Strength Training vs Size Training by Dr. Mike from Renaissance Periodization

Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for Renaissance Periodization. Let's talk about strength training versus size training, the match of the century, JK. A lot of folks think these are the same. You ask someone what they're training for, they'll say, oh, to get like bigger and stronger, and there's a ton of overlap. There's not exact overlap, especially as you become more advanced, it pays to know the difference between these two and perhaps pursue them separately. even if you want in the end to be as big and strong as possible. So here's what we're going to talk about today. First, aren't size and strength training the same? We'll see that they're not, right? Then we're going to talk about some differences between strength training and size training. Notably, differences in loading, how much weight you're using. Differences in volume. Differences in how you progress over the weeks. Differences in optimal frequencies of training and the undulation of how many hard workouts versus easier workouts you have. And if you're thinking, what the hell are easier workouts? Well, then you're a hypertrophy trainer because there's no such thing really. But for strength training, you're like, oh, easier workouts. That makes sense. Automatically, we have a difference right there. Exercise selection differences between the two approaches for optimal results. And then we're going to talk about how to get the best of both. And there are some really good ways to do that. At the end, we'll wrap it up with some simple take-home points. Let's get started. So aren't size and strength training really just the same? They are very similar. Okay, but they are not the same. Optimized strength training looks a little bit different than optimized size training. A really quick anecdotal piece of evidence, and it's not anecdotally small, it's just anecdotal in a technical sense, is the fact that bodybuilders at a high level, professionals, and powerlifters at a high level, professionals, don't train the same. Yes, they both train in gyms. Yes, they both use barbells. But the differences are, gee, really massive. If you've been in a gym for longer than a few months, you can start to tell them apart, not just in their appearance, but how they train. Maybe there's something to that, and there really absolutely is. So let's find out what there is to it and start with the most obvious, loading differences. Basic strength, what we in sports science call basic strength, the fundamental ability to produce force, not peaked for competition, which is like... sets of one to three reps, but basic foundational getting stronger and stronger type of training is best done in the roughly three to six rep range per set, okay? So like sets of three, sets of five, sets of six, stuff like that, those sets build basic strength the best, right? However, overall hypertrophy, overall hypertrophy, not the kind of hypertrophy that translates to strength the best, which we'll get into later, overall hypertrophy is actually best stimulated in the five to 30 rep range. Right? When I used to be a powerlifter and I was dabbling in some hypertrophy training, I would do dumbbell presses for sets of 20. And my powerlifting buddies correctly were like, dude, what are you doing? Like, that's not going to make you stronger. And fundamentally, they had a really, really good point. If it was going to make me stronger, it was going to take months to convert that new size neurologically into the ability to use it for strength. There's a big difference there, right? So if you train for sets of three to six, you get your best strength results. If you train for sets of five to 30 reps, close to failure, you get your best size results. Gee whiz, I'm no mathematician, but it's a really small overlap. You can do sets of five, you can do sets of six, and that's it. Okay, you have two types of sets to do, two rep, not even ranges, two specific numbers of reps you can do. And that's all the optimal overlap really is at the end of the day. That's not that great, right? So can you train for sets of five and six and get a decent measure of hypertrophy shake? Yes, your variation is going to be very low. So after a while, your results are going to suck because you're not mixing it up enough. But fundamentally, you're just missing out on a lot. right? Someone could be like, why don't you do sets of 10? And you're like, and someone's like, why don't you do sets of three to get even more peak strength relative to what you have now? And you're like, well, I kind of want both. But it's a very, very tiny overlap. And sort of that's not the greatest thing in the world, right? We can do better if we're going to optimally get for hypertrophy with this whole thing we're just not using, right? It's like, it's almost like here, you know, I'm dieting still because of the food analogies. It's like going to an all you can eat, like super incredible buffet. And you're on like a clean food only diet. And you're like, I'm having fish and chicken. like bland, like with white rice, like if they happen to have that at the buffet, but they also have 50 trillion other things, do you wanna maximize your buffet experience? Don't go there on a diet. Can you? Sure. If you're gonna maximize your diet, stay at home. You don't have all the smells distracting you, so on and so forth. It's just the same. The strength rep range is over here. Hypertrophy rep range is a tiny overlap, but it's really large. It's way over there. And truthfully, if you stick to the five to six reps thing, you say sets of five and sets of six are just sort of in that general range. are good for both, I would bet, and there are some good studies confirming this, and certainly almost every bodybuilder can tell you this, if you really try for extended periods of time to get all of the same hypertrophy volume from just sets of five to six, never doing sets of eight or 10 or 20, then the fatigue accumulates really fast and really messes you up. So even if you grit. pretty good or close to optimal short-term hypertrophy results doing, let's say, sets of six and great short-term strength results, you can't keep that going on the hypertrophy front. So, because the volumes are too high for those low rep numbers. For a month or two, it can work, but it's not sustainable, which is also why basically nobody trains like that. So, we got some problems. There are some differences. If you want the best of one or the other, there's going to have to be a little bit of a fork in the road. Next up is volume. Strength training is really fatiguing per set, especially sets of three and four, right? Which are great for strength development. They beat you up more per set than like sets of 10 or something like that, especially over time, joint fatigue and how people feel psychologically. It's really, really, really tough training, right? At the same sort of thought process is strength training sort of beats you up more per set. But in order to do your best in strength training, the amount of total fatigue you can have at any one time needs to be lower. You need a high degree of preparedness. You can come into the gym and a hypertrophy training program and be pretty tired, pretty messed up, but just grind and get great results. For strength, you have to be on, right? There are weights that if you're even... somewhat fatigued, you simply can't lift for any reps anymore. Okay. You were doing them for sets of four last week. You got too much fatigue. Now it's sets of one. It's just untenable, right? So at the same time, while strength training fatigues you more per set, it actually is optimal for you to never do that many sets of it because strength training isn't optimized at high levels of fatigue that that many sets bring in, right? On the other hand, hypertrophy training doesn't generate a ton of fatigue per set, right? which is great because you can do a lot of it. But it doesn't also require a high degree of preparedness. So not only does the fatigue allow you to get more productive sets in, but also you can get even more fatigued because you don't have to be spot on for