How Much Muscle Can You Build Naturally? | Dr Eric Helms

0:03You've spent 20 plus years, I believe at this point, building your own muscle, your own physique without drugs. For the person who has also been training for years, and let's say they've stopped seeing results, or at least results that they are able to feel or see or measure. in in your experience is it most likely that that person that's been in the gym for five ten maybe more years has reached a a genetic limit so to speak or do they need to think about the the way that they're training and make some adjustments yeah great question i think it is extremely unlikely that they've hit their genetic limit.

0:53And I think even the way that we think about quote unquote genetic limits doesn't fully comport with the way it actually works based upon our understanding of hypertrophy adaptation over time. But I also would say that the vast majority of people, if they fully understood it, which I know we'll unpack, wouldn't want to do what was probably necessary to hit the most theoretical amount of muscle mass in any practically even extreme but still possible style of training or approach that they could hit so a lot of it really does come down to what do you want what are your goals how important to you is it and then over what time frame do you need to kind of adjust your perspective on so there's a lot to unpack accurate, but everyone is super curious about their genetic potential or muscular ceiling.

1:50So when you say if someone sort of fully understood what they would need to do in order to get closer to genetic potential, they might not want to do that. Is that because of the effort that would be required? Is it because of time and it would eat away at someone's time to socialize or be at work or their family, what would you say is the primary thing that would deter the average person from putting in play, you know, let's say the very best of evidence-based principles here? It really comes down to what do they consider meaningful. And the big disconnect that we have between even applied research, whether it's sports nutrition, sports science, or even health-based research is the difference between what might be measurable or quote unquote significant if you're taking say a frequentist approach to your statistics versus what matters to people.

2:49So as an example, and we can unpack this, if you had to do three to four times the total work in the gym and you were needing to take almost every set to failure, perfectly managing your recovery environment than what you were habitually doing to get an additional, let's say, kilo of lean mass accrued in a year. Would that be worth it to you? And the answer is going to differ for someone who, say, try and compete in a world championship event and say powerlifting or bodybuilding versus someone who is just wanting to look good, feel good, move well, and maybe is sort of has that kind of dopamine chasing interest and self-betterment, you know, the completionist video game version of life, you know?

3:38So that's what it comes down to. And would you say your experience, are you more experienced in identifying where that athlete is falling short? Or are you also looking at, you know, for example, a lot of our listeners might be a 40 or 50 year old, let's say recreational lifter. So they're not professional athlete and maybe the one kilogram of muscle a year is not their goal and getting on stage. But what they're interested in is being able to continue playing tennis recreationally or hiking. Maybe they do that with their wife and their dog and they'd like to stay physically independent and sort of confident moving around as they're getting older.

4:24Are you looking at the research and or working with people and therefore able to identify where most people in that circumstance are kind of leaving gains and progress on the table? I've had a long and storied career. You know, I started as a personal trainer in 05 and did that with the general population until around 2012 is when I fully transitioned to online coaching. and the target audience of 3D Muscle Journey and the people I largely interacted with and seminars, content creation, indirectly because I've been a personal trainer educator for years are much more of what you would describe in that latter group.

5:02But once from 2012 onward, it's people who are explicitly competing in drug-free strength sport or physique sport, or it's people who aspire to that kind of level of commitment. And they're hiring a bodybuilding coach instead of, you know, a PT in the gym. So I've worked with the full spectrum, which is kind of cool. And, you know, Simon, one thing that I think people probably wouldn't realize is that in many ways, you still take the same approach, whether you're trying to decide, you know, what to do with someone who wants to go from top 10 to the top five in IPF or WNBF World Championships, or someone who is trying to reach their goals, as you described, being able to play tennis, play with their grandkids who are young and running around and toddlers and just feel better as they age.

5:51And they used to be an athlete or maybe they've always been physically active, but they're just finding it takes a little bit more. And ultimately, I take what I think many practitioners would describe as a constraints-led approach. and you evaluate what needs to be done to get to the outcome the person wants and then where are the biggest barriers and constraints. And I think people think athletes differ from the general population because the assumption is, oh, athletes will do anything. But it's just not true. Athletes have values. Athletes have time-bound goals. Athletes, especially in the type of sports I work with, are losing money to compete.

6:31They're not making money, even the top pros and they have full-time jobs and families. So you have to figure out what resources, time, and mentality and personality you're working with to then figure out what is possible in the first place. And then you can have those realistic conversations and you can start to look at the highest priority items. So for an athlete, while the constraints differ, it's still a constraint approach compared to someone who is a full-time parent and has a job where they have to travel. So it actually ends up being the same thing. And then if there's a mismatch between what their ideal goal would be and their current ability to meet those and the constraints actually prevent achieving that goal, then you have a harder conversation about how do we modify your constraints rather than working within them?

7:26And what would that take? Or how do we find a level of acceptance with what is realistic to achieve? And that is also true at the highest level of sport. You could do everything in your power and you may never go from top 10 to top five. Are you okay with that? What does that mean? What are your values? Do we need to shift your perspective on competing? Are you going to retire or you know what? So it really does come back to starting with with that person's goal. But what I'm hearing from you is that a lot of your thinking is applying similar principles to people who have different goals. So you're still thinking about exercise selection and intensity and weekly volume, all of these types of training principles, whether you're working with the elite athlete or the 50-year-old, but what each of those is going to be kind of fine-tuned or what it's going to look like will come back to that person's goals.

8:26Absolutely. And I think this is where the science is actually quite helpful because I mentioned earlier that we don't truly have a genetic limit, not in the way that people conceive it, in practical ways we sometimes do. And there are a lot of different perceptions out there that are not necessarily in line with what the data indicates for what it's like to get closer and closer and closer to a given potential. And, you know, for example, there is debate within the serious but not necessarily competitive lifting community of, hey, if I take a lower volume approach, but I really do, you know, train close to failure, really, really intentful, you know, maybe a little heavier, you know, a style, if you will, maybe, and this is still kind of coming from the evidence-based perspective, rather than a more dogmatic attachment to a training style, maybe I will still get to my peak potential.

9:20It'll just take more time. And this still operates off of the idea that every person, if you could look inside their DNA or something like that, has a fixed genetic potential. And it's just a question of, do they want to get there? How quickly can they get there? Do they get hurt along the way? And that's not actually the way it works. So if you're a practitioner and you don't know that, you can end up spinning your wheels for a long time in the case where someone might be willing to do something differently, or you may have certain dogmatic attachments to certain approaches that might become harder to sustain or might limit the overall training dose that you can take, depending upon someone's goals, what they like to do.

10:05So it's quite interesting because we have big data and big modeling studies now that help us understand the relationships of these variables, but how we apply them to the individual is very, like you said, you know, context dependent. If you've been listening to me or some of my guests talk about the gut microbiome, you'll know that it thrives on very specific types of fiber and polyphenols and resistant starch, many of which the average person falls short on, despite the very best of intentions. That's why Dr. Will Bolsiewicz and I founded 38Terra, a gut health company where science meets supplementation.

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11:21Has it been borne out in the research as to how much genetic variability actually exists when it comes to, say, building muscle and strength? If you were to go out and apply these principles that are known to work from research, from clinical observation, how much variability is there from person to person in terms of how they respond to those training principles? Well, this is where it gets fun, Simon. So, response variation is actually a very challenging thing to understand because what we measure in research and what people interpret it to be, there's a pretty big gulf there. So I'll give you an example of a classic study by Hubel and colleagues from the early 2000s.

12:06I think it was on close to 1 ,000 people, men and women, untrained, 12 weeks, multi-site trial, big government grant to do it. And they're measuring changes in cross-sectional area of the biceps, as well as 1RM strength in the bicep curl. Like I said, untrained individuals. And the classic interpretation of this study, the numbers are right, but the interpretation is wrong, is that you see anywhere from like a couple percentage points increase in a 1RM up to say 250 % increase in a 1RM and anywhere from no change and hypertrophy up to a 59 % increase cross-sectional area in 12 weeks. And that's all correct.

12:46The interpretation that is a bit flawed or at least overextends what we actually can know is that represents genetic variability and that some people are freaks and some are not. But here's the thing. It's a 12-week study. And if you were to repeat that study again, it's not implausible that some of those people would have made no gains. And you're thinking, oh, that's because they're doing the same program again. Well, no, let's create a, you know, let's make it like that new show, Dark Matter. No, we go to an alternative reality that's almost exactly the same as we got now and run that study.

13:21do we think they would get the same gains? Are those persistent high responders or did the person who got 59 % gains just happen to get into a really good new sleep routine, stress changed, environment changed, and they had elbow and tendinitis before and now they don't? You know, you can imagine many, many scenarios. So the only way to really test this would be to actually do, for hypertrophy at least, or the best way to test it, I'll say, is a repeated crossover design using a within-subject assessment. So left arm versus right arm. That way it's connected to the same brain, digestive tract, sleep, everything.

14:00And then to randomize that person again to whatever two protocols you're comparing to see if they responded better within person to that or if they themselves tend to respond better to all resistance training compared to other people. So this is incredibly resource intensive, but it does answer the question And it has been done, to my knowledge, exactly once by Dr. Zach Robinson as part of his PhD. And I can tell you that he would not do his PhD again because of how logistically challenging it was. But he did find some really interesting answers to this question. So I have to imagine, given your reputation as being involved in the science, also in natural bodybuilding yourself, that you must, from time to time or quite frequently, get people coming to you thinking they've tapped out at their genetic potential?

14:49Absolutely. And why is it that they led to believe that? Is it an unrealistic expectation of how much strength and muscle growth you should experience on a year by year basis? Is it that, like, I remember when I started lifting, the first few years were incredible. The feedback was amazing because your body's just changing like day by day, week by week. You're seeing it, you feel it, your strength is increasing quite quickly. And then the longer you've been at it and the more consistent you're at it, it feels like progress sort of slows down. And I think if you're not kind of aware of what is good progress, what's realistic, you might become discouraged and think that you've stalled when in fact, it might just not be progress that you can perceive week to week.

15:40And we have really robust data, not that we need it, like anyone who's lifted for long enough knows this is the reality. Your newbie gains are not replicable. And people often spend their early stage, quote unquote, intermediate years trying to recreate them if they're not aware of the strong diminishing returns that occur. The more muscle you build, the less muscle you can build additionally on top of it. That's the way it works. And this has been modeled with massive meta-analyses now, but we see it. So I think the typical person who comes to me and says, hey, hey, I think I'm tapped out or I don't know how to make more progress.

16:20Can you help me? The motivation either comes from one of two places. They're dissatisfied and they want an excuse to no longer be natural, which, you know, fair enough. But I think you want to have a realistic assessment of that. And more importantly is you're going to have an enhanced limit too. And this is where it's really, I think, useful to talk about. There's an enhanced limit at every dosage of performance enhancing drugs that you decide to take. And the difference between the open professional top three at the Mr. Olympia versus say the classic physique amateur, you know, which is a much smaller division at a high level amateur show that's untested is the dose of anabolics and also genetics and things like that, of course.

