What REALLY Builds Muscle After 40 | Ep 478

What REALLY builds muscle after 40?

The honest answer comes down to 3 things: sufficient effort for growth, how many hard sets you need each week, and recovery.

This episode covers mechanical tension as the proximate cause of muscle growth, what the research says about training close to failure and reps in reserve (RIR), the how many weekly hard sets (volume) drives muscle growth (hypertrophy) vs. diminishing gains, and how sleep, protein, and recovery enable muscle growth.

Plus, what changes for lifting weights over 40 and for women in perimenopause and menopause, and a 30-second test you can run in the gym to find out how hard you are training.

Try Fitness Lab, the AI coaching app that works alongside the tools you already use to calibrate your effort, dial in your training volume, and tell you what your data means for building muscle and losing fat over 40.

Timestamps:

0:00 - 3 things that build muscle
6:39 - Mechanical tension and mechanotransduction
9:30 - Size principle and proximity to failure
11:19 - Reps in reserve and calibrating your effort
14:28 - Volume as the dose for hypertrophy
15:52 - Hard sets per muscle per week
17:45 - What makes a set count
18:44 - Building your week of training
21:50 - Effort tracking and programming over 40
23:24 - Recovery as a permissive factor
25:18 - Sleep, protein, and strength training over 40
26:21 - Building muscle through perimenopause and menopause
30:21 - Bonus: 30-second test for whether you've hit "failure"

