Should You Lift Heavy For Muscle Gains, Light For Fat Loss?

your goal with weight training has to be must be in a fat loss phase the maximum retention of muscle mass because losing it is a possibility you don't want hey folks Dr Mike here for Renaissance periodization should you go heavier when you're training for muscle gain and do lighter higher reps when you're training for fat loss oo is this fact or fiction lots of ideas let's find out what's correct and what is not the idea of going heavy for your bulk my bulker every now and again I read the steroid forums and I'm always upset

and every now and again they use terms like bulker and cutter doing a cutter and I found some wistw underneath Grandma's old shelves got my PCT together got kgal on hand just in case sides hit honestly if I ruled the world it would be a Libertarian capitalist Paradise Ubi all that shit hell yeah Bernie Sanders you can state to everyone who's ever commented with slaying in a steroid form lined up and fucking shot in public as a lesson never say bulker or Cutter nothing is ever on hand I'm just upset in any case when you

are bulking a very common tradition Through the Ages has been okay you got to go heavy to put on mass sets of like five to 12 reps is what most guys have in mind and then in a fat loss phase that everyone kind of knows or the old school tradition is I'm old school brother uh is you do higher reps maybe sets of 10 to 20 reps if not higher but definitely if you tell most old school bodybuilders hey like when I'm buling a kind of sets of 5 to 10 5 to 12 when I'm

uh trying to lose some fat I go to sets 10 to 20 is very unlikely anyone's going to bat an eye they like yeah obvious but does this actually make sense it does make some sense other sense it does not make let's find out how first it doesn't make sense what are the cons against this view first there has been enough research collected now we pretty confidently never sure thing science is never certain we can very confidently say that heavier loads and lighter loads build a roughly equivalent amount of muscle sets of five to 30

repetitions and even a little bit outside those ranges have been shown in almost every study study after study after study different designs different populations to just not be reliably differentiable in muscle growth so if you said something like well sets of 5 to 10 build mass more than sets of 20 to 25 if you loop back to the literature talk to somebody like Brad shonfeld the world's expert on hypertrophy then it would be like that that's actually not true and the thing is a lot of us who do the science and RP funds a ton

of the science and I'm a co-author and bunch of papers nowadays we are all hardcore to begin with like we're all from that era and we all thought this was true sort of hoped it was true and then we found out it wasn't so it turns out that is just not true to say that like heavier weights put on more bulk or more mass take that for what it is there's a probability that it's true but it's just not evident in literature or in real practice you got guys getting big you know like Tom Platz

the way he got big legs was like Ultra High Reps all the fucking time okay so oh that that's just Tom plat legs didn't apply was he an outlier if you look at all the data and all the experience there's just nothing to generalize to next lighter loads May in fact be superior for certain muscles certain exercises in a muscle gain phase on average there doesn't seem to be a difference between sets of five to 10 sorry between sets of five all the way up to sets of 30 in specific individuals in specific muscles some

individuals seem to grow better from higher reps some individuals and their muscles on certain exercises seem to grow better with lower repetition but because that diversity is the case you can even find lots of individuals and or muscles on individuals which just grow better from higher reps and lower reps are just not the answer for example just taking myself my biceps if I do sets of five to 10 some stuff happens but if I do sets of 10 to 15 or 15 to 20 my shit blows up and so if I was to be a

strict adherent of the okay it's time to bulk that's a 5 to 10 my biceps just wouldn't grow that much and then when I got to the fat loss phase I would notice when I switch to higher reps like my biceps actually like unfortunately I'm not eating enough to really grow muscle now but they're just getting a better stimulus I wonder what would happen if I did this in the offseason when I'm bulking and the answer is I would just get bigger so that dogmatic you got to train heavier to put on size thing isn't