17:07So if someone can only be motivated by progress, I know that they'll eventually quit lifting because you will stop progressing. And it may result in a lot of frustration and loss of focus on all the cool aspects of lifting along the way. Now, if we think about not those people, not the people who are being pressured by the tyranny of progress, but enjoy progress, want to get better, and they're the completionists, but they don't know how to keep going. I think that describes me. I'm motivated by putting in everything to get very small returns on investment because that's the game. That's fun for me, right?

17:47It's just like if anyone's a fan of, say, Dungeons & Dragons, you know, video game or in person. I'm a real nerd. I roll the D20s on the table. The experience level that you need to go from level one to two versus, say, 19 to 20, it's an exponential increase. It's very challenging to go up to the next level. So for those people, when they come to me, there is often at least a component of not realizing just how strongly the gains diminish and then both accepting that, but then also, as you said, reframing what are realistic expectations if I'm going from my 10th year of training into my 11th. What's the best case scenario currently?

18:32and then if I reframe to that, and this is of course a guess, then am I satisfied with that? And if I'm not, then, you know, again, there's a conversation that's not about the science, but it's about the psychology. If we make this, let's translate this into the gym, something super practical. This is a conversation I was actually having with a buddy the other day in the gym. He said, you know, what can he expect? Let's say over a year, natural lifter, guy in his probably late 30s. And he said, how much should my squat be going up per year? Or how much should my deadlift be going up per year? I seem to just be sitting on the same weight a lot of the time.

19:14If I'm doing things correctly, what does that look like? And am I just going to get to a stage at a certain age where it's not going to keep increasing and therefore I'm just trying to maintain or hold on to that strength as best as possible. I like that you brought up strength. It's a little easier to talk about because we have this really cool thing called open powerlifting, which is this massive database that has all of the squat, bench, deadlift, total results that have ever been done for any kind of recorded competition going all the way back into the 70s. And the cool thing is you can restrict it to, say, drug-tested competitions.

19:51You can restrict it to masters one, two, three, four, so over 40, over 50, over 60, over 70. And there's been some really cool long-term data analyses. And observational data like this is quite helpful compared to, say, a trial, where even if you have all the resources in the world, you're probably going to be doing an experimental trial that lasts no longer than a year and a half. and we have modeling data on a year and a half of training for untrained people, you know, and we can plot that and there is good data on that. But you also have to remember that in almost all experimental trials, there's not the same type of variation or changes that occur in a program as someone who's competing and trying to get to their strength limit.

20:36And that's neither one is exactly the type of thing that you're asking about, but the latter is probably closer to it. So there's a really cool modeling study that was done on powerlifters. And this is not considering age. Now, most powerlifters, this is people who want to actively compete in squat bench deadlift, they're coming to the sport reasonably well-trained in what we would probably describe as an intermediate. So they're already on the slowing arc. And what we see is that within the first year or so of competing, they increased their total by 10%. So let's say we use easy numbers. You're totaling, let's say, 450 kilos or roughly 1 ,000 pounds, right?

21:19In the first year, you're probably going to get up to around a 500 kilo total or an 1 ,100 pound total. And that's awesome. And I see this in every new power lift. It's like, if I do this every year, I'm going to be a world champion in four or five years. 450 kilograms? Are you talking about volume there or what's this? So maximum squat plus maximum bench plus maximum deadlift. So let's say that someone is putting up a 120 kilo bench. My math is going to be off here. A 150 kilo squat, and then whatever 450 is minus 270, 180. That's actually not bad, right? That's a reasonable split. So each one of those, they can probably improve by 10 % or collectively.

22:00On average, if we're talking about data on 10 ,000 power lifters, you're going to see a whole lot of variation. There's going to be a bell curve distribution. But the average data would say, hey, in the first couple of years of training, you're up to a 10 % average improvement from where you were with one standard deviation on either side of that maybe being, say, 7 % to 12 %-ish, something like that. And then it takes another 10 years to do that again. So you think you're on the trajectory to being the best in the world because you just went from... Don't get me wrong. Most people who compete in powerlifting, there's some selection for being strong.

22:37Most people may never even get to a 450 kilo total unless they're a male who's 100 kilos or more and has some athletic background. But that's very average in powerlifting because it's a strength sport, right? So that means that they might go from 450 to 500 to then 550 once they've been competing for 10 years. So that is a very rude awakening, especially considering that this is not a controlled trial. This is people iterating, getting plateaus, getting hurt, and doing everything in their power because they're not everything, and doing a lot more than the typical person would because they have a competitive desire to get as strong as possible.

23:18So that is a decent way of looking at it. And in my books, and when I talk to people, I really discourage them using strength standards that are applied across everybody, but more so thinking about where did you start? And then based upon where you started, where is it reasonable to go? Because you can't change that necessarily. But I think a lot of people confuse what aspects of quote unquote genetics are determining their final endpoint. A great example is just comparing men to women. Massive difference is a baseline, right? At the same height, you're typically going to see a pretty substantial difference in terms of strength and lean mass.

24:08However, when you look at the actual relative increases, the percentage change in strength and muscle mass, no matter how you measure it, multiple meta-analyses have confirmed this, pretty similar response. Now, that doesn't satisfy people. If I said, hey, no worries. You and your training partner can both increase your, let's, we'll use the squat example. You know, let's say you, Simon, and your training partner, you come to the gym and one of you has far better, what we'll describe as quote unquote baseline genetics. First time you step into the gym, you're squatting one wheel, 135. Training partner though, or 60 kilos in our part of the world.

24:46Training partner squatting 225. A whole extra wheel first time. That's their one rep max. You're trying that out. You're doing your program. You got a good, the same program. You got a PT looking after you, all that good stuff. And, you know, first you're like, wow, they're a lot stronger than me at baseline. And if I come along and say, don't worry, you can make the same relative gains. And then in six months, you both increase your squat by a third, 33%. Now you're up to 180, you know, and they're up to 300. They started higher, 90 pounds heavier or whatever it is. And they finished 120 pounds heavier.

25:24So for you to look at that, the relative gains don't make you feel better. You know, like that's still frustrating, even though you both actually did make very similar proportionate increases from baseline. And that's what the broad data would suggest. Obviously, in this scenario, we wouldn't expect the perfect mean response and an average to apply to you and your training partner. There would be some, you know, obviously variation there. But that is kind of the way at the group level, on average, that things seem to play out. And do you think most of that difference in that scenario is explained by genetics, by physiology, the differences in hormone levels?

26:07or is it earlier exposures, environmental exposures that those two people have kind of diffident with respect to their lifestyles? Yeah, the answer is yes, right? Because it all goes into the bucket, what is heritable and what is environmental and things that we would traditionally consider genetics or not. There's a really good preprint. It's relatively controversial, but it's a good preprint that came out of Lehman College. Dr. Brian Schroedfeld has a hypertrophy oriented program there. And one of his African-American students wanted to investigate the claim that you'll often see online that, you know, people of African descent have better genetics for lifting.

26:49So he recruited in New York, which there's some context relevant here, you know, 50 people who either self-identified as white or black. Now, obviously race is a a societal construct. It's not the same thing that maps perfectly with ancestry or DNA. So they then took these people who self-identified and then they did commercial genetic testing. I think it was like ancestry.com, right? And they ended up after dropouts and everything with 20 people with predominantly European or sub-Saharan African genetics with more than 50%. And they found that at baseline, there was higher degrees of strength and muscle mass in the people of African descent.

27:30I think it came out to be something like 8.5 kilograms of lean mass on like an in-body 770. So it's a lot. But once again, the relative proportions in terms of strength adaptation, muscular endurance adaptation, and gains in lean mass or muscle thickness when they measured via ultrasound were actually on average for the groups, not individuals, quite similar. So that's an example where yes, quote unquote, genetics, your genetic ancestry does seem to impact at least the starting point. But to answer your question in another way, here's an interesting comparison between men and women. So when you look at these big meta-analyses, you generally see that lower body strength as well as overall muscle mass increase in a similar proportion when you compare untrained, quote unquote, men and women.

28:24But women sometimes, and actually has been shown in large data sets, gain more strength in their upper body when they're untrained versus men. Now, that's a tough one to explain, unless you think about the societal context. Because untrained, like, what does that really mean? You know, if you send an astronaut to space, they'll lose muscle mass, right? And that's even if they continue to train with resistance bands and do more resistance training than they did on earth. Likewise, if you take someone who's completely untrained and highly sedentary and you give them a walking program, they actually experience hypertrophy sometimes to the degree we can measure it.

29:09But neither one of those would change them to be, you know, you got a trained person losing muscle doing training. And then you have, because they're in space or microgravity, and then you have an untrained person gaining muscle, not doing resistance training. So what's the difference between untrained men and women? Well, we still have a bit of a gap between what is societally acceptable or normalized in the West for men and women. So as an example, if you're doing a study on college age, you know, like university students and actually a science class in 2026. These are people who are born in the mid 2000s, right?

29:49Even if you look at now and back then and what was going on for high school, you're still seeing a gap in sports participation and you're seeing a difference in what sports are being participated in. So you'll see more men in your study who played sports in high school and then of them, especially this is a study in the US, they probably did football. And even if they didn't do much strength condition, they came from a small school, there was pushing, there was pulling, there was upper body movements. And the gals, you know, they might have done more basketball, track and volleyball, some more lower body dominant stuff.

30:29So okay, they're starting from a similar baseline, same one arm strength in the lower body. But they're also potentially less trained, even though everyone's untrained for the bench press, right? Which is one of the very common upper body strength tests. And furthermore, also like what was their first job out of high school? Like what are they doing right now while they're taking classes and participating in this research study for extra credit and exercise phys 101? There's probably going to be more of the guys who are doing contracting work and manual labor because of gender differences and societal norms.

31:03So is it a sex difference per se? Is that a genetic heritable difference because you have different chromosomes? Or is it that untrained men on average are going to have more upper body conditioning and they're going to be a little bit closer to that supposed genetic ceiling for strength and more familiarity with the bench press? Because they've messed around, but they've never really quite unquote did a training protocol to be excluded by this untrained participant study compared to the gals. Yeah, I'm laughing because it reminds me when I was 18, my training partner, a good friend of mine still to this day, he left school and became a roofie.

31:39So he was doing manual labor. And I left school and went and did physiotherapy and was working at a Japanese restaurant cleaning dishes. And it used to dishearten me so much. We would go to the gym and we'd both really, this was when we really first started lifting. and he was just so much stronger. Both of us didn't have lifting experience. He was so strong at that point. I'm glad to report back that I made some progress chasing him, but I'm still pretty sure to this day he's much stronger than me. But I do think his occupation had something to do with that for sure. I remember how strong his forearms and grip strength was at the time.

