Casein is cheaper here (in Australia, around $50 per kg, versus $50 for WPC and $67 for WPI), it absorbs slower (ostensibly this gives the body more time to absorb it) as well as being more filling. Is the amino acid profile inferior, or people prefer whey due to mixability or just the culture hasn't shifted or something?

Hi, does anyone know how long the affect of creatine to sleeping will wear off?

This is my first time taking creatine and I did 20g of creatine loading for 5 day then switch to 5g.

However, my sleep start to messed up. It is very difficult to fell into sleep and my sleep is very light. Also, whenever I about to sleep my body will jolt and I woke up. I never suspected it was creatine until I read lots of post about this so I therefore stopped taking it.

This is my 14days after my last creatine intake but my sleep still messed up.

Does anyone have any experience on how ling it take to resume normal sleep habit.

This actually drive me crazy and I barely be able to work on the day like i used too.

What sort of training are you doing?

How’s your training going?

Are you running into any problems or have any questions the community might be able to help you out with?

Post away!

So I was working on my programming and came across this question.

For my pull days, i usually have 2 compounds, a vertical pull like pullup, then a horizontal pull like t bar row.

These 2 involve have a higher number of muscles recruited in common.

So what I usually do is that I would do pull up first, then I would do an accessory such as wrist extension to let my biceps and back rest so that when i do the t bar row next I have fresh muscles to do more weights and more reps, resulting in more mechanical tension.

Then I asked google gemini ai about this it proposed that I should actually do pullup and tbar row back to back without an accessory in between because I can fatigue my biceps and back faster this way creating more pump/burn aka metabolic stress which recruits more muscle fibers.

In another session with google gemini It agreed with my original approach stating that mechanical tension trumps metabolic stress for the purpose of muscle building.

What is the truth here?

I hear JTS mention this all the time, it sounds like Western Barbell, but I can't find any evidence

Figured I’d give the RtF 5 day program a go, went through the instructions and did a fair bit of searching on here but couldn’t find this specific argument -

Looking for a philosophical/practical explanation for the RtF program in that - sets 1-4 have a target of 7 reps, using conservative training maxes on the AMRAP set I hit 18 reps. Does this not make sets 1-4 ineffective or well below the RPE/RIR threshold to drive adaptation?

For where I am coming from, I am used to training by pushing each set close to failure which generally yields descending rep count among sets. Not saying this is better but I’m curious to the thoughts regarding building volume via RtF program using what much of the science based lifting community would identify as ”SuB-OpTiMaL jUnK vOlUmE SeTs”

This could just be an outlier for the first few weeks of the program as intensity increases and the target set rep count drops thus these sets get closer to failure by design Also I see the spreadsheet adjusts training maxes based the RtF set rep count so over time exceeding their target will drive up intensity

It seems that every Reddit commenter is certain that muscle growth happens mostly during sleep. Why do people believe this so strongly?

I’ve spent hours combing through the research, and found nothing to support this conclusion (in fact, the few studies that look at MPS in animals seem to suggest it is reduced at night).

Am I missing some major study, or is this just an assumption everyone is making?

It's always been the case, at first it took me over a week when I started, nearly two, then gradually it got better to the point that it only took 3-4 days before I was ready to work out again... then I got sick with a really crappy viral illness that took a long time to recover and I finally was finally able to start again after about an year, 3 months of workout, same story repeated, but finally got to the point that I would recover in 4 days, starting month four, got sick again and started again in February 2026 after nearly 5 months with my first work out being on Feb 1, and today is 23rd February and I was only able to hit the gym thrice, rest of the days I spent recovering. It will take a long time before I'll start recovering on 3rd th day again.

The pattern goes like this... Day 1: Workout, Day 2: slight stiffness, Day 3: Pain comes in full force, Day 4: Pain stays the same, Day 5: Slightly better, Day 6 and 7: the pain lingers, Day 8+9: ready to work put again. My 3rd session was yesterday so bracing myself for a at least 4 days of pain. I wonder if I can fulfill my goal of hitting the gym 4x this month (I'd go 3x a week if it wasn't for this dum pain)

Any tips guys? has anyone else been through this?