• Transcript

  3 things that build muscle

  Philip Pape 0:00

  If you've been changing up your exercises, chasing the perfect rep range, switching programs every few weeks to keep your muscles guessing, and you're still not seeing the muscle you'd expect for how hard you feel like you're working, this episode is for you. Today I'm going to show you the three things that actually build muscle and why everything else that you've heard about on social media or elsewhere is more for optimization. If you can get these three things right, the rest really don't matter as much as you think. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and I'm over 40. Many of you are as well. You're probably lifting weights, and maybe you've been doing it for a while. Maybe you are a gym rat. I don't know your situation, but you've heard maybe a hundred little rules about how to build muscle and different rep ranges. What range is best? How heavy should I go? Is eight to twelve hypertrophy versus say, you know, one to five is strength? You do you have to mix things up to confuse or to challenge the muscles? Do you have to switch your program every X number of weeks following a D-load? What exercise selection do I do so I'm not wasting my time? What about effective reps? What about training close to failure? And the list goes on and on. And I think the fitness industry is just making a ton of money selling you all the variables to optimize this stuff, all the programs you need. And I'm sure you've poured a lot of your hard-earned cash into these things, or at least a lot of time on social media. So the problem I see with a lot of you, and I've dealt with this in the past for years and years and years until I finally figured things out with the help of some amazing people, is you're working incredibly hard. Now, if you're not even going to the gym at all, okay, fine, let's stop right there. You're gonna have to train, you're still gonna take a ton away from this episode. In fact, you're gonna be ahead of the game. But many of you are spending your effort and your attention on variables that do not move the outcome, or you're going to the gym and not even progressing at all, and you're just moving weights around. Yeah, you feel good. Maybe you get a sweat. Maybe you're just kind of hold on, you know, holding on to what you have, but you're not really making any progress. And that can be very frustrating. But really building muscle comes down to just a few key principles. Okay, that is what we're gonna talk about today. Everything else is optimization, everything is dialing in, maybe, but we're gonna focus on what matters. I'll say that this is not a beginner episode necessarily. Like we're not gonna talk about, okay, step one, here's how you train. Step one, right? This is really, if you already know the basics, you know what a deadlift is, you know what a squat is, you've been already listening to podcasts, reading articles, et cetera. And maybe you're a little tired being told, okay, here's another thing you have to do. Maybe you listen to Mind Pump or something like that, which I love these shows, but they can confuse you because there's just so many things that they throw out there as information or tips. But it's more liberating sometimes when you just have simplicity. So we're gonna try the two, we're gonna try to do that today. And then if you stick around to the end, you know, I always like to throw in something special at the end of the episode. Today I'm gonna give you something to do in the gym to tell whether you're training hard enough and also whether you're training close enough to failure versus what you think you are. We're gonna do it very objectively. A lot of people would get that part wrong and it kind of holds you back on progressing the right way. Today you're gonna learn the one thing that's the actual proximate cause of muscle growth. It's just one thing. Also, why proximity to failure matters more than weight on the bar. I know shocking to hear me say that. How many hard sets per muscle you actually need in a week, because there's a lot of confusion there, and then the role of recovery, which may have some surprises in store for you today. So let's start with what most people believe building muscle is about. Okay. If I ask the average dedicated lifter, Jim Goer, what they're focused on, I will hear specifics like, okay, I'm doing these rep ranges, these are my exercise selection and variation. Sometimes people talk about, you know, mixing it up and making sure they're trying to hit all the muscle groups. You know, we talked about muscle confusion in a recent episode. Go look that one up. It's actually a pretty cool discussion. I hear about sometimes time under tension and tempo, about mind muscle connection, about this split or that split. Now, those are tactics. None of that is worthless. I would say it's you've got to learn, you've got to find what works for you and understand that there's a spectrum of stuff tactically that influences muscle growth. But all of these are downstream. They are like the trim on the house. And we want to focus on the foundation of the house, not the paint on the wall, but the frame of the house, the foundation. So I want to reframe, pun intended, this whole concept today using the way that I like to think about things, which is an engineering problem. When you have a system that isn't producing the output you want, you've got to fix the system. You don't fiddle with the dials. You identify the constraint. What is the one bottleneck that is limiting the results? And then put all your resources there. That is a very efficient approach. For most lifters, especially as we age, we're over 40, over 50, and you're not building muscle the way you want. The constraint is almost never exercise selection, guys. And yet that's often the top of the list. Oh, what exercises should I do to X, Y, Z? It's almost never the rep range. Oh, should I be working in five to 10 or 10 to 12? I get that question a lot. The constraint for most of you is this you are not training hard enough on the sets that you do, and you're not doing enough of those hard sets across the week. That is it. That is the whole game for most people. Listen up, I'm gonna repeat myself. You're either and either or not training enough, hard enough on the sets that you do, and you're not doing enough of those hard sets across the week. Now, notice actually, neither of those is technically volume in and of itself. It's effort and frequency that leads to volume and ultimately will tie to the one principle that glues it all together that we're gonna talk about. So those are the things you're gonna want to nail. Now, I know you're a lot of you are saying, wait, I do train hard. I'm wiped out when I go to the gym. Well, hold that thought because we're gonna test that out. All right. Getting wiped out, being sore, being, you know, and sweating is not a primary variable. Those aren't primary variables of what actually drives muscle growth. So if it is not, let's say, rep range and it's not exercise selection and it's not variety, then what

  Mechanical tension and mechanotransduction

  Philip Pape 6:39

  is it? Well, the answer that we definitively know at this point is mechanical tension. Mechanical tension is the proximate cause of muscle growth. It is the cause of muscle growth. That is the thing that your muscle fibers respond to. It's not the burn or the pump, not the soreness, not any of those things. Although those can come along for the ride. They can be there for sure for different reasons. But the signal that tells a muscle to grow is high tension, mechanical tension on the fiber, repeated and accumulated over time. So it's not a one-off, but repeated and accumulated over time. And here's why that matters in plain terms. When a muscle fiber is under high mechanical load, that physical force gets converted into a chemical signal inside the cell. This is fascinating. The science term is mechanotransduction, mechano, as in mechanical, transduction as in trans, you know, transduces or uh changes or converts into chemicals. The upstream part of how the force becomes the signal is actually still not understood, guys. That's why I use the term proximate cause. The upstream part in your body of how that force becomes that signal, even by people who study this for a living, tell us we don't quite know. But the downstream part is very clear. That signal, right, from the mechanical tension into the chemical signal, that signal then ramps up your muscle protein synthesis through a pathway called mTOR. And that's what builds new contractile tissue. And I think there's a newer name for mTOR today, but we're gonna go with mTOR because that's what everybody knows and loves. Now, for a long time, we talk about or we have talked about three drivers of growth mechanical tension, metabolic stress, which is like the that burning feeling you get when you lift weights, and then muscle damage, which often is correlated with soreness. That's what we used to talk about. Over the last decade or so, the field has consolidated to no, it's mechanical tension. That's the one that matters. That is the one that matters. So please consider this an update in your scientific library. The other two, the burn and the soreness, they mostly seem to matter to the extent that they help you produce more tension, or they are just byproducts of the work. The source, soreness is never the goal. It's like a side effect of sometimes what you're doing correctly here with mechanical tension. But the question is, how do you produce high tension on a muscle fiber? Because what we care about is what do you do? As a human being, going to the gym with a fitness lifestyle, what the heck do you actually do? So let's get practical. Your body recruits muscle fibers in a specific order. Smallest and weakest first, biggest and strongest last. It's called the size principle. The fibers with the most growth potential,

