and 20 sets per muscle per week. And remember that the way that volume is calculated in the literature is basically any movement that involves any muscle, even if it's a synergist or a secondary muscle in that movement, like the triceps and the bench press, that counts as a set to the triceps. Right. And then finally, exercise selection. We want to make sure that we're choosing exercises that actually target the muscle that we're trying to grow. Right. So for instance, if you're squatting for your hamstrings, that's probably not ideal. In fact, that's not a good idea at all. I'm being too charitable to squats. And there's more to talk about with exercise selection when we break this down. But before that, Danny boy, do you want to say anything about proximity to the failure or volume or anything like that?

No, I think you cover them pretty well. You went into some. Some more detail. But, yeah, exercise selection, I'm sure there's a lot more to say.

This is the biggest one to talk about. Proximity, failure, train hard, but not like you don't have to go to failure every single time. Volume, make sure you're doing somewhere between 12 and 20z each muscle. And then exercise election is like it's full conversation. You could make a whole podcast out of this. And we probably will at some point in the future. But we had a particular request from a listener, which is the first we've had ever, which was really cool. And he wanted to hear us talk about using the big three, the squat, the bench, and the deadlift in a hypertrophy program. If we should do it, if it's a good idea. And I think this is a really good place to talk about that, considering we're talking about exercise selection for hypertrophy. So the short answer for me, squat the bench and the deadlift, no, you should not. None of those should or need to be by any means in your program. And in fact, I would be willing to make the argument that there's really no strong argument for them to be in the program at all. And I think you could even make an argument that they're probably. I hate to use this term unironically, but suboptimal for hypertrophy gains. Most of them don't allow for a good stretch on the intended muscle, and most of them, usually you aren't stopping that exercise because of the muscle in which you're trying to target. Not necessarily true for the bench press. Usually your pecs are what are giving out. And then I would say maybe the quads as well can be the thing that gives out on squats. But that's not always the case, certainly for the deadlift. Like, I don't know, usually your hamstrings or glutes, which generally speaking, the muscle people want to hit when they're doing stuff like deadlifts are not going to be the reason that you cut that off. But also, what do I know, Danny boy? Anything you want to say about exercise selection or specific to what I just said? Either?

Yeah, I think the specific big three. So a barbell squat, a barbell deadlift from the floor and a barbell bench press. Regular barbell bench press. Probably. Yeah, I mean, I agree aren't they are definitely good choices. So I wouldn't say that they were, you know, of course you could definitely, probably get most of your gains from them because we don't know how stretched we need to be in order to get the most benefit and so on. So all of the benefits are, you know, somewhat theoretical. But you could probably make a different argument for each one specifically. So I'd say bench is probably good to great where many people sort of are already getting like a really good stretch there and the target muscle is the, the reason why they're failing and it's stable enough where they get a really good stimulus, it can overload it. So it checks a lot of boxes there for the squat. Same thing. It usually checks a lot of boxes. And the deadlift I'd say is probably the one you can make the strongest argument against because of the fact that the range of motion is considerably smaller than it could be if you were just, you know, elevate yourself on a plate or you know, have some sort of deficit there. You also are considerably more fatigued. I think anybody you ask, you know, which, which lift takes the most out of you and if you're already saying that it's probably not the best from, you know, taking the muscle through its full range motion standpoint and then you add on the fact that people just don't want to continue the session after they're done with doing deadlifts and so on, you could probably say, yeah, you know, probably not the best choice. Is it still good or is it going to cause a considerable amount of growth and can be part of a program for sure. And we'll talk about later on how to sort of integrate these. But yeah, I think none of them definitely need to be in a program. Like, if I saw a program and none of them were included, I wouldn't think anything of it. If anything, I'd be like, oh, that's, that's, that's great. But the patterns I would want to see.

So of course, pattern, some sort of.

Hinge pattern and some sort of pressing pattern is, is, you know, or horizontal pressing pattern would definitely be. You definitely want to include. But there's always going to be pros and cons, what people have, you know, access to, what people enjoy doing, so on. But yeah, I definitely agree for the most part that. Would they be in the S tier for, for any particular muscle group? Probably not.