hypertrophy training to work well. You can be pretty fatigued and it still works really great. So essentially, hypertrophy sees higher stimuli with way higher volumes and strength training. does. And the result, to get a little bit technical real quick from volume landmarks, and you can Google all this stuff, just Google hypertrophy, Israetel guide, and you'll just go right to the RP website and read about all this stuff. But basically, your maximum adaptive volume, which is the volume at which on average you grow the most for strength training, is often at what is somewhere between the maintenance volume and the minimum effective volume. By the way, that means it's under minimum effective volume of hypertrophy training. So to put this as an example, something like eight sets of quad work per week on a strength program is like a lot of work. I mean, that's like full on well into that, you know, maximum adaptive volume. That's meat and potatoes work. Where on the other hand, that might just be a little bit above what maintains your quads for hypertrophy. And something like 16 sets of quads for that same person is totally possible and close to optimal for muscle growth, but 16 would just not even be survivable for a week on strength training. So there's a huge discordance there. The optimal volume for strength training is here. The optimal volume for hypertrophy training is here. And if you try to mix the two, there's going to be some middle ground in which you're not getting the best of either one, right? And the reality there is that for best results, you probably really can't do both optimally at the same time. Progression differences. This one's super straightforward. Intensity, loading progression is everything in strength. You get stronger not by doing more sets of 200 pounds. I mean, you will put on some muscle and your work capacity will go up and that's nice. And that will make you stronger for a while, but not optimally. This is the least rocket science shit I'll ever say. You get stronger by putting more weight on the bar. It's crazy, I know, right? So you get stronger going 200, 210, 220, 230, you know, over time, maybe not each week. But when you are asked, okay, you have to present a bigger stimulus and strength training, where is that bigger gonna come from? Is it gonna be more reps? Is it gonna be more sets? No, no, no. It's almost always, mostly, going to be increases in load. On the other hand, for hypertrophy training, Doing more reps grows more muscle. Doing more load grows more muscle. And doing more sets really grows more muscle. But if you start at your minimum effective volume, the fewest number of sets it takes to grow, the distance to your maximum recoverable volume is really high. It can be like 10 sets per muscle group different, and you slowly work from your minimum effective, and you add one set here this week, two next week, zero the week after, based on how you're recovering, two again, one again, and then all of a sudden... You've traversed a huge progression in set numbers, and that got you a lot of growth. That does not work very well for strength because your fatigue will go zip, and you'll do a whole lot of nothing. And why the hell are you adding sets to begin with? You get fundamentally the most strong by adding load. So we reach this question, if we're trying to really do both at the same time, you know, should I add, for example, 15 pounds to the bar, but zero sets next week? Or should I add five pounds to the bar? but add a whole set next week. Same amount of total fatigue increase, same amount of stimulus generally, one stimulates much more strength adaptation, one much more hypertrophy. So adding 15 pounds, definitely the right choice for strength in this example, but the five pounds in one set, probably the right choice for hypertrophy. Now, adding 15 pounds will add hypertrophy. It's good, but not the best. The best hypertrophy probably comes from raising volumes quite a bit, sometimes raising repetitions, but raising the... load a little bit more slowly because you want to build high volumes of growth. You want to do a lot of training and only increase as much as needed to keep the sets challenging. Whereas with strength training, you're trying to increase as a matter of course. The whole reason you're there is to try to put more load on the bar. In hypertrophy training, it's a tool. In strength training, it's everything. So For this fundamental reason, either really bias load increases or really bias your volume increases at the expense of as much load as you can increase, it's either one or the other or something in between. You can't have everything of both. Interestingly enough, in advanced strength training, you'll even have plans, which are quite good, which do something like five sets per week, four sets per week, three sets per week. while the load really goes up really fast. It'd be like five by five, four by four, three by three. Great strength progression, but that decrease in weekly volume causes arguably no hypertrophy at all, or even sometimes a slight degree of a sort of temporary atrophy, so you can make a weight class, have your best performance ever, and then rebuild some muscle. Absolutely a thing. If you do an advanced plan like that, there's no way you're getting muscle growth out of it. You definitely can't have both at the same time. What about frequency and undulation? Here's the deal. In hypertrophy training, you need the local muscle to be healed to do another good job of training again. And you don't even need the joints and connective tissues to heal completely. Because if you train heavy on Monday, for example, sets of five to 10, on Tuesday, you can do the same exercise for sets of 10 to 20, and you're probably not gonna get hurt. And you're probably gonna get a good hypertrophy stimulus because the muscle is healed. And the joints are like healed enough, connective tissues healed enough. But because you're dropping the load, you're reducing how much weight you're lifting. You're not really at risk of much of anything. On a Wednesday, for example, right after that Tuesday, you can again do sets of 10 to 20, but just switch up the exercise. And all of a sudden, you're hitting different parts of the muscle, different parts of the joint, and everything's fine. And then Friday, you might do sets of 20 to 30. Again, your muscle has recovered each time, your joints and connective tissues have not, but the sets of 20 to 30, they're too light to beat up your joints and connective tissues. The whole thing heals by the end of the week, and the next week, you restart that progression. So with hypertrophy training, you can squash a lot. of highly effective stimulative training many times in the week. And as long as the muscle is recovering, neither are the joints and connective tissues beat up as much because the rep range is on average are higher, the loads are lower, but also you don't need them completely healed at all times or even close. With strength training, it's very much the opposite. Stimulative sessions, for them to actually cause strength improvement, you need much fuller recovery than you do for hypertrophy training, right? If you do extra sessions on top of those, they're not super useful, right? As far as, you know, getting you results, they might be useful for enhancing technique and strength, but they're not exactly pushing your strength along and they're certainly not pushing your hypertrophy along. What would that look like? So for example, a better strength sort of weekly undulated pattern would be on Monday doing like sets of two to four reps at a nine RPE, really, really tough, really, really heavy. Wednesday, you do sets of four to six reps, still strength, but this time at an eight RPE, it's more volume. Less loading and less relative intensity so you can you know, you really messed it up on Monday on Wednesday You really put in some good work to continue to make that progression Friday There's no way you're doing hard training in this example At least for this advanced lifter you might do sets of two to four again But it is six RPE like you basically doing the same loads you did Wednesday for four to six But now you're doing