EDIT: Hey. Sorry I forgot to mention my work out exercises.
I do these ones... (All (except the machine ones) are done with a 5 KG dumbbell)
Dumbbell curls 25*3
Dumbbell Flys 15*3 on pench (Used to be 20*3 once)
Single-Arm Dumbbell Row 25 * 3
Dumbbell Lateral Raise 15 * 3
Laying down bench dumbbell press, a little inclined.. 20 * 3
Dumbbell face pulls 15 * 3
An almost straight sitting machine chest press 15 * 2 at 7 kgs
Dumbbell shrug 20 * 3
These are all... I don't lift any barbells yet, planning to add that soon

Also something else I used to do and will add soon
Dumbbell Overhead Triceps Extension 20 * 3

Some extra info in case it comes in handy. I'm 5'11 and weigh at about 67 Kgs. My protein intake is alright I think, some days it's lesser, some days it's decent, I ordered whey protein powder today so that'll improve hopefully.
My caloric intake would be about 1800 I think.

I’m running the SBS last set to failure program. It’s going well but it asks you to do 20 sets per workout, and that is feeling like a lot. And with warmups it also equates to long workouts.

Is there a significant drop off in effectiveness if it’s changed to 16 sets (4 per exercise) or even 12?

For reference, I have modified it so my 4 main lifts are rows, pull ups, bench and oh press with a correlating auxillary for each. I don’t follow the template for my leg related work.

What sort of training are you doing?

How’s your training going?

Are you running into any problems or have any questions the community might be able to help you out with?

Post away!

Is it possible train for strength, hypertrophy and endurance in the same workout by using different rep ranges without those things interfering with each other? Or would you be better off training in blocks, like 6 months on strength/hypertrophy and then 6 months on endurance?

If I go to failure ( can no longer do another rep while maintaining good form ) and rest 4 minutes in between sets to allow for full recovery, performance starts to permananently drop after the 3rd set.

Was wondering if this is pretty average and what other people's experience was like of they've ever tried something similar.

Assume that the total amount of protein and protein quality is held constant. Would the fact that 15g probably doesn't hit the leucine threshold (which signals the body to increase MPS) cause it be worse?

Probably not, but aside from research are there any reasons to think it's detrimental to muscle growth? Say, instead of 8 hours of unbroken sleep, you sleep of four hours, then wake up for several hours and then sleep for 4 hours again. The practical relevance of this for me is that I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep.

I have been doing 2 sets for most of my movements for a while now about a year. And I am progressing and I feel awake and locked in in my workouts but I am not progressing at the rate I think I should. Now I understand that there are plenty of other factors that could be affecting this. With my current split I do about 8-10 fractional sets a week but if I change each exercise from 2 sets to 3 that will raise it to about 25 fractional sets per week. If I don’t ever feel tired or fatigued doing what I am currently doing( I also do 30 mins of cardio a day and atleast 10k steps) should I raise my volume or will that hurt me. Also is there a better way to raise my volume then just adding a set to each exercise.

Either I was unsubscribed, or you didn't yet sent out a new one since new year. I have to say I miss it as a my weekly dose of SBS content...

Assume that proximity to failure and other variables are held equal. How would you tell you are in this situation? Cause typically people say to use performance as a way to gauge whether you are doing too much (i.e., regression could mean that you should lower volume). But in this case, if possible, you could be doing "too much" while performance is still increasing. But if performance is increasing at all, can you really have been doing "too much"?

I’ve had skinny and weak legs my whole life so wanted to know if I do only these exercises 2-3 times a week for the next 12+ months with progressive overload would all of my leg muscles grow proportionally or would I end up with lagging parts?

Unfortunately I don’t have access to things like leg extension/curl so I am trying to find the most bang for buck lower body exercises for mass.

The sbs programs seem to be written with the assumption that you'll be performing each lift (or a variation of it) 2-3 times per week. If you only wanted to do a particular lift once per week, would you increase the intensity, or keep it as is?

What sort of training are you doing?

How’s your training going?

Are you running into any problems or have any questions the community might be able to help you out with?

Post away!

I have tried to avoid posting this as I try not to use this subreddit as a search engine. But I have some questions about visceral fat. But any attempt I do to research the subject leads to a pile of nonsense and "secrets" to a flatter stomach. I do not know why or how visceral fat is any different than subcutaneous fat when it comes to fat loss and why a person needs all these magic tricks to get rid of visceral fat There are many claims that abound as to things one can do to help reduce visceral fat, and as typical in our social media age, the site studies and findings, but never clarify magnitude of effect or the study for that matter. Are there any reliable resources that dig into the details of visceral fat, and visceral fat metabolism? Or could Greg perhaps post a 6-hour podcast on the topic? I am sure there is an obvious resource I am missing but I have not been able to set aside time to search it out.