Yeah. And then I think it's important to note it. Note on like anatomical differences. Like some people like, like for instance, you and Mike Israel squatting. For you guys, I mean, it's basically a quote. Again, I hate using this word, but like an optimal exercise essentially for, for your legs, it's just no problem at all for either one of you to get to a deep, deep hole when you're squatting. Right. For less fortunate individuals such as myself, my femurs are a little bit longer. And squatting for me is if I don't have like an elevated heel and I don't take some precautions, squatting is just not a great exercise for me. Now. I still do it because I do think it's a great exercise and I don't have access to like a leg press or a hack squat or pendulum squat or anything that I think would be theoretically better. It doesn't matter. I do think they're fine exercises. The deadlift, of course I want to see an RDL or some sort of hip hinging pattern. Do I think it even that. Do I think it's ideal or, sorry, necessary for hypertrophy? I don't know. It's actually a really interesting thing to me. If you're going to choose one hamstring exercise to do. I think doing a hamstring curl over a hip hinge is probably ideal solely because all the hamstrings are involved in curling. Most, but not all are involved in hip hinges. Just a little quick thing there, but not. Certainly not like super important or anything. And then the bench. Yeah, like most people just don't have trouble benching or anything like that. Anything else you want to say about exercise selection or important factors for increasing hypertrophy? Anything left?

I mean, I think there's a bunch, but I Think those are probably the top three. I think we'll probably get into how we sort of make decisions about a bunch of different tenants of each training. But before we do that, I think because we're already on exercise selection, we can sort of just continue with that. So I think one important thing to point out for exercise selection between the two is that hypertrophy is a lot more forgiving. And as you were just talking about, like with the hamstring curl or with any sort of leg curl, you could have arguably optimal program with just curling variations and probably not be leaving much on the table in the way of hamstring growth. With, with. If you're, if your goal is hypertrophy, but if your goal is strength and you want to get stronger at any deadlift especially, yeah, then you definitely want to include some sort of hinge and obviously the deadlift itself so you can't get around some of those more fatiguing exercises or even around injuries, which is something that obviously we all deal with either niggling injuries or, you know, actual really bad injuries. You can almost always do something for hypertrophy where whether it's bfr, whether it's higher reps, whether it's a different exercise that doesn't tempo, that thing is even like hand, hand injuries and, and things like that you can easily, easily work around. While obviously for strength, when you have a specific set of exercises you're trying to get better at, you could be held back. There's always stuff you can do and it's, it's a good idea to still do all the things that you can, but you're definitely taking a major step back while in hypertrophy. Honestly, a lot of the times people realize how they sort of have eye opening moments when they get injured with hypertrophy training. While, you know, the same is probably not true for strength where it's like, oh, wow, I can really add these exercises and potentially even get a better overall session from not having, you know, too many fatiguing exercises in one session just because a lot of people consider them to be the best and so on. So yeah, I think something with exercise selection that it's important to point out is that you just have one, a variety of options and it's more forgiving. But two, that variety probably also facilitates more growth because we have potential for regional benefits and potential for, you know, different muscles, especially when they cross two joints and so on, to be working during different exercise patterns. So variety in and of itself is going to be good for growth. So that's why it's just so forgiving. While in strength, you really want that variety to facilitate a specific exercise. Moving up in load. So sorry for you strength folks out there, but, yeah, it is definitely harder to work around stuff, and it's a.

Less forgiving adaptation in general. Like, with hypertrophy. Like, I've said this maybe even on this podcast, like, a billion times, but, like, not every road leads to Rome with respect to hypertrophy, but, like, damn near all of them do. And there's like a. An essentially limitless number of ways to achieve basically the same goal. So basically, anytime any jacked person says you have to do this to get jacked, they're likely wrong. Because they're. They're wrong. And with respect to strength, like, sorry, you want to get better at the squat? You're gonna have to do the squat at some point if you want to get to. If you want to be the best squatter that you can possibly be. Right. And so, yeah, I agree that, like, the three DMJ guys talk about injury and bodybuilding training a lot and how, like, they'll have dudes, like, six weeks out of an actual bodybuilding show, and all they're able to do because of hip injuries or whatever it is is leg extensions and leg curls, and they step on stage and they look the best they've ever looked. So. Which is awesome. Thank goodness. We like hypertrophy training. It makes working around the injuries that I'm constantly dealing with much, much easier. Right. Okay. Moving away from exercise selection. Right. And into more general, kind of less big pillars, but still things to consider for programming. We're going to talk about just a couple. We're just going to give a couple of examples of practical decisions that you have to make with respect to other things like rest periods and proximity to failure and rep ranges and stuff like that for programming in general. So, like, for instance, Danny Boy volume recommendations, the number of sets that you're doing in a week, how does that differ when you're programming for maximal strength versus programming for maximal hypertrophy?