it for sets of two to four and even maybe lighter loads This allows you good practice on the bar put some weight on your back still trains the nervous system Doesn't cause a tiny bit of hypertrophy at all It doesn't directly enhance strength either. So in this example, you have two stimulative strength sessions per week, fundamentally in one recovery session to get ready for next week. Whereas in the hypertrophy example, you have four stimulative hypertrophy sessions. You can't really do the same hard training frequency for both, okay? If you try to have an optimal hypertrophy training frequency and you try to do strength that many times, you will burn in the sun. You'll last out two and a half weeks. and you'll fall apart like Mr. Potato Head. On the other hand, if you try to get maximum hypertrophy results, training only as hard as your strength training is often, training hard as often as your strength training would dictate, then you're training like at a decent frequency, but nothing to write home about, and you're gonna be missing out on optimal hypertrophy results. Someone could say for that Friday workout, they watch you do sets of two to four reps and at a six RP, and they'd be like, was that stimulating growth? You're like, nope. They're like, why don't you do some growth stuff? You're like, well, that'll beat me up too much for next Monday. You can't have the best of both worlds, certainly not at the same time, right? Next, a little bit more of a minor point, but nonetheless salient. It does apply. Exercise selection differences. Strength training is usually defined by a set of exercises, not just abilities or parts of your body. People usually talk about increasing their squat, not just making their legs generally stronger. Can you imagine someone's like, hey, man, I want to... I want to, you know, get my legs stronger. And you're like, all right, sweet. We're going to focus on hack squats and leg presses. And if they've been in any sport that's related to strength sport long enough, they'll be like, don't you mean like low bar squat? And they're like, well, no, you said stronger legs. It doesn't really matter which exercise. And I'm like, well, I meant stronger squat, right? So all of a sudden, there's some exercise differences there. You'll notice that like high-level pro bodybuilders, a lot of the exercises they're using, they're not exactly strength exercises. And that's okay for them because they're geared towards hypertrophy. So a lot of times when we... say we want strength, we just want a movement to increase, that means we have to do that movement often. Sometimes. That means doing other exercises less, exercises that would offer benefit. For example, it's been shown that if you vary the kinds of exercises you're using for a muscle, you can get regional hypertrophy differences. More parts of your muscle growth use different exercises. For example, if you do legs Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you do squats, then hack squats, then leg presses, you probably get better hypertrophy overall in your quads than if you do squats, squats, squats, right? But if you're training for optimizing strength, optimizing strength, and you want your squat to go up. Your program's probably going to look a whole lot like squat, squat, squat. And someone could say, well, are you getting bigger legs? Totally. But are you getting as big of legs as possible? Absolutely not. You would use different exercises for that, which again, is why pro powerlifters train with like two or three exercises, like squat, front squat, maybe one or the derivative. Occasionally I'll do a leg press. And my bodybuilders train with nine or 10 different exercises because they get better overall development, plain and simple. Next, strength training is just not ideal with some exercises, right? you don't develop strength on cable pushdowns. You don't develop strength on lateral raises. You need more compound variations. You might develop strength better on JM presses. You might develop strength better on upright rows. So if you're choosing exercises, there's gonna be at some point where you have to give up the best hypertrophy exercises to do more strength or give up the best strength exercises to do hypertrophy. There's not a perfect intersection of those circles. And again, missed opportunities if you always want the best of both worlds all at the same time. We took care of the intra-week variation, right? So if you're sticking to hypertrophy training, you do a lot more exercises usually than strength training. That's a downside for strength training. Opposite of hypertrophy, we have a confluence problem there. And sometimes the best stimulus to fatigue ratio exercises for strength are not the best ones for hypertrophy, especially at the given volumes. For example, a really good stimulus to fatigue ratio exercise for improving your squat, even low bar, is the high bar squat. I mean, it really drives your squat up there in strength. What about in hypertrophy? The high bar squat's a great exercise, but there's only so many you can do until your lower back gives out. And maybe you'd switch to hack squats or leg presses. But as far as making you strong, hack squats and leg presses, because they're a little bit more isolation-based, they're not as compound, they don't require a balance, not as much of a neural drive component, usually can't load them as heavy safely, they're just not as great for strength. So some of the best exercises... for hypertrophy are just not gonna make you as strong potentially, it's not just like with lateral raises and upright rows that it's just difficult to load them. A lot of times they just don't work as well. So you're gonna have this thing where if you wanna choose optimal hypertrophy versus if you wanna choose optimal strength development, it's gonna be like, power lifters are gonna be over there doing jam presses and you're gonna be like, but cable tricep extensions? They're gonna be like, nope, not really. And you're like, man, I don't know which way to go on this. Definitely some decisions to make. All right. Speaking of decisions, how do we get potentially the best of both? If you insist on concurrent hybrid training, if you insist on training strength and hypertrophy at the same time, which we'll talk about in a little bit, it's actually possible for some groups of people to get good results with. Here are some recommendations as to how to structure your plan to do the best with what you have, right? First of all, You're going to choose, as far as all of your exercises for any given session, you're going to choose more compound free weight exercises because they're the ones that make you stronger, right? So you're not going to be, compared to the average hypertrophy trainee, doing as many machines or as many cables. You're going to be doing more barbells, more dumbbells, so on and so forth. In each session or almost each session, the first thing you're going to do is perform those compound strength-based exercises in the three to six rep range. Almost every session, that's what you do first because you're fresh, right? Accessory movements to enhance hypertrophy are going to be performed after in probably the 6-12 rep range because 6-12 grows a great deal of muscle, but neurologically, it's not as different as sets of 20 or 30. Those would prepare your nervous system very poorly for strength and actually sort of potentially make it even short-term worse at strength. Sets of 6-12, still very close to those low rep sets. They don't detract from your nervous system as much, but they also add size. So it's kind of... A little bit more of a happy medium, though not an optimum. Lots of sets of 6 to 12 in the accessory movements, but you want the accessories to be very related to your strength movements, so they're still strength enhancing. For example, a bodybuilder might do some squats and move on to leg extensions. As a person who's doing a hybrid training, a concurrent program, who wants to enhance power and strength as much as, or sorry, size and strength as much as possible, they might do squats first, just like the bodybuilder, but then they would move into... high bar close