  Size principle and proximity to failure

  Philip Pape 9:30

  growth potential, the high threshold ones, those only get called into the game when your effort gets high. And that's either because you're lifting something genuinely heavy as a percentage of your max, or listen up, or because you fatigued the smaller fibers enough that your body has to recruit the bigger ones to keep the set going. So do you see what this means? It means that the last few reps of a hard set, the ones that get difficult, the ones that, let's be honest, you are attempted to not do because it's getting hard, right? Those are the reps where the magic happens. Those are the reps that put you your most responsive fibers under the real mechanical tension. If you stop a set when it starts to feel hard, you're actually walking away right before the part that grows the muscle. Now it's it may not be as close to failure as sometimes claimed. So there's a little bit of a window there for sure. Okay, we we can talk about that nuance, but it's the principle we're talking about here. And so this brings us to the single most important number in this conversation, and that is proximity to failure. Like if we need a metric, it is proximity to failure. How close are you actually training to the point where you can't do another rep? And the research here is pretty consistent. Muscle growth increases as your sets get closer to failure. You don't have to go all the way to failure, and I'm gonna come back to that, but you have to get close. And by failure, I simply mean, again, you your form would completely break down and you literally can't do another rep. The most useful way to think about this proximity to failure is reps in reserve, R-I-R. Now, there are two systems there's rating of perceived exertion, RPE,

  Reps in reserve and calibrating your effort

  Philip Pape 11:19

  and then the inverse of that is R I R. We're just gonna go with IRR. R-I-R, it's a really easy way to think about it because it's how many reps are left in the tank. RPE gets confusing, so we're not even gonna go there. So let's say if you have five more in the tank, that's five R I R. And so as you can see, the smaller the IRR, R I R, the closer you are to failure, all the way to zero R I R, which is complete failure. And the closer you are, generally with a dose response that is mitigated somewhat by how much fatigue you're getting in the set, we're gonna talk about that, affects how you build muscle. Now, this should affect how you train significantly if you weren't doing it right the first time and if you're not getting a result. Now, we take somebody like Dr. Eric Helms, who I very much respect, and his colleagues, they've done a lot of work on this. And there's a finding that keeps coming up in the research. Most people, especially less experienced lifters, which I know a lot of you are. Heck, I've been training now for about five years pretty well. And I consider myself pretty experienced when I compare my form to, say, someone who's newer, but I have a long way to go and a long way to learn. I'm always trying to improve. So let's just assume we're all less experienced. Many of you dramatically underestimate how hard you're actually training. You think you're one or two reps in reserve, but you're actually five or six. This is very common. In one set of studies, when trained people were pushed, okay, trained people, people who already resistance trained regularly, when they were pushed by a coach, they got an average of five, two, six more reps than they predicted on a load or a weight on the bar that they thought was their limit. So that's five or six more that they were able to get. That is a lot. That's a difference between a set that really does effectively grow muscle and one that's kind of on the edge, or maybe it's not even really moving the needle for you. It's just burning calories, makes you feel like you did something, but now you're gonna need a lot more volume or time to get where you want. And if you're let's say in a bulk or a maintenance or body reconp, you're just not getting everything out of it you can with your training stimulus. So that's why I'm sharing this with you guys. This is so important. That's why this episode is called What Really Builds Muscle. I think I think it's after 40, but it really is for everyone. So we've established a mechanical tension as the driver, and that the effort you put in that gets close to failure is how you produce that tension. Now we have to talk about how much because that effort without enough repetition, without enough volume, does not get you there. You're gonna get detrained. You need to continue to challenge your body to continue so that it adapts onward and upward. I mean, that makes sense, right? Like if you have the best gym session you've ever had in your life, you train hard, you're in the gym for two hours today, and then you never train the rest of your life, well, obviously you're not gonna keep building muscle. Okay. So the framing I love comes from Brad Scheinfeld uh and others like him. It's basically this if intensity, okay, intensity in this case is proximity to failure, I apologize because we also use intensity to mean load on the bar. But if if proximity to failure is the drug, if we're talking about dose response and that's the drug,