32:20The other thing that I think is interesting when comparing men and women is I think earlier you said that there's a different starting point, but sort of relatively speaking, women can build muscle and strength just as well as men, but yet they have very different testosterone levels. And so there's this idea out there that really muscle growth and strength, it's all driven by testosterone, more, more, more, more, more. But how do we reconcile that with the fact that, relatively speaking, women who have much lower testosterone concentrations can build just as much muscle and strength? Yeah, I think it's good to think about the difference between super physiological exposure for a given period of time versus your resting concentrations within the quote-unquote normal range, and then the difference between mechanical load-induced hypertrophy versus pure hormonal-induced changes.

33:20So the way I like to conceptualize this, and I'm not an endocrinologist, nor am I a physiologist. I'm an applied sports scientist. So I think this does need to, of course, be tested. But the way I like to think is, if this was true, what would the world look like? How do our anecdotes comport with the data, comport with our understanding of things? And since we can't fully investigate this, the way I like to think of it, and this does comport with all of that to the best of my understanding, is that taking exogenous testosterone, especially in high doses, is kind of like going through a second puberty in some ways.

33:52There's some classic studies by Basin where they basically took hypogonadal men, induced that, and then either had them lift weights or not lift weights. And then in each one of those two categories, either take different doses of testosterone or not. And one of the comparisons was a 600 milligrams per week testosterone injection, which is super physiological and way more than you would get from most like legit TRT clinics that are dealing with getting you to normal levels, not like, you know, boosting you up to the high, high normal for funsies. And what you see is that the 600 milligram testosterone group put on more lean mass.

34:34But I do wonder what that actually would have looked like because testosterone makes you grow everywhere. And if you've been in the bodybuilding industry long enough, you see that people who go and are taking anabolic steroids, they get changes in their facial structure a little bit. They get growth of muscles that they're not lifting weights with peripheral muscles. And I think, I think people don't view drugs in the same way they do these physiological changes in our body. That's different. And I I've stepped back from that and I've gone, well, hold on, like testosterone isn't magic, right? And we see very different things at different dosages.

35:12So when you look at the highest quartile versus the lowest quartile of men who are carrying like high normal versus low normal testosterone, there's maybe a kilogram of lean mass difference with them walking around. So there is a signal in the noise. It's just that when we think about the differences between men and women or the differences between bodybuilders taking, you know,$2 ,000 a month of anabolic steroids, where they're at these crazy ranges when you think about what they're actually being exposed to, you know, grams of androgen per week, not 600 milligrams, which is already multiple fold times more than you're even a pretty virile teenager would be putting through their system.

35:59it really elevates what I think is the baseline quite a lot. And these things are happening at the same time as resistance training. And it's very difficult to tell whether they're synergistic, additive, and what's going on. But you will see that when you take someone who used to be, say, an IPD Mr. Olympia, and they come off gear, they lose huge amounts of muscle, even if they keep training hard. So I think it is elevating the baseline of what you see between men and women, but then those differences in testosterone are not providing enough to elevate the baseline again. And it's that you're training that mechanical induced overload to muscle tissue that's going to create that same curve.

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39:43That's code Simon at im8health.com. It almost seems like earlier you mentioned that when you start training, you can put on a lot of muscle and build a lot of strength and then it kind of becomes much harder and the body's almost fighting back against it to an extent. It almost feels like that super physiological exogenous testosterone kind of lets you bypass that pushback from the body. And then once you remove that signal, the body again, and again, I'm not an evolutionary kind of scientist or physiologist, but my lay interpretation would be that to a point, it's helpful to have more muscle and strength.

40:25but then maybe it's counterproductive and resource intensive. It is, you know, and there's a lot of evolutionary biology speculation of, you know, how we evolved and the difference that we have to other primates. But I think another way to view this is not necessarily that testosterone removes the brakes, but that it is changing the environment and the baseline. Another way to look at it is if you take RETS, relative energy deficiency in sport, where someone is in a deep deficit. This is almost a guarantee if you compete in natural bodybuilding, you get really, really lean. But it's also quite common in, say, endurance sport or some team sports or CrossFit athletes, people who want to have muscle, and they go through these phases where they're unable to meet the energy demands of their sport plus their physiology, at least in an optimal level.

41:15And what you'll see is a decrease in the amount of lean mass they carry. So every natural bodybuilder who gets really, really lean and let's say they're at a high level, they're typically like, for example, right now I'm walking around around 94 kilos. I might compete in the low eighties. And I would love to think that all 12 kilograms of that loss is fat mass. Some of it's lean mass. And some of that lean mass is skeletal muscle tissue. There's no way around it. And that's because I have like one fifth of my normal testosterone levels. I don't have the same energy levels because of the calorie restriction and getting below my natural lower intervention point for body fat.

41:51My hypothalamus, is going, ring the alarm, we need to downregulate a whole lot of things here for energy conservation, going back to evolutionary biology. Now, if it was true that my hormonal status and my physiological status and the mechanical induced overload had the same diminishing returns response, then I would never be able to compete the next season within that short timeframe. If I'm up close to the highest I can get my muscularity, I would never be able to regain that lost one kilogram, but you see it happen all the time. So what probably happens is that your baseline drops because you're in a sustained period of a really counterproductive hormonal environment for maintaining muscle mass, but you're still training really hard.

42:41You're doing everything else right. And then after recovery, you lift that baseline again, and you see a faster return of your baseline level muscularity than you can achieve by trying to gain muscle through mechanical overloading. And there you go. And the only muscle loss that's probably really hard to get back is if you couldn't sustain enough training to maintain the level of muscle that you had because you're dieting that hard, you know, but year on year, or even every other year, you'll see top level natural bodybuilders competing at least as good or slightly better until they get into their late 40s and 50s where they start to struggle.

43:23And that's also a really interesting observation, Simon. Top-level pro-natural bodybuilders are constrained by age at a much later point than athletes in other sports because it's not how fast they move. It's not how strong they are. You can find ways to grow muscle with slow tempos, high reps, low load, different variations, machines. So while a power lifter, and we could talk about this as well, might not be at their peak as an M2 and they're struggling to maintain in their 40s the strength they had in their 30s and 20s. A bodybuilder may be not as strong on the given movements they used to do, but with smart exercise selection, they might be able to be at their peak even into their early 50s.

44:05And we have examples of people who have won top titles in pro bodybuilding in their 50s. That is uncommon on the enhanced side of the sport. People burn out much earlier into their 30s and 40s, probably because of heavy drug use. But in the drug-free sport, you don't have the performance-hensing drug use dragging you down. And if you're creative, as we know from good data on when does physical health truly start to decline purely from age, not because we get more sedentary and life gets harder. You know, there's some data that indicates testosterone doesn't even meaningfully drop until you're in your sixth decade of life for really healthy men when you correct for factors like obesity, physical activity, and things like that.

44:48So that's the explanation though of why it would become harder for a natural bodybuilder to build muscle in their 50s and 60s. It is the decline in testosterone. I think that's probably a very minor player. I think it is probably eventually related to, you know, I don't want to say wear and tear because it makes it sound like a car. But by the time you're 50, if you're a natural bodybuilder, in most cases, you're not just in your 50s and looking at your peers. You're also someone who's been lifting weights to get as big as possible for 30 years. so I sometimes like like right now I'm 43 and I'm I just had my best season ever in 2025 I play sixth out of 11th in the pro light heavyweight WMDF world championships I'm beyond wherever thought I would be I'm literally in the best shape of my life but I'm also banged up you know and not not in an awful way like I would be far worse and man when I take a look at some of my peers who have not stayed active in their early 40s, you know, they deal with different problems than I do.

45:56But I am definitely experiencing what it's like to be an athlete who's been training and competing for since my first competition in powerlifting in 06. And I've done 20 powerlifting meets, five weightlifting meets, three strongman competitions and 20 bodybuilding shows and a Highland Games comp starting in 06 when I first began. And I've worked with athletes at the highest level into their 50s who are still competing in the pro open division. And I've also worked with, you know, just soccer moms who are interested in lifting weights because they've been told that it would be good for their bone health as their kids move out or something like that.

46:34I guess you're not a soccer mom if your kids move out, but you know what I'm saying. So I've kind of seen it all. And I can tell you that the biggest barrier to being you're still progressing it's a certain point it feels like it's musculoskeletal and it's difficult to separate how much of that is you've been training hard for a long time or age or the combination of course it's both congrats on that that recent performance that's very inspiring at 43 if someone's not familiar with your personal journey here and your story what what drew you to natural bodybuilding in the first place? You know, I was first drawn to bodybuilding and strength sport without really knowing that that was a aspect of it.

47:19So we're talking, I started lifting in 04, kind of burgeoning internet, pre-social media, and I knew of bodybuilding. And I kind of just assumed that eventually, if you wanted to compete at the highest level, you had to do performance-intensive drugs, anabolic steroids. But it was actually the bodybuilding.com forums and Lane Norton, who before he got into powerlifting, he was actually a competitive natural bodybuilder. And then some of the local competitors where I was at the YMCA in Augusta, Georgia, who I talked to and, you know, I met an old WNBF heavyweight world champ, Rodney Hilaire, who actually, I think won his last heavyweight title at 48 or 49 or something like that.

48:01And it kind of opened my eyes to all of this. And for me, it's not a moral thing or a legal thing, although those factors did come into it. Some from the US and they're also illegal in New Zealand. And I'm not actually want to, like the reality of it, oh, I have to find a source. And this is the same guy who sells meth, right? And there are legal ramifications. But for me, it was just my personality. When I was bit by the iron bug and I wanted to get as big and as strong as possible with a kind of video game completionist mentality, like, oh, I want to see how far I can take this. I actually really was glad to see that I wouldn't have to go down the enhanced route because the line in the sand to kind of protect myself from my own personality is pretty important.

48:48So I knew that if I was training as hard as I could, if I was following my diet as best as I could, the only variable left was to up the dose. And that can get quite crazy. And I'm not talking about like the risks of low dose TRT, you know, that every person over 30 is on Instagram is getting pitched affiliate codes to go do. And it's told it's a panacea of, you know, health and vitality. I'm talking about, again,$2 ,000 of polypharmacy taking experimental drugs and stacking, you know, insulin growth hormone injectable and oral compounds, as well as experimental stuff. and then taking fat loss agents all at the same time.

49:28And that typically does not go well. And we have data on different eras of bodybuilders and lifespan and healthspan. And I've seen it personally because the bodybuilding community is relatively interconnected and I'm not someone who judges them. So for me, it was a decision about, hey, if I can cage or put constraints around the insane person inside of Eric Helms to compete, I can get very far and de-risk it and still have a level playing field where I can enjoy being a competitive person and maximize my own personal journey into trying to get as maximally jacked as possible without drugs. But that's really just my personality.

50:09Some people do it for health reasons, moral reasons, et cetera. Do you think from when you first started, so 2004-ish or early 2000s to now, the use of anabolic steroids and peptides we can throw in there, growth hormone, insulin, is more or less prevalent in the young kind of bodybuilding sphere of the world. I think, unfortunately, it's more. And that's because you've kind of had this like Maha bro culture, carnivore, political melding of these worlds. And you see a lot of people who are typically not in the competitive bodybuilding space. So when I say, quote unquote, bodybuilding, it's kind of just like social media bro culture, right?

