Chris Beardsley Q&A on Hypertrophy

Chris Beardsley (strengthandconditioningresearch.com) writes the amazing review of fitness, biomechanics, and sports medicine research.   It is a must read for those who want to stay up to date with the latest fitness research.   Chris has  released a free e-book literature review: Training for Hypertrophy, which can be found on the website above.

Tom: As the chair of the bodybuilding track at the SPSS, and from your recent literature review on hypertrophy, I expect you must be brimming with knowledge about muscle building?

Chris: Thanks for inviting me to do this Q&A, Tom. I appreciate the chance to talk about my new literature review and also to promote the SPSS conference in London, at which I am speaking in June this year. I wouldn’t say that I am brimming with knowledge right now! I think it is more accurate to say that I am still coming to terms with the realization of how little we know about what training programs are best for hypertrophy. These days, when I talk with my colleagues, I joke that all we really seem to know is that resistance-training is pretty effective for hypertrophy – beyond that it seems to be educated guesswork.

Tom: OK, but since you’ve just finished a literature review of the research into hypertrophy, where do you think the research on hypertrophy should or will go next?

Chris: Really, I would say that the sort of projects that Brad Schoenfeld is working on are the most important right now. Brad is working hard to assess whether many of the current training practices of bodybuilders (e.g. short rest periods, high volume, etc.) do actually lead to greater gains than other approaches. Also, as my friend James Fisher has noted, we need to see more (and more highly-powered) studies in trained individuals. There have been far too many trials performed in untrained subjects where any kind of resistance-training program is likely to have a beneficial effect and the difference between one specific protocol and another will be obscured by the overall improvement and the inter-individual variations.

Tom: And what is the most common myth about hypertrophy training at the moment?

Chris: Strange as it may seem, the most common myth is the idea that we “know” exactly how to structure a resistance-training program in order to create more muscle growth. In fact, if you look at the state of the research, we don’t actually know very much at all. Of course, it is to be expected that fitness professionals marketing their services to people for increasing muscle mass will exaggerate their knowledge. But I find it interesting right now that even fitness professionals who read research seem to believe that they know exactly how to create a training program that will lead to the best gains in muscular size. For example, on a popular bodybuilding website, I recently read an article that stated (and I paraphrase) “there are lots of studies showing that shorter rest periods lead to greater muscle growth.” Actually, I am not aware of any studies that support this statement. In fact, as my recent literature review shows, the only studies investigating this particular outcome measure show either no effect or the opposite effect. So how is that evidence-based fitness professionals believe they know so much about how to train for maximum hypertrophy? It is hard to say. One possibility is that they don’t fully appreciate the difference between what acute studies and chronic studies tell us. When we are talking about hypertrophy, acute studies are those that measure certain variables during or just after a workout that uses a particular training approach (e.g. short rest periods). This used to mean post-exercise hormones when that was popular. Now, it usually means muscle protein synthesis or one of many different signalling pathways. In contrast, chronic studies in the area of hypertrophy measure the differences in muscle growth between two groups, where one group uses one way of training (e.g. long rest periods) and the other uses another (e.g. short rest periods).

So while acute studies are interesting, they don’t actually tell us what happens to muscular cross-sectional area when we change the training variable. They just tell us about certain physiological changes that happened and which may or may not be related to long-term gains in muscle mass. In other words, they give us a clue, which we can then go and test using a chronic study, but they don’t give us the full picture. On the other hand, chronic studies do actually tell us what happens when we change a training program variable (e.g. rest periods). That’s why I decided to write a detailed literature review, so that people could have all of the results of the chronic studies in one place and see what the evidence actually was for each training variable.

Tom: So which training variables can we manipulate to maximize hypertrophy?

Chris: Well, as I keep saying, the chronic literature is very limited at the moment and it is very hard to say! However, I think that the only factors for which we can make even the most tentative statements about right now are: volume, range-of-motion and muscular failure. It seems that training with a higher volume, a greater range of motion, and training closer to muscular failure all lead to greater hypertrophy than training with lower volume, reduced ranges of motion, or further from muscular failure.

At the opposite end of the scale, I think that it is very hard to see how relative load, rest periods, and repetition speed affect hypertrophy. I feel odd just writing this, as I think this is fairly radical information right now for the fitness industry, especially when you think how many hypertrophy-focused programs are based around short rest periods or talk about time-under-tension as being a key part of their approach. I haven’t been flamed yet but I won’t be surprised when it happens!

Tom: “Radical information”, is what keeps this field interesting for many of us.  Thanks so much for doing this Q&A, and bringing your critical thought process to a field that needs it.