I Proved (Almost) Everyone Is Wasting Time In The Gym

What if half the time and effort you're spending in the gym isn't actually doing anything? What?

What?

I know, I know how that sounds, but I just ran an experiment on over 200 people, and what we found went against everything I thought I knew about training. I'll break down exactly what we did, why most studies never catch this, and how many workouts you actually need to get the best results. Ever since I got into lifting, I've always been someone who trains a lot. Usually with 6 hard workouts a week. Because according to the latest research, the more sets you do at the gym, the faster you grow. But most of these studies have only tested high volumes on 1 or 2 muscles at a time, not your entire body. So was I actually getting more gains training 6 days per week, or could I have gotten just as good of results training with half of that? To find out, I just need to run one of the biggest experiments of my life on 200 real people. That's Drew. He's one of 200 lifters we recruited as part of our 10-week experiment, where each lifter was randomly assigned into one of 2 groups. The first group, which Drew fell into, is training 6 days per week using a push-pull-leg split. Pretty much the exact same routine I followed for years, with around 20 sets per muscle per week. Now, the second group is also doing a push-pull-leg split, but only 3 workouts per week. So same general program, same Muscles worked, but half the workouts and half the number of sets. Coming off of working out 6 days a week, this is kind of nothing. Like me and most of the subjects we polled, Matt is predicting that the group training twice as much should build the most muscle. He's even worried if he'll be able to build any muscle at all on this plan.

I don't know.

I hope I don't get fat.

Now, to control everyone's nutrition, every subject followed a small calorie surplus with a minimum daily protein target, and everything was tracked in our Built With Science app. So if we noticed anyone wasn't consistent, we kicked them out of the experiment. We also made sure both groups were balanced for gender and had an equal number of beginner and intermediates in each. And as for how we're measuring muscle growth, each week participants are submitting circumference measurements of their flexed and unflexed muscles. And while you might think this isn't the most accurate way to assess growth—

A lot of studies, including some of your videos, Jeremy, you'll take a smaller group of people and do these really high-tech body composition measurements. But obviously you can only do that with small groups of people. So with this kind of design, what we do is we sacrifice the high-tech body comp measurements so that we can expand out and get a more, you know, larger, more representative sample.

That's Dr. Eric Trexler, a statistician and muscle growth researcher who helped us design this experiment in the first place. After the 10 weeks are up, he'll independently crunch the numbers and tell us exactly what happened. But so far, after just 3 weeks of training, the 6-day-per-week group are struggling to keep up.

This week I missed a few morning workouts, had to do them at night. After leaving the office, I started to dislike the 6-day split a bit.

This is where we quickly started to notice a big difference between our 2 groups. We actually asked all of our subjects to rate the difficulty of their program at the end of each week. Going into the gym only 3 days a week, I am giving 110% rather than cutting corners here and there. I'm totally digging the program so far. I've done it 6 times. I've tried 6-day routines in the past, but this program, it gives me energy. I wake up wanting to work out instead of dreading it. And in the first 4 weeks, the 3-workout group consistently rated their workouts feeling easier and easier, whereas in our 6-workout group—

It's a lot.

It's definitely tough to hit 6 days of the week. My muscles are still sore when I work out. Probably tougher than I expected. They ranked their workouts as much harder and never really got any easier. But we also asked both groups to rank how much they thought their workouts were working. I had a massage this week and she said that she could tell that my muscles were a lot stronger, a lot of definition and like the V-shape.

I will say that my progress has been explosive. If I look at week 0 and now, there is a huge difference.

And while both the 3 and 6-day groups were confident their plans were working, the 6-day group repeatedly seemed to believe their program was doing more to maximize growth. And it seemed like that confidence was helping them push through even the most challenging of their workouts.

I feel nauseated, which causes vomiting after the leg exercise a couple of days ago. Now I can relate to people who like to skip the leg day.

Meanwhile, some members of our 3-day group weren't sure if they were seeing results at all. My belly's what's growing. The rest of me is, is kind of staying the same. I do not feel any stronger nor fitter. So at this point, I would say our 6th workout group not only had over a decade's worth of research predicting they would win, but they also seemed to have a clear advantage in confidence as well.

I've been telling myself to stop whining and wake up when the alarm is on. I'm enjoying the result of my discipline, which means enjoying the program as well.