  Volume as the dose for hypertrophy

  Philip Pape 14:28

  that's the stimulus, then volume is like the dosage. Okay. You need both of them together. So it's not that volume in and of itself is anything special, it's that volume at high mechanical tension is special. So then what is that dose? What is that volume? Well, when we talk about volume for muscle growth, we typically count hard sets per muscle group per week. It's a nice, easy metric that you can quantify. Not the total time or tonnage or how trashed you feel or how sore you are, not even how many days in the gym, right? Because you can you can at work, you can get a good volume from three days or from six days. It's hard sets. Okay, and the research is really clear on this. A recent large analysis that pooled dozens of studies, so we call that a meta-analysis, found that more volume reliably produces more growth with essentially 100% certainty in the direction, but with diminishing returns as you go up. So the curve starts to flatten, diminishing returns. So when we talk about dose response in fitness or nutrition, it almost invariably is an asymptotic curve for my math nerds out there. In other words, it it increases, but by less and less as you go. So the marginal increases get smaller. It's not a linear relationship, it's more of a curve. Very important to know because then you want then you can find like that sweet spot

  Hard sets per muscle per week

  Philip Pape 15:52

  where you get a lot of the response, but you don't have to put in significantly more effort for a little extra, which also, by the way, has negatives in terms of fatigue and recovery. Okay. For most people, what does that look like? Well, the responsive range of volume is around 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle per week. If you are newer to lifting or if you're short on time, you could get a lot out of that low end, that 10 sets. That 10 sets. In fact, if you look at the dose response curve, you can go as low as five and still get a response. You're just leaving some stuff on the table. That's my point, right? You going from zero to five is a massive improvement. And then five to ten is another big improvement, but then between 10 and 20 is a decent improvement, and it depends on how much you want to put in. And if you're newer, you're gonna get a huge responsiveness anyway, even with fewer sets, which is why I don't focus as much on volume for new, new for uh newbies for beginners. I focus more on, hey, get in the gym three days a week and do the main lifts for a decent amount of, you know, for like three sets, and you're you're generally covered. If a specific muscle is a priority and you're recovering well for that muscle group, then you might say, okay, I need 15 to 20 sets on that upper range. I'm gonna do a little specialization. One of my all-time favorite coaches, Andy Baker, he puts it simply, he's like, look, if you want to get bigger arms, you got to do it twice a week, two different exercises, which, you know, depending on the number of sets, can put you around 15 to 20 because you also have a lot of indirect work generally hitting those muscle groups, right? So specialization in one exercise, you just got to think about the number of sets. Beyond that, beyond the 20 sets, the evidence is a little murky. It's also very individual. And for a lot of us who are older, this is where the over 40 piece, the recovery is really an important variable. And if you're training too much, you could just be constantly fatigued and underrecovered, let

  What makes a set count

  Philip Pape 17:45

  alone if you're not sleeping well, if you're stressed, and if you're not eating enough. Right? Those stack on. Now, we take everything I just talked about, and now let's tie this together because what does it mean? Well, a set only really counts toward that volume if it was hard, which means reasonably close to failure. If you had 20 lazy sets with the same, I hate to say pink dumbbells, but whatever weight you did last time, and it's five, six, seven, eight, nine reps in reserve, every time, even if you feel like you got some work done because you're sweating, you're just not gonna get the same result. In fact, you might not be getting, you might not be putting pushing the needle enough to get stronger over time and actually increase the weight. And next time you go to the gym, you can't do any more until you train harder. So it's not just about counting the sets, it's counting the ones that are hard. Now, for those of us logging, you're gonna count all your sets. The point isn't to only count hard sets. The point is make sure that all your sets are hard. Okay, that's my point here. All right. Warm-up sets don't count. In other words, you should track your warm-up

