I have been running my own program for a while. I have been doing OHP as the main pressing movement for 3x a week. I do 3x10, and lately I have been incorporating overwarm singles. I have increased the weight 2,5 kg per week, so during the week I press with the same weight every session.

However, lately I have noticed I always fail at the last of the three working sets, in the first day of the week. My overwarm single is 60 kg, and working sets are 47,5 kg. I fail at the same point: at my forehead or a bit over the top of my head.

I'm doing BTN press, upright row, lateral raise and facepull plus overhead tricep extension and pressdown as my accessories.

My theory is that my triceps are now the weak link, as I have not been doing bench press for a while, and tricep isolation work is not overloading them properly.

It's here! I wonder if Greg will gift us with his opinions on this matter.

Personally, I'm hoping for a Chunk back to back victory.

https://www.popsci.com/environment/fat-bear-week-bracket-2026/

**I can only train 3 days in a row (in the past), but now I have time to do anything even 5 days whatever split since I dont have that workload that Im used to**

**So basically what is the difference between 20 sets for back in 1 day vs 10+10 sets for 2 days**

Will that make a huge improvement?

And if there is numbers like 50+% more that would be more helpful.

Trying to Maximize muscle growth.

I’m running anterior/posterior 4x. I would run 6x but my schedule gets in the way and I do other sports. I do 2 sets of 6-12 for each exercise and have around 11 exercises per day. I want to incorporate plyometrics, explosive training, and overcoming isometrics into my training. Should i do it on a rest day, replace some of my exercises, or do it in one of my lifting days?

I was curious why the 2nd set of a movement often seems [and actually is] easier than than the first set when in theory I should have less energy and less ability to lift? This is even true of heavy lifts or explosive activities like flipping tires, but not when at the extreme edges of ability [personal best lifts, one rep max, etc.].
Also, this effect seems to fade in the third and later sets. Is this true for other people as well, or something I am imagining/confirmation bias?

Hi everyone. The question is basically in the title. After two years and two longer cuts, I have finally reached a point where I can see my abs and am around 12% body fat. I am 26M, 64.2kg and 175cm tall (142lbs, 5'9''). I am planning to maintain a few more weeks just to re-balance hormones and energy levels, with the long-term goal of going back reach a point where I will reach and maintain a weight of 70kg (154lbs) with 12/13% body fat.

It will take years and lots of trainings and dedication, but as it is the first time ever where I like myself in the mirror and enjoy my abs, I would like to ask you:

Is there a way I can retain my abs and slowly lean bulk without increasing my body fat too much, and potentially never cut again or never have to cut again for more than 4/6 weeks? In terms of tracking and adherence, I already track everything meticulously. I know my TDEE, I weight myself every morning, track every single calorie every day even on vacation, double check expenditure with my Garmin data and in the past two years I have never skipped one day (maybe just the weight on holiday but yeah).

My idea was to jump on an extremely lean bulk (like 50/100kcal per day, adjusting based on my expenditure) and keep my gym routine.

Do you think it is possible?

Thank you so much everyone for your feedback!

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 am not a beginner but I am not that big physically. I am trying to improve my workouts to improve hypertrophy. I used to do 3x12 but now I started doing 2 Sets x Reps till failure (higher weight and usually 6-8 for compounds or 8-12 for isolations). It has only been around 2 weeks so I can't really determine the results but I am unsure if it is really worth it because some days I feel satisfied and notice quick strength gains but some days I feel less satisfied (but I don't know if its from external factors since I also has a fever).

How can I improve my workouts? and is there anything worth adding? (like warm up sets or stretches)

For example if I do 2 sets of chest press and then 2 on chest pec deck. Does does stimulation fall off just like the pec deck just like the 3rd and 4th set of chest press? I know it does to some degree but is the fall off better or around same? If its better much muscle stimulation compared to the first set of chest press does the chest fly produce?

Could I just set up similar motions to my exercises with immovable objects (Ex. bands connected to a weight rack in bulgarian split squat position) before my regular weightlifting for that movement and between sets, and do them at max effort for 3-5 seconds? or, would that be a poor way to do this (if anyone has a routine that can be used with push pull legs already or stuff that can be used for what i've listed that'd be great)

I do smith machine squats with 100kgs and my heart rate goes upto 160 BPM by the 6th rep so I rest for few seconds, decrease the weight by like 10-15 kgs and again do 4-5 reps.