50:57It has become, there's so much more information, which is good, but it's very difficult to find good information. It's not hidden. There was definitely gatekeeping in the 2000s. So like the way it would work, because I knew these guys and I knew that pathway if I wanted to go, it is like you lift in the gym and there's some absolute monsters. They're the local competitors. And once you are kind of like, okay, this guy is serious about it, this gal is serious about it, they're in here every day or whatever. And you've put on some decent amount of muscle, you've been in the gym and you make friends with them.

51:30They ask if you're interested in competing. and then if you take it to a certain point, they're like, do you want to go to the next level? And then they can help you find people and sources and coaches and all that stuff. That's not the case now. Like I said, anybody can find a way to get gray drugs, peptides. Some of them do nothing. Some of them probably do something. Some of them do stuff we don't know or a TRT situation. It's very easy now. It's also, it's not just educational. It's also been normalized to a point that I don't know it should be. So I'm all for informed consent and awareness, but I don't think people are well informed as to the risks, the potential benefits, and it is content.

52:17You know, it is something that a YouTuber, you know, like I remember when Larry Wheels made his video about, hey, I'm going to go, you know, natural and just be on low dose TRT to maintain normal levels. and he made it sound like this big revelation and he was trying to be like a responsible kind of father figure for all the people watching and hey, you know, I don't think you should be on the big amount of gear I'm on. And then somewhere halfway through, he goes, by the way, if you want to use the same TRT clinic as me, here's my affiliate code and the link. And it's like, good God, you know, like it's, this is where we've gotten to.

52:51So people are also habituated and normalized to self-injections now, the GLP-1 craze. So I think we have a very different culture and community where it's super easy to access this stuff You know SARMs are everywhere very similarly to when pro-hormones were out when I first came up I mean, there's some parallels you could buy Legitimate anabolic oral steroids From gnc under the guise of pro-hormones before the u.s got their 2004 and 2005 act together And there was a point where some of the surveys of muscle building supplements showed like 15 % of them were actually steroids in one form or another.

53:30And then that changed rapidly with the legal changes. And I think now we're in a different version of that. So we had 10 years ago, pre-workouts that were essentially containing methamphetamines. And then we had the SARM craze. And now the first question I get from anybody, even if they're 18 or 19 is like, what peptides should I use? Not tell me about training, tell me about nutrition, which is, I find quite unfortunate, but it is some degree of another version of what I saw as I've been coming up over the years. It's just amplified and faster and easier to access. Did you catch the enhanced games earlier this year?

54:08Did you see that in Las Vegas? I knew of it. I know some people involved in it. I saw some content and to me, it really just kind of seems like a big marketing piece for selling drugs and peptides. It didn't kind of really do what would be an interesting sociocultural question of what if we just allowed it all, but replicated the Olympics. It was more of a spectacle and a circus act than a financially motivated thing. The more I look back on it, like that's just my perspective. So I wasn't really interested in actually following it. I think it speaks to the point you made about a lot of these things being normalized, to the point where an event like that exists and I guess received a lot of media attention.

54:51I found it interesting and I think it's difficult to interpret, but I found it interesting that there was only one world record broken. And that was from an athlete that was wearing a super suit that's actually banned in the Olympics because the swimsuit is performance enhancing in and of itself. Now, it could be that these people were older, or I've seen some people claim, well, maybe that means that all of the Olympians are already doping. Yeah, it's a really common perspective, and it's really understandable, but it's also a relatively flawed perspective. You know, I mean, how many times have I heard, yeah, whatever, Olympians can do whatever they want.

55:32Lance Armstrong never got caught. And I was like, well, no, he did. You know, like, was he getting away with certain things? but some things will really change your perspective. Like if you look at how many times weightlifting has rechanged their weight classes as a way of trying to wipe the records clean because they were contaminated by doping from an era where drug testing was either non-existent or just way, way behind the doping. There was a survey of, I think in the late seventies or eighties of shot putters and discus throwers of how many of you are, you know, using anabolic steroids and it was anonymous and it was like 90 plus percent.

56:10And some of those records are only now getting touched. And we're talking about a time when there was billions of less people, right? And far fewer, therefore, participants in sport. But the amount of drugs was not constrained at all, right? Because there was not testing for it. So if you want to look at the heyday of anabolic steroids, it's not just whatever the most modern era is because drugs are getting so good. which is kind of the, I would say that the not nuanced and haven't really thought about a take on the internet. It was in the late eighties and the early eighties before the testing got there.

56:46But I mean, the hormone industry started in the, in like the forties and fifties and all these different types of explorations of ways of modifying testosterone had been done for years. So if we're talking about doping programs in full bloom without oversight and athletes being relatively unlimited. Yeah, that happened in the enhanced games, but it was the norm in the 80s. And now it's changed a lot. Actually, the interesting thing now is that retrospective testing has changed the game in a lot of ways. So there's this belief that athletes don't care. They'll do anything to win. And there's even some misrepresentations of surveys that make people think that's the case.

57:32But it is heavily influenced by region, sport, normalization, And athletes also want legacies. So if you know that your blood test might be saved for four to five years and, you know, that the concentrations that you took now and the compounds you took now, yeah, they can beat the tests currently at the detection thresholds and the assays they provide, but you could be caught five years later. We've actually seen what all data would indicate is a reduction in people attempting to dope. And even if there is a fair amount of doping in sport, which I'm not naive, of course there is, right? It is a concentrated in certain countries, locations, based upon their local testing, how corrupt they are, what's normalized for the sport in that region.

58:19And it is far, far less than you would anticipate compared to a complete lack of a testing protocol. It's what's the least amount that I can potentially get away with and try to get a small advantage. But the enhanced games is, or let's say enhanced bodybuilding, which is completely untested or enhanced powerlifting. Those are, take as much as you can get the competitive advantage. So the perspective I have, when I look at say the IPF, International Power Federation, which is pretty well drug tested versus the untested, and powerlifting has exploded in the number of participants, is that you're starting to see the untested records getting beaten by some of the best individuals in the tested ranks.

59:08And there's two reasons for that. One, it's a weight class sport. If you put on a ridiculous amount of muscle mass, you are not going to be able to be a 74 kilo lifter, you know, so you're going to go up a weight class because that's the way that anabolic steroids make you stronger by putting on more muscle. And the untested federations do allow like a 20 far away in versus two, they allow different equipment. So there's a lot of things that are going into why their numbers were higher, but their size is diminishing. We're seeing a lot of people not going into the enhanced side of the sport, because unlike, say, the West Side era, it is actually the tested side of the sport that is getting more coverage, has more opportunity, more sponsorships, is more well-developed, and is in the World Games.

59:55It's not quite the Olympics, but it's there. So the population has actually increased more than 20-fold in the last 10 years of entrance into competitive powerlifting. And if you know statistics, you know that the larger the base, the higher the peak, and you get more and more outliers. And someone who was a 93 kilogram world champion in 2013 now is probably totaling less than one weight class below them. So it is not the drugs that are the primary thing that dictate performance in elite sport. It is participation in genetics. And then drugs, of course, make a difference, but it depends upon what is the sport dictated by And then how much drugs are in the sport?

1:00:42Massively influenced by social cultural factors. And it is at least constrained, if not controlled by doping programs. So I think that perspective is not accurate. Like you said, most of these are like retired, not peak athletes. It was a spectacle. We're not looking at, you know, drugs on top of elite genetics in a full sporting program like you would see in the Olympics. If you let the reins off and every athlete in the Olympics actually did want to and engaged in maximal performance enhancing drug use, I think we'd see some insane things that would blow away the enhanced games. Are you allowed to be an enhanced bodybuilder and then stop using anabolic steroids or growth hormone or whatever it is and shift over and compete in competitions against yourself, for example?

1:01:31You mean against natural athletes? Yeah, so go and compete at a natural bodybuilding show against someone like you, but someone that maybe had five or 10 years being enhanced prior to that. That very much depends upon the Federation. So the interesting thing is that I'll take a little tangent to history to explain why this is the case. It was the late 70s where bodybuilders started going, what's going on here? we should start natural bodybuilding. Because since the early 60s, drug use in strength sports started becoming common. And it really started to make an obvious difference. And everyone kind of looked up at one day and went, hold on, this is not just like different training protocols or protein supplements.

1:02:17And that was when some of the first natural shows and organizations got, you know, put on. And very quickly, they realized that you could beat a test, you could come off, and you could be natural on the day. So how do we control for that? And it would be the late 80s and then early 90s where polygraph testing, so this is the quote-unquote lie detector test, it's not a lie detector test, started being implemented and they started having numbers of years drug-free. And the most common things you'll see in the polygraph tested natural bodybuilding shows is somewhere between five to 10 years drug-free.

1:02:51And what is meant to occur, and I'll say the most rigorous approach, which I think is the WNBF, they have a 10 year drug free list and they have some exceptions to that based upon what it is, how commonly accessible it is. And then they have like an amnesty, like, okay, if you haven't done this in the last two years, all good. And then it becomes, you know, that plus whatever timeframe since you first did it. And eventually it gets phased into being part of the 10 year drug free rule. And you get a trained polygrapher who sits down with you and goes over the banned substance list and then asks you what you did or didn't take for that, you know, you know, over the 10 your period to make sure that you can even get on stage.

1:03:27So that's an entry requirement for everybody. And then you're tested for kind of on the day. If you win a pro card, so if you go from amateur to pro, or if you're a pro and you win prize money with some quote unquote random testing being done, you get typically a urine test to see those assays. So the screening tool is the polygraph. And, you know, there's a lot of critique of the polygraph. It is not, usable in court in most countries. But it's also quite interesting that it is used in counterintelligence. When I was in the Air Force, I had a security clearance. And to maintain it, every year, I would have to sit down with a Department of Defense trained person who came from the polygraphy school, and they would try to assess if they thought I was selling secrets to our enemies or anybody.

1:04:16And that is one of the most consistently used tools in um You know, security clearance is across the world. And if you try to look into polygraph science, you'll see good and bad things that it is heavily dependent upon the polygrapher's skill, whether they can detect lies. And it is very much dependent upon how well is it used? How long is the test? How good things are communicated? And some natural bodybuilding federations basically just hire a local law enforcement person who does a 15 minute test. And it is really just a deterrent. And then others do a very good job. And they actually have certain standards that they adhere to because they're pretty serious about it and have maybe the resources to do that.

1:04:58And what you will see is that if you're in the natural bodybuilding community and you've been around a while, you'll see that the purely urine tested shows. They have far more incidences of people who are trying to game the system and cheat. And there are so many natural bodybuilding federations because it came around after the primary federation, which is not drug tested, you know, leading into the Olympia, the IPV Pro League, that you will see certain people who will only compete in certain organizations. You'll see more failures in certain places. And you will have some federations which operate as kind of a wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

1:05:35You can invite your grandmother to the show and say you're natty, but we actually haven't done a test once this year. And there's even sociological studies, one out of Australia, that interviewed someone who got caught for doping. And the main reason that they said they did it is because they believed that everybody else was doing it. And I know because I know the scene that the specific federation at the year of that person being interviewed didn't do testing that year. So the biggest portion of this is psychological, sociocultural. If you are entering a federation that you know is drug tested, and remember that there's very little reward in bodybuilding.