  Building your week of training

  Philip Pape 18:44

  sets, in my opinion, so you can kind of repeat them next time, but only the working sets that are close to failure. So let's say you go to the gym on Monday or whatever your next training day is, you're gonna pick the movements that you can load up and repeat week to week and actually progress on. You don't need 12 exercises per muscle. You don't need to do body maxing or whatever you want to call it here, full body maxing. You just need a handful that you can develop skill on and get better at because there's a neuromuscular piece and then there's this the muscle piece. And you're gonna take, I'm gonna say, all of your working sets to within one to three reps of in reserve. Bigger lifts tend to be farther, like three, maybe four reps from failure, whereas smaller lifts, isolation work, bodybuilding type accessory work is gonna be closer to one rep in reserve, maybe even zero. I'm generally working around one to two for almost everything. If I'm doing major squats, major benches, something like that, I might have a set. My first set might be three sets or three, maybe four reps shy from failure, but generally three. So that's kind of my thought there. And then you're gonna count up your hard sets per muscle across the week and aim for that 10 and up range. Now, you should do this ahead of time by planning out your workout that way. If you're following a decently designed program, it should cover those bases. One thing I noticed in the program I built for myself recently is somehow I totally forgot to put in lateral delts, even though I'm trying to build up my shoulders again since my surgery, and I had too much rear delt work. Now, rear delt work is great when you've had rotary call surgery, but I had like way too many sets of that and very few of lateral. So I'm getting very specific in terms of muscle groups. You don't have to do it that way. You can generalize to shoulders, upper legs, arms, right? It depends on, you know, back. You could do it that way as well. But you've got to find where you're responsive, what you need, and then you're gonna build from there. So that's kind of the program. Notice I didn't tell you what exercises, when, what order, none of that. Those are tactical details. The point is 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle group per week. That is what works to give you mechanical tension, repeated enough so that you keep getting stronger and building muscle. It's not about muscle confusion, it's not about the perfect rep range, because like I just said, mechanical tension can occur at a wide rep range. It can occur anywhere from like three reps to 30 reps, believe it or not. And I know it sounds crazy, but if you do something for 25 reps, yes, it's a lot lighter. But man, if you are one rep shy of failure on that 25th rep, you're still hitting those muscle fibers we talked about before, and you're still going to get the mechanical tension. It's pretty mind-blowing in a way. Now, we're not talking about strength, we're not talking about specificity. Those are different. We're not talking about bone density and some of the other benefits of lifting heavy, heavy meaning more down in the four to six rep range. Okay, that has its own unique benefits. We're not talking about that today, but there's a lot of overlap that you can take advantage of when designing programs for efficiency. Now, you're listening to this,

  Effort tracking and programming over 40

  Philip Pape 21:50

  you're like, okay, I'm sold on this, but how do I know if I'm hitting one to three reps in reserve? How do I track my heart sets across a week? How do I design my program? What program should I? Build. And we have an app called Fitness Lab that solves that for you and will give you exactly what you need. Fitness Lab is my AI coaching app. It is not a tracking app that stores your numbers. It works alongside tools that you have. It integrates your data. If you have an iPhone, it connects to Apple Health. And it can prescribe for you workouts across any combination you can imagine. And it could even work with you if you have a trainer or your own workouts. So it can do either mode. And it's, I don't want to say vibes. I hate that term. But it asks you questions about how the session felt, how close you got to failure, and things like that in plain English. So it's beyond like, okay, for example, macrofactor workouts and boost camp are two of the workout loggers that I like as well, personally. But they're much more numbers-based, they're objective. Fitness Lab does that plus the subjective piece, like you had a coach, and you're like, hey, this is how it felt. This is what I did. By the way, here's a video of my lift. Give me a form check, and we have amazingly advanced AI that will give you feedback on your form. Now, isn't that incredible? I think it is. I think it's awesome. Go to witsandweights.com slash app. Go to wits and weights.com slash app. And you know what? I thought I wouldn't do this, but I will. We are not in a promo right now. But if you send me a

