The Best Recovery Hacks to Build Muscle Faster (Based On Science)

Foreign it is Max Goldman and Daniel Plotkin here with the Built With Science podcast. And today, Danny Boy and I are going to be talking about recovery, and we're going to be discussing various aspects of recovery from what it is, fundamentally, why it's so crucial and important for hypertrophy, how we can maximize recovery and then consequently, hopefully maximize our hypertrophic adaptations to exercise. And we'll even touch on some recovery strategies that we commonly see people doing that are likely doing more harm than good. But first, before we do that, of course, Danny Boy, why don't you lead us off by just telling us what recovery is in general?

Yeah. So, surprisingly, recovery's kind of hard to define, especially in the context of exercise. So recovery from a general standpoint is just returning to basal state. So you get some perturbation of homeostasis or some sort of insult, and then you try to recover from that insult or try to get back to your normal state from that insult. But when we talk about the context of exercise, we're actually trying to gain something out of that insult. We were trying to gain something out of stressing the system. So in the context of hypertrophy training, we're trying to gain muscle from stressing the system for in the context of strength training, we're trying to put more load on the bar and so on. So I think the best way to define it in the context of exercise is doing the right amount of things inside the gym and the right amount of things outside the gym to create the best adaptations. So all of the outside the gym stuff and managing what's going on inside the gym would be considered recovery strategies. So in a lot of ways, it's almost the whole show, so it's something people definitely need to pay attention to in order to maximize adaptations.

Cool.

Cool.

And so recovery, obviously, super important, it seems like hypertrophy adaptations or I guess any adaptations, even outside of exercise science. So, like, learning or just whatever it may be, is a matter of balancing both the good and the bad of the stimulus. Right. So we've talked about it before, I believe, but there's this thing called the fitness fatigue model that was originally proposed, I believe, sometime in the 80s that basically just says, as you exercise, you accrue all these wonderful adaptations, but you accrue a bunch of, you know, other things as well that may not be as beneficial and may actually inhibit your ability to continue producing these adaptations. Right. So I think Mike Ezra Tell commonly uses the analogy of like, a kitchen. So, like, let's. Let's say a Kitchen and hypertrophy training, we're using those as analogs right now where you have a dinner service and you're making a bunch of food. Right. The kitchen is making a bunch of food. That would be considered the muscle growth and hypertrophy training. And the negatives associated with that are like, we're also getting a bunch of dishes that are piling up and we need to do something with, with those dishes. And you can think of that as, you know, fatigue in the context of exercise science. So with that, now that we understand kind of the importance of what recovery is in the context of hypertrophy training as well, can you kind of maybe tell us how we can tell? Like, are there indicators of knowing if we are not recovering enough or, or if we, if there's things we could be doing to then help recovery more? So I guess start with how can we tell if we are even not recovering in the first place?

Yeah, so there aren't super amazing ways, but there are definitely some indicators. So I think the biggest indicator is whether you're putting more load on the bar or particularly if you're getting weaker week to week. So if you started to there week to week, weeker, oh man, well done. Well done. So if, you know, one week you have to put a little bit less on the bar, totally fine. But if week to week you're not getting stronger, at least maintaining strength, then you should probably take a look at your recovery strategies because things aren't going in the right direction. If somebody came to you and said, listen, I started this mesocycle doing 135 and I'm close to ending it and Now I'm doing 120 pounds, then you're, you're probably a little worried for that individual and they're probably under recovering. So that's one indicator. Another indicator is sort of like sensational. It's, it's kind of hard to describe, but when you've trained for long enough, you sort of feel it where it seems like your, your nervous system is just not giving you that same juice to your muscles. You're not getting the, the same kind of pumps. Just the quality of your training feels lower. You feel less motivated to do the next set, you feel less motivated to get through the se and so on. So being cognizant of that while not letting that take over too much because, you know, training should be hard. So finding the middle ground where you feel motivated but you're not like dreading the sessions is a really good idea. And then the last bit is like more obvious signs of overtraining. So under recovering is a different category than overtraining. Overtraining syndrome is a lot more severe and a lot more uncommon. But when you start seeing drop offs in sleep quality, when you start like literally feeling pain in your, like your, your nervous system and just not feeling, you know, alert and things that are a lot more severe in nature, then you can start worrying about overtraining syndrome and you need to scale back a whole lot and wait till you get, you know, back to baseline at least. But just be aware that that's very rare, especially for typical hypertrophy training athletes who are doing multiple sports and also training and stuff like that is a lot more common to experience overtraining syndrome.

Yeah, and I, I, I think it's important to, to, to, to make this qualifier here that we are saying that or you, you are saying, and I concur obviously, that overtraining is actually like, it's pretty rare in, in the context of hypertrophy training. In fact, when trying to study overtraining literature, Chris Fry, I believe is, is very big on this. Not the Chris Fry in Kentucky, but the Criss Fry in Arkansas, I believe. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It's big on studying overtraining and it's like kind of hard to achieve overtraining status in the context of exclusive hypertrophy training. But that does not mean that we are saying that it is possible to do too much in the gym. Like, it is still possible that you are potentially doing too much in the gym, even if you're not technically over training. Under recovering leads to the same result, which is you're not getting the adaptations that you're looking for, obviously. So I just wanted to make that clear and then just to touch on kind of the more subjective indicators of maybe under recovering being like a lack of motivation or you're just finding it harder for you to bring yourself to the gym. I think that's an area that you need to be really honest with yourself in, especially. I've talked about this on numerous podcasts now where like Danny and I, our favorite part of the day usually is going to the gym. It's like the thing we look forward to most. It's, it's where we're our most zen and happiest states, generally speaking. So if we find ourselves not wanting to go to the gym, that's usually a pretty big indicator that, okay, something's gone awry here. This thing that generally brings me all the joy in the world is now something that I'm finding myself to, I'm thinking of it as a chore more than, more than an opportunity to go do something I love. Right. Whereas, like, let's just Joe Schmo, who doesn't really enjoy exercising, but does so for his health, if he finds himself not wanting to go to the gym, but that's kind of his standard, it's probably not a good idea to use that as an indicator of if he's under recovering or not. So I just wanted to throw that, that little qualifier in here. And I know I, I, we kind of touched on this, but is there any way of knowing, just generally speaking, the, the delineation between those two and what I mean is, is there a way for us to know if we're doing too much in the gym or if we're not doing enough outside of the gym to recover between exercise bouts? Does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes sense. In terms of knowing where it's coming from without having any context on the individual, probably not, but there's always the context of the individual. So knowing where hypertrophy landmarks are. So like 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week, if you're doing significantly over that, or if you're doing something that's adding stress to the system in terms of like, you're going on super long runs, you're also a marathon runner while, you know, trying to gain hypertrophy and so on, then you can start, you know, figuring out what's going on a lot more. So are things going on outside of the gym that are putting stress on you, are you having family issues and so on. So like, considering your specific context usually gives you the best clues. You're not gonna really know from like a physiological sense what's going on for the most part, other than those indicators that you mentioned where like, at the end of a session, if you're like really, really dreading those last sets and so on, then you might be getting into like junk volume territory and so on. So there are definite indicators in, in both regards, but the best indicators are going to be just like taking a look and auditing. What are you actually doing inside and outside the gym and are you getting those things right?

Yeah. So I think we're definitely about to touch on what it looks like when you're doing everything right outside of the gym. But just to give maybe like an example, right. Of knowing when recovery, like where these la, this lack of recovery is coming from. If you are someone who's doing everything right outside of the gym and like, I said what we're about to touch on what that is, then it's possible that you're. You're doing too much in the gym. So if you're getting plenty of sleep, you're eating plenty, and you're still not recovering, it's probably worth taking a look at the training itself to see if it's just too much for you to recover from, because we do have an upper limit of what we're capable of returning or recovering from. Right. Okay. So, yeah, just eat more and take sleeping pills every single night so you get at least 12 hours. Right, exactly.

There's no science on the recovery.

