I like your explanation of processes so maybe you can help.
Charles Staley advocates the reduction of junk volume, saying "the assumption that it's really only the final 3 or so painful reps that deliver the benefits of the entire set" -- This makes sense to me with the mechanism of metabolic stress and coincides with traditional bodybuilding techniques.
But ladders, Rite of Passage, Total Tension Complex, etc are all hypertrophy programs that appear to be based on large volume of sets of sub-max reps. So why isn't that "junk volume"? I'm assuming it doesn't stimulate hypertrophy through metabolic stress as much as through mechanical tension & muscle damage...? Is there a difference with triggering myofibrillar vs. sarcoplasmic hypertrophy?
Thanks for any input from any & all!
Nate, I had more or less the same question:
Benefit of low reps rungs in ladders? My interpretation of the responses is that these reps might be considered "junk volume" from a hypertrophy perspective, but they are giving you "quality practice" at moving a challenging weight, which improves neural adaptations.
@Bro Mo also pointed out that low rungs "warm you up" for better performance on higher rungs. (I thought the goal of RoP is to increase your max press? Strength and hypertrophy are hardly mutually exclusive goals/adaptive processes, and
@Steve Freides pointed out that you can adapt the RoP program for more hypertrophy.)
For further reading, see Chris Beardsley's work on Medium
Chris Beardsley – Medium where he details the mechanisms behind the "effective reps" logic behind Staley's position. Basically, what Beardsley says is that hypertrophy is optimally stimulated when the high threshold motor units are recruited and fatigued, which only happens during max effort or when lower threshold units are too fatigued to carry out their work (many fine points apply). Reason: low threshold motor units are capable of less hypertrophy because they're already getting lots of stimulation through daily life and because they are biased toward slow twitch fibers; high threshold motor units, biased toward fast twitch fibers, are not active except under special circumstances, and, more to the point,
they are bigger than low threshold MUs and therefore contribute more to hypertrophy. This ties in to "effective reps" (and their opposite, "junk volume") because those early reps are the ones that precede the recruitment of high-threshold motor units.
The key article is here:
What is training volume?
WRT sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, see Nuckol's post already mentioned:
Sarcoplasmic Hypertrophy: The Bros Were Probably Right and very recent research by fellow Stronger By Science coach Cody Haun:
Muscle fiber hypertrophy in response to 6 weeks of high-volume resistance training in trained young men is largely attributed to sarcoplasmic hypertrophy
There's been a lot of disagreement as to whether or not sarcoplasmic hypertrophy exists in distinction from myofibrillar hypertrophy. Haun's paper suggests yes, but prior research suggests maybe not. Even if sarcoplasmic hypertrophy does exist, it very likely potentiates future strength gains because bigger muscle cells require more myonuclei, and more myonuclei should mean more potential for muscle protein synthesis.