Yeah. So your goal, and you're trying to get stronger, is to get stronger. So putting more weight on the bar is what you want to do. So generally speaking, more moderate volumes are going to make the most sense for strength because that allows you to not have fatigue in each session and allows you to put more weight on the bar. While from a hypertrophy standpoint, you do want to be getting stronger, but your goal is not necessarily to be getting maximally stronger at a Particular lift, like we were saying earlier, your goal is to stimulate all of those anabolic pathways. So there could be a situation where you could be not getting as strong as you possibly could. And that's very likely to be the case, not getting strong as strong as you possibly could at a particular lift. But there is more anabolic signaling. So you generally want to veer on the side of, you know, no resource constraints, no time constraints, and things like that. You generally want to be on the side of more volume for hypertrophy and more on the side of moderate volume for strength. But strength is an interesting one where I think while hypertrophy is more forgiving, strength is an easier adaptation to actually track and know you're getting better because it's obvious there's more weight on the bar, right? There is obviously some fatigue to account for and so on, that you don't know exactly how maximally strong you are at any given point, but you directionally know when you're getting stronger. You don't really directionally know when you're getting more jacked until four, six months down the line after you've cut. You know, you have proxies, you have the fact that you've gotten better at a whole bunch of lifts and so on, but because of those neural adaptations and structural adaptations that aren't necessarily tracking with actually getting bigger, they're could be a situation where you got stronger at a whole bunch of things but didn't actually get that much bigger. You might have gotten a little bit bigger, but not to the amount that you wanted to. So with strength, I think while the recommendation is for most people, moderate volumes probably make the most sense, experimenting with what actually gets you more weight on the bar after any given cycle is probably a really good idea. While for hypertrophy, my opinion on this at least is cycling between moderate and high, if you can tolerate it, is probably a really good idea. So you're getting some theoretical benefits at those higher levels and then sort of cycling down to the moderate, where you're probably getting most of the benefit and psychologically switching gears and so on. So I think that because of the fact that we don't really, really know if we're getting bigger on shorter time scales, experimenting with higher and moderate makes a whole lot of sense for hypertrophy. But for strength, if you find that you just do better and put more weight on the bar with more moderate or even lower volumes, which many people fall into that category, then just stick with that. Your goal is more weight on the bar, it's not more tissue or at least in the medium term. Right. So I think that's a very non succinct answer to your question, hopefully. Do you have anything to add there?

Just, let's just put some numbers on it. Like when you're saying things like modern versus high, like are we saying for hypertrophy somewhere like if you're on the higher end, maybe somewhere like 15 to 20 sets per week for a muscle, and on the modern, maybe closer to like six to ten sets per muscle. Like, does that sound relatively in the ballpark of what we're trying to communicate?

Yeah, for strength. Yeah. I almost have different landmarks, but yeah, like 6 to 12 for that versus like 12 to 18 for hypertrophy. But even with hypertrophy training, when I, when I mean moderate to high, I'm talking like 12 to 20 being moderate and high being 20 to like 25, slash even 30 for some muscle groups. So I'll play this is time, not an issue. Recovery, not an issue.

Everything's created equal just on paper, obviously.

Yeah, exactly. For the vast, vast, vast majority of people, I'd probably stick with 12 to 20 for, for hypertrophy. But if the person says I want to absolutely do everything I can to maximize muscle size and I seem to recover well from higher volumes and like, you know, my weights are going up, all that kind of stuff at higher volumes and moderate volumes, I'd probably oscillate between moderate and high. So to 12 to 20 and 20 to 30. While from a strength standpoint, I'm not necessarily going to oscillate because of the fact that with hypertrophy I don't know exactly what's going on. So I'm going to look for those theoretical maximizations. While from a strength standpoint, you know, it'll be a little easier to see what's going on with what they can actually put on the bar with different volumes.