  Recovery as a permissive factor

  Philip Pape 23:24

  personal email, okay, join my email list, witsandweights.com slash email, and reply and say, hey, I want your discount. I can give you a private link for 20% off. So that's witsandweights.com slash app to check it out. But again, send me an email if you want a special link for 20% off. All right, so we've covered tension, effort, and volume. There is a fourth piece here, very, very, very, very important. And that is, you guessed it, recovery. I want to give the right frame on recovery though, because I think a lot of people put the cart before the horse. Recovery does not cause muscle growth. Training causes muscle growth. Recovery is permissive of muscle growth. It allows your adaptation to occur. Okay, think of it this way: your training is like the seed. If you were to plant something in your garden, recovery is the soil of the garden where the soil doesn't grow the plant, right? It gives it nutrients, but it doesn't grow it. If you plant a seed in bad soil, you don't get a plant, but you still have to have the seed, is my point. So training is the seed. Is that I hope that's a good analogy? Because like without training, it's there's nothing. You have to have the training. So you have the training, that's the seed. You have your recovery, that's the soil. When the soil is bad, when you don't have good sleep, when you don't have enough protein or calories, when you're stressed to your gills, the same hard workout results in less of a result. Does that make sense? So you did this work and you don't get to get the result. I don't like that equation for you guys. I don't. And that is exactly what makes people quit, besides a lack of consistency or it's not enjoyable enough or whatever. The biggest reason is, man, you're just tired, you can't fit it in, you don't get enough sleep, you're not eating enough, you don't get the result, you start to get sore, your joints start to hurt. A lot of that is a recovery issue. And I think the biggest levers are sleep and protein, or I should say sleep and calories. It really depends on who you are. Some of

  Sleep, protein, and strength training over 40

  Philip Pape 25:18

  you, some of you are getting enough protein, but not enough calories. Carbs, I would put off to the side, although I'm a big fan of carbs, that's usually not the main issue for folks. It could become an issue if other things are dialed in as an optimization. Again, going back to the big rocks versus the small optimizations here. We know that a single night of bad sleep can drop your muscle protein synthesis by up to 20%. Okay. We also know we have to have enough calories and protein to support our muscle building. And protein at least 0.7 grams per pound. There's also evidence is as we get older. Again, this episode is titled After 40, because as we get older, we tend to be a little bit less responsive to protein and training. And that's not an excuse not to do it at all. No. It just means, hey, you've got to be getting that protein and you've got to be getting the right training, but not so much training that it impedes your recovery. So that's why it's a nice little balancing act that we have to do. That's why tracking, that's why being time efficient, that's why using compound lifts, all of these things are super effective to master the fundamentals. And it's