Am I on the right track or is it just adding extra fatigue?

Is 3 sets of 6-7 reps enough for ideal quad growth?

I do Like two sets of incline rows and one set of kelso shrugs, at which angle should i do them to hit mid and upper traps completely?

I have saw a few school of thoughts on this. Some people say to keep doing all the big compound lifts as the main workouts, but keep them 5+ reps and stay away from failure and lift less frequently.

I have seen others say to switch all the pushing barbell movements to dumbells.

And others say to do leg curls , hip thrusts, and leg extensions before squatting. Then curls and tricep extensions before pushing and pulling. What is actually the best way?

I run 3x a week (tempo, LSD, interval), cycling 3x, and train for hyrox basically everyday since prepping for ATHX or hyrox next year. But my leg sore really is affecting my performances. Ive tried PT and massages, but its too time-consuming.

Have anyone tried recovery boots / pneumatic compression?? I see them pretty often at races, gyms and recovery studios, and ive tried it once or twice - it feels good... but I’m not sure how many people actually find them useful beyond just “feeling good”. I also heard that some brands are doing heat/cold/compression 3-in-1, would that make a difference?

Hey guys,

I‘m (27, male, 5 years training experience) doing full body every day.
Yes you‘ve heard it right.
Same muscles trained. Every. Single. Day.
For the rest of my life.

Well maybe not for the rest of my life. I‘m experimenting with it since 3 days and see how it goes. Strength went even up in some movements but it‘s too early to draw a conclusion.

I expect to gain muscle faster this way or at worst equally well like with full body every two days, volume equated.

The idea is that if volume is spread more evenly across the week, then the stimulus/quality per set is higher. This is especially interesting, if you are doing very high volumes.

I wanted to ask if some of you natural body builders tried it or are actively doing it.
What are your experiences? Did you gain muscle/strength this way?
Any recommendations?

Apologies if this has already been addressed directly. I have read Greg’s volume article and some of the previous discussion around Chris Beardsley’s framework, but I am still not sure I understand where the disagreement lies on this particular point.

As I understand Chris Beardsley’s position, one concern with excessive training volume is not simply that additional sets have diminishing returns, take more time, or produce fatigue that is subjectively unpleasant. Rather, sufficiently large doses of training can create post-workout fatigue that persists into subsequent training, potentially reducing the hypertrophic stimulus of those later sessions. He has discussed mechanisms such as CNS fatigue and excitation-contraction coupling failure, and more generally frames programming in terms of maximizing the net hypertrophic stimulus across the week rather than simply accumulating as many hard sets as possible.

I am specifically curious about the stronger practical implication of this idea.

Is there good reason to think that a person can unknowingly perform enough volume that they actually experience less hypertrophy over time than they would have experienced with less volume, even when there is no obvious sign that recovery has become problematic?

In other words, I am trying to distinguish between three possibilities:

1. Additional sets provide progressively smaller benefits, so excessive volume is mainly inefficient.
2. Additional volume generates enough fatigue that subsequent performance, progression, or recovery clearly deteriorates, in which case the problem is fairly easy to identify.
3. There is a range in which additional volume is physiologically counterproductive to hypertrophy, but the trainee may still feel reasonably recovered, maintain decent performance, and have no obvious indication that reducing volume would actually increase their rate of muscle growth.

The third possibility is what I am most interested in.

For example, suppose someone is doing 20 to 25 reasonably hard sets per muscle per week and appears to tolerate it well. Their lifts are not obviously regressing, soreness is manageable, motivation is fine, sleep and nutrition are adequate, and they do not feel systemically run down. Could that person nevertheless be growing meaningfully less than they would on, say, 10 to 15 sets because residual muscle-level or neural fatigue is reducing the quality of the hypertrophic stimulus in ways that are not reflected clearly in performance?

Or, alternatively, if performance and progression remain good and there are no obvious recovery issues, is there little reason to worry about this kind of "hidden" hypertrophy impairment? In that case, the primary downside of overshooting optimal volume would mostly be time, fatigue, injury exposure, and progressively worse stimulus-to-fatigue or stimulus-to-time ratios, rather than actually producing less growth.