stance squats or high bar close stance squats on a Smith machine or front squats or maybe hack squats or leg presses, but leg extensions are so far away from specificity and from transferring to strength, they're not as compound, they're not as heavy, they don't require as much coordination that maybe they wouldn't choose them as much. And if you could say, well, I could definitely do more sets of leg press than hack squat and they beat me up less, well, yeah, or leg extension more than hack squat, yeah, but you're... definitely missing out. You're not going to be getting your optimal hypertrophy, but you're going to be doing a decent job at it while getting as strong as you can, given that context. Number four, you're going to begin at your hypertrophy minimum effective volume. That means you're getting some palms, you're getting a little sore, nothing to write home about. You're not getting super blast, crazy optimum workouts, and you're going to stick close to it, and you're going to progress mostly in load week to week. Maybe you progress in sets a little bit. So for example, if your minimum effective volume is roughly 10 sets per week for hypertrophy, your maximum recoverable is like 20. If you're doing a concurrent program, you start at 10 and you just increase load more than you usually would. Maybe you end at 10 or maybe end at 12. You sure as hell aren't going to 20. That is how a concurrent program in any one week does the best job. However, ideally you would not do this. And especially if you're advanced, we'll get to that in a bit, you phase potentiate. What does that mean? It's actually super complicated term. It's actually super easy. For two to three mesocycles in a row, like three or four months, you do hypertrophy training, but because you wanna be bigger and stronger in the longterm, you stick mostly in the six to 15 rep range, but you start each session with strength building exercises for sets of five to 10. and then later do exercises that are in the 10 to 15 rep range. Gives you a really good combination of both, but a really close to optimal hypertrophy stimulus while keeping you sort of neurologically and technically by practicing those movements ready to transition to strength, which is what you do next. So after two to three mesos of hypertrophy training, hypertrophy for strength, you do strength training in which you do two to three mesos, mostly sets of three to six, right? at your strength maximum adaptive volume, which could be like, you know, six sets a week of something instead of 10 or 12. And you will keep some hypertrophy work in very low volumes, maintenance volumes, like several sets a week of stuff to train your lats or your biceps or your calves, side delts, stuff that's not adequately covered by your strength lifting, but you're gonna keep those in sets of 10 to 15. So there's no room for sets of 30 or anything like that. You're just gonna wanna do relatively strength. focused stuff, but also keep the hypertrophy stuff on the back burner. It's not going to cost you a lot of fatigue. It is going to cost you some, but that's the price you pay for being both as strong and as jacked as you can possibly be. After that, you take a one to three week active rest, active recovery phase, really heal everything up. And then you go right back in to hypertrophy training and then strength training and the cycle repeats itself. That's probably the best way to do it. Let's take a look at three examples of how concurrent or hybrid programming would look just examples of how strength-specific programming would look and of how hypertrophy-specific programming would look. Those last two are in the context of getting as jacked and strong long-term as possible. So concurrent quad session would be you do squats for three sets of six reps, decent hypertrophy stimulus, but notice it's six reps, not three or four. So it's a little bit more volume, a little bit more hypertrophy. And after you do leg presses for two sets of 10 reps. 10 is pretty heavy. So you still get a decent strength stimulus, but notice it's three sets of squats, two sets of leg presses. So you're still biased pretty well into strength, but you get some decent hypertrophy as well. If you had like two or three sessions like this in the week, earlier sessions in the week would be a little bit more strength focused, slightly lower reps, less accessory sets. Later in the week, you could do less strength work and a little bit more hypertrophy work, potentially. What about strength? A pure strength session for quads that still conserves your muscle mass. would be squatting only, because that's your strength exercise, for five sets of four reps. Four reps definitely over a long term will increase your strength better than if you just do sets of six, so it's better than concurrent. And it's five sets, way more practice, right? Still the same number of sets here, but it's way more practice at the actual lift. This will get you stronger faster than concurrent, but it won't optimize muscle gains at the same time, which is why if you did the strength quad focus for a few mesocycles after that, After an active recovery phase, you would do hypertrophy focus with strength in mind, which would look like squatting for two sets of eight reps, right? Two sets of eight is not going to get you a ton stronger, but eights are pretty heavy and you're ready to transition to strength right after you stop that. And it's just two sets. We have more fatigue left over, more volume. Our next three sets are going to be 12 in the leg press, probably a better distribution, better hypertrophy than any of these other samples. But not very good for strength training, but remember, we have a whole other series of mesocycles in a phase-potentiated pattern to not just recover our strength, but to elevate it further and further and further. So, which one of these three approaches is best? I mean, Two of the approaches have to be done at the same time. You can optimize strength or you can optimize hypertrophy. But ideally, if you want both size and strength, you do several miles cycles of strength with hypertrophy in mind, with the back burner hypertrophy, and then several miles cycles of hypertrophy and so on and so forth. You basically just stagger them with some active rest in between. For sure, that's the optimal. But it's really more about who's going to notice optimal versus who won't. Here's the deal. Beginners can just do sets of basically five to 10 reps. They build so much hypertrophy and so much strength off such a minimal stimulus, they literally just get the best of both size and strength. So beginners, people that have been training for less than a few years, there is no discordance between size and strength training. Fundamentally, it's really just the same thing. Sets of five and 10. or sets of five to 10 reps, boost their strength and size like crazy, just leave them. And actually they can make the decision after the first couple of years when they begin to be intermediates, which way to go, mostly size, mostly strength or somewhere in between. Intermediates, many times can benefit from the low complexity and very good effect of a hybrid concurrent program, just like we described. Hybrid concurrent approach can have them sort of mixed strength and hypertrophy in the same weeks, in the same sessions, and that's okay. But as you become more advanced, as a later intermediate and early advanced, you need to be increasing the phasic bias a little bit more. So you still can do a concurrent program, but like I said, you can't do a hybrid. Some mesocycles will be a little bit more biased towards hypertrophy, and then some mesocycles will be a little bit more biased towards strength. As you become advanced, that split really starts to happen where you have dedicated hypertrophy phases, dedicated strength phases, then you truly get the best of both worlds. Because if you're advanced, true hybrid programming starts to work very poorly for you, and you have to split it up to get the best of both worlds. Folks. I must have said get the best of both worlds at least 20 times here. I'm going to stop saying that shit, and I'll see you next time for the next video.