So yeah, yeah, if weight goes down over time, with respect to like, sorry, not over time, but like, let's say one week you're doing 135 for 10, and the next week you're doing like you get 135 for 8. If we're doing, if we're training for strength, it's like, okay, something's wrong here. If we're training for hypertrophy, it's like something might be wrong here, but either way let's kind of keep pushing it because we don't really know. So I think that I agreed with basically everything that you just said. I think that's a really good point. And I didn't think volume was going to take so long, but that was silly of me to think that we were going to breeze through that proximity to failure. I don't think there's a whole lot to say here. Probably more important for hypertrophy than strength. You can probably be a little bit further away from. From 0rir. You can be a little bit further away from failure when you're doing strength training. Again, at all costs. We're trying to maximize the amount of weight that's put on the bar. Right. And obviously if you're. Go ahead. You have something to say there.

Oh yeah, I was just going to add because I think this might be useful to people. The difference between RPE and rar.

Oh, hell yeah, dude, for sure. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. So basically for from a hypertrophy standpoint, using RPE or rating of perceived exertion isn't super useful because you're usually at moderate rep ranges. So knowing how many reps you are from failure or reps in reserve is very useful. And you probably don't need RP ever. So if I have two reps left in the tank, I have two reps in reserve. That means that if I completed those two reps I would reach failure. But from for rpe, it's more about how hard the set feels and many of the times they correlate decently well, but they have a very one very distinct difference in that RP basically allows you to say how hard something felt and especially when you get to lower rep ranges. So three reps or a three RM. Let's say I do 315 for three. I could have had one rep left in the tank. But you could be at an RP, you know, nine for 315 and then an RPE 9.5 at 330. But you still had one rep left in the tank. So you can have a bunch of lifts where you still have one rep left in the tank, but you don't get to say exactly how hard the set felt and how much of a grind it was. So having that level of granularity for a strength program and using RPE in conjunction with a strength program I think is very useful to people. And it's a common question. We get like, oh, you know, RPE versus rir, why can't we just use one or the other? Is it the same exact thing? So RPE9 equals RIR1. And yeah, to some extent they definitely correlate, but there's Differences, especially at those low rep ranges that really allow for RPE to shine for strength programs.

Yeah, I think. I think the.05, as silly as it is, like just being able to do 0.5 for something, meaning I couldn't have done another rep, but I could have done the same number of reps with a little bit more weight, is like an incredibly valuable thing for strength training and doesn't really offer much at all with respect to hypertrophy training. So, yeah, that was a really good point with respect to programming for strength versus hypertrophy. Okay, last thing we'll talk about before we talk about the last little variable we'll talk about before we get to how to program for both, if you want to increase both, is just rest periods and not a whole lot here to be said. Again, we're trying to maximize weight on the bar for strength. So rest as long as it takes for you to be able to maintain the amount of weight that you have on the bar for a set of a triple or whatever it may be. And for those, the classic meme of like a power lifter in the gym always has a lawn chair with him because he's going to relax and. And sit down for 10 minutes in between sets. And then with respect to hypertrophy, it's kind of even more simple than that. It's just rest as long as you need to until you kind of feel ready to go again. Which, generally speaking, we're going to have a whole podcast on rest periods here soon, I think. But generally speaking, anywhere between like 1 1/2 minutes to 3 minutes is probably a good idea. And you can rest longer. Not really any reason to think that resting longer is necessarily bad as far as, like, just time management in the gym, you probably don't want to be resting for five minutes between sets if you could get away with resting two minutes. Right. Anything you want to say there?

I think it's good. Succinct.

Cool. I mean, you had a whole poem on. On rest periods that you wrote. So I actually remember, like, for the.

Next three weeks, and then I forgot it. Sorry.

That's cool. It's like what I did with the preamble, and it's great. That's quite all right. Okay, last thing we're going to discuss before we cut the cut. This episode is just some considerations you would make if you were trying to achieve both simultaneously. So let's say you have a guy come to you or a gal come to you, and they're just like, hey, look, I'm not Tricking. I'm not looking to get as big as I possibly can. I'm not looking to get as strong as I possibly can. But generally speaking, I want to get stronger and I want to get jacked. What would you recommend?