1:06:12I lose money every time I compete as a pro. And even if you're a top level pro, like you're making maybe 1500 USD if you win a show and your plane ticket to go fly to that pro show was twice that hotel room. You know, and you also have to pay to get your polygraph, which is a couple hundred dollars. Right. So you're not doing this for the glory. You're doing it for the love of the game. And if you want to just say you're natty, have a good physique, you don't even have to compete. You know, you could just take gear and have an Instagram account. And many top natural bodybuilders have better physiques than some of the influencers who are on light gear, but don't even have an Instagram account because that's not what they're doing it for.

1:06:51So when you've been in the game a long time, you'll see that in these federations that are very outwardly serious about natural competition and creating a level playing field, even if you could game the system, there's very few people who try. Because they could just go to the untested ranks, or they could go to a slightly less serious natural federation. So in my experience, you see that play out because I've coached people, I've judged, I've been here 20 years. So the answer to your question is yes and no. Someone who got off gear last week could, for some federations, do a drug-tested show, not what I would describe as a natural show.

1:07:29And for other federations, it's kind of like the honor system that you haven't done anything for three years. And in others, it's we're going to have a really well-trained polygrapher confirm that you haven't taken anything in 10 years. So you'd have to wait or risk failing and not getting on stage. In your view and understanding of the physiology, if someone was taking anabolic steroids and then hasn't for the last 10 years, are there any advantages maintained? And I guess I'm asking this question from the perspective of if you think about what exogenous testosterone does to adaptations to muscle cells.

1:08:06I don't understand. I don't know this area that well, but just thinking out loud here, does that heighten the level of testosterone? Does that increase, for example, the number of muscle cells you have? And so when you come off of it, you still have an increased level of muscle cells higher than what you would have had otherwise to work with. Oh, now we're getting into some more fun physiology, Simon. And this is another one where the perception and the lay public and even the science interested community versus the actual science and especially people have really done and dove into this and done primary research, there's some pretty big disconnects.

1:08:44And there's a massive overlap with the concept of muscle memory. So the primary hypothesis of why you could potentially have an advantage from taking anabolic steroids is that it creates muscle memory, right? That you are going to retain some level of muscularity that you couldn't have otherwise gotten to by taking steroids versus staying natural. And the primary proposed mechanism is what's called myonuclear permanence. So you specifically mentioned, do people have more muscle fibers? That's a tough one to examine. but what is true is that some studies in animals and humans might indicate that the number of nuclei, so you know cells have a nuclei, and the cool thing about muscle fibers is they have multiple nuclei.

1:09:33And the idea is that as you get to higher levels of muscle mass, there's what's called myonuclear domain theory, is that the idea is you expand the area of a muscle, it gets very challenging to keep all of its functions going effectively, and you need more nuclei to govern a given area. So you'll see satellite cells actually express and become nuclei with more degrees of hypertrophy, and it seems to be required with large degrees of muscle mass. And some studies would indicate that someone who used anabolic steroids previously or currently has more nuclei than someone who does not. And some studies on animals indicates they retain it.

1:10:11But here's the issue. Is this an effect of steroids or just having more muscle mass? because the amount of muscle you grow is going to require some degree of increase in nuclei. People who lift weights or are trained have more than they used to and more than others. And then how permanent are they? And then just because you were on anabolic steroids is providing a unique advantage because the mechanism, at least this proposed mechanism, is that it's not the steroids that did it. It's having more muscle mass for longer. So if you cannot maintain the same degree of muscularity because you're no longer on drugs, does it provide a continuous advantage?

1:10:55Can you actually get over your quote unquote genetic limit? And is it different to then just whatever size you attain naturally? Is it a unique mechanism? And while that is an open question, there are also studies showing that myonuclei aren't necessarily retained, which has been shown in some animal models, some human quasi-experimental data. So we're still uncovering if muscle memory is a real phenomenon, if it's physiological, neuromuscular, epigenetic, or related to myonuclear permanence, or some combination, and then what is required to achieve it. And anecdotally, from what I've seen, is I don't necessarily think that in times when I've seen someone who used to be on a whole lot of anabolics and kept training and is now natural, that they look fundamentally different from their lifetime natural peers of a similar training age.

1:11:52It's not a clear, obvious difference. And there's also other things to consider that may act as a counterbalancing effect. If you got to IFBB pro Olympia levels of muscle mass, you were a national champion, a pro champion, Olympian. Often you have also shut down or at least decreased your natural production of testosterone. And now you would need HRT just to be in the kind of low normal range. So if you're not on gear and you can't be on TRT in most national organizations, are you going to have a lower baseline that kind of corrects for that? I don't know. But I think the assumption that because someone previously used anabolics, that they're going to be more muscular now is that it's an assumption.

1:12:39And we need more data and more of a mechanistic understanding to see what's going on to truly understand if that's the case. that hydration is one of those foundational things that somehow we manage to overcomplicate it underpins energy focus and mood yet most hydration drinks are basically sugar and food dye in a health product costume for me element is a regular part of my padell routine half a sachet around 500 milligrams of sodium or a can of element pink lemonade being my go-to flavor about an hour before every training session or match. On the rare days that I skip it, I've noticed that my recovery is considerably worse, as is my sleep that night.

1:13:21That's an N equals one association, not a controlled trial. So take it with a grain of salt. But I must say it has been pretty predictable. Get too few electrolytes and it can show up as headaches, cramps, fatigue, or even brain fog. Get it right and you certainly feel the difference. It suits anyone active, anyone fasting, or anyone on a lower carb diet where sodium needs tend to go up. Receive a free element sample pack with any order at drinkelement.com forward slash Simon. That's drinkelement.com forward slash Simon. My holiday calendar is already filling up and this year I'm making room for my health too.

1:14:06One of the things that this means for me is booking in a pre-holiday blood draw with Function. I've been using Function now for several years and one thing that I really like is that it gives you access to key cardiometabolic health markers like ApoB, glucose, fasting insulin and hemoglobin A1c or HbA1c. They're all part of the 160 plus lab tests that members can access each year through a lab visit with results showing on the Function app. This year I've been able to measure the effectiveness of lipid lowering therapy with Function watching my ApoB go down from around 75 to 50. I've also been able to significantly improve metabolic health markers with some small changes to exercise.

1:14:49So don't sleep on it. Get your testing done this side of Christmas and together we can make a plan to enter 2027 with. Function gives you access to 160 plus lab tests for just$365 a year, about a dollar a day. Join at functionhealth.com forward slash Simon Hill and use the code Simon25 for a$25 credit. That's functionhealth.com forward slash Simon Hill and use the code Simon25. That shutting down of testosterone production is something. I've had two urologists on the show and they've spoken about how many young men they're seeing in clinic who are experimenting with exogenous testosterone and unfortunately are unaware of this knock-on effect and the fact that if you're increasing your testosterone levels through an exogenous source, your body is able to detect that high testosterone level and therefore isn't going to produce naturally testosterone.

1:15:51It doesn't need to. It's a negative feedback loop normally. And it kind of also speaks to what you were saying earlier. When experimenting with these compounds, it seems like it could easily become a bit of a roller coaster because the way they were describing it to me was, well, if you're going to do that, you're also going to have to take this, take that in order to maintain fertility. And so you're balancing all of these different things and we're juggling all of these different things at once. It sounds rather chaotic to pay attention to, quite frankly. Coming back to your training, personally, I'm interested.

1:16:25You sort of alluded to the fact that as you become more experienced and you're older, you perhaps are making some tweaks or some adjustments to your training to stay fit and healthy. What does a week of training look like for you at the moment? And what are some of those key adjustments that you have made as you've gotten older that you think have been helpful? I think the biggest piece of context here is that until 2023, I was a dual strength and physique sport athlete. So I was always including my primary strength sport, barbell squat, bench and deadlift to the competition specifications of powerlifting.

1:17:06So squatting until when viewed from the side, my hip creases below the top of my knee, touching my chest on bench press and pulling a deadlift from the floor. And those were obligatory components to my training because I was equally interested in maximizing my strength and my size. And these are nice marriages. You know, it's not like I'm trying to run a marathon while I'm also trying to do Olympic weightlifting or something like that. And it works really well until I got to a point where I believe that I could take bodybuilding further just because I'm probably better at looking strong than being strong.

1:17:42I have a, you know, just the way I'm shaped and, and, and, and some of my personality and propensities are better suited towards competing at a higher level in bodybuilding. You know, I've competed twice at WMBF World Championships. I've been to IPF World Championships multiple times, but only as a coach. And it's just not in my cards, right? So I am strong for non-highly competitive powerlifters. And I realized that what I would have to invest, especially in 2023, I had turned 40, to maximize my powerlifting potential, precluded me from having a more balanced proportional development and would only get me 1 % better.

1:18:23It wouldn't change my competitive band in powerlifting. And I had a potential because I just turned pro that year. I finally got my WMBF pro card. I was like, wow, I wonder where I could take it. So once I removed barbell, back squat, sumo deadlifts in a low bar position, maximum grip, wide grip bench press and purely trained for size where I didn't need to do one RMS, I realized how much more I could do and how much better my recovery was for context. I'm also six foot, you know, and my weight class that I competed in was the 93 kilo class. And if I was really lean for a bodybuilding show, I could sneak into the 83s.

1:19:04If you're a good power lifter and you're six feet tall, 183 centimeters, you're a 120. So I just don't have the frame for powerlifting, right? It's not necessarily like big joints are better for bodybuilding. It's more like joints relative to one another in proportions, how small is your waist, wide shoulders, the way you look. So you can be an amazing powerlifter and bad at bodybuilding if you have a really thick, stocky waist. And you can likewise, kind of like myself, you can be pretty good at bodybuilding, but notably better than you might be at strength sport because you don't necessarily have the chassis that'll allow you to squat 600 pounds at 160 pounds or whatever it is.

1:19:42So anyway, my training drastically changed from 2023 to being able to do much higher volumes, higher reps, machine-based work, and varying my program away from needing to do the strength work. And it realized how much more I could do. And so my protocol now is more restricted by my time availability and some musculoskeletal limitations that are now cropping up. I'm trying to do a very, very high volume of training more so than a couple of years ago, my total training volume was limited by the musculoskeletal effects of trying to be as strong as I could on these big three, which was getting harder and harder.

1:20:24And my injury frequency was increasing to get to my peak for powerlifting. So I don't know that it's age related, Simon. I think, you know, when I first switched and I started training like another day per week and I started like my actual number of say, quote unquote, sets per muscle group probably went up 50%, but training was easier. I recovered better. You know, there's a huge difference between doing, you know, a bunch of sets of 15 on a machine chest press and doing fewer sets of three to five on a max, you know, grip bench press with a huge arch and my neck being in pain. So as I've tried to maximize my potential now as a single sport athlete, I've ran into things like elbow tendinopathy.