There's no science recommendation. Yeah, yeah, true. A gallon of milk a day should take care of any recovery issues you might be having. Okay. Outside of a gallon of milk and sleeping pills, let's talk about some recovery strategies that we can use when we find ourselves struggling to recover workout to workout. So I guess ways of managing fatigue, for instance, can we talk about maybe ways of going about making sure that we are doing everything that we should be doing to recover between our workouts? Between. Yeah, just in generally. Just generally speaking, it doesn't have to be workout to workout, but just in general making sure that we're doing enough. Just making sure that we're maximizing recovery as a general rule, I guess. Don't. It doesn't have to be in the context of workout to workout.

Yeah. So I think the. The big rocks are definitely gonna be sleep, nutrition, and just managing stress. So getting your seven to nine hours of sleep is super important, not only from our recovery standpoint in terms of quality of sessions in the gym, but also the exact composition of the mass that you put on. So you'll gain actually more muscle mass and less fat mass when you get adequate sleep. And this has been shown in a few studies now, and one that was like a super practical study where they just had individuals that were training and they gave them essentially what was sleep education and just that sleep education and teaching them, you know, the right habits around sleep and, you know, stressing the priority of sleep actually had them gain more muscle. So don't sleep on sleep is number.

One, your second incredible mnemonic of the day. Well done.

I'm on point. Nutrition. Obviously this is gonna depend somewhat on the phase that you're in. So whether you're actively trying to build, maintain, or lose. But for the most part, you want to make sure that you're not severely undereating. So even if you're on a cut, being extremely aggressive, probably Warrants some adjustments elsewhere in terms of stress, what's going on in the gym, and so on. Especially if you're being extreme with your deficit and also getting adequate protein. So, you know, protein facilitates. You know, it gives you the necessary building blocks. So making sure you're getting 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight is a really good idea to maximize recovery. I. I definitely would try to split it up into at least two meals a day, but ideally three plus would be a. If you're really trying to maximize and cover all your bases would be a good idea.

Cool. So. So, I mean, as boring as it may sound, sleep, nutrition, and managing fatigue just in general, and managing. When I say fatigue, just managing your stress levels in general are the things that you should be doing first and foremost if you're trying to maximize recovery. And with that, when we talk about managing stress, kind of the real true first and foremost outside of maximizing recovery is making sure that your workouts themselves are something that you can recover from. Right. So no matter how much you're sleeping, or I'll use myself as an example.

Right.

No matter how much I'm sleeping, no matter how many calories and protein I'm getting a day, I'm never gonna be able to recover from a hundred working sets for my quads a week. It just. No matter what I do on the recovery side, there's nothing I can do to make up for that. Right. So first and foremost, even before those recovery strategies, is making sure that the workouts themselves are not too demanding. Obviously. Now, with that there as it's. It's been speculated largely that if we want to maximize these adaptations that we're trying to achieve, we kind of may have to push that limit a little bit. So making sure that our workouts are not so fatiguing that we can't recover from them is important, but it's also important to make them hard so that they still cause an adaptation. Sorry, a little bit of a brain fart there. So once you've done that, once you've kind of found that good middle ground of not too hard that you can't recover from, but still hard enough that it causes an adaptation, then you can start using some of these recovery strategies to then further maximize what you're able to recover from. Right. And then we talked about managing stress in general, that goes far beyond the gym, obviously. So it's possible that you've heard stress is stress is stress is stress. Because your body really can't tell the difference between, let's Say a really, really hard week of training and your girlfriend breaking up with you or your significant other breaking up with you. Right. So it's important not only to make sure that you're not doing too much in the gym, but things outside of the gym are also not causing undue stress onto you. So there's a lot of things you can't control. Right. There's not a whole lot we can do about our boss coming and yelling at us, that our quarterlys are due at the end of the. At the end of the day. But there are some things that we can do, you know, outside of those big rocks that can help us maximize recovery further. So you want to touch on those a little bit. Maybe some things that we can do if we find ourselves in a position where we're not recovering and we're doing everything we need to be doing. So we're sleeping, we're eating. Workouts aren't too hard, but they're still hard enough. And we're doing everything we can on the outside to make sure that stress isn't undue. So, yeah, sorry, a little bit of a tangent there, but let's talk about some strategies you can use if you do find yourself in a. In a position where you're not adequately recovering.

Yeah, so life definitely hits you with things that are unexpected and you know, there's emotional challenges and stuff outside the gym that can affect what's going on in the gym. So you want to be able to make adjustments, still improve, maybe not maximally, but still improve and not under recover. So things that you can do when you know that you're going to be experiencing more stress are just lighter days in the gym. Like there's no harm in, you know, going in there and not doing exactly what you had planned a small percentage of the time if it means that you're going to benefit in the long run. So just doing either less sets of the exercise that you put or doing less load and being a little bit further away from failure, just greasing the groove, still keeping the habit, not falling off entirely, but doing a lot lighter than you would have done is sometimes a good idea. I mentioned this sort of non explicitly, but lowering the volume so you can still benefit from lower volumes. Like a lot of the recommendations that are to maximize volume are actually reaching the point of diminishing returns where you're actually probably getting less stimulus per set at closer to 15 to 20, as you would at, you know, near 10 to 12. So being afraid of lowering that volume, especially when you're in stressful situations is probably a really bad idea. You know, you can get a whole lot from those lower, lower ranges. Even, even eight or. Yeah, six, you know, things, things of that nature.

I think that's really important to point out that remember, are these adaptations. Hypertrophy muscle growth is a balance of the stimulus that we're providing, resistance training and what we're able to recover from, like our ability to recover. So if we're in a point of high stress, let's say it's a, it's a, it's a big week for. You have like three birthdays that you have to buy presents for, whatever it may be. That's a really, if that's your stressful week, that's a great week. That's a terrible example. But. And you have a workout like let's say that day, and you're already really stressed. You're actually probably, this is speculative, I want that to be clear. But you're probably better off going and doing a lighter day than you are trying to, let's say, brute your way through that workout. Because your, your recover, your recoverability is already diminished because of the stress in your life. So just throwing more stress on top of that in the form of a, of a hard workout may be doing you more, more harm than good, at least in the short term. Right. Uh, so light days. What about just skipping the workout entirely? Like, just not like if you're like, oh, I'm stressed. I don't even really feel like going to the gym. I'm just gonna. Today, I'm just, I'm not gonna work out at all. I'll, I'll miss today's workout. Is that a viable option as well? Or is that maybe not as wise?

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of that depends on the individual themselves. I think there's very, very, very little downside to skipping a workout once in a blue moon. But let's say the person just started the habit of resistance training, then maybe just getting in there and literally doing anything, just doing stuff that they consider to be fun and not super fatiguing could be a good idea because they're still in sort of that, that habit building phase. But definitely don't be afraid. I know a lot of people sort of, they give themselves a ton of credit for never missing a workout. And I think there's definitely a lot of good things about that attitude. But many of those people can get in trouble and you sort of find that many of those people are fighting demons that are not related to the adaptations that they want to get, but they need the therapy from the gym and they need, you know, that, that badge of honor that I never skip a workout and stuff like that. So don't be too afraid to listen to your body once in a while. We're not saying to, you know, skip half your workouts, definitely skip as little as you possibly can, but you're not a better person for never skipping a workout in, you know, three years. Like, you probably could have benefited from skipping that workout because you needed to make your kids recital and you know, sorry, bro.

Well, they're a heavy single today. Not making it my daughter's dance recital. Sorry, babe.

Exactly.

Yeah, I think we'll, we'll have a. Hopefully we'll have an episode later about using exercise as therapy versus using exercise to actually achieve the results that you want because there actually is, there's a huge difference there, believe it or not. And, and just as a quick little aside, I, I miss workouts. Not often, but it happens. And I think that it's better in my personal opinion, and maybe this is just because this is my bias, but it's better to take pride in doing the things necessary to achieve the goals that you want to achieve. So like I take pride in skipping workouts if I think that that's going to actually lead to a better adaptation in the long term. It's, it's cooler to be a robot than a warrior in that regard, in my personal opinion. So, so I definitely agree. Um, so, yeah, don't be, don't be scared if you, if you have to miss a workout here and there or not, even if you have to, but if you miss one because you feel as if you shouldn't be going to the gym because whatever it may be. Right. Uh, so what about maybe instances where it's not so short term? Right. Like let's say we've gone now, we've had two weeks of training where it's not going kind of as well as it has been in the previous weeks. And I just feel like I need a break from the gym that one day is really not going to do. Like taking one day off is really not going to satisfy that, that feeling of a break that I need. Any suggestions in that situation?