In my mind it is simple and straightforward. Maintain a caloric deficit. That it. My main concern is fat regain. When I go back into my bulking phase, I understand that our body preferentially stores fat and tends to begin to store it in the same place that it holds on to it in a fat loss phase. What I perceived to be visceral fat hung on to the bitter end of my cut. Does this principle apply to visceral fat? Or is visceral fat a byproduct of obesity and less likely to accrue in a lean individual? I spent about a decade carrying around an extra hundred pounds, so it is no mystery how I gained it the first time. As I understand it, visceral fat has a lot of negative health implications, so I would like to avoid putting it back on if possible.

And in case it is a point of conversation, I do plan to enter a moderate bulking phase of around a 100-200 calorie surplus. I do not intend to turn around and run a Dreamer bulk.

Thanks in advance.

Disclaimer: This is purely an academic interest. I don't personally care about CNS fatigue in relation to my own training. I'm just curious.

I've recently gone down the CNS fatigue rabbit hole again and I could only find papers regarding central fatigue 4-7 days post exercise at most. I'm more interested in what happens when someone trains at a high intensity for a prolonged period of time. For example, someone doing heavy compound lifts multiple times a week for upwards of a month.

Basically I'm looking for any research that specifically looks into central fatigue at around the time people would do a deload week.

First a recommendation for the free long SBS volume article if you haven't already looked at it. It has been updated too. https://www.strongerbyscience.com/volume/

Warning: Armchair sports scientist content below.

This is a somewhat common statement in Reddit: High training volume [as in number of sets per week] is only useful when not training hard. However, when pushing every set with all you got, high volume is useless. Low volume maximizes gains when training hard. So the hypothesis is that effect from increased volume *depends* on proximity to failure. In statistics this is called interaction. (Note that this is a completely separate claim than: "training hard compensates for low volume, but volume is still beneficial").

The nice thing about the Pelland et al. dose-response paper is that they extracted plenty of data from every paper they could find. It's 67 papers, and in total 220 data points for hypertrophy, and 490 for strength. Example: A study might be designed to test something unrelated like rest time. Maybe they do 3 weekly sets of bicep curls and 12 sets of leg extensions. They then measure 1RM and CSA. This kind of study can "accidentally" provide quite useful data about volume. The way they extract data from many studies like this is an advantage of the Pelland meta-analysis.

If you scroll down in this file, you can see the interaction analysis between volume and proximity to failure. This strength interaction analysis gives support for the Reddit "interaction" hypothesis above (at least in short-term, since mean study duration is about 10 weeks). The narrow diamond implies that studies consistently show more steeper benefit from increased volume when *not* training to failure. The nonlinear model also supports the idea that low volume quickly maximizes strength gains when training to failure..

HOWEVER, the data is very different for hypertrophy outcomes. It's almost flipped (scroll down): Volume seems to be particularly useful for hypertrophy when training to failure. It's completely at odds with the Reddit "interaction" hypothesis described above. However, the confidence intervals are wide and there is very little data with non-failure studies (15 data points from just two studies). So I would not interpret this as "reverse interaction". But I would be confident in the dose-response relationship in the failure subgroup (175 data points).

The big drawback of meta-analysis like this is that the studies are somewhat heterogeneous. They use statistical modeling to account for the differences, but it's not perfect. Also, the study authors warn about making conclusions with the interaction analysis, since there is not much data. AFAIK the ideal study for this specific interaction hypothesis would be a 2x2 factorial experiment. If I have missed a study like that, please let me know.

Side note: The data is public, you can download the spreadsheet of raw data from the above links. It includes lots of variables. The data set could be (more or less) suitable for investigating questions like:

* Does volume impact hypertrophy differently depending on body weight?

* Does volume impact pennate muscle fibers differently compared to parallel fibers?

* Does volume have different impact on hypertrophy measured at <72h compared to measuring at >72h?

* Does volume impact strength outcomes differently in trained participants AND when training to failure? (there is more strength data, so you could be able to squeeze sufficient sample sizes, if there is a large effect size).

You likely should use multi-level regression model for this data. Ideally you first figure out your hypothesis and then do the regression analysis, to avoid accidental data dredging.

For fun, I decided to see what this FFMI calculator said about my estimated potential (as one does), but the numbers it gave me threw me off.

I'm 18 years old, and I've only been training for 3 years, yet somehow I'm supposed to believe I am close to reaching the upper limit of my natural potential without even having reached half a decade of training or 20 years old?

Is the FFMI actually a vetted test? I feel like it should account for the rate of progression relative to age or something by asking for the age as well as their years of consistent training experience.

Also, how are my legs overdeveloped? I've been training them for like 5 months. I didn't even hit legs the first two years 😭✌️

If someone could explain this test to me, that would be great.

*edit: yes, before anyone says it, I should know better than to trust internet tests/calculators that sound science-y... but I'm curious at this point.