even if you want in the end to be as big and strong as possible. So here's what we're going to talk about today. First, aren't size and strength training the same?

We'll see that they're not, right? Then we're going to talk about some differences between strength training and size training. Notably, differences in loading, how much weight you're using. Differences in volume.

Differences in how you progress over the weeks. Differences in optimal frequencies of training and the undulation of how many hard workouts versus easier workouts you have. And if you're thinking, what the hell are easier workouts?

Well, then you're a hypertrophy trainer because there's no such thing really. But for strength training, you're like, oh, easier workouts. That makes sense. Automatically, we have a difference right there. Exercise selection differences between the two approaches for optimal results.

And then we're going to talk about how to get the best of both. And there are some really good ways to do that. At the end, we'll wrap it up with some simple take-home points. Let's get started. So aren't size and strength training really just the same?

They are very similar. Okay, but they are not the same. Optimized strength training looks a little bit different than optimized size training.

A really quick anecdotal piece of evidence, and it's not anecdotally small, it's just anecdotal in a technical sense, is the fact that bodybuilders at a high level, professionals, and powerlifters at a high level, professionals, don't train the same. Yes, they both train in gyms. Yes, they both use barbells.

But the differences are, gee, really massive. If you've been in a gym for longer than a few months, you can start to tell them apart, not just in their appearance, but how they train. Maybe there's something to that, and there really absolutely is. So let's find out what there is to it and start with the most obvious, loading differences.

Basic strength, what we in sports science call basic strength, the fundamental ability to produce force, not peaked for competition, which is like... sets of one to three reps, but basic foundational getting stronger and stronger type of training is best done in the roughly three to six rep range per set, okay? So like sets of three, sets of five, sets of six, stuff like that, those sets build basic strength the best, right?

However, overall hypertrophy, overall hypertrophy, not the kind of hypertrophy that translates to strength the best, which we'll get into later, overall hypertrophy is actually best stimulated in the five to 30 rep range. Right? When I used to be a powerlifter and I was dabbling in some hypertrophy training, I would do dumbbell presses for sets of 20. And my powerlifting buddies correctly were like, dude, what are you doing?

Like, that's not going to make you stronger. And fundamentally, they had a really, really good point. If it was going to make me stronger, it was going to take months to convert that new size neurologically into the ability to use it for strength.

There's a big difference there, right? So if you train for sets of three to six, you get your best strength results. If you train for sets of five to 30 reps, close to failure, you get your best size results. Gee whiz, I'm no mathematician, but it's a really small overlap.

You can do sets of five, you can do sets of six, and that's it. Okay, you have two types of sets to do, two rep, not even ranges, two specific numbers of reps you can do. And that's all the optimal overlap really is at the end of the day. That's not that great, right?

So can you train for sets of five and six and get a decent measure of hypertrophy shake? Yes, your variation is going to be very low. So after a while, your results are going to suck because you're not mixing it up enough. But fundamentally, you're just missing out on a lot.

right? Someone could be like, why don't you do sets of 10? And you're like, and someone's like, why don't you do sets of three to get even more peak strength relative to what you have now? And you're like, well, I kind of want both. But it's a very, very tiny overlap.

And sort of that's not the greatest thing in the world, right? We can do better if we're going to optimally get for hypertrophy with this whole thing we're just not using, right? It's like, it's almost like here, you know, I'm dieting still because of the food analogies.

It's like going to an all you can eat, like super incredible buffet. And you're on like a clean food only diet. And you're like, I'm having fish and chicken. like bland, like with white rice, like if they happen to have that at the buffet, but they also have 50 trillion other things, do you wanna maximize your buffet experience?

Don't go there on a diet. Can you? Sure.

If you're gonna maximize your diet, stay at home. You don't have all the smells distracting you, so on and so forth. It's just the same. The strength rep range is over here.

Hypertrophy rep range is a tiny overlap, but it's really large. It's way over there. And truthfully, if you stick to the five to six reps thing, you say sets of five and sets of six are just sort of in that general range.

are good for both, I would bet, and there are some good studies confirming this, and certainly almost every bodybuilder can tell you this, if you really try for extended periods of time to get all of the same hypertrophy volume from just sets of five to six, never doing sets of eight or 10 or 20, then the fatigue accumulates really fast and really messes you up. So even if you grit. pretty good or close to optimal short-term hypertrophy results doing, let's say, sets of six and great short-term strength results, you can't keep that going on the hypertrophy front. So, because the volumes are too high for those low rep numbers. For a month or two, it can work, but it's not sustainable, which is also why basically nobody trains like that.