Yeah, so I think that's when we sort of get into like the half week deload territory. So these are things that, you know, the fitness industry likes to argue about a whole lot. What, what is the benefit of them, when should you do them, how should you do them? And so on I think there's definitely a benefit and I think we're going to get into this in terms of how much downside is there to doing a lot less for a week or not doing anything for a week and so on, and then contrasting that with actually just continuing to push yourself when things aren't going well. So that balance is, I think, something that we're going to get into and something that I think you're going to take the reins on because you recently ran a study looking at this exact thing. So do deloads actually benefit strength and hypertrophy and so. Hop right in, buddy.

Yeah, so. So I did just recently conduct a study on deloads. But before I touch on that, deloads in general, just like for those of you who listening, who don't maybe don't know or haven't heard that term because it's not intuitive at all, deload is the weirdest thing ever. You don't deload a truck when you're unpacking it. Right. You unload it. Anyway, sorry, that's a huge tangent. We can go on later. Anyway, not a huge super set definition for what deloading is, but essentially it's just an easy week of training. And there's a bunch of different ways of achieving that, achieving that easy week of training, whether that be lowering your volume substantially, just going to the gym, maybe like half as much. So if you train six days a week, going three days a week instead, staying further away from failure, whatever it may be. But it's just good to think of it. It may even be just not training for an entire week.

Right, but it's just a question on, on this because I think people misinterpret this and I think a lot of people sort of screamed at you about this. Does deloading mean using less load? I mean, it's in the name, right?

Load.

So does, does that, is that the a correct definition?

It can be, it can be a correct operational definition within the context of a conversation you're having. But given that we don't have a set definition in the literature of what a deload is, we kind of just have to use a bunch of proxies for how it's used in the real world. Right. So Dr. Pak Lee Bell, some other incredible researchers out of Sheffield Hallam and other schools in England recently conducted an interview study where they reached out to a bunch of really high level coaches and athletes. And when I say high level, I think, oh, goodness, I'm sorry, I'm. I'm miss speaking here, but I think the average coaching experience was like 10 years or something like that. Like a decade. And high level individuals were being interviewed here. I don't want to say names because I'm not sure that that's allowed, but very high level people you guys have probably heard about if you're watching the Bill of Science podcast. Anyway, they basically were conducting interviews to find out what are the common practices so that we could then go on to like, make a definition for deloads. So the re. I threw a bunch of information right there, but basically the whole point of that is me saying that there isn't a definition for deload. So as long as in the context of the conversation you're having, you. You provide a definition for what you mean when you say de load, then it's. It's hard to get mad at someone for using whatever definition they propose. Right. So basically all of the people getting mad at me on Instagram, leave me alone. Okay? I did the best I could. Okay. Anyway, so deloading in general, unless I sufficiently answered your question, do you have. Yeah. Okay. So we talked about the fitness fatigue model earlier, right. Which basically says, like, as you exercise, you accrue great things, right? The dinners that you cook versus some. Also some negative things. The pots and pans in the kitchen after you're done cooking. Right. And so that has led a lot of individuals to believe that a deload could be used to dissipate the negatives of resistance training while maintaining any of the positives that you got. So let's use this. Let's continue with the. The kitchen analogy here. It would be like your lunch service at a restaurant where you're cooking all these meals. You have these incredible meals, but there's a bunch of dishes now that have piled up from hours and hours of cooking. Right. A deload would be like a break between the lunch service and the dinner service where we are not spending any time cooking meals at all. And that might lead people to be like, what are you doing? Why aren't you cooking meals? Like, that's what the goal is, Right? Producing meals. And they. Absolutely. But if we take some time to dissipate the fatigue, in this case the dishes, then that potentiates us to cook more meals down the road. Right. So it led people to believe that if we use deloads, we can dissipate the fatigue by maintaining the fitness and then in the long term, ultimately grow more muscle. Right. So that idea and that theory led me to want to conduct A study where we directly tested this. Right. So what we did, just very briefly, I won't, I won't exhaust the method section or here or anything like that. We basically took a group of 50 individuals and we split them up into one of two groups. Right. A group that trained continuously for nine weeks, start to finish, two days a week, every week, or a deload group that trained for four weeks, same workouts as the continuous group, but at week five, they just didn't come to the gym at all. They took a complete week away from training entirely and then came back and trained for four more weeks. Right. So kind of like a realistic idea of what a deload would look like in the real world. Okay. They were doing like, you know, normal lower body workouts twice a week with us, pretty intense exercises. It was 5 sets of 8, 12 reps to all out failure on the Smith machine squat, the leg extension, the standing calf raise and the seated calf raise. So a pretty, a pretty intense workout to do twice a week for nine weeks or for eight weeks, depending on which group. And I'll just cut straight to the results. We saw no differences between muscle growth between either group. So both groups grew basically exactly the same amount of muscle. Right. Suggesting that, you know, maybe there, there's not a huge benefit to taking a week off in the middle of a nine week training program. But even more, you know, exciting than that is that there's not a detriment so you're not hurting yourself by taking a week off, which is, which is really good news for those who maybe have a little bit more of an inconsistent life. So if you travel a lot for work or whatever it may be, and you find yourself in a inable to work out, don't worry that like you're gonna lose all of your muscle mass or you're doing yourself a huge disservice. Now, in the context of strength, we actually did find some pretty substantial findings regarding strength. So basically the traditional group, the group, the group that trained the entire nine week period, did make substantial strength gains over those that took a week off in the middle. And there's some, maybe some theories as to why that's the case, but we don't have to delve too deeply into that right now. I just wanted to give kind of a, a general overview of what the study was and what we found and then sh. As far as my like, takeaway from the study, does that mean that we should just never take breaks away from the gym or should we just try and train continuously forever that way we're maximizing both hypertrophy gains and strength gains simultaneously. Obviously not. I, I, I certainly don't think that's the case. And, and we can touch on reasons why that might be the case, but I've just talked for like 10 minutes and haven't taken a breath. So if you want to ask any questions about what I just said, or break anything what I, or break anything down that I just said, please be my guest.

Yeah, so I think the main takeaway there is that from at least a hypertrophy standpoint, whether you take a week off or not didn't matter. So depending on who you are and what you're prioritizing, you might choose to take that week off and realize that you're probably not going to have a really high detriment. But also in the context of the real world, when you take that week off matters. So this is, it was kind of an arbitrary, you know, halfway take the week off and then continue training. So maybe in the real world, if you're trying to maximize returns, you might take the week off at a very specific time where you've, you've either ramped up volume up until that point, or you felt that your performance wasn't going the way you were going the way you wanted it to, or some of those performance indicators that we mentioned before in terms of how you feel in the gym, how motivated you are, and so on. So it's important, I think, to stress that it's one study, the first study to look at this. So taking one study and just absolutely running with it and trying to draw mechanistic and practical conclusions is obviously not a great idea. But what are your thoughts on sort of reactive deloads and how people should go about that?