Yeah, so if you consider all the pillars there, then you veer on the side of every single theoretical recommendation for hypertrophy that is speculative, forget about, because there's, there's just no reason to be at higher rep ranges. There's no reason to do a lot of the variations that might get. So like bfr, for example, you know, there might be some unique benefits to bfr, but if you go to strength, then, you know, getting those theoretical benefits is not worth it to you and so on. So just from a sort of bird's eye view, take all those theoretical considerations and don't lean into them pretty much at all because they, they don't really matter that much in the grand scheme of things. So with that out of the way, I think exercise selection, obviously you're going to choose the specific exercises that they want to actually get stronger at and keep them in the program and very.

Less far away from them, obviously.

Yeah, exactly. So all of the variations are going to be very similar to the, the pattern. That's what you're referring to, right?

Yes, yeah, of course.

So then obviously if time is not an issue, allowing them to rest as much as they need is specifically on the lift that they want to get stronger at, but not necessarily on the sort of ancillary lifts, I think is a good idea. Having proximity to failure be in that moderate zone. So going so close to failure where you're getting pretty much no extra benefit for hypertrophy, most likely you're going to lean toward leaving, you know, two in reserve for especially the, the lifts that they want to get better at. That way they're not tanking themselves on the first set and then have to, you know, lower the load on that specific lift. So they're getting a good amount of practice in for that specific thing. And after that, I mean, honestly, training looks very, very similar. So I don't think that there's any like super, super special considerations there other than, oh, I didn't mention volume, so I'd stick to moderate. I wouldn't go so high that, you know, some theoretical hypertrophy benefits there, but you're probably going to get the vast majority of the benefits in that sort of 16 sets per muscle group per week range. So probably stick to around there and let what's going on with those Lifts.

Guided a little bit.

But my guess is, is that for the vast, and I've seen also for the vast majority of people, they can continue to milk their gains in that range for both strength and hypertrophy. So literally in either direction, doing any sort of, like, theoretical gymnastics is just not worth it for the person that's trying to sort of catch those two rabbits.

And I think you can get even more granular. Yeah. Like, think about it. I think the way that powerlifters and people who care about strength think about lifting is they think about it in terms of movements and the way that bodybuilders and people like Danny Boy, who are fake bodybuilders call it, like, we think about muscles. And I think that you can. You can take that, take aspects of both and apply it to this type of programming. Right? So the movements that the individual, this, this Jane or John Doe that comes to you, the movements that they care about, and let's just keep it simple and say that they care about the big three, the squat, the bench, and the deadlift for getting strong, we can apply all of the pillars that we talked about with respect to strength training and apply those to those movements. And so we're still technically practicing them. We're using a decent proximity to failure, but nothing too taxing volumes that are appropriate for that type of lift. Resting, obviously, the way we would. And then for other muscles, especially muscles that aren't going to drastically interfere with those big three movements, we can treat very similarly to how we would in a normal hypertrophy program. Right. So, like, and I'm really thinking of delts here. Right. Like, if I want to. Like, I don't see any reason why doing a set of 20 on lateral raises would have a. And using a relatively higher volumes for delts, especially lateral delts, would have a big impact on my big three. Assuming that I'm applying all of the same logic that I would for a powerlifting program to the big three. Right. And I know some individuals have talked about if you want to maximize both, you can basically do a normal hypertrophy program with very specific training to increasing 1 RMS for the squat, bench and deadlift. There are issues there. And I think Danny Boy's approach is a little bit more appropriate in that all of the theoretical benefits of.

The.

More tinkering small details of hypertrophy training, you can throw those out, and that's probably a much more appropriate way of going about maximizing both. Rather than doing five sets of one or five doubles on the squat and then going and doing a normal leg workout. Right. But I think aside from that, there's not a whole lot to consider here right now. If you have someone come to you and they're like, I want to get just generally stronger and I want to build more muscle, to be quite honest, I'm just going to throw that person on the hypertrophy program because, like, they're probably going to get the benefits that they actually want. However, if someone specifically comes to me and they say, I want to get better at the squad pension deadlift, like, then we're going to have to make some more considerations like the ones that we were just talking about. Is there anything you disagree with, with what I just said? Is there anything that you think that that wouldn't work out super well?