just not statistically on average true it's on average neutral there are many times where where it's actually wrong and so if you have that dogmatic view you're going to be wrong a lot you're going to have the situation where you do in sets of 5 to 10 on squats and lag presses and your knees kind of hurt a little bit your quads get a decent pump decent tension takes you little few days to recover and you're good to go and you're having like okay leg training and then one of your buddies comes in from out

of town and you hit a couple sessions with him you know he's there for maybe he's staying with you for a few weeks or something before your wedding or some shit like that get getting you ready for the the married life and you hit a couple workouts with him and he's doing like a high rep program and you're like bro my legs are exploding I'm sore all the fucking time my pumps are out of this world I physically fucking added like half an inch I swear to God in the last two weeks on my legs

he's like oh sweet I love it yeah this this rep range really works for me and then he gets on a flight and leaves and you're like all right back to bulking so that's a five to 10 that didn't really work all that well for me so there are situations in which clearly higher reps work better and that doesn't make a whole lot of sense one thing I didn't write here on the PowerPoint which is also true is the corollary of that is in the fat loss phase some guys if they do nice controlled slow

Ecentric nice and strict injury probability kept low sets of like 8 to 10 or even 6 to 10 they can have an unbelievably more efficacious retention of their muscle tissue some guys could say like dude as soon as I start going light pre-contest my fucking shit falls off my body my muscles just start sinking off but if I keep going as heavy as I can safely I just have this fucking hard big ass look I'm able to retain all my trouble muscles that happens all the time so it's both false to say that heavy training

is always best for growth and it's false to say that light training is always best for cutting problem next you'll hear guys this one I had to put in here because something you're going to hear and I want you guys to be inoculated against this fucking nonsense is why fucking build with fucking heavy weights right right makes sense and then fucking etching the details on a cutter guns loaded don't fucking say that shit again fucking on a cutter just kidding uh on a fat loss phase my bad I fucking Etch in the details with higher

reps oh okay well let's pretend I'm a physiologist oh wait I am of sport and let's pretend that we know something uh together you and I Mr viewer about how Muscle Works and what it is describe to me how etching in the details could possibly work from a physiological or anatomical persp perspective I'm sorry you're not a sculptor motherfucker either the fat decreases in size or the muscle increases in size I don't understand what etching in details can possibly mean and if you think about it long enough it can't possibly mean anything so people who

say I'm using the fucking High Reps to etch in the striations that is just unabashed nonsense muscle grows or get smaller fat grows or gets smaller you want to etch in details keep your muscle the same size or grow it a little bit and take your fat stores and Shrink them down details etched no rep range required people also say you know the higher reps burn more calories and that's true to an unbelievably tiny extent that makes almost no difference the real calorie snc that you generate for the deficit comes from diet a little bit

of it comes from keeping up a normal slash normal to high level of physical activity doing your cardio getting your 12,000 steps a day whatever almost none of it comes from differences in weight training and remember weight training we have one big goal on a fat loss phase we want to make sure that we preserve as much muscle as possible sort of attempt to build it and the building is can canceled out by the catabolic State and then you end up at neutral most of the time ideally if you start to go okay in my

workouts my weight training I want to burn more calories you were necessarily sacrificing optimal hypertrophy because optimal hypertrophy is like a one one target goal you shoot for that what are extra goals are are up to n it's like if you want to go to Subway and pick up a sandwich and your friend's like hey can you stop by like CVS for me to pick up like some gum you're like yeah it could it's going to cost me 20 extra minutes we're just not that close of friends so no I'm not going to do anything

for you again ever Bob ever don't ask who Bob is never ask me about who Bob is he's dead to me in any case if the goal is getting a Subway sandwich the anything you do extra is extra and if you're really crunched for time you're not just a piece of shit that says no to Bob it really is taking away from the goal so if your goal with weight training has to be must be in a fat loss phase the maximum retention of muscle mass because losing it is a possibility you don't want trying