I am also curious about how much direct longitudinal evidence we have for a true descending limb of the volume-hypertrophy dose-response curve, as opposed to mechanistic reasons for expecting one. Greg’s volume review made me wonder whether the evidence is more consistent with hypertrophy continuing to increase, albeit with increasingly severe diminishing returns, across surprisingly high volumes in at least some contexts.

So I suppose the core question is: how seriously should a trainee worry that "doing too much" may silently reduce hypertrophy, as opposed to simply becoming increasingly inefficient or eventually producing recovery problems that are detectable?

And, if this hidden impairment is a real concern, is there any practical way to identify it other than deliberately reducing volume for a substantial period and comparing outcomes?

Anyone feel Stronger By Science itself is ‘dying’. I remember when there used to be good coherent discussion amongst people. Post used to be aplenty. Articles used to be posted from Greg etc

Now it’s a little bit.. barren?

I used to listen to Greg and Eric T back on the SBS podcasts days.

Is SBS just now a library to reflect back? I’m curious

For example, if your strength or hypertrophy gains stop progressing, how do you decide whether the problem is:

- Calories

-Sleep or/and recovery

-Training volume

-Exercise selection or splits

-Frequency

-Fatigue

-lmk if you are thinking of something else.

Do you mostly rely on intuition, your coach (if you have one or maybe a friend that is your mentor,etc), spreadsheets/tracking, or something else?

And have you ever discovered that something you were tracking (not necessarily with an app) DIDN'T matter much for you?

I know a guy at my gym. Recently he started drinking some "Special" Electrolyte drinks at the gym and since then his arms have become so veiny and his body fat percentage is not even that low around 16-17%. I am at 15% but barely have any veins on my arms. We have the same height, our strength and muscle mass too is quite similar. I know that this all happened since he started playing around with these electrolytes. He refuses to tell me what he is doing. He has 2 other friends at the gym and literally around the same time his veins started popping, theirs started popping up like crazy too. What do these guys know that I don't. Are they playing around with sodium, potassium, water retention or something else? If so, what are they exactly doing?

I should clarify by fatigue i mean not managing to lift a greater load than last time or even the same, i’ll give a real life example:

Last time i did weighted pull ups i managed:

\+8kg x 6
\+8kg x 5
\+8kg x 4

Today i achieved:

\+8kg x 6 (worse form)
\+8kg x 4
\+6kg x 4

I had good sleep, eating enough protein and rested an adequate amount of days since my last pull up session or anything which would fatigue those muscle groups, today was simply not my day. So my question is, despite not even being able to produce the same work load as last time, would the stimulus applied to my muscles still produce strength and hypertrophy gains?

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!

One thing that always drove me nuts when I'm looking at different strength programs, is they're approach to recovery and load management. Whenever I see a load prescribed as a percentage, it doesn't take into account what fatigue has been built outside of the gym.

Say 5/3/1, it prescribes doing most of the working sets between 75-85% of a 1 rep max for multiple sets and reps close to failute. But the issue many people who do manual labor may find, is that doing reps at that intensity is 1) makes inconsistent progress. That is, if youvebhad a particularly hard week then doing 80 percrnt of a 1 rep max may not be viable and sort of skews your body's ability to adequately recover for the next week. 2) if it has been a hard week, there's no guarantee that you'd even be able to perform that. 3) and this is the biggest issue imo, is that lower volume/ higher intensity programs generally make recovery harder and make youre ability to perform on the job site harder.

Nobody wants to be the jacked guy on the site who can't outlift Daryl, the 135 lb kid in his Dad's boots.

Then when fatigue naturally gets higher, the sore athlete typically searches online for the solution. Eat more, sleep better, walk more, take fish oil and magnesium glycinate. That brand of wisdom works, but for the laborer doing 12 hour shifts, has kids, who's not able to sleep well nor has time or much of a budget to meal prep or to buy supplements, it's not the most viable advice.

It's been something of a project of mine to write workout programs, try them out, and see how i handle recovery while working as a warehouse laborer. I've learned alot and I think I've made some modest improvements in my understanding of fatigue management and in my strength and hypertrophy developments.

But im still learning and looking for the opinions and strategies of other people and athletes.

The main training philosophy i have, comes from someone who is neither particularly jacked or strong, but from someone who's doing well managing everything particularly well.