Yeah, so I think that was far and away the most interesting finding for me. So we, I didn't touch on this, but I should. We employed something called the Readiness to Train questionnaire, which is basically just like a seven question little sheet of paper that asks you various questions about how you're feeling. So like, some of the questions are like, how strong do you feel today? Mentally, how strong do you feel today physically? How was your sleep last night? Stuff like that. Basically stuff to kind of check those fatigue markers that we were talking about earlier, more subjective markers that we were talking about earlier. And we employed that after the fourth week of training and after the ninth week of training. So like, you know, typically when you would be asking your clients if they need a deload, and the answers that we got were just surprising. So we I. This is a pretty high volume training program. I believe it came out to 90 total sets per week for the upper and lower body, like summatively. Right. I don't know if that's a word. And basically none of the very few of the individuals reported poorly on the readiness to train questionnaire. And then anecdotally we also just asked almost all the, we asked all the subjects on the final day of testing, like, did you ever feel like you needed a deload? Or do you feel like you need a deload now that you've trained nine weeks straight and all? But I believe one or two said no, I feel good. I don't think I really needed a deload at any point during the study and I don't think I need one now. I'll probably get back to training here soon. And I think that, that all of that lends itself well to the idea of certainly we might not need a deload every four weeks. You just probably don't based on at least this one study. Once again, just one study. So take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. But you probably don't need a deload. Cause I mean, the odds are that if you're watching this podcast, you're not training 90 weekly sets all to all out failure, failure constantly. Right. So really, I think we kind of touched on this earlier. But getting in tune with your body and understanding when you'll need a deload, there's a lot of inter individual variation there. So Daniel might need a de load much more frequently than I do. And unfortunately there's not ever gonna be a study that can tell Daniel when he needs to deload versus me when I need to deload. So that's something that. It's something that's gonna require a lot of trial and error, which is something I hate saying because that sucks. I wish I could just give a straight up answer of like how to use reactive versus proactive deloads, but I think it's. It's gonna come down to you learning your body and understanding when taking a break from the gym is going to work best for you. So again, long winded there, if you wanna break any of that down.

Yeah, I think that was definitely a really good synopsis. One thing that I often think about is sort of for regular people, a lot of the time the deload might take care of itself. For in terms of, you know, times in your life where you, you're going on vacation or you need to take a little bit of time away from the gym because life stuff comes up. So for. For most people, I think just getting things right inside and outside the gym to the best of their abilities and then taking that time when life stuff is planned and comes up is probably a really good idea for the normal individual. Optimizing for the person who is, like, trying to get everything right. The bodybuilder and so on, I think is a slightly different category where there's a whole lot of nuance and, you know, maybe not like a tremendous amount of benefit, the, the more nuanced you get. But I think they are really, really the folks who want to get super in touch with, like, how can they have good indicators and how can they push their volume in order to get the most out of a training cycle? But for the regular person just going to the gym, and I think that's the vast, vast, vast majority of people going to the gym, life will usually take care of a lot of a lot of that stuff. So I think that's one thing to keep in mind when we're talking about deloads.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Like, the way you use them if you're an IFBB pro, and the way you use them if you are someone who likes to lift. Like, they're two very different. That's two very different conversations. So, yeah, like, a lot of people gave me flack for using a week of complete detraining as my, as the, My proxy for a deload. But if you look at what the majority of people are doing, who aren't losers like Daniel and I, who just spend our whole life thinking about this, they are just taking infrequent breaks entirely from the gym, whether that be from vacation stress at work, where they're like, I don't. I just don't have time to go to the gym. So I think, I think it does lend itself relatively well to the average gym goer as far as ecological. Ecological validity is concerned. I guess I, we. We kind of covered deloads, but now I'm just curious, like, I'm just curious for my own personal benefit, like, how do you usually go about using deloads for yourself? And then also how do you go about using deloads for your clients?

Yeah, so there's probably a bunch of different categories where if the person is not pushing super hard most of the time, it will be very reactive and very rare. So if a client is training two times per week, almost never deload, you know, like they're recovering enough between sessions where they don't need that time off psychologically or physiologically. So I think that especially when training gen pop clients is going to be the majority, not only are they potentially not training frequently enough or training hard enough, but they also have, as I mentioned, a whole bunch of things that come up in terms of work and vacations and all that kind of stuff where they end up actually deloading a decent amount, regardless of the fact that they're not necessarily pushing their limits. So I think that's one category. For the people who I train that are trying to get the most out of their gains. Many times what I'll do is assess sort of their psychology to some extent, because I don't think that it matters that much. I like to look at how people sort of view their training. So, like, the people who are really hard asses that are like, I'm going hard every single time I get in there, I like to ramp up things and I like to make it a little bit more intense throughout the cycle and then have them deload for basically a full week where we'll do either half the sessions and half the volume or actually take the full week off. So people like, oh, people never actually do this. I mean, with people who are really pushing it. I've had them take full weeks off just because I think psychologically for them, they really love that. Like, they're just like, I'm gonna smash this week and then I'm gonna take next week off and, you know, enjoy whatever it was and plan vacations around that and so on. So I think there is a, if not a physiological benefit for those types of people as, like, put them in the archetype. I think that psychology actually really helps them out. And then the last category is by muscle. So we push certain muscles more than others, and then we'll take a de load for that specific muscle while maybe continuing to push those other muscles at like, maintenance, I mean, like above maintenance volume. So one muscle goes down to maintenance, maybe even a bit lower, while those other muscles travel, you know, upward, or at least stay where they were at.

So similar trajectory.

Yeah, exactly. So I think there's a lot of ways to do it, and I don't think there's a super wrong way to do it. But I think considering the person's psychology and how their psychology interplays with their training is an important thing to take into account.

Yeah, deloads, to me, at least just the way I think about them, have always had a stronger Rationale psychologically than physiologically for me. So like there are reasons to believe that there are physio physiological benefits to deloading or taking periods of detraining. So we have some studies showing like a transition to like more growth prone fibers after periods of detraining. We see like more favorable, more favorable testosterone to cortisol ratios and uptick in like anabolic signaling molecules. But those are not, those are usually acute studies that show that they're not. And also the meaningfulness of those things, like is it really a big deal if our testosterone to cortisol ratio is slightly better in this week? Right, but they're, they're really good psychological rationale. Right. Or at least on the surface, like it makes sense. Like look, going to the gym's hard and doing hard stuff all the time is almost never a good idea. It just doesn't like, that's just our, the body does not work that way in general. It's the reason we have weekends and vacations at work. Right.

Especially when there's so little downside. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But interestingly the findings from my study go against that. Like they. So for instance, that readiness to train questionnaire, we gave it twice at the end of week four and the end of week nine. And those that trained continuously, their motivation to train never changed. It was about, it was about the same at the end of week four and the end of week nine. However, those that took the deload were actually, they saw a decrease in their motivation to train. So like they were more motivated after week four than they were after week nine. Which just completely flips what we thought the benefit of deloading was. Now once again, one study, and also Danny Boy made it very clear that he was talking about a very specific, specific type of person who deloads may benefit psychologically. And so, so maybe for some people, yes, there is a huge psychological benefit to de loading. Like for me, myself, like I, I am one of those people I love knowing cycles are just fun on my dumb lizard brain knowing that like I like oh, I get to start something over again or whatever it may be. Right. So yeah, person to person, the psycho psychological aspect of, of deloading changes. But I just thought that, I mean that that was the most interesting thing that I found from my study personally. So yeah, I definitely agree and I think we've, unless you have something else to add, I think we've done a really good job of covering deloads as well as like the big rocks of recovery. So you want to throw us a little synopsis of what we talked about so far before we move on to the fun part of this podcast.

Yeah, well, I think what we didn't touch upon is the Ashwagara studies looking at.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okasawara.

Yeah, Ogisawara. Ashwagara. Ashwagandha.

I thought you were talking about Ashwagandha. And I was like, oh, Danny, I didn't prepare for this.

Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce any researcher's name and I get them wrong constantly. So I'm sorry to every single researcher out there that doesn't have the most generic white name.

We're going to get canceled immediately after this. So apologies to Chris Barakat for our previous butchering of his name.

Mayo. Is it Meow or Mayo and colleagues? I have no idea.

M A. I don't even know who you're talking about. So.

What? The overhead tricep, the.