1:21:10I've had simultaneous golfer and tennis elbow, but I play neither sport because I'm doing forearm training, biceps, triceps, and trying to get in like 30 sets per muscle group per week and having to navigate that this kind of comes back to where we started the conversation around like what's someone's goal you're really trying to reach your genetic potential you're squeezing those last few drops out of the the towel and so your volume's up at 30 sets per muscle group which is you know it's a high volume and probably probably close to zero of our listeners here who are aged between 40 and 60 and are just recreationally lifting and wanting to stay fit and healthy are doing that.

1:21:53That across all muscle groups is a lot of weightlifting in a week. You go and try it for a week and you'll see. Based on what you've seen with your own body, with other people, also the clinical research, what's the range there? What's the minimum number of sets, working out your chest or your back where someone could start to see some good progress without going all the way to the 30 sets a week? And are there any other things that someone could think about if they crunch for time? And so total volume is hard for them. This is where it gets to go full circle. I think this will be a really satisfying answer and conclusion to where we started about what determines and where is your genetic limit and how it connects to values and time.

1:22:38So I competed just under two kilograms heavier in 2025 and my first full pro season compared to 2023 when I turned pro. And the difference was exactly the changes to my training that I described. And if you had a transformation contest and you said, Hey, in two years, I put on two kilograms of muscle, people be like, get a new trainer. But in the context of a 40, you know, 40 year old pro natural bodybuilder, all of my colleagues were like, what'd you do, bro? You look awesome. And I greatly improved my competitiveness. I went from being basically a top amateur to a mid-level pro. And those are very different positions.

1:23:19But I think the average person wouldn't think that I had a massive change in my physique. And if I told them what I did to get it over the timeframe that I wanted, they wouldn't see it as worth it. So to clarify, I think this is another thing. People look at a high-level athlete and they think, oh, that's what I need to do to get their results, they forget that it's time bound. I am trying to grow as fast as I can for my next season. I am probably in excess of what even me having been in the gym so long needs, quote unquote, to make any progress. I'm trying to be better in 2027 or maybe 2028. I haven't decided yet.

1:23:55And I think that's different, right? So there are two things we know. There's a huge meta regression meta analysis by Roberts and colleagues on like hundreds of resistance training studies with thousands of participants up to like a year and a half long. And they've modeled very clearly that resistance training adaptations diminish like we talked about. The more muscle you get, the less it grows, right? And also there's a huge, pretty good size thousand participant, three dozen studies meta regression on the training dose on volume. and it shows that, yeah, there's a monotonic, there's an increasing response.

1:24:29The more you do, the more you get. So not only does resistance training itself diminish, but there's a different amount that you get at every dose, but all of them diminish. And the rate for each dose is progressively less and less and less and less. So for example, if you do say 10 sets per week, you're probably gonna get more than twice the gains if you were doing four sets per week. And that sounds like, oh, that's pretty reasonable, right? But to get that again, now you got to triple your volume. So now you're committing to basically three programs. You know, like if you think about 10 sets per muscle group over a week, that's your typical standard solid, like upper, lower four days per week approach.

1:25:15And then you go, cool, just do three of those every week. And now you can, you know, get the same relative improvement that you got from going from four sets to 10. And most people are checked out. I am not because I'm crazy. And a lot of bodybuilders are as well. But that's not necessarily an endorsement of that. It's saying, if you look at this from an investment standpoint, you know, return on investment, what I'm doing is stupid, right? Like, I've gotten to the point where each unit of money I put in, I'm getting far less return. And if you were saying, hey, I want to maximize my return on investment, then you would probably want to be somewhere and say the 10 to 20 set range, right?

1:25:51And I think that is appropriate for almost everybody. And still six to eight sets is quite good. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. And it's far exceeds physical activity guidelines. So, yeah, I think that context is important. And how you get there is also important because I am now constrained by time. So I do a lot of peripheral supersets, drop sets, rest pause. And I also split my training up into two daily sessions. not just because I'm crazy, although again, to reestablish the fact that I am, I do it because I can preserve the quality of the volume I'm doing. So I know that if I have an opportunity at 6 a.m.

1:26:32and 6 p.m. every day, I can look at the total amount of training that I'm trying to get across the week, auto-regulate it based upon how I'm feeling in a given session. And it's the opportunity to train that makes my life easier. It's not, oh my God, Eric's training 14 times a week. That's stupid and crazy. It's more like, hey, this is the same strategy of putting your running shoes in your car and your gym shorts in your car. You know, if you didn't have them, there would be just a little more friction that say, screw it. I'm going to go home and stop on the way to McDonald's. But if you have your gym shorts in your car, you walk back to your car and you go, you know, the gym is on the way home.

1:27:09I'll get it in. And it's similar for me. Believe it or not, even though I'm trying to do insane things, I am going, well, I barely have time. I need to do some emails. And it's okay today if I get it in at 6 p.m. and I just do 30 minutes of supersets and dropsets because I have now 10 more opportunities for the next five days where I could get to where I'm trying to get to for the week. So I use auto-regulation. I use all these tools because it's the same thing. What are my constraints? It's a constraints-led approach. And it's the same philosophy that I would apply to someone who only has two hours a week to train.

1:27:44And if they did dropsets, supersets, they might surprise themselves. they'd be getting into better cardiovascular shape. They'd have to build up to it, obviously, but they might be able to do something like 10 to 15 sets per muscle group of high quality and get much better gains than they thought, but they might not be able to talk to their workout partner and they might be a lot sweatier at lunch. So like you have to think about those constraints as well. I think there may also be some misunderstanding out there that when you finish a set, you need to kind of sit and rest and do nothing. But what you just mentioned there with the kind of antagonistic style training that if providing you're fit enough, it would be okay to do a set of some sort of pushing chest movement and then go and work out the opposite muscle like a lat pulldown.

1:28:29And that's a big caveat though, providing you're fit enough, right? So I say that because you can't just jump right into this, but I can tell you haven't been involved in S &C for years. If you take a high level endurance athlete who's reasonably strong and doesn't like strength conditioning work, you'll be shocked. They can do like a 10 RM on leg press and in two minutes, they're ready to go again. But if you take someone who is really only done kind of like bro-based training and they take six minutes rest because they're talking to their buddy and they're also quite strong. So there's a lot of ATP required from the absolute load.

1:29:02That seems impossible. But now I've experienced that you can get in the kind of shape to do that even when you're pretty high level. And that's just comes down to exercise physiology. Like why can't you do two reps with your one RM? It's because, yes, the 1RM is your, like you can't produce more force than that if it's a skilled movement. And the only reason you can't then do it again is that the ATP demand is much too rapid for you to do it. So that's why we do different rep ranges. We get different adaptations from that. And if you get really, really good at being able to turn over ATP and maximize the energy systems that are associated with resistance training, awesome.

1:29:39but there's also the overall cardiorespiratory demand, the cardiovascular, you know, fatigue and all the things that make it feel really hard. And when we look at circuit training, when we look at superset or peripheral type training, you won't see a decrement in performance. Like this is like the pairing of bench press with a row, a leg extension to the leg curl, bicep curl, tricep push down and doing both before then taking the two minute rest period. When we compare those types of training to traditional training, you see similar outcomes in terms of strength and hypertrophy, but the perceived exertion of the whole session, it's like one or two points higher.

1:30:15So it feels 10 to 20 % harder because the training density is higher. You're out of breath, you're sweating. You know, there is, you're basically hanging out in zone two or zone three, the whole workout while you're also lifting weights. But it is truly, if you can overcome that and push through it, it's the local energy demands and energy systems for the muscles you're training that are going to limit performance so long as, like you said, you're fit enough, which again is a big if. But there are ways to do it that are less challenging. Like you don't have to do, you know, like a leg press superset with a hamstring curl or a, you know, a bench press with a bent over row.

1:30:54You can do a lateral raise with an RDL. You know, you can do a calf raise in between sets of leg press on the same machine. It comes back to just ensuring that you're maintaining quality. of those sets and that not having the rest and going and working out the opposite muscle group or another muscle group isn't kind of eating into the quality of your next set such that you're just completely spent and the effort's not there. And I'm a scientist, right? So I have training records. I know exactly what my typical performance drop-off is when I'm performing traditional workout partner, me and my wife.

1:31:29So for example, on the weekends, this is where I only optionally take those morning sessions because I like to train my wife. So we go to the gym together. We talk. She's not a competitive modeler. I'm not going to make her, you know, have to like do all the crazy shit I'm doing. And I will train in the morning only if I need to. But if I think in my hour and 10 minutes with, with Barb is, is sufficient, then we'll just alternate sets, you know, two to three minutes rest. And so I know what my normal performance is on a lap pulldown. And if I superset a lap pulldown with a pressing exercise and I see a greater drop off in performance from set to set doing that versus normal, it's readily apparent to me.

1:32:06And then I know that the pairing doesn't work, I need to rest longer, or what have you, or I need to get in better shape. And that's something that I think everyone as a philosophy should have is if you implement a new strategy, whether it is some cool new workout, more volume, less volume, or you listen to this podcast, you're like, oh, I'd love to give these supersets a try. You should be able to check if it works. So you're not just a victim to the latest fad, track your training monitor. You know, I didn't move up my volume haphazardly. I incrementally increased my volume over two and a half years.

1:32:41And actually we're now we're in 2026, three years, Simon. And only when I thought I could sustain it. And, you know, I tried to push 30 sets on my quads as an example. This is one muscle group. I don't do it. And I got quadricep tendonitis, not fatellar tendonitis, like most real athletes experience, but like the top, which is just from overuse, you know, and I just realized, okay, I can't do nine sets of hack squat or leg press and leg extension every other day without really running into some issues. I can do that in my upper body, but maybe I need to dial it back to 20 for my quads and I can keep it higher on, you know, the glutes in the upper body.

1:33:19So anyway, all of that stuff I found out iteratively through monitoring. And I don't do certain superset pairings. I make different jumps and drop sets. I rest as needed. So you should be monitoring to tell when you are kind of going on to the other side of it, where there is a drop in quality, where the cost of the perceived exertion is actually impacting your performance. And that's where it's too much too soon. Sounds like you got the feedback that you needed. I guess ideally that you're getting that feedback. Like you said, you understand your lat pulldown. So you get that feedback before an injury.

1:33:56But at some point, otherwise your body's going to give you that feedback. Just as you changed your training. So you increased your volume because your goal had changed. You were interested in before 2023, both strength and size. So you had different type of training. Then you decided, it. Okay. I want to go a bit more all in on, on the size and the bodybuilding side of things, increase your volume. If we're thinking, and I'm going to ask you to speak, I guess here in generalization. So if we take the average 40, 50 year old, what rep range do you think would be optimal based on the average person's goal?