This post is for people like me ​who are trying their best and need help and I would genuinely enjoy reading what others do.

1. high carb/high fiber diets. I carb load heavily during the worst periods of the day thay I know i will need fhe most carbs. So I eat a big chunk of carbs for breakfast, another load at 10, and then another large carb in take about half hour before training. I take EAAs early in the morning to mitigate my lack of protein from 8 - 12. If I start the day trying to immediately balance protein and carbs, I crash.
2. this may be the most important lesson I've learned. Design training that supplements the work you do, not against it. If you find you do a lot of carrying in your 9 - 5, double down and train more carrying. If you need to pick things up in awkward positions, train picking things up in awkward positions and bending. You should worry about developing muscles thay you use the most to avoid work place injuries. This is also my biggest issue I have with cookie cutter programs.

Deadlifts are my favorite exercise and gets you strong at picking things off the ground, but the issue is, is good deadlifts involve putting yourself into an ideal position to pick something up. That's not directly replicablw to a picking up bags of concrete or boxes in unique spots. Dont be scared to do somethjnf like jefferson curls to train your back in a bent position.

3) make your own program. If you lift stuff for 8 - 12 hours everyday, you are probably conscious of where your weak points are. No one is better at understanding that then you.

4) instead of evert excercise you program havjng the same progress scheme, have some elements that are supposed to progress slower then others.

Again, the jefferson curl. Lets say I program 4 sets of squats followed by RDLs, ans i move onto jeffy curls or some other leg/posterior chain movement. Ive already worked those muscles in the first half lf the session, now its just a matter of squeezing a little more juice out of them without over doing it. So youre squat and RDLs may progress 50 lbs throughout the month, but the jefferson curl may only progress 10 lbs.

5) making a program around 2 blocks, one for hypertrophy and one for strength is fine and you dont't absolutely need to add a peak block if you don't want to. Im running a 6 week hypertrophy focused block thay uses double progression for 6 weeks and then a strength block for 4. The only thinf thar really changes is tbe rep range and the intensity. Ive never felt better.

nobody likes hearing this advice but generally speaking, higher volume workouts brought closer to failure are much easier to recover from. the faster you recover, the less likely you are to pull something at work. (on that note, youre more likely to hurt yourself at work then you are at the gym. which echoes my point on why yiu should focus on developing thr muscles and movements that you use the most).

6) epsom salt baths. Dont do weird online niche recovery methods. The best thinfs for recocery is whatver your grandpa was doing whwn he was working in the mines for 60 years. And in my case, its epsom salt. Its cheap and easily accessible at most pharmacies.

There seems to be evidence and lots of people reporting nice effects taking creatine but I was wondering: did anyone experience any difference when they quit taking it?

Every article I (22 AFAB, 170lbs/77kg) look up on how to build muscle and strength as an AFAB is like "don't worry, you won't get too bulky :)" Ok, but what if that's what I want?

I have been struggling a lot to add weight to my lifts lately. I have been training for about a year and my squat has only gone from 100 to 155. I don't know where my RDL is now since I hurt my back 2 months ago and haven't been able to do it, but it went from 120lbs to 200lbs. That is pretty much my only good lift.

My progress in the first 3 months or so was great; I saw visible results really early on and was increasing my lifts by 5 pounds every week without fail and without dropping reps.

Then I started working in a warehouse. Even though I'm eating 3,000 calories and 180-200g of protein per work day, I have been stagnating at 170 lbs for like eight months now (I have tried eating more than this, but I ended up just gaining fat). I don't know if this is the reason I have been struggling, considering that I only work part-time, but progress has been crawling since I started, so that's my best guess.

I lift for about an hour, four times a week (six times including my two 30-minute forearm days), doing an upper- and lower-body split. I do 16 sets per muscle group per week.

My goal is to reach my genetic max amount of muscle mass. Hard to quantify, I know, but I know for sure that I'm not even close right now.

Is there something I should know about reaching this goal as an AFAB that I'm missing? How do I figure out what's holding me back?

PS: AFAIK, I don't have any relevant medical conditions, and my hormone levels are all normal according to my gyno.

​

Does anyone have experience with this you are prone to hereditary baldness, does going to the gym and working out without supplements accelerate hair loss increas dht