Oh, oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, sorry. Anyways, please. Yeah, Exercise science is very popular outside of America, which is awesome. But it also makes it really hard to pronounce the researchers names from the studies that we read. Anyway, so yeah, we did not touch on Ogasawara and I thank you so much for bringing that up because I do think that's valuable to touch on. Um, so my study was actually a kind of a tweak of these other studies that were performed in Japan by this incredible researcher, Ogasawara, at all. Right. In which they took individuals and they basically did what I did, but on a much larger timescale. So there's two studies we'll talk about the one that he did most recently, which was six months, and I think the first one was about three months where they took, I think like it was pretty low sample size, which is one of the reasons. What was one of the impetuses, I don't know if that's a word. One of the reasons, one of the drivers for me to want to do this study on my own or to repeat the study, right, where they took about 15 individuals and did the same thing. They placed them into their continuous training group for six months or a group that used periodic training where they trained for six weeks and then took three weeks entirely off and then trained for six weeks. And they also found almost to no differences in strength or hypertrophy actually. So they also found no differences in hypertrophy. And they. And conversely to my study, they did not find any differences in strength either. These studies, like my study obviously were not perfect. So untrained subjects, 15 individuals which is just not that many when you're looking for differences amongst groups. And they also only used the bench press. So they were only measuring bench. They only trained with the bench press I believe twice a week. It's just things that like just don't lend themselves very well to ecological validity. Right. To the real world. The way people that typically go about training and they. Sorry, I kind of lost my train of thought there. But they used the three week training period also doesn't really lend itself super well to like the real world because like most often people aren't taking an entire three weeks off of training unless you're just you know, going on vacations constantly to like different parts of the world or whatever it may be. Anyway, they also did find. I want, I want this noted because this is something that this is kind of talked about often on other podcasts and stuff. They say that there was no differences between groups, but actually there were in both studies. So the group that trained continuously in both Ogasawara studies did actually see greater strength gains and hypertrophy gains than those that took frequent periods away from the gym. But they just didn't reach statistical significance. But there it was, you know, a pretty substantial. It was, I hate to use the word substantial cuz that means significant but like meaningful. Somewhat practical. Practical. Practically meaningful differences. Right. Where like on the magnitude of like 5% more growth in the triceps or, or something close to that. I'm probably butchering the exact results. But yes. So the Ogasawaro study, those studies are very. Give valuable insights into like deloading as well. And I think the biggest thing to take away from those like my study is that relatively infrequent and even sometimes long periods away from the gym are just not gonna cause you to lose all your muscle or strength even. But even though my study showed that it's still. It's not like the individuals who were taking a deload like didn't get stronger. They did, they got significant. They got re. A lot stronger throughout the course of the study. They just didn't get the same strength gains that those in the, in the traditional or continuous great training group did. So yeah. Did you have anything else you wanted to add about the Ogasawara studies that I didn't touch on?

Yeah, I think just to summarize, both groups trained the same total amount of time. One group took two three week periods off. Or was it one three week period off?

Two. Well we can do the math because it was a 24 week study and.

They trained So I think it was two, three weeks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And they found similar but slightly different hypertrophy and strength gains. So what that underlines to me and we could sort of talk about statistical significance and all that kind of stuff as well, but you can take a substantial amount of time off and what the mechanisms are aren't necessarily clear, but it seems like there's some sort of resensitization or memory and so on that allows you to get more gains out of a shorter period of time after that time off. We're not necessarily recommending it because as you mentioned, there were meaningful differences between groups even if they didn't reach statistical significance. And many times how people sort of interpret significance is that, oh, there were no differences, but there's many instances where looking at how meaningful something is and whether something is binary significant versus non significant is not a very good way of going about things. So that's one, one way that people really misinterpret research, only looking at P values. But people I think can find solace in the fact that taking even a substantial amount of time off a couple of times. And I think they did, I think they replicated their study. I think they did two, two studies that showed.

Yeah, they did. So they had an 18 week study where they had one three week period away from training and then another one where it was a much longer version of that. And yeah, and they found the same, the same result and then even more stark in. Well, it's not more stark, it's the same result but it's even crazier because I. Math is probably not perfect here, but I believe that the traditional group or the continuous group trained like 25% more. So like they were training, let's call them 100%. The, the periodic group trained 75% as much as the other group and saw very similar results across the. For the 24 week period. Right. So yeah, crazy shit, excuse my language, but like pretty wild that these individuals were able to achieve very similar growth and strength increases using 75% of the volume or amount of training that this other group is doing. And I think that lends itself really well, Danny boy, to what you were saying earlier about the like diminishing returns of training. Right. For the average person, they just kind of, you know, they want to be a little bit healthier. They want to make the everyday tasks of life a little bit easier. And if you can get that doing way less. But that's awesome news as far as I'm concerned. It also is great for Individuals like us, like, oh, so there is a benefit to doing a little bit more like that. 5% on a bodybuilding stage. 5%? Are you kidding me? That's a, that's a, that's the difference between, like, first place and not making it to the stage. Like, it's. It's a big deal. So I think, yeah, some really cool takeaways from that Ogasawara study. And I. A big shout out to him in the first place. Cause he's like one of the biggest reasons why I conducted the study that I conducted. So shout out. Cool. Sorry I kind of interrupted you there. If you had anything else to add about that, please.

No, yeah, I just think to summarize, it seems like deloads make a whole lot of sense psychologically and to some extent physiologically. And since we know that even a week off or three weeks off in some instances has downsides, but very little downside, I think you can find solace in the fact that if you need a break, whether you feel you need a break or you plan it out, however you want to structure it, I think baking some sort of deload into the cake is a good idea, considering the trade offs.

Yeah. And just a last thing we'll say on this, because I do want to move on, but it's only a downside if you're someone like Danny and I where like you just. It's a downside because I could have gotten 3% more growth in my pec or whatever it may be. Right. But if for most people, that's not even a downside, that's just a fucking coincidence, whatever it may be. Right. So, okay, so I think to summarize, just all the shit we've talked about so far, not just with deloads recovery. The first and foremost, make sure that you're providing enough stimulus to where you. You get the adaptations you want, but not too much to where it's. You're constantly feeling as if you're not recovered. And then the big things to take care of to make sure that you are recovering between workouts. And just in general, make sure your sleep is in order, make sure your. Your nutrition is order so you're eating enough calories, even if you're trying to lose weight, to sus. To, you know, help you build and repair the stuff that you want to, like, accrue the adaptations that you want. Sorry. And also just managing stress outside of the gym as well. And then if you find yourself in positions where you maybe aren't recovering, there are some things you can throw in there to like make it a little bit easier on yourself, whether that be light days, just a day off of the gym if you don't feel like going. And then if you really feel like you need a break, maybe it's worth taking something like a deload or a half week where you're either training way less for that week or you're just simply not training for that week at all without having to worry about losing all the muscle and strength that you accrued previous to that. So I think really good job there as far as covering the big rocks of recovery and how we can use recovery to help build as much muscle as possible. But in the intro we talked about how there are some recovery strategies out there that we see that may be actually doing more harm than good. So we listed out a bunch of different recovery strategies that we commonly see and we kind of place them into either a, a good, bad or, you know, meh category where it's probably not hurting you, but probably isn't helping you very much either. So kind of touch on the good here, which is just like everything that we've already said. And then also on top of that, things like just basically anything that relaxes you. So like if, if for instance, you are someone who there's nothing you love more than sitting at home with your dog and watching the office, it's probably a really good thing to do and it's probably going to like actually improve recovery and theoretically lead to more growth over time. If you take time to do that and it relaxes you and you enjoy it. There's also some theories as to active recovery. So Daniel, if you want to kind of touch on active recovery and active rest and talk about how that might be pretty good for maximizing hypertrophy or hypertrophic outcomes.

Yeah. So I think it's important to point out, like, where we're getting this information from and how we're sort of assessing these things. So most of the studies that are looking at recovery are either looking at performance recovery. So are people sprinting as much as they did before they had that stressor? So if you have people sprint, then have people do X, Y or Z and then have them come back and sprint again. Did these tools allow them to recover their sprint ability or recover their 3 RM ability or whatever the task may be? And then other studies looked at the mechanisms. So like, was there more muscle damage, was there a higher amount of stress related protein, C reactive protein, things like that. So there's a bunch of limitations to how we interpret these different lines of evidence, because how much do those signals actually matter for hypertrophy from a mechanistic standpoint or strength from a mechanistic standpoint? How much does soreness and so on actually correlate with the outcomes we care about? So I think the best proxy that we have is performance. But even performance, especially from a morphological. So like, muscle gain standpoint, isn't necessarily a one to one relationship. If you've recovered your performance, does that necessarily mean that in on that short term basis, you were gonna gain more muscle mass? So we're making inferences or we're sort of making guesses based on a fairly limited amount of evidence, but we can still make some good and educated guesses based on.