1:34:34Is it lower reps and really optimizing for strength? Is it going higher and just focusing on hypertrophy? Is it somewhere in the middle where you get both? I think you really need to think in two dimensions, the exercise selection, as well as the rep range. And then maybe even in three, how close to failure do you want to train? And the reason why this is so helpful is because it gives you more creativity as your body starts to complain more. So the reason why I was constrained by powerlifting or anyone would be if they're training concurrently for strength, which is always expressed through a movement.

1:35:08And most people, they're going to do this through barbell based movements, because that's what the social currency or the norm is, is because I had to train for strength within those barbell-based movements and for a 1RM. That comes away if you understand, which gets to your question, which adaptations am I trying to get and what are the necessary components that I've been training on doing, you can be more creative. Unlimited creativity is just intimidating and constraining and leads to inaction in untrained or novices or people new to the gym, but it's very helpful when you're more advanced.

1:35:42So knowing a little bit can go a long way. So to answer your question, heavy training, let's say anything that is equivalent to 80 % of 1RM or higher, or maybe let's say your 8 to 10RM, a load that you could do for 8 to 10 reps, should probably be in there somewhere because there are age-related declines in strength and functionality is important. And that's probably the best way to get that. But these sets don't need to be close to failure. And these sets, especially if they're done with technically demanding compound lifts, probably shouldn't be done to failure. So you can do sets of four to six with your eight to 10 RM.

1:36:18So you're leaving a few reps in the tank. And is that ideal or perfect for hypertrophy? No, there's probably a slight cost, but that's, think of your, your squat, your bench, your deadlift, or whatever movements you're interested in maximizing, not as the vehicle for size. That is you being able to put forth a very high level of force development, right? You're training your body to be strong. And then you can shift into an isolation movement that has, you know, less risk, less joint discomfort. And you can modulate because hypertrophy can occur. It's a very forgiving adaptation across many, many rep ranges.

1:36:53So long as you're getting reasonably close to failure and you can do say three sets and anywhere from the eight to 20, 25 rep range, whatever is, you know, feels best for that movement. And then just make sure that you're going close enough to failure that if you were to record it and you were attempting to put forth maximal effort on each lifting phase, concentric, that it would involuntarily slow down. So if there's an actual slowing, you're getting close to failure because it's easy to tell yourself you are just because it feels hard, then you've probably induced sufficient stimulus to make that set pretty good for hypertrophy.

1:37:30So the slowing down of the rep, I'm just imagining someone doing a squat here, right? So we're talking about a slower velocity as you're moving the weight up, right? So you're coming back to standing upright. If you're getting within a couple of reps of failure, which you're saying is a pretty good goal, you're going to get some adaptations there. The last few reps of that are somewhat of a grind. You're not able to move that bar as quickly. Exactly. And, you know, in that first example, I said, hey, choose your strength vehicles. And you only do four to six reps with your eight to 10 rep max.

1:38:05Those are all going to be slow reps, because it's heavy. If it didn't move slow, it's not three to 10 rep max, right? This is just physics. So if you are training heavy, the reps are going to be slow just based upon load. But when you're training light, like let's say you're taking your 20 rep max, let's say that's a squat, you might be able to actually do a jump squat with that. Not advising it, just saying that if you take 60 % of your 1RM, you might be able to actually leave the floor if you have some decent leg strength, right? But that's not what we're doing, right? You're actually breaking.

1:38:37You're actually purposefully slowing it down so you don't leave the floor, at least your initial reps. And then it takes maybe 10 to 12 or 15 reps before you're moving at that same speed, but you're trying to move it faster. So you're basically seeing fatigue go up, and then you're compensating for it with your effort degree on each rep to maintain the same tempo. But eventually, there is no ability to compensate because of course, all sets unfortunately fail at some point if you continue. So it is the point at which involuntary velocity slows and you can feel it, you're grinding out some reps.

1:39:13You don't need to do it until you collapse or you grind out all the reps. But once you do see 20 % loss of velocity or what probably feels like being within three to four reps of failure, Now you've made that set at least reasonably productive. Sure, it'll be better if you go all the way to failure, but then, you know, can you sustain that? Do you like that? Is that the best movement for it? How does that feel if you're doing a high rep range in a compound movement? Is it going to tank the rest of the workout? So I think for the general population, a pretty decent rule of thumb is that if, you know, whatever rep range you're using, so long as it's moderate to high, you want to see some slowing of rep speed because you can feel like you're close to failure and it might just be that it hurts and it's hard and you're not really there.

1:39:57So, I mean, back when I was a personal trainer, I remember giving someone, let's say I gave them a barbell back squat and we put 10 kilos on the side and they're like, oh, that's heavy. And I knew this was probably something they could do to 15 to 20. Now it is heavy for someone who has historically, the heaviest squat they've done is, body weight when they get off the toilet, but it's not heavy from an exercise science perspective. So if I hadn't been there to monitor this relatively untrained person, they might have either racked it and gone lighter, or they would have only done five or six reps with it.

1:40:33And it wouldn't do that much. It would give them some gains initially. Like I said, untrained people, walking program, they might grow, but they would plateau very quickly. And how many people do we see who are committed enough to come to the gym regularly, you know, the same time you go, you see them, but they never see any kind of rep speed slowing. And they're basically on a maintenance program. And that's fine. Like I said, at the start, not everyone even wants to hit their limit. You know, most people, when they first start lifting are not trying to get as muscular as possible. That might become something that they get quote unquote bit by the iron bug along the way.

1:41:06But most people really like, even if you take a cross section, people have been training for 20 years, I would guess that 10 % of them are what we would describe as late stage intermediates or advanced. 90 % of them hit kind of the end of the runway of easy gains and have been maintaining it for 19 years. And for health, fantastic. Nothing wrong with that. So you could probably maintain your muscle and strength even if you're finishing a set with like four reps in reserve. Do we know that? it depends upon what you got to get there. And this is where the whole genetic ceiling is so challenging to talk about.

1:41:45I'll give you a parallel for endurance, which I think is a little more easy for people to think about. If you take a look at the latest meta-analysis on how much aerobic training, quote unquote, is required to maximize the change in VO2 max over a given time period in sedentary older adults, that amount of training is not crazy. It's not that high, and it is insufficient to maintain the VO2 max of an elite level cyclist who is approaching a 70 VO2 max. If you look at the maintenance protocols, the detraining studies on athletes, you'll see that they've still got to basically do five sessions a week, and maybe at least two of them need to be high intensity.

1:42:25And they're doing maybe one third, one quarter of their volume, but they need those high intensities just to stay where they're at. So there's some version of that for lifting as well. This is why when you leave a gravity well, an astronaut loses muscle, right? There is some baseline level. So we're thinking about our ceiling a lot, like what's our genetic ceiling? But the thing we have to realize is the floor is also lifting. The more adaptation you get, you have to do something. It doesn't mean you need to do an astronomical amount of volume, but there is some relative amount of work that you have to maintain to prevent a decay in that degree of fitness that you had.

1:43:02It's very hard to determine. but it is bootstrapped to your doing in the adaptation level you've achieved. So where those numbers are, a lot of the research is not sufficient to answer those questions. And they're extrapolated from untrained people. And it's just not the same. Like I've watched high level athletes take a week off and their performance drops. But, you know, I've trained people in the gym and they come back stronger from their vacation because they're untrained. I've been using WHOOP for over six years and I can confidently say it keeps me on track when it comes to my sleep and exercise routines.

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1:44:30On training to fatigue, and I think this might have been a study that you guys conducted looking at finishing a rep or two short of failure or going all the way to failure. I think that was your study, correct me if I'm wrong. But how do you feel about the strategy? And I know this is pretty popular in kind of bodybuilding where you take a compound lift, which is often harder to go to complete failure like a squat unless you have a spot and without a spot, you can increase risk of injury or it can just be difficult to perform properly. And then, so you do your compound lift and then go into some type of machine like a knee extension and go all out to complete failure.

1:45:06This is a question of degrees and magnitudes and context, but generally that's a totally fine strategy. And you're leveraging two things that we know to be true from the literature is one, the heavier the load, so long as you can get enough reps for it to quote unquote count or last long enough as a equal footing hypertrophy stimulus, you don't need to go to close to failure. But if you go heavy enough, you're always close to failure. Like you can't do more than 10 reps with your 10 RM, right? But the study we did that you're referring to, we compared one limb to another limb of highly trained lifters, some of them bodybuilders and powerlifters, and we had them do leg press followed by leg extension.

1:45:45And on one leg, every time they trained, they went to failure on both sets. Some were typically in the eight, I think the six to 12 rep range, higher reps on leg extension, lower reps on leg press. And the other leg, the intention was stop two reps shy on the leg press and one rep shy on the leg extension. And in this relatively short term study and pretty advanced level lifters, there wasn't a notable difference in hypertrophy of the quadriceps. And they did grow. I think that's another tough thing when you study trained people. It's like if nobody grew, then how do you know the difference between groups?

1:46:15But they were pushed very hard. So that tells you at the very least that at least over a couple months, it probably won't matter. But there is also large scale metaregression data on like 2 ,500 people where you've extracted RIR estimations as well as hypertrophy data. And we basically see this slightly inclined slope where the closer you get to failure, the more that set is going to produce hypertrophy stimulus, but it's incrementally, you know, the difference between two or three RIR is very small. Same thing with zero or one or two. And the data did not show a significant effect when you're training really heavy.

1:46:54And that's because when you train heavy enough, you're reaching what we would describe as probably maximal motor unit recruitment from the get-go. And if you want to produce higher level forces, it's actually rate coding or the increase in firing frequency that is occurring. So it's kind of improving, if you will, the quality or the efficiency of the output of force of all those motor units. So when you're doing heavy enough work, failure is probably less important. And there's experimental data and rationale to support that. But when you're going light, you do need to get pretty close to failure.

1:47:27So what you described is great because the technical demands of a heavy barbell lift and the consequences of potentially failing and not having a spotter, there's a genuine safety safety concern. So you can get still a lot out of it and then you can get the higher rep work. Do you have to do it immediately? Does it need to be to failure? No, but that's a great example of implementing what I described earlier of thinking beyond just the rep factor and combining it with the load and the exercise selection. That's interesting. So what I'm hearing though, is that if you're someone that's choosing a weight that's say 80 % of one RM for the squat, and you're able to do eight to 10 reps, get within two reps of failure, do you consider that a heavy load?

1:48:11And therefore the superset to failure is going to have less of an effect than if you were someone that was pumping out 20 reps on the squat and then doing it. And the reality is, is that if you did 20 reps on a squat to a two RIR, the performance will drop on everything else. And the reality is also that if you did say six reps with your 10 RM, stopped at a four IR and then jumped onto a leg extension to failure, when you come back to the squat, you're going to have to drop the load unless you're resting like 10 minutes. So the practical kind of on the ground realities for some of this stuff can get, like you have to kind of have some experiential knowledge to do this.