to also Co spped it to just burn a few more calories seems like a really shit way to disturb a really important process for a really small gain I wouldn't recommend it it's just not a thing that's going to work now that's all the downsides there are upsides and a lot of folks who are hashtag evidence-based will be like of course that's all true and uh that you should just train heavy all the way through ah but should you there are distinct advantages to going heavier on a muscle gain phase and lighter on a fat

loss phase and here they are first when you're trying to bulk up especially later in the end of a bulk your body fat percent's a bit higher and you're a lot heavier higher reps can gas you the fuck out and because gassing out is almost defined as your cardiovascular system limits your performance before your local musculature does as you're cranking out hamstring curls and you're now like can't breathe very well and you have to stop you might have stopped like four rep shy failure where you think it's one it was one rep shy of total

system failure which is why you stopped but you had four reps in the actual muscle left over it's the lungs that kept you back if you instead didn't train for sets of 20 in the hamster and curl but try to set do sets of 10 you might have reached one rep away from failure amazing stimulus without your lungs burning much because you just didn't have to do 10 extra reps higher Reps for muscle growth are amazing when you can do them but there may be times towards the end of a bulk where lower reps are

better just because they're not limited by our cardiovascular ability and thus they are actually more effective for muscle growth on the other hand when you are cutting higher reps can be easier to do each week instead of harder because you lean out when you're squatting for higher reps let's say sets of 15 I don't know why the fuck you'd ever do that well let's pick a more rational exercise to sets 15 hack squat when you're hack squatting for sets of 15 and you're doing it in a bulking phase oh my God bro you're just going

to start vomiting blood at some point and stop eight rep shy failure because you can't fucking breathe and you're rolling on the floor thinking you're good this is it I'm going to die if you're doing sets of 15 on the hack squat especially in the tail end of a fat loss phase you're losing weight session to session week to week and those higher reps are much easier to do when you were physically lighter you ever notice small people can crank reps like crazy big guy does 12 reps and he's on the floor throwing up and

you're leaning out and nothing in this world short of actual endurance training makes your endurance better than losing fat I mean it's magical as you're leaning out you're more able to do higher reps which is great here's another really trippy thing as you impose a caloric deficit on your body's musculature that long-term exposure to the caloric deficit upregulates ampk activity and down regulates mtor activity what that means in science speak is that it makes your muscles unfortunately slightly more catabolic likely to break down their own structures for feeding the body because it's fucking starving to

death and less anabolic less propensity to grow muscle that sucks however there's a silver lining there ampk is also the it's not just the central catabolic governor of your cell it's also one of the central governor of endurance adaptations and a lot ofk activity actually changes your fiber type isoforms on the margins it improves it signals to improve vascularity around the the muscle tissue and a ton of other uh effects it actually can improve the oxygen transport ability through and to the muscle and what that ends up doing is at the longer you do a

fat loss phase 4 and the more ampy activity is summated over time you actually get better at reps you get more endurant so not only getting better reps because you're getting lighter and leaner but you're now getting better reps internally physiologically at the molecular level that's kind of cool so you might as well lean into the shit you're getting good at as opposed to leaning shit you're not getting good at coming back to that if you're trying to go your all-time heaviest at the end of a fat loss phase that can be needlessly injury promoting

let's take charge of what's going on here or take stock of what's going on at the end of a fat loss phase you're really fatigued you're at a body weight you're not used to the cushioning of the connective tissues and the rest of your body is minimized because you've been losing fat you're probably in a slightly less hydrated State than you would be on a bul because you know you don't have bloat face anymore and that means all of your joints connective tissues are not dehydrated but they're less hydrated you're also fatigued in a way

that affects your coordination one of the earliest signs of high systemic fatigue in athletes is they're not as fluid and smooth anymore with their movements they're a little shaky a little Breaky they make more mistakes you make a mistake under 200 kilos in a squat of athleticism you have to lean forward a bit more something pops there it is you make a mistake under 120 kilos if you're a 200 kilo squatter H probably not much is going to happen so trying to go alltime Ultra heavy at the end of a fat loss phase could just