Yeah, it's an educated guess based on what we have. Though it's not perfect. For sure. Ben and I would have morphological changes. So you. We talk about adaptations to resistance training, right? You have performance adaptations. And that's just like, did I add five pounds to my bench press in after this? Nine weeks of training? And then you have things like morphological changes, Right? So that's what. If you're watching this podcast, you probably care about, like, did your muscles get bigger? And there's a bunch of other morphological adaptations as well, but the one we really care about is did my muscles get bigger, essentially. So hypertrophy is a morphological adaptation. I just wanted to point that out because I didn't know what morphological adaptation meant for a long time, and I wish someone had provided me a definition. So anyway, now, now that we've given that disclaimer, active recovery, active rest, good, bad, where does that fall for you?

Yeah. So in terms of, you know, in the context of what I just mentioned, are we a hundred percent sure that if we ran a study and we had one group do, you know, just sit around and the other group do active rest, that they would gain more muscle.

What is active rest? Like, like what? Like, I literally don't know what that is. So what is active rest?

Yeah, so active rest is essentially just being active when you're away from the gym. So going for walks, you know, walking your dog, making sure that you're moving around and not just being sedentary is.

So like recreational basketball even could be considered like an example of active rest. Okay.

As long as you're not going crazy dunking on people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you're not turning it into a workout, this thing that's supposed to be like fun, you know, it's. It's still exercise. It's still physical activity, but it's, you should, it shouldn't be so hard to where you even find yourself like sore from that activity because then that clearly is not helping recovery. It may be doing more of a detriment anyway. So go ahead.

Yeah, so the reason it's in the good category is not necessarily because it's gonna be a night and day thing on an eight week basis in a study. Like I highly doubt that you would actually see differences, you know, in the short term, but in the long term it makes a whole lot of sense because a healthier individual and a person with a better aerobic base is a lot more likely to one, make it into the gym more consistently and two, to recover between sets. So recovering between sets is an aerobic process. So creatine needs to be re. Resynthesize all that kind of stuff. So making sure that you're just a healthy individual is a really good idea for recovering on a long term basis. And people tend to, in studies with performance outcomes they're a little bit all over the place. But on average it does seem like they recover performance better from some sort of active rest. So given all the evidence we have, it makes a whole lot of sense to be active and make sure that you're not sedentary outside the gym from a health and performance standpoint. And we're pretty confident long term that being a couch potato would hurt your gains. Maybe not on an eight week basis, but definitely on, you know, like a six month year and so on.

Well, if you die at 40, you like lose a potential like, like I know that sounds more than kind of like a joke, but you lose like 10 to 15 years of like of good quality training, to be quite honest, like in which you could be spending potentially building more muscle. I don't, to be quite honest, I don't have the likelihood of building more muscle if at 45 for me considering I started training at 13. But nonetheless, if you have more time on earth, you have more time to, to continue building muscle and getting more jacked. Right. So, so being a healthy person almost inarguably just makes it so you're as the likelihood of building more muscle as possible. So outside of the big rocks and potentially active recovery and active rest being the, the good in the good quality. And of course like I said, anything that relaxes you, those are like the goods as far as as recovery is con is concerned. Let's touch on the meh before we get into the bad. Cause the bad's the one that like really Exciting and fun, obviously. So the more meh, like, you know, they're probably not hurting you, but probably not helping you that much either. So what, what are some of the examples of that that you've seen?

Yeah, so I think most recovery tools probably fall into this category where they might do something in terms of placebo, but when you compare them to, like a really robust placebo, they probably don't do a whole lot. So things that I would put into this category are all types of massage tools. So whether it's a person giving you a massage, whether it is a massage gun, a foam roller, anything that involves any sort of, like, myofascial release, if you want to call it that, even though that's a terrible name, but it's.

A great name if you want to catch some eyes, because it sounds super scientific.

Exactly. So all of those things have many times been shown to reduce pain. So if you're the. A person who wants to avoid, you know, the sensation of soreness or any sort of pain sensation, I think they can be useful tools. But in terms of disentangling pain and performance, it doesn't seem like those two go hand in hand. So I personally wouldn't spend money or spend the time on doing those types of things just to get a slight reduction in pain. I enjoy the, the, the pain. It's a reminder that I worked hard, you know, so.

So I know you're joking, but I love muscle soreness. Like, I love knowing that I stimulated a muscle and that it's. I would say if you're doing things correctly, it's. It's more of a discomfort than like a pain sensation. Muscle soreness, conversely, foam rolling and. And the other forms of myofascial release hurt, like, not like uncomfortable. Like it literally is a pain for me personally. So I think that people, people who don't like the pain of muscle soreness, using something that is significantly more painful to alleviate that, I don't see that being a common thing. And it is done, obviously. But like, for me, foam rolling is just way more painful than muscle soreness, obviously. So.

And I think that's a. Yeah, that's a really important point. And I think this is probably the most salient point when it comes to this conversation. These therapies are not easy to study because the other group that's in the placebo doesn't really get something that's very similar to the actual therapy. So it's very hard to fake a massage. Like, there's been some studies that like, gave them some Sort of education thing as the placebo or didn't push as hard in terms of, with the massage and so on. And they tend to find less benefit. But they still, you know, show favorable outcomes toward the therapy group. But that's only, and that may be only because people have certain, certain preconceived notions. They, they enjoy massage, they believe that the massage is helpful for them and therefore they have benefits in, in that regard for them. And potentially that's partly placebo, maybe it's some blood flow related things. But it's very hard to disentangle the mechanisms. And if you actually read the literature, the researchers are like, yeah, we have no idea if it's actually working because of any sort of mechanism or just placebo alone. And we have no idea what the mechanisms are other than like a hand wavy type of, maybe blood flow is helping out. So you mentioned that it's extremely uncomfortable for you to do, you know, any sort of myofascial release, foam rolling and stuff like that. So for you, I'd be pretty confident that it's probably neutral to negative. But for somebody that really enjoys it, and particularly when it comes to touch, people, like really enjoy that. So I definitely wouldn't discourage people from doing it if that's something that they enjoy and really believe that it's benefiting them. But you have to sort of consider whether it's worth your time and your money given the fact that it probably is not making, you know, a night and day difference, just based on the evidence that we actually have.

Yeah. So that, that, that the meh, Right. Kind of like a good, a good example of meh is just like there are things that are probably neutral and depending on your opinion of them can actually take them further on either end of the spectrum of good to bad. Right. So myofascial release and like massages, they feel good to a lot of people. Like they do. And it makes sense. It's similar. You can think of it as burning your finger and then shaking your hand. The pain of muscle soreness to some people is that you can compare that to like burning. It's more painful than like shaking your hand or myofascial release. Right. So it's just replacing one sensation with another sensation. So if that other sensation feels better to you than the first sensation, then it's probably a good, it's probably a good thing for you. Right. We said that anything that relaxes you is probably good for recovery. I go to a massage room and they tell me to take my clothes off and I immediately get uncomfortable and my, Like I did, I. My recovery probably is diminished because of it. So other, besides massage guns, other examples of, like, you know, meh strategies, strategies that we see people using that are probably not hurting them, but may not be doing what they think they're doing either. Any. Anything you can think of.