So, we got some problems. There are some differences. If you want the best of one or the other, there's going to have to be a little bit of a fork in the road.

Next up is volume. Strength training is really fatiguing per set, especially sets of three and four, right? Which are great for strength development. They beat you up more per set than like sets of 10 or something like that, especially over time, joint fatigue and how people feel psychologically. It's really, really, really tough training, right?

At the same sort of thought process is strength training sort of beats you up more per set. But in order to do your best in strength training, the amount of total fatigue you can have at any one time needs to be lower. You need a high degree of preparedness. You can come into the gym and a hypertrophy training program and be pretty tired, pretty messed up, but just grind and get great results. For strength, you have to be on, right?

There are weights that if you're even... somewhat fatigued, you simply can't lift for any reps anymore. Okay. You were doing them for sets of four last week. You got too much fatigue.

Now it's sets of one. It's just untenable, right? So at the same time, while strength training fatigues you more per set, it actually is optimal for you to never do that many sets of it because strength training isn't optimized at high levels of fatigue that that many sets bring in, right?

On the other hand, hypertrophy training doesn't generate a ton of fatigue per set, right? which is great because you can do a lot of it. But it doesn't also require a high degree of preparedness.

So not only does the fatigue allow you to get more productive sets in, but also you can get even more fatigued because you don't have to be spot on for hypertrophy training to work well. You can be pretty fatigued and it still works really great. So essentially, hypertrophy sees higher stimuli with way higher volumes and strength training. does. And the result, to get a little bit technical real quick from volume landmarks, and you can Google all this stuff, just Google hypertrophy, Israetel guide, and you'll just go right to the RP website and read about all this stuff.

But basically, your maximum adaptive volume, which is the volume at which on average you grow the most for strength training, is often at what is somewhere between the maintenance volume and the minimum effective volume. By the way, that means it's under minimum effective volume of hypertrophy training. So to put this as an example, something like eight sets of quad work per week on a strength program is like a lot of work. I mean, that's like full on well into that, you know, maximum adaptive volume. That's meat and potatoes work.

Where on the other hand, that might just be a little bit above what maintains your quads for hypertrophy. And something like 16 sets of quads for that same person is totally possible and close to optimal for muscle growth, but 16 would just not even be survivable for a week on strength training. So there's a huge discordance there. The optimal volume for strength training is here.

The optimal volume for hypertrophy training is here. And if you try to mix the two, there's going to be some middle ground in which you're not getting the best of either one, right? And the reality there is that for best results, you probably really can't do both optimally at the same time.

Progression differences. This one's super straightforward. Intensity, loading progression is everything in strength.

You get stronger not by doing more sets of 200 pounds. I mean, you will put on some muscle and your work capacity will go up and that's nice. And that will make you stronger for a while, but not optimally. This is the least rocket science shit I'll ever say. You get stronger by putting more weight on the bar.

It's crazy, I know, right? So you get stronger going 200, 210, 220, 230, you know, over time, maybe not each week. But when you are asked, okay, you have to present a bigger stimulus and strength training, where is that bigger gonna come from?

Is it gonna be more reps? Is it gonna be more sets? No, no, no.

It's almost always, mostly, going to be increases in load. On the other hand, for hypertrophy training, Doing more reps grows more muscle. Doing more load grows more muscle.

And doing more sets really grows more muscle. But if you start at your minimum effective volume, the fewest number of sets it takes to grow, the distance to your maximum recoverable volume is really high. It can be like 10 sets per muscle group different, and you slowly work from your minimum effective, and you add one set here this week, two next week, zero the week after, based on how you're recovering, two again, one again, and then all of a sudden... You've traversed a huge progression in set numbers, and that got you a lot of growth.

That does not work very well for strength because your fatigue will go zip, and you'll do a whole lot of nothing. And why the hell are you adding sets to begin with? You get fundamentally the most strong by adding load.

So we reach this question, if we're trying to really do both at the same time, you know, should I add, for example, 15 pounds to the bar, but zero sets next week? Or should I add five pounds to the bar? but add a whole set next week. Same amount of total fatigue increase, same amount of stimulus generally, one stimulates much more strength adaptation, one much more hypertrophy.

So adding 15 pounds, definitely the right choice for strength in this example, but the five pounds in one set, probably the right choice for hypertrophy. Now, adding 15 pounds will add hypertrophy. It's good, but not the best.

The best hypertrophy probably comes from raising volumes quite a bit, sometimes raising repetitions, but raising the... load a little bit more slowly because you want to build high volumes of growth. You want to do a lot of training and only increase as much as needed to keep the sets challenging. Whereas with strength training, you're trying to increase as a matter of course.

The whole reason you're there is to try to put more load on the bar. In hypertrophy training, it's a tool. In strength training, it's everything. So For this fundamental reason, either really bias load increases or really bias your volume increases at the expense of as much load as you can increase, it's either one or the other or something in between. You can't have everything of both.

Interestingly enough, in advanced strength training, you'll even have plans, which are quite good, which do something like five sets per week, four sets per week, three sets per week. while the load really goes up really fast. It'd be like five by five, four by four, three by three. Great strength progression, but that decrease in weekly volume causes arguably no hypertrophy at all, or even sometimes a slight degree of a sort of temporary atrophy, so you can make a weight class, have your best performance ever, and then rebuild some muscle.

Absolutely a thing. If you do an advanced plan like that, there's no way you're getting muscle growth out of it. You definitely can't have both at the same time. What about frequency and undulation?

Here's the deal. In hypertrophy training, you need the local muscle to be healed to do another good job of training again. And you don't even need the joints and connective tissues to heal completely. Because if you train heavy on Monday, for example, sets of five to 10, on Tuesday, you can do the same exercise for sets of 10 to 20, and you're probably not gonna get hurt.