be um getting together kind of a consilience of let's get hurt uh potentially unwise in addition you may not be able to go as heavy as possible because you are so fatigued because your coordination is so off because your muscles are literally bereft of most of their glycogen stores which allow you to do lots of repetitive efforts if you go heavy at the end of a cut psychologically this kind of sucks because you can literally just watch yourself get weaker that blows if you started doing some higher reps at the end of a cut the

amk transformative process for the muscle the loss of fat the loss of weight can actually allow you to continue to either hold your ground or even make PRS especially if you're doing sets of 15 to 30 reps and you're not adding load or maybe a little load but you're adding reps last month of a cutting phase you do like press for 400 lb for a set of 15 the next week you do 400 lbs for for sets of 16 then 17 then 18 then D Lo something like that you can actually make PRS which psychologically

is really awesome at the tail end of a fat loss phase is kind of like how are you able to hit PRS is it through heavy low rep no not really okay don't do that are you able to hit it with higher reps yes then do that because remember we know their ability to hold bule is similar and also the higher ups don't get you hurt as much starts to be a pretty good argument here and this leads us to best practices so there's some downsides there's some upsides what are the best practices the first

thing I have to say is this just generally when you're training the preponderance of your logic for choosing the rep range should come from the stimulus to fatigue ratio that a rep range implies you can only do this by trial and error if sets of five to 10 on the leg press cause amazing tension felt in the quads closer to set rep number 10 they cause a crazy burn in the quads your pump after a few sets is Monumental the muscles are clearly perturbed right you try to walk away from the leg press and you're

kind of walking with bent legs and someone's like you okay you're like let me just grab on of this drinking fountain so I don't pass out good sign that you did something to your legs and if it gets your muscle nice and sore while at the same time minimizing joint and connective tissue disruption nobody's going to be able to set to tell you that sets a five to 10 of leg press are the wrong thing because your stimulus to fatigue ratio stimulus being all those good things I said and fatigue mostly being joint connective tissue

stop but also how much an exercise systemically beats you up if your stimulus to fatigue ratio sets a 5 to 10 is amazing that's the right answer let me tell you guys about the RP hypertrophy app with over 28 preset programs already in the app you can choose to make your own you can modify an existing program or you can just run the programs exactly as they were written by me personally this app programs everything for you exercises weights sets reps frequency the whole thing after every single workout on every sing SLE week the app

adjusts to your unique parameters with every single input we have over 250 exercises in the app with detailed video tutorial links to every single one you never have to be confused about technique or form ever again I'm guessing right now you're pretty interested in the app download the RP hypertrophy app today if you go to sets of 20 to 25 and you gas out it's your it's your cardio that's keeping you behind your muscles aren't being super stimulated you can't really feel a ton of tension at that range there is a burn but you're getting

more of a burn in your lugs than in your muscles the pump is cool but it's kind of a transient pump like you see some veins then half an hour later after you're' done training it's gone whereas when you go heavier it's like a pump that lasts kind of all day the muscles are perturbed like they're tired but they're they're more fatigued than perturbed by perturbed I mean like if you go heavy and sorry not heavy whatever as effective and you try to use your legs after they're going to feel weak and wobbly and particularly

there's a coordination problem and sometimes the muscles even cramp but if you do a rep range that's not the best for you like High Reps for Legs for This example you could be like yeah like move your legs around jump around a little bit like I like feel tired and kind of heavy but nothing like anything magical happened to the muscles it's just a similar to how it would feel after like a five mile run like well that doesn't grow a lot of muscle that's not good and if after that session you don't really get

hardly sore at all then the clearly sets of 5 to 10 are better for you in the leg press in that time than sets of 20 to 25 you will have all the data in the world as you train with the RP hypertrophy app link in description of different rep ranges with different muscle groups with different exercises and you're going to start to learn which rep ranges give you the best results sometimes it can be a diversity it could be like there's no wrong answers for Skull Crushers I get a great pump when I do