Yeah. So I think there's probably two more categories here. I think compression garments fall into this category. It's. I think the mechanism is probably fairly similar to massage, where it increases blood flow. So all those types of, you know, compression devices, compression clothes, I think fall into the same category. Maybe they have some benefits in athletic populations. I'm very skeptical of the benefits for hypertrophy, but they're going to be small benefits. If there are physiological benefits, but same thing, you enjoy them, go for it. Saunas probably fall into this category. Many people ask if they have a performance benefit or detriment. The evidence that we do have, although it's limited, shows that it's neutral. So if you enjoy it, you can go for it. One thing that I would caution is that it is a physiological stressor. And in a lot of studies where they sort of like compare cardio to sauna and increases in blood volume, like there is a physiological effect. So overdoing it might actually be a detriment. But I'm pretty skeptical of that. I'm pretty skeptical of the fact that people could even overdo it to the extent that it would have a detriment. But something to consider, but mostly meh, mostly neutral. Not something that I would worry about. If a client came to me and said that they were doing sauna three times a week after their sessions and so on. How do you approach? I think this sort of dovetails with how do you approach when a client is doing something where, you know, is meh, but they really enjoy it. Like, somebody comes to you and say, listen, I foam roll all the time. I feel like it's really helping me. It's helping me recover between my sessions and so on. How do you sort of broach that topic?

Yeah, I, So before I, I, I do want to answer that, but before, I just wanted to be clear. This is an official statement by Daniel Plotkin. Diabetics stop using your compression garments because they're not doing anything for you. It's all placebo. No joke, obviously. But yeah, so, like, if I, if a client comes to me and they're like, hey, man, like, I started doing saunas and my workouts are feeling way better, I'd be like, dude, let's go. That's awesome. Keep doing saunas. Personally, the second that I get into a sauna, I'm miserable and want to leave. The second I'm in there, so they're not good for me. And then usually I'll explain, like, because I think that transparency is really important when you're talking to your client and sometimes even sacrificing that placebo that they may be receiving from something for the benefit of disseminating what true knowledge we have on the subject is worth it. But I think there are ways to do that without diminishing the placebo of. The effect of the placebo of like, let's say saunas, right? So client comes to me and says, like, I love saunas. I'd be like, that's great, man. That's. That actually might be all I say, like, that's awesome. Keep, keep it up. Because I know it's not gonna hurt them. But if they keep asking me, like, what my actual opinion is on is on it, or like what the science has to say about it, I would, I would probably tell them, like, well, look, it's, it's probably not hurting you, but I doubt it's really. I, I doubt those heat shock proteins are really making you much better in the gym. Right? But also I would remind them, like, look, science is literally about averages. Science is science. The way that we do science, the way that we conduct science, and the way that we disseminate the sci, the information we get from science is based on group averages, right? So for instance, in those in that sauna research, I am sure that there are individuals who in those studies saw a significant detriment in their performance after using sauna. Right? And I'm, I'm being speculative here, cause I, I'm not super familiar with the research on sauna therapies and there are probably other individuals who the sauna was like incredibly beneficial for, right? But on average, it didn't make a huge difference. Right? And if you compile all that together, it shows pretty neutral effect, right? You, the proverbial. You, the proverbial client that we're talking about right now is not an average. It is an individual. And that individual, he or she might fall on that end of the spectrum where they did see a benefit to using saunas. So I think reminding people of that is really good. And I think that's like one of the, like, similar to P values is another way that I see research misinterpreted very commonly. So that's probably how I would handle a Situation of someone coming to me and giving me a meh strategy that they enjoy. But do you have any difference of opinion there?

No, I think, I think you covered all the. The main points, and that's pretty much exactly how I broach it. I think just to piggyback off of disseminating sort of the collective knowledge on a specific subject, I think even more important than being accurate is trust between you and your clients. So if they come to you and they ask you about a therapy and then they're, you know, super scientifically inclined, and then they find out, you know, a few weeks later where a big headline, you know, maybe, hopefully it's not an inaccurate headline, but a big headline comes up and shows that that therapy is not effective and jives with previous evidence. And they come to you and they say, you know, why didn't you tell me this? I was wasting my time doing this, and so on. So creating that trust between your client and not, you know, straight up lying, essentially is probably a good idea. So I think I'm totally in agreement. And just to piggyback off that, I think the client trust is super, super important.

Yeah, it's. I'm glad we rarely agree. So this is so nice. Okay, so now the part of the episode that I have been looking forward to the most is talking about the implements that we see people using that there is clear evidence on for a detriment. So let's go into that. Right. What are some things you see people doing that are likely hurting their recovery between workouts in the context of hypertrophy? Wait, maybe. Yeah, sorry. So, yeah, that's it. People see people. Go ahead.

Yeah. All right. So I think the biggest one that's super popular is ice bath. So, you know, just cold therapies in general, something that makes sense for this is something that we maybe touched upon, but maybe should be underlined. Something that reduces pain and sensation can sometimes be negative for outcomes. So there's requisite or necessary inflammation that may actually facilitate adaptation. So inflammation that's actually allowing you to get, you know, bigger and stronger. So there's now a decent body of literature. I think it's maybe four or five studies. If not.

I think you.

Yeah, I think you guys bet on that. But I. In terms of the ones that were clearly negative, I think it was five, but I'm not sure if you. You've seen the effect sizes on that. But it's a substantial body of literature that shows that there's negative outcomes to cold baths. So substantial evidence that it's not good for hypertrophy and some weaker evidence that it's not good for strength, but still a signal there as well. So I would definitely avoid ice baths right after a training session. So if you're going to do them and if you enjoy them for their, you know, cognitive benefits or anything like that, then I would do them away from a session, potentially before a session, or at least three to four hours after a session.

Cognitive benefits or like psychological benefits?

Either one.

Are there cognitive benefits to ice baths? Truthfully, full disclosure, oftentimes me and Danny are playing characters here, but this is just my genuine. I did not know that there were cognitive benefits to ice baths or cold therapies in general.

Yeah, I'd be surprised if those like, well, how do you differentiate cognition and psychology and whether the psychology is playing into cognition? But yeah, whether there are direct studies looking at cognition is a good point. I just sort of assume sometimes they go hand in hand. So, yeah, probably psychological benefits is maybe a more accurate way to say it at the moment. Although I'd be surprised if there were no studies looking at some sort of like maze game or any, any. Anything like that. But yeah, psychological for. For sure.

We don't care about baby. Exactly. Okay. Yeah, just. And to give some numbers. So we did. I was recently involved in a meta analysis looking at ice bath's effect on hypertrophy directly, and that was led by Alec Pinero, the Lehman favorite Harvard grad. Shout out Alec Pinero, if you see this, where we took a bunch of different studies looking at that and then tried to truncate all that into a meta analysis and to get like, an idea of like, what is the actual effect there. And we found a standardized mean difference of about.0,22 in favor of not using ice baths. Right. And I'm going to give a very rudimentary explanation of like, what that actually represents. And Danny boy, who understands statistics much better than I do, maybe be able to give a better understanding of what that actually represents. So if we have an SMD or standardized mean difference of 0.22 and we. That we can consider resistance training without ice baths as like 100% of the adaptations you can get from resistance training. Right. And if you throw ice baths in on top of the standard, on top of the resistance training you're doing with a standardized mean difference of 0.22 that we found, that means that you're getting about 78% of those adaptations that you would have gotten had you not used ice bath. So a pretty significant detriment to your Gains if you're using ice baths. Now, important to note immediately after your resistance training. So it's possible that doing it further away, obviously like Danny Boyce said, might not have those, those negative impacts. Anything you want to touch on that?

I think that was a, a good summary for sure. And something that I think people for sure aren't, aren't aware of because they're super popular with all the, you know, big influences, influencers out there hopping in right after. So I think that's a good synopsis for sure.

Cool. So other than ice baths, there are things that we see people commonly using that are likely not help, likely hurting them more than they're helping them in the context of hypertrophy.

Yeah. So I think the evidence on these is, I don't, I, I don't wanna say not as strong, but the amount that you need to do them is probably a lot higher in terms of, I don't think the average person is actually experiencing a detriment from these, but I think the two main ones that I see are non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs and high dose antioxidants. So if you're someone that just takes, you know, Tylenol every single day for any type of, you know, pain, shout.

Out Derek Van Avery.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So there are a non negligible amount of people that probably abused them. They should probably stop doing that from a health standpoint. You know, there's I think now pretty good evidence that many of them actually are detrimental for heart disease and other outcomes that we don't care about. Obviously we just want to get as jacked as possible.