And you're probably gonna get a good hypertrophy stimulus because the muscle is healed. And the joints are like healed enough, connective tissues healed enough. But because you're dropping the load, you're reducing how much weight you're lifting. You're not really at risk of much of anything.

On a Wednesday, for example, right after that Tuesday, you can again do sets of 10 to 20, but just switch up the exercise. And all of a sudden, you're hitting different parts of the muscle, different parts of the joint, and everything's fine. And then Friday, you might do sets of 20 to 30. Again, your muscle has recovered each time, your joints and connective tissues have not, but the sets of 20 to 30, they're too light to beat up your joints and connective tissues.

The whole thing heals by the end of the week, and the next week, you restart that progression. So with hypertrophy training, you can squash a lot. of highly effective stimulative training many times in the week. And as long as the muscle is recovering, neither are the joints and connective tissues beat up as much because the rep range is on average are higher, the loads are lower, but also you don't need them completely healed at all times or even close.

With strength training, it's very much the opposite. Stimulative sessions, for them to actually cause strength improvement, you need much fuller recovery than you do for hypertrophy training, right? If you do extra sessions on top of those, they're not super useful, right? As far as, you know, getting you results, they might be useful for enhancing technique and strength, but they're not exactly pushing your strength along and they're certainly not pushing your hypertrophy along.

What would that look like? So for example, a better strength sort of weekly undulated pattern would be on Monday doing like sets of two to four reps at a nine RPE, really, really tough, really, really heavy. Wednesday, you do sets of four to six reps, still strength, but this time at an eight RPE, it's more volume. Less loading and less relative intensity so you can you know, you really messed it up on Monday on Wednesday You really put in some good work to continue to make that progression Friday There's no way you're doing hard training in this example At least for this advanced lifter you might do sets of two to four again But it is six RPE like you basically doing the same loads you did Wednesday for four to six But now you're doing it for sets of two to four and even maybe lighter loads This allows you good practice on the bar put some weight on your back still trains the nervous system Doesn't cause a tiny bit of hypertrophy at all It doesn't directly enhance strength either. So in this example, you have two stimulative strength sessions per week, fundamentally in one recovery session to get ready for next week.

Whereas in the hypertrophy example, you have four stimulative hypertrophy sessions. You can't really do the same hard training frequency for both, okay? If you try to have an optimal hypertrophy training frequency and you try to do strength that many times, you will burn in the sun. You'll last out two and a half weeks. and you'll fall apart like Mr. Potato Head.

On the other hand, if you try to get maximum hypertrophy results, training only as hard as your strength training is often, training hard as often as your strength training would dictate, then you're training like at a decent frequency, but nothing to write home about, and you're gonna be missing out on optimal hypertrophy results. Someone could say for that Friday workout, they watch you do sets of two to four reps and at a six RP, and they'd be like, was that stimulating growth? You're like, nope.

They're like, why don't you do some growth stuff? You're like, well, that'll beat me up too much for next Monday. You can't have the best of both worlds, certainly not at the same time, right?

Next, a little bit more of a minor point, but nonetheless salient. It does apply. Exercise selection differences. Strength training is usually defined by a set of exercises, not just abilities or parts of your body. People usually talk about increasing their squat, not just making their legs generally stronger.

Can you imagine someone's like, hey, man, I want to... I want to, you know, get my legs stronger. And you're like, all right, sweet. We're going to focus on hack squats and leg presses.

And if they've been in any sport that's related to strength sport long enough, they'll be like, don't you mean like low bar squat? And they're like, well, no, you said stronger legs. It doesn't really matter which exercise.

And I'm like, well, I meant stronger squat, right? So all of a sudden, there's some exercise differences there. You'll notice that like high-level pro bodybuilders, a lot of the exercises they're using, they're not exactly strength exercises. And that's okay for them because they're geared towards hypertrophy. So a lot of times when we...

say we want strength, we just want a movement to increase, that means we have to do that movement often. Sometimes. That means doing other exercises less, exercises that would offer benefit.

For example, it's been shown that if you vary the kinds of exercises you're using for a muscle, you can get regional hypertrophy differences. More parts of your muscle growth use different exercises. For example, if you do legs Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you do squats, then hack squats, then leg presses, you probably get better hypertrophy overall in your quads than if you do squats, squats, squats, right?

But if you're training for optimizing strength, optimizing strength, and you want your squat to go up. Your program's probably going to look a whole lot like squat, squat, squat. And someone could say, well, are you getting bigger legs?

Totally. But are you getting as big of legs as possible? Absolutely not. You would use different exercises for that, which again, is why pro powerlifters train with like two or three exercises, like squat, front squat, maybe one or the derivative. Occasionally I'll do a leg press.

And my bodybuilders train with nine or 10 different exercises because they get better overall development, plain and simple. Next, strength training is just not ideal with some exercises, right? you don't develop strength on cable pushdowns. You don't develop strength on lateral raises.

You need more compound variations. You might develop strength better on JM presses. You might develop strength better on upright rows.

So if you're choosing exercises, there's gonna be at some point where you have to give up the best hypertrophy exercises to do more strength or give up the best strength exercises to do hypertrophy. There's not a perfect intersection of those circles. And again, missed opportunities if you always want the best of both worlds all at the same time.

We took care of the intra-week variation, right? So if you're sticking to hypertrophy training, you do a lot more exercises usually than strength training. That's a downside for strength training.

Opposite of hypertrophy, we have a confluence problem there. And sometimes the best stimulus to fatigue ratio exercises for strength are not the best ones for hypertrophy, especially at the given volumes. For example, a really good stimulus to fatigue ratio exercise for improving your squat, even low bar, is the high bar squat.

I mean, it really drives your squat up there in strength. What about in hypertrophy? The high bar squat's a great exercise, but there's only so many you can do until your lower back gives out. And maybe you'd switch to hack squats or leg presses.