five I get a great pump when I do 30 and everything in between there could be times when it hurts your elbows and times when it doesn't there could be a Vari situation where you have some stainess you've been doing sets of 5 to 10 for a while and then it feel not so great you switch to sets of 20 to 25 and just the novelty alone Burns you out and it's amazing so at the end of the day just going with whatever is a great stimulus to fatigue ratio and to put that another way

avoiding exercises and rep ranges that are bad stimulus to fatigue ratio like not a lot of pump not a lot of soreness my joints hurt this exercise is hard as fuck to do then that's not really the answered and that's the best possible thing you can say so if someone's like hey you got to train heavy to build muscle that's a 5 to 10 you got to be like oh you know that's true for some muscles for some of the time for me but it's not really true for most muscles and they say how do

you know well stimulus to fatigue ratio so that's the key core concept to keep in mind on top of that you want to layer some other ideas consider going a bit higher rep and adding reps as a form of progression instead of load especially in the last Mesa cycle of a fat loss phase where you're tired you can't make strength PRS anymore your injury probability is a little higher that might just make it psychologically and physiologically and safety-wise the better choice I'm not saying always do it give it a shot and I don't mean Ultra

High Reps I mean if you normally train for sets of 10 to 15 maybe more sets of 15 and fewer sets of 10 uh at the end of a fat loss phase lastly when in that first Mesa cycle of massing of bulking out of a fat loss phase definitely keep lighter training in stick to the lighter ranges progress in loads through them gently but don't go heavy right away what you do not want to do is finish a lot of light training on a fat loss phase and then as soon as you got some food

and fuel in you and some rest you start day one of the bulk with ultra heavy shits that's a five you may want to do that but your joints and connective tissues or tendons they're not adjusted to those heavy loads it's a very different stimulus and because not only are they not adjusted but now you used to have very little energy and now you've been eating food and you have a fuck ton of energy this is a big fucking problem because that combination of bad adjustment to historically what has not been heavyweight in the last

few weeks or even maybe months combined with the fact that you're now feeling really strong and motivated can cause injury and a lot of guys get hurt at this time and it's needless what you should do is through through the bulk the first Mesa cycle continue to train with slightly higher reps then in the next phase pick some lower reps and then phase after that you can if some of the lower reps are working really start to keep doing the lower reps and slowly over time add weight so that by the end of your bulking

phase you're doing less High rep training than you used to plenty of low rep training maybe a little bit of high rep training in the muscles that don't gas you out and then when you transition back to a fat loss phase again you can start training relatively heavy and then over time choose some lighter rep ranges as you continue through the bulk sorry through the cut good God that's all I got at the end of the day folks don't be pedantic about stuff and don't be dogmatic about it don't say well I read this from

a book so it has to be true you could give it a little bit more thought all the evidence doesn't say that injury risk is enhanced directly by going heavy at the end of a fatloss phase because that training science has never been done that doesn't mean that the reality isn't kind of quite obvious and don't be dogmatic don't say well this is how it works and that's it maybe or maybe some guys got some shit you know kind of wrong I mean if you think about a lot of the arguments are like well the

old school guys did it yeah they were smaller and less well- conditioned and uh not as impressive and there were fewer of them you say Fuck dare you bro Arnold was better than everyone sure but how many Arnolds were there and imagine if Arnold said this during his day he'd be doing some exercise and he'd be like where'd you get that from got Vince Janda the and guys from the 50s I mean they really knew things and guys from the 30s I mean they knew it all and guys from 1910 I mean circus strongman they

didn't even have weights they knew everything because old school is better the that's bullshit we learn stuff over time and some of the stuff from the past can be informative and true and some of it gets filtered away so there is some truth to going heavier and a massing and a bulking phase and going lighter in a fat loss phase but it's new and it's not direct and mostly what you want is the best stimulus to fatigue ratio possible guys thanks for tuning in check out our members area check out our description for links see

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