But they're making my heart bigger. That's a muscle, so that's good, right?

So yeah, if you're abusing non steroidal anti inflammatory medications over the counter and whatnot, they could have detriments. And now we have, I believe, two studies that have shown that they negatively affect hypertrophy outcomes. Interestingly, one study in older individuals found that it was beneficial to take those medications. So it seems like the sort of how much inflammation you have matters here.

So like your baseline level of inflammation, which as we know is higher in adults or older individuals.

Yeah, exactly. So it seems like a certain amount of inflammation facilitates growth and above a certain threshold you may actually have negative outcomes. So getting older individuals who potentially were at a higher baseline, whether because they were sedentary or obviously age itself matters here. So I'm not necessarily saying that if you're an older individual to take those drugs, I'm just helping Sort of contextualize the physiology here. So it seems like there's a requisite amount of inflammation that facilitates hypertrophy and if you blunt that or if you reduce that, then you could actually be reducing your gains. And I think the same concept is true for antioxidants. Super high dose antioxidants which nobody would be getting from normal consumption food, just fruits and vegetables and stuff like that.

But blueberries aren't gonna, you're not going crazy if you're just eating blueberries. You have to take supplements for this usually.

Yeah. So definitely don't stop eating, you know, your antioxidant rich foods. But if you're mainlining supplements that are high in antioxidants, which a non negligible amount of people are actually doing because, you know, tons of influencers, you know, misunderstand how these things work. So no high dose NSAIDs, no high dose antioxidants, but not something that you should be worried about if you are just taking them as a normal individual would. So this is definitely in a category where, you know, not something that you should be super worried about. And I wouldn't equate it to like the ice bath thing where, you know, normal amounts of ice baths after training could actually negatively affect your gains in a, in a much more meaningful way.

Yeah, I think so. The, I think the biggest thing to take away here is that like in those ice bath studies, they're very like accurate to what is actually done in the real world. Like very commonly individuals in athletics will, they'll have practice and then literally after practice, like immediately they'll run to the locker room and give them the ice bath. Right. So there's actually, those studies are typically conducted with a very high degree of ecological validity, whereas the NSAID research is not. And there's a reason for that. Obviously we'll get into later maybe the, the idea of proof of concept and the reason they do this in research. But they're having individuals take exceedingly high doses of NSAIDs that are just not practical and not what is common. So that's why we are much more confident in ISPass being detrimental than like NSAIDs being detrimental, for instance. And then the really good point about the antioxidants, I didn't even think about that until right now. I know that taking antioxidants in high dosages can interfere. Certainly we do have very direct data on this. Interfere with your ability to like increase aerobic capacity and other aerobic adaptations. But with regard to hypertrophy, I never even thought about that. So that's really interesting. A couple more that. So those are the big ones. Those are the big ones that we're like, sure. Like those are bad probably for hypertrophy if you're looking to make it as jacked as possible. Right. And there are some other more speculative ones. So like one that I don't see as common, it's not nearly as prolific on social media is just people who maybe deload too frequently. Right. So people who are, you know, they kind of use it as an excuse to not train cuz they just don't like training. So they're like oh, I, I'm, I'm doing, I'm just, I'm taking a de load this week. Really? Cuz you took a de load two weeks ago. Like do you really need a deload this week or whatever it may be. Again like not super common and, and probably not even like super detrimental to, to your gains, but just you know, probably not helping you by any means. Um, and then also I see people like treating their deloads not as deload. So like when you think of a deload is supposed to be easy and it's supposed to be a week where you're like the goal is recovery, not adaptation. Right. And I see people being like yeah, I'm b loading this week. So took out all my heavy lists and I'm just doing a bunch of drop sets and myo reps and a bunch of other high volume techniques. What? That's not a deload. You're just, you're just switching your goal essentially. So that's another thing that I see people doing that are probably not helping them. Obviously it's probably not killing them, but it's probably not helping them. And then I guess the last one I'll touch on is just doing more stuff. Like oftentimes people are like oh, I'm not recovering dude, like time to start doing my sled pushes again to, to help facilitate recovery. This was like very popular like five to 10 years ago. I feel like I was seeing this more than I am now. But like particularly like those in the powerlifting community just doing more stuff in general, like more exercise with the goal of just. But different than powerlifting training with the hopes that it will make their powerlifting training better because of some, you know, hand wavy once again recovery strategy. So yeah, it's like I am stealing this analogy directly from Mike Israel, but it's basically like your significant other coming to you and being like hey, like we travel too much. Like We. We were traveling so much, and, like, I'm. I just want to stay home and do nothing. And you're like, okay, great. Where do you want to go? Like that. Like, that's, like, it's a good. Like, that's. You're completely defeating the purpose of. Of a deload or. Or. Or of recovery in general. But those are the big ones as far as bads. Any. Any others that you feel like we should touch on?

Yeah, I think just to piggyback off of the sled pushing, I think an important one to touch on that, you know, not the biggest deal in the world, but especially at, you know, once you get more advanced, it matters, is exercise selection. So just choosing the exercises that make sense for the goal that you have. So something like a sled push, if you were trying to use that as a hypertrophy exercise, may not be the best choice. There's no eccentric, so eccentrics have been shown to be pretty important for hypertrophy. There's also, like, a pretty decent cardiovascular demand to sled pushes, you know, so just choosing exercises that are specific to your goal, you know, matters to some extent. Extent. Especially when you're on the higher end of the volume ranges and you're really trying to push adaptations. So I think that's the last one on the bad, so to speak.

All right, so this has probably been our longest episode yet. I have no idea how long we've been running for. But let's just real quickly, if you. I kind of did one earlier, but if you now want to just throw a synopsis of recovery and what we've touched on today so we can. And then we can. We can sign off for this episode.

Yeah, for sure. So I think recovery is all about doing the right amount of stuff inside the gym and the right amount of stuff outside the gym. So making sure that you're not doing too much inside the gym and making sure that you're choosing the right exercises in your training program, the right amount of volume, the right amount of rest between sets, all that kind of stuff while you're there, and then matching your recovery strategies to that. So making sure that you're getting adequate sleep, making sure that you're getting adequate nutrition, not underdoing it, making sure that you're minimizing stress, and making sure that all the stuff outside of the gym facilitates what's going on in the gym and adjusting as necessary. So if you know that you have a higher stress period outside the gym, making those adjustments to the gym is a really good idea. And then in terms of strategies outside the big rocks, there's just stuff that facilitates recovery in the long term. So being active, being healthy, and making sure your cardiovascular health is not tanking is a really, really good idea and probably facilitates recovery outside the gym and inside the gym between sets. So that's probably the. The biggest one in the good category to have long term adaptations. And then stuff that's in the meh category is anything that you enjoy that's probably pretty close to neutral and there's a lot of placebo going on. But if you really enjoy it, definitely do them. But make sure that they're stuff that you personally or your client enjoys, because those things could actually be detrimental in the context of somebody that does not think that it's facilitating recovery. And then the things that are clearly bad are ice baths right after training have been shown to be detrimental to gains both in hypertrophy and strength. And high dose NSAIDs and high dose antioxidants are something that you should consider if you're on the extremes of taking those things. And yeah, I think I covered most of them. Deloads, I think is one that I missed. So just making sure that how you go about doing deloads is appropriate. So there's many ways to skin the cat. You can do it in a reactive way, proactive way, but making sure it's not too often, making sure that you're listening to your body and not worrying too much about some time off, getting back on the horse is a really good idea.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that was a. Was a really beautiful synopsis, guys. And just remember that, look, hypertrophy is just a balance of the stimulus that you provide and the recoverability of your body. So recovery is really important. Take it seriously. Just as serious as you take the training that you do, obviously, because it's literally 50% of the equation. Uh, but yeah, great synopsis there. And as always, thank you guys so much for listening to the Bill of Science podcast with Max Goleman and Daniel Plotkin. And if you have any other topics or things you're interested in us covering, please feel free to comment down below or reach out to us at Built with Science on Instagram. All right, peace.