anoopbal - 27 July 2010 12:01 AM

And I wouldn’t read too much into an unpublished thesis. If i had published it, got accepted, then it is worth discussing it.

Just trying to understand where you are coming from. So you did measure an increase in muscle mass in both groups?

I read the part of the Wernborn study about intensity and came to the conclusion it does not provide enough evidence to say anything about training load for muscle growth except that +60%1RM works well and less than that doesn’t. This does not mean that the load above 60% does not matter, because there simply is not enough good studies done. Wernborn suggests that it might be so, but to me he is guessing. Then again there is not enough evidence to suggest that load past 60% does matter much. (at least in the real world)

Soooo…....that’s my conclusion. You may disagree, of course.

I will have to look and see if there are other studies. I know there are some out there. I try to keep an eye on this topic since it was my favorite and I feel like I have stumbled on a few which didn’t show a difference. I just didn’t bother to save them.

The whole thing about heavier load being more effective is just theoretical. As you rightly pointed out, the Low rep group did 10 less reps. But imagine doing 3 exercises for 6 sets of 5 reps(18 sets) for 2/3 days/week. I think that’s a great recipe for over training. So even someone normalized the rep ranges , I don’t think it is going to work in practice. in my study, I had subjects int he heavy group complain about fatigue. If you look the bill Starr and Rippitoe, you can see how low volume they are.

The theory atleast was that greater load, greater the damage and greater protein synthesis. If this indeed was true, we would seen in the intensity study on protein synthesis. They did a pilot study, did another study comparing older people, and young. All got the same results. Maybe in trained there might be an increase in protein synthesis with heavier weight ( 1-5). But then again, how much volume can you tolerate with heavy weights and not get fatigued. So i guess this study made me lean a lot more towards my conclusions. You need more mechanistic studies like this to figure out why things happen or if they happen as people claim.

So I don’t really disagree with you.

Please, feel free to post those studies whenever you find them again.

And yes, you do disargee with me a bit, and that’s ok, we just both know that overtraining is a factor in all this and the research does not show much. Although I think “overtraining” is an often incorrectly used term. Underrecovery might be better.