No, I think that's definitely good. I was nodding my head in agreement basically, like, honestly for. And I'm thinking of a few clients here throwing in a triple or two with the lifts that they care about while doing, you know, mostly hypertrophy program. I mean, they get stronger for sure. As long as you're practicing that movement and adding tissue and your goal is not necessarily to have the absolute most strength possible, you're going to continue to get stronger at those lifts and maybe even have more fun at it than really, you know, going crazy trying to make sure all your ancillary lifts and all of your. This is something we didn't talk about. But bringing up weaker muscles as opposed to bringing up lagging muscles is a big thing between shrink and hypertrophy. So which, which muscle is limiting the lift as opposed to which muscle is limiting how jacked you look is obviously a consideration there. So if you have super, you know, weak triceps and they're limiting your bench press, obviously doing more specific tricep work and so on. So I guess that brought us to, to that point. So, so that's a good thing. But yeah, I don't, I don't think that it matters that much beyond just making sure that you get some good practice at the specific lifts that you care about. While, you know, mostly hypertrophy looking program. And I definitely agree with the whole, the person wants to get generally stronger and they, they want to get jacked. You pretty much can, I mean, they're going to get stronger in hypertrophy program. The goal is to get stronger at a specific rep range. So I definitely lean into that. And I think that's also why like a lot of people ask, well, why do you care about, you know, body composition slash, making people more Jacked. Well, the vast majority of people that come to you just want to look better with a shirt off. So I think the reason why we sort of leaned into it is because of the fact that we, along with most of our clients, just really want to be a bit leaner and more jacked. So the vast, vast, vast majority of them don't care about having a, you know, 500 pound squad and, you know, a 315 bench and so on. So, yeah, I think, yeah, I think.

I mean, it goes without saying that looking like you can bench 225 is infinitely more important than being able to bench 225, I think. And I would hope that all of you agree with that. Listening. Otherwise, stop listening because you are in the wrong podcast here. You're listening to the wrong group of people talk. Just a joke. Please continue listening. Makes us look good and feel good. All of our confidence comes from people listening to this podcast. Okay, all good?

I think so.

Recap everything. All right, so just to very quickly go through this again, and I'll just say that the most important things for increasing strength, generally speaking, are the specificity to the movement that we care about, the amount of weight you're actually lifting, so the percentage of 1 RM. And then, of course, improving the technical aspects of a lift, getting better at actually doing the movement you care about. Right. As opposed to hypertrophy, in which the most important factors are how close you are to failure. Generally, you want to be somewhere between one and three, but maybe even like five reps away from failure. You want to make sure that you're doing enough volume for each muscle each week to ensure that you're maximizing the anabolic signaling that you get to ensure more tissue growth. So somewhere between 12 and 20 sets a week for each muscle. And then of course, you want to choose exercises that actually stimulate the muscle you're interested in growing. And there's more to talk about with exercise selection, but not on a recap. And then if you want to maximize both, generally speaking, your program is going to look a lot more like a hypertrophy program than a strength program. With a couple of things sprinkled in specifically for strength. We're going to cut out all of the potential intensity techniques that we would be doing. We're going to cut out any rep ranges above certainly 15, but honestly, probably like 12. And we're going to have some practicing of heavy lifts. So depending on which movements you care about, generally the squat, the bench, and the deadlift, we're going to be having to do some doubles, some singles, some triples, to make sure that we're actually practicing the movement that we care about getting stronger out. Anything else?

I think that's good. I think we spent the whole podcast not mentioning the fact that more muscle tissue, generally speaking, is going to make you stronger. So that's why it's important to point out that, you know, it looks most mostly like a pertrophy program, because a lot of the adaptations that allow you.

To get bigger ultimately result into you getting stronger as well. Jeremy Linnick, you listening? Just freaking out in his seat right now because I know he was in this podcast. Yeah, Yeah, I think that was well said. Okay. All good?

Yes, sir.

All right. As always, thank you so much for listening to the Built With Science podcast. If there's a topic that you want us to talk about or cover that we have yet to do, so. Wow, I really butchered that, didn't I? If there's something you want us to talk about that we haven't done yet, please feel free to reach out to us at Built With Science on Instagram. And of course, as always, thank you so much for listening.