1:48:50But ultimately, the most you can do in terms of total number of working sets, the closest to failure, the most often and sustained for the longest is what's going to dictate how big you get with understanding that there's a massive diminishing returns and poor return on investment. Strength, however, is more about peak load exposure. You only need so much volume because the volume serves two purposes. It's giving you deliberate practice with these skilled lifts, because strength is not just the force production capacity of a given group of muscle fibers and all the muscles. It's also the motor skill that you're expressing through this movement.

1:49:29So it's a skill and a physiological quality. And volume for strength training is really, after the skill component, is really only there to potentially make you grow more so that your capacity to execute that skill is higher. And there's no rule book that says you must use the squat to grow your quads. You can absolutely take an approach where you think about the minimum dose you need on heavy squats to get good at it. And then you get a lot of hypertrophy volume from other things. And that's actually the periodization strategy I use with strength athletes. If they need to put on more size, they might do, they start with squat and they just simply work up to a single at a seven or eight RPE or say two to three reps in the tank.

1:50:16Something that they might do before their opener on the platform because you get three attempts. So a challenging, but absolutely know I'm going to get it single. And then, you know, they've done their warmups. They did that. They got their skill practice. Maybe they do some back offsets or for further enough competition. That might be all they do. And then they're getting in a bunch of accessory work to build their quads, their glutes, their hamstrings, their lower back that is easier to recover from, safer, and also doesn't necessarily stress them out as a powerlifter where they're constantly testing the thing that they, you know, evaluate as their progress.

1:50:51And in that phase of training, I might just want to see maintenance of strength, but improvement in performance and all the accessories. And then as we get closer to competition, the ratio changes. Now we're doing three singles and some triple back-off work and two less accessories, right? And then we peak and taper into the competition. So it really just comes down to understanding what are the determinants of developing strength? And then what are the determinants of training for hypertrophy? And how do you blend them in a way that gets the best of both worlds, minimizes fatigue and avoids joint pain?

1:51:26And I think the typical quote unquote, like power building approach, if I'm just going to do like sets of six to eight or four to six on everything is probably not the best way to do it. Like, why are you doing a heavy set on tricep extensions? Because a tricep extension is not going to transfer your bench. The only reason we're doing it is to make your triceps bigger. And if your elbows are complaining when you're doing loads that are, you know, anything heavier than a 12 RM, then just do sets of 15. Because this, you know, standing here pushing your arms down is not going to improve the skill of benching.

1:52:00But it might help you put some more size in your triceps, which in two years might add a couple kilos is kind of the mentality. Does your knowledge of power training and your experience with it, how, if at all, does that translate to healthy aging and diminishing power? So we think about age-related changes. And I mean, that's an interesting phrase itself. You often wonder in the research, what is age-related versus being sedentary in these studies? But if we think about what happens to muscle physiology and performance as someone ages, and we've been speaking so far around volume and reps, how important do you think it is for the average person to think about power and the speed at which the tempo that they're moving the weight?

1:52:44The average person, I would say, is probably experiencing cumulative years of sedentary behavior more so than they are experiencing age and that their body is less resilient to it. You know, when you're 20, and you've talked about this in your cardiovascular episodes, like arthrogenic risk is just airing to the curve. And I think in many ways, fitness is as well. Like you just haven't accumulated as much sedentary time if you're kind of living that lifestyle in your 20s. But if you've maintained that for 40 years, you're dealing with those issues and just getting in there and training without really worrying about whether it's power, strength, hypertrophy, and just being consistent, high effort is far and away the most important thing to do.

1:53:27But now if we're just talking purely physiologically, now we can kind of look at different codes of athletes and master's athletes. And I think there's some two really big take homes. One, the peak performance age of say an Olympic weightlifter. Now the movements, while it's still just like powerlifting, you're doing a 1RM, but the movements allow and require a much higher velocity because you have to get a weight over your head and drop underneath it. So the velocity of the concentric lifting phase of a snatch or a jerk or a clean at 1RM is much higher than a squat bench or deadlift where it's just one pure movement.

1:54:05Those are very, very slow speed strength. Ironically, it's called powerlifting. So the peak age is typically the late 20s for when an Olympic weightlifter is no longer able to improve. And that's probably because that's also around the top of the peak of when you can maximally produce power. And a good way to think about power, what is that? It's just high velocity force production because all movements have a power. That's just force times velocity. So it's really velocity dependent strength. And rate of force production, how quickly you can produce force is going to dictate the velocity. And fortunately, the power lifts, ironically named again, you can perform slowly and you can ramp up force production and you might see a slower movement.

1:54:51But the peak age for power lifting is in the 30s because they're not heavily velocity dependent movements. And then, like I said earlier, the peak age for muscle mass development is even older than that. Can you figure out a way to load tissue? Now, I don't think those differences are meaningful enough that it would be super, super, super important for the average person struggling with sarcopenia or age-related decline to go, I need to include plyometrics in heavy training. I think that might be a concern once they're two years down the track of consistent training in any way that they can, and they can look back and they say, listen, I've exceeded the physical activity guidelines.

1:55:36I've lifted at whatever velocity with a couple of movements per muscle group and some skilled movements that require balance. Tell I've actually said what Eric described. I've experienced that slowing of velocity now. Okay. Now you're a little bit older and you're noticing you've lost this step, but you're also, your fitness has improved. This might be where I go. Let's, let's include some jumps, ease into some plyos. Let's maybe start playing with the four to six RM range and doing, you know, doubles and triples. And I think that's absolutely something that I would put on the table, but it would first require them to get that movement competency.

1:56:15And I think this is a really important public message because I understand certain content creators who maybe even mean well, who say like, listen, you need to be doing stiff leg jumping, you know, your 5RM, heavy squats, axly loaded barbell based movements. And there's a ton of people who are really interested in that content. You know, the people who ask me questions about creatine now are not 20 year old bros. They're 55 year old women dealing with menopause now, which is hilarious. They're the same people who told me when I was young, there was a gateway drug to steroids. But anyway, so they've never lifted in many cases.

1:56:48I'm not going to be like, yeah, I want you to do a low bar back squat triple to a nine RPE that there's a link. Like, what is that? How do I do it. So the idea of them now thinking that they need to be training like a strength or power athlete to combat age-related decline, the number of times I've seen like, well, screw it. I'll just get anti-bone loss drugs, vibration plate, and blow my savings on it and take some creatine and hopefully it'll be fine. And I'll do some weighted vest walking, but I'm not going to engage in resistance training because supposedly 60 % of 1RM for sets of 15 won't do anything.

1:57:24And that's just absolutely not true. So I would much rather lower the barrier to entry. And then if they find they really like it, and if they want to push it further, that is when I would want to see maybe a couple of years in once they can move in the weight room, once they're comfortable walking up to dumbbells, barbells, or machines, and they know how to do it before we're having them start doing power or true strength training. Yeah. I think you're speaking to a larger problem in science where often you can find a little finding in a study, but it's over extrapolated and to the point where so much focus becomes on this optimization factor at the expense of the big rocks and what people really should be focusing on.

1:58:05And that exists, you know, in certainly in nutrition as well as, as exercise. I could speak to you all day. We could keep geeking out. I have not got through half of what I wanted to speak to you about, which is a testament to all the knowledge that you've shared with us. So if I can twist your arm, I'll have to get you back on, Eric, and we can go deeper into training programs and menopause and nutrition. How do you support recovery and what does that look like? Rest days, I mean, the list goes on and on. So thank you so much for joining us. Is there anything here that you want to kind of add to anything that we've spoken about or kind of leave the listener with that we didn't get to today?

1:58:41I think I just want to circle all the way back and help people who are going, wait a minute, I don't have a genetic potential. What does that mean? And I think they basically, the way to understand it is that if baselines differ between people based upon quote unquote genetics and training has a diminishing returns effect, you know, basically the rate at which you start at, there's some logarithmic function of what it decays to, and then more and more volume increases that initial rate, but in diminishing returns, that means that you have as many ceilings as the number of different training doses that you can sustain for the rest of your life before sarcopenia rearses a ugly head.

1:59:19Now, unfortunately, the amount of effort you put in, you know, is going to be disproportionate to the height of those ceilings. You know, they're going to be going like, is that two mils higher? But I've done 10 more sets. And that is therefore going to help you understand what a plateau or a true kind of reaching of your potential feels like. Because if it's slowing down, an abrupt stop, you getting, oh man, for the last two months, I haven't made any progress. That's not your natural limit. Your natural limit should feel like you're trying to walk through increasingly higher mud and you're pushing further through it because you want to maintain a pace.

1:59:54Maybe you're walking through mud and there's an alligator behind you. Strangest analogy ever, Simon, but I went there. So that can help people. If you knew that you had to do a ridiculous amount of volume to get one more kilo of muscle mass, then don't do it if that's not relevant to you, right? But know that the good news is your baseline doesn't determine your potential for growth. Obviously, a higher baseline means a higher ceiling and you maintain that advantage over people who had a lower baseline from the start. But compare yourself to yourself and then think about what are you willing to invest and what do you want to achieve?

2:00:26And you'd be surprised how much a little can do. A little goes a long way when it comes to resistance training, if you can keep it up for a lifetime. And where can we direct people if they want to connect with you online and read some of the things that you're publishing? Yeah, so I'm an actual publishing scientist. I'm also a science communicator and you get to opt in based upon your degree of nerdiness. So if you really want to go wild, I almost exclusively do open access publishing. So feel free. You know, you can search me, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, all that good stuff. And you can read my publications in the field of sports science, or if you're looking for lay interpretations, you want to stay up to date with the science, you can check out massresearchreview.com.

2:01:09There and my colleagues, Lauren Clemza-Semple, Dr. Eric Trexler, Dr. Mike Zerdos. Since 2017, we've been doing applied reviews of these topics. And then finally, if you're like, I don't need to stay up to date with it, just give me something I can read. Check out muscleandstrengthpyramids.com. Those are my nutrition and training books that were just updated end of last year. That's kind of like my whole brain as far as maximizing muscle and maximizing strength on both the nutrition and training side. So those are all of the various ways you can opt in. And if you're like, listen, I don't want to read any of that stuff.

2:01:39Simon's crazy. I'm listening to a podcast for a reason. Follow me at Helms3DMJ on Instagram and you can see reels. You can see podcast clips. You can also check out Iron Culture, which is my podcast with primarily Dr. Eric Trexler, but it's all things history, science, and culture related to the iron game and lifting weights. I'll put links to all that into the show notes so people can go and check those out. And a lot of listeners will remember Lauren Colenso-Simple, who was on the show and was very popular, who you ride Mass with. So I definitely recommend folks check out Mass. It's an unbelievable resource and really just a treasure trove of information to help you with your training.

2:02:19So thanks again, Eric. This has been awesome and I look forward to hopefully doing a round two sometime soon. I would be honored and privileged. Thank you for having me. There you have it, friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did and want to stay up to date with future episodes, be sure to hit that subscribe button on YouTube and follow on Apple or Spotify. Finally, thank you for showing up and the effort that you're making to take control of your health. I look forward to hanging out with you again in the next episode.