Hearing Atto say this made me feel pretty optimistic that he was using the best plan. That is until the last few weeks of the experiment, where there was one trend I kept noticing from our 3 workout groups. I feel way stronger than I did last week. I'm starting to feel like I'm in my 30s again. Our 3-worker group kept making videos about feeling stronger and lifting heavier than they did the week before. I think maybe I did push myself harder because I only had 3 days and like, we gotta make these count. We gotta go hard. We only have 3 days. Meanwhile, members of our 6-worker group were talking about the training plan as if they were just trying to survive.

Am I enjoying the program so far? No, I'm not.

I don't know that I would recommend anybody to follow this kind of program. Maybe if I were half my age, It wouldn't be such a big deal. But feelings don't necessarily tell you which program actually builds more muscle. So after 10 weeks, we collected all of the data and we sent it to Dr. Eric Trexler and let the numbers decide.

Whenever I analyze data, the first thing I do is just visualize the data. I try to get an understanding of the data characteristics and the distributions. You're basically trying to make sure that your data collection process yielded data that are high quality and realistic. And looking at the data from this experiment, that was definitely the case. The analysis revealed that all of the groups in this experiment did on average achieve statistically significant growth.

Now, the million-dollar question is which group grew the most?

Combined growth in the 6-day program was 0.83 inches on average, whereas the 3-day-a-week push-pull-legs led to a combined growth of 0.75 inches. Now, you might say, you know, that looks like, like a meaningful difference. But it's important to understand that that was not nearly a significant difference between the two. And any statistician would look at these data and say those two groups essentially grew the same amount.

So despite our 3-day group doing half the training, statistically they grew pretty much the same as the 6-day group. Now, my first assumption is that we accidentally screwed something up. The strongest available research out there suggests that if you go from 10 sets per muscle per week To double that, you should get about 60% more gains. And when I run that calculation, that means the 6-day-per-week group should have seen a combined growth of 1.2 inches instead of just 0.83.

In my experience, most people who push to higher frequencies and higher volumes, they end up sacrificing other aspects of their program.

That's Dr. Eric Helms, a muscle researcher and natural pro bodybuilder. When I came to him with our findings, he explained how your muscles don't actually care about how many sets are written in your workout. They only respond to the actual muscle-building stimulus those sets create.

So there's absolutely scenarios in my coaching experience where people have done something like going from 20+ sets to say in the teens and started to grow better or more or break a plateau. And it's because the actual dose was higher. When they dropped the volume, it's just that they did everything else better and they didn't realize how much they were sandbagging.

And there's an interesting psychological reason as to why this happens. See, back in 2014, researchers had people do 12 sets of maximal isometric bicep contractions, trying to produce as much force as possible on every set. But researchers only told half the participants how many sets they'd be doing, whereas for the other half, Researchers lied and told them they would only have to do 6 sets total. And so despite both groups being told to push themselves as hard as possible on every set, the group that knew they were going to be doing 12 sets paced themselves and consistently produced less power than the group who thought they only had to do 6. And that may be exactly what was happening in our 6-workout-per-week group. There's an accumulation of fatigue. I need to pace myself more. It's just, it's just a lot of volume to do 6 days a week. Even though our app prompts them to push them close to failure, failure on every set, just knowing that they had twice as much training to get through could have very well caused them to subconsciously hold back or let their form slip as they got tired. But now you might be wondering, if that's the case, then why do studies still consistently show more volume equals more growth?

Ready?

Push, push, go, go, push, go, go, go! Most people do not train hard enough in their training. When we get them into the lab and we— I mean, they're all supervised training and we push the crap out of them. Research studies are designed to isolate one variable and control everything else. And so when volume is increased, participants are supervised to make sure they're still pushing just as hard and keeping their form consistent. In fact, just 3 days before we were supposed to post this video, a brand new study was published by one of our Built With Science researchers. They compared a group training under supervision with another group doing the exact same plan but with no one watching them. And after just 8 weeks, the supervised group grew more in pretty much every single muscle measured, with fat-free mass gains favoring the supervised group by more than a pound. So in the real world, unless someone is watching every rep and pushing you, you're left to manage that yourself. And if you don't, a lot of the extra time and effort you're putting into the gym could very well be going to waste. Okay, so what should you actually do with all this information? Well, to start, there's 3 tests you can do to determine if you're actually wasting time in the gym. Test number 1 is rep speed. If you're pushing hard enough, your last few reps in a set should move much slower compared to your first few reps. If not, it means you're likely stopping too soon. Test number 2, rep drop-off. So let's say you're doing 3 sets of an exercise. If with the same weight, your reps stay almost perfectly flat from set to set or somehow go up on your final set, that's a good sign you didn't push hard enough in your earlier sets. If you're pushing hard, you should see some drop-off. And so maybe 12 reps in set 1 becomes 11 in set 2, and then that becomes 9 or 10 in set 3. But the final and most important test is actually the simplest. If you look back at the last 2 or 3 months of your training, are you consistently adding reps or weight on your main lifts? If yes, then your program is probably doing its job. But if you're training 5 or 6 days a week and your lifts haven't moved in months, you might actually want to try cutting it back.