  Building muscle through perimenopause and menopause

  Philip Pape 26:21

  where I see people go wrong as well. Because they're trying to do a lot of things that like a 25-year-old would do. All the pillars here, you know, get 15,000 steps and get nine hours of sleep and then, you know, train six days a week. You can't do it all. You can't do it all. So you need to be efficient. And then for the women, the ladies who are listening in perimenopause or post-menopause, okay, this is in this is really encouraging. Okay. I'm not a fearmonger about this stuff. Resistance training builds muscle and strength just the same, regardless of your age and your hormone status, as a percentage of your current body mass, as when you were young and as when you're old. It's all the same. In other words, the relative gains you're going to make are the same, even when you weren't in menopause, and they're the same as men. Yes, you have less absolute muscle to begin with, but so what? The change, the amount you can grow and build, the rate is the same. Now, the falling estrogen might make the job a little bit harder and recovery a little more sensitive, but it doesn't take away your biggest tool here, which is training. You can't afford to coast on effort, no matter who you are. And that's not sexy and it doesn't sell programs to say you need to work hard. But it really comes what comes down is it's really what it comes down to. But when you do that work and you get the result and you're 55 and looking better than ever and feeling great and functional, and knowing that no, you're not gonna end up in a nursing home. No, you're not gonna end up having trouble getting off the toilet. No, you're not gonna have trouble playing with your kids or grandkids and being active. Holy smokes, isn't that so empowering? Because you put in a little bit of extra effort and you actually feel so good about it that the effort is something you start to look forward to. Now, I'm not saying rep ranges don't matter. I'm not saying exercise selection doesn't matter. A lot of that matters for other reasons. It might matter because of the equipment you have, it might matter because you enjoy something more than others. Like some people say, Oh, I don't know if I could lift heavy. When you start lifting heavy, you sometimes find sets of four are more enjoyable than sets of 14. You know, even though they're super heavy, there's a difference, mental difference as well. All right. Also, you don't want to go to complete failure on everything because that's gonna create a lot of fatigue. So almost never going to complete failure except for on the small movements, one to three basically captures all the growth from that mechanical tension at a fraction of the fatigue cost. All right. Now, if you're an advanced competitor, if you're an athlete, you're trying to squeeze out the last 5%. This episode's probably not for you anyway. You know this stuff and you know that you need to take it really right to the edge and maybe even a little bit beyond. Let's be honest. If you're a competitor, if you're an athlete, you're gonna sacrifice and make some trade-offs. You're gonna, you're gonna live with some pain. But that just is what it is. I'm watching the documentary about Rafa, you know, Rafael Nadal, tennis. I'm not a tennis guy, but it's incredible to see how much he makes himself suffer and how much intensity he puts into the game. And that's why he's successful. And I'm not saying that's for you. Those of us listening, we just want a really, really great result and we want to feel great and look great. And you're going to, if you if you listen up and follow the principles in this episode. All right. So this is the foundation. Stop worrying about the trim of the house. Worry about the foundation of the house. Train each set close to failure, accumulate enough hard sets across the week. That's 10 to 20 per muscle group. Sleep and eat to support it, and rinse and repeat. It is not exciting, but it works. Not exciting, but it works. All right, before we wrap up, I wanted to give you a 30-second test to see if you are training hard. Okay. I'll give it to you in just a second because it's super, super helpful. If this episode reframed how you think about building muscle, I want you to do things. First, hit follow so you get more episodes like this. If you're not already a follower in your app, just hit follow. Second, if you've got a friend who is frustrated or they want to learn, or you know this can help them, just send it to them. Please text this to a friend. Say, hey, check out Wits and Weights. I really love this. Or give them your favorite episode. And I would be super, super grateful. We we need more people to learn this stuff and go to the gym and really get the results they're looking for. All right, here's a test you can run on your next training session. It

  Bonus: 30-second test for whether you've hit "failure"

  Philip Pape 30:21

  takes 30 seconds on your last set of an exercise. So I want you to do this like on a machine or cable or isolation type exercise, something safe where you're not gonna get pinned or super heavy. I want you to first predict how many more reps can you do or do you think you can do when you would normally stop? All right, how many more reps do you think you could do when you'd normally stop? Like, is that two reps? Whatever it is. So you're pre-logging your R your R I R right now. Then doing the exercise, when you get to that point, instead of stopping, keep going and do what's called an am wrap, as many reps as possible. And take that set to the point where you cannot do another rep, absolutely bar none, complete failure. I don't want you to get into bad form, tweak your back or anything like that. That's why you picked like a simple safe exercise here or a safer type of exercise. And I want you to count how many you got. So this is the am wrap technique. And I do this a lot on first sets as well, sometimes if I'm starting a new program just to kind of calibrate. But this is more to see what true failure is for you and compare it to what you thought it would be. So if you guessed that you would be too RIR, but you got five more reps, well, that just taught you something profound. You've been leaving more in the tank than you realized every time you lived. So that is like muscle gains you're leaving on the table, and you can start to close this gap. That's it. You can recalibrate. Now you know what the effort really is. Now you can get yourself to push a little bit harder. Now it helps to have a training partner or a coach sometimes for some of us to push us to do that. But try it out and let me know how it went. All right. And you can let me know by the way on Instagram at wits and weights, or you can send me an email, go to witsandweights.com slash email, get on my list, and then reply to any of my emails. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, you do not build muscle by finding the perfect program. You build it by doing the basic things hard and then doing them again. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.