Well, it might not be a terrible idea to do a little experiment with yourself. You know, try to cut down on your volume for a training block or 2. Really push your intensity. Be very intentional about bringing effort into your sessions. And it's easy to just kind of watch your progress over time.

Practically, this could look something like just doing 2 hard, high-quality sets per exercise instead of the usual 3 or 4.

If you do find that, wow, I'm actually pushing those sets a lot harder, I'm more focused in the gym, and the lack of volume is not holding me back, You may find retrospectively that you were kind of wasting your time doing some low effort sets.

Okay, but now let's say you're somebody like me. You know how to train hard, your form is dialed, and whether you have 5 sets or 20 to do, you're gonna push them all properly. And so in this case, surely doing way more volume should build more muscle, right? Well, this is where things get interesting, because shortly after we finished our experiment, a group of researchers conducted a very similar experiment. They took over 100 trained lifters and compared roughly 36 weekly sets for their arms and thighs against just 9 sets. That's about 4 times the volume. But unlike our experiment, every workout they did was supervised to make sure the high volume group didn't start slacking on the extra sets. And so if high volume was ever going to completely blow lower volume out of the water, technically this should have been it.

The data do slightly favor the higher volumes in this, in this study, but the difference is probably what most people would consider non-meaningful. I think that's just worth acknowledging that every single set you start adding, and especially once you get into the teens and 20s, it's such a marginal return on investment.

But that doesn't mean the extra work was useless, especially for someone like Eric who's on a mission to become one of the top 5 natural bodybuilders in the world.

I just spent 10 to 11 hours of this week training, and I could have gotten almost the same outcome doing a third of that. Like, it's, it's, it's stupid, right?

And so if you're someone who's willing to make that trade-off to squeeze out every last bit of muscle, then I have some really good news, because we actually tested a third workout group that actually got the best results of the entire experiment. For this group, we took all the volume from our 6-day split And we packed it into just 3 full body workouts with supersets to save time.

The difference was very small and not statistically significant, but technically the program that caused the most growth was the 3-day full body program. It led on average to a growth of 0.87 inches, which was slightly greater than what we observed on the 6-day push-pull-legs program. It's probably not the volume because the volume was matched with that push-pull-legs 6-day-a-week program. Maybe it's the frequency, right? So that 3-day full body workout, they're training higher frequency per muscle group, meaning because you're taking the same volume per muscle group but splitting it into more workouts, you're not getting into that situation where your performance trails off when you do set after set after set.

Ironically, this plan is actually quite similar to how Eric Helms structures his own training. But instead of doing just 3 full body workouts per week, He does 6, with each workout being split into 2 separate sessions, one in the morning and one in the evening, to maximize volume while keeping the quality of each workout as high as possible. And so if you're somebody who wants to do everything you can to maximize your growth, and you're confident you're not going to let the extra volume compromise your effort or form, then here's what I recommend in terms of sets per week and some good workout split options. But on the other hand, if you just want to make solid gains without spending a ton of time in the gym, Or you're somebody who's training a lot right now and just not seeing great results, then here's what I recommend. And so while I'm personally not willing to go as far as Eric to maximize growth, I do train hard 4 to 5 times a week, which gets me about 60 to 70% of the way there. Trade-off that makes sense for me. But just as we saw with our experiment members, any plan can get you results as long as you're willing to stick with it and support it with good nutrition. And if you want all of this guesswork taken care of for you with a personalized workout and nutrition plan that adjusts weekly Based on how your body is actually responding, I highly, highly recommend trying out our Built with Science Plus app. You can try it completely free for two weeks by scanning this QR code right here or heading to builtwithscience.com. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you very soon. Hello.

Oh hi!

What's up, man?

Good to see you.

How did you like training six times a week? It seems like you had quite a hard time.

Am I enjoying the program so far? No, I'm not. I feel nauseated. Quite frankly, I am. I would say that I hated at that time.

Well, I do have some good news for you. I have another experiment.

Oh, wow. Yeah, sure.

I'm in.