But as far as making you strong, hack squats and leg presses, because they're a little bit more isolation-based, they're not as compound, they don't require a balance, not as much of a neural drive component, usually can't load them as heavy safely, they're just not as great for strength. So some of the best exercises... for hypertrophy are just not gonna make you as strong potentially, it's not just like with lateral raises and upright rows that it's just difficult to load them.

A lot of times they just don't work as well. So you're gonna have this thing where if you wanna choose optimal hypertrophy versus if you wanna choose optimal strength development, it's gonna be like, power lifters are gonna be over there doing jam presses and you're gonna be like, but cable tricep extensions? They're gonna be like, nope, not really.

And you're like, man, I don't know which way to go on this. Definitely some decisions to make. All right. Speaking of decisions, how do we get potentially the best of both?

If you insist on concurrent hybrid training, if you insist on training strength and hypertrophy at the same time, which we'll talk about in a little bit, it's actually possible for some groups of people to get good results with. Here are some recommendations as to how to structure your plan to do the best with what you have, right? First of all, You're going to choose, as far as all of your exercises for any given session, you're going to choose more compound free weight exercises because they're the ones that make you stronger, right? So you're not going to be, compared to the average hypertrophy trainee, doing as many machines or as many cables. You're going to be doing more barbells, more dumbbells, so on and so forth.

In each session or almost each session, the first thing you're going to do is perform those compound strength-based exercises in the three to six rep range. Almost every session, that's what you do first because you're fresh, right? Accessory movements to enhance hypertrophy are going to be performed after in probably the 6-12 rep range because 6-12 grows a great deal of muscle, but neurologically, it's not as different as sets of 20 or 30. Those would prepare your nervous system very poorly for strength and actually sort of potentially make it even short-term worse at strength. Sets of 6-12, still very close to those low rep sets.

They don't detract from your nervous system as much, but they also add size. So it's kind of... A little bit more of a happy medium, though not an optimum. Lots of sets of 6 to 12 in the accessory movements, but you want the accessories to be very related to your strength movements, so they're still strength enhancing.

For example, a bodybuilder might do some squats and move on to leg extensions. As a person who's doing a hybrid training, a concurrent program, who wants to enhance power and strength as much as, or sorry, size and strength as much as possible, they might do squats first, just like the bodybuilder, but then they would move into... high bar close stance squats or high bar close stance squats on a Smith machine or front squats or maybe hack squats or leg presses, but leg extensions are so far away from specificity and from transferring to strength, they're not as compound, they're not as heavy, they don't require as much coordination that maybe they wouldn't choose them as much.

And if you could say, well, I could definitely do more sets of leg press than hack squat and they beat me up less, well, yeah, or leg extension more than hack squat, yeah, but you're... definitely missing out. You're not going to be getting your optimal hypertrophy, but you're going to be doing a decent job at it while getting as strong as you can, given that context. Number four, you're going to begin at your hypertrophy minimum effective volume. That means you're getting some palms, you're getting a little sore, nothing to write home about.

You're not getting super blast, crazy optimum workouts, and you're going to stick close to it, and you're going to progress mostly in load week to week. Maybe you progress in sets a little bit. So for example, if your minimum effective volume is roughly 10 sets per week for hypertrophy, your maximum recoverable is like 20. If you're doing a concurrent program, you start at 10 and you just increase load more than you usually would. Maybe you end at 10 or maybe end at 12. You sure as hell aren't going to 20. That is how a concurrent program in any one week does the best job.

However, ideally you would not do this. And especially if you're advanced, we'll get to that in a bit, you phase potentiate. What does that mean? It's actually super complicated term. It's actually super easy.

For two to three mesocycles in a row, like three or four months, you do hypertrophy training, but because you wanna be bigger and stronger in the longterm, you stick mostly in the six to 15 rep range, but you start each session with strength building exercises for sets of five to 10. and then later do exercises that are in the 10 to 15 rep range. Gives you a really good combination of both, but a really close to optimal hypertrophy stimulus while keeping you sort of neurologically and technically by practicing those movements ready to transition to strength, which is what you do next. So after two to three mesos of hypertrophy training, hypertrophy for strength, you do strength training in which you do two to three mesos, mostly sets of three to six, right?

at your strength maximum adaptive volume, which could be like, you know, six sets a week of something instead of 10 or 12. And you will keep some hypertrophy work in very low volumes, maintenance volumes, like several sets a week of stuff to train your lats or your biceps or your calves, side delts, stuff that's not adequately covered by your strength lifting, but you're gonna keep those in sets of 10 to 15. So there's no room for sets of 30 or anything like that. You're just gonna wanna do relatively strength. focused stuff, but also keep the hypertrophy stuff on the back burner.

It's not going to cost you a lot of fatigue. It is going to cost you some, but that's the price you pay for being both as strong and as jacked as you can possibly be. After that, you take a one to three week active rest, active recovery phase, really heal everything up. And then you go right back in to hypertrophy training and then strength training and the cycle repeats itself.

That's probably the best way to do it. Let's take a look at three examples of how concurrent or hybrid programming would look just examples of how strength-specific programming would look and of how hypertrophy-specific programming would look. Those last two are in the context of getting as jacked and strong long-term as possible. So concurrent quad session would be you do squats for three sets of six reps, decent hypertrophy stimulus, but notice it's six reps, not three or four.

So it's a little bit more volume, a little bit more hypertrophy. And after you do leg presses for two sets of 10 reps. 10 is pretty heavy. So you still get a decent strength stimulus, but notice it's three sets of squats, two sets of leg presses. So you're still biased pretty well into strength, but you get some decent hypertrophy as well.

If you had like two or three sessions like this in the week, earlier sessions in the week would be a little bit more strength focused, slightly lower reps, less accessory sets. Later in the week, you could do less strength work and a little bit more hypertrophy work, potentially. What about strength?

A pure strength session for quads that still conserves your muscle mass. would be squatting only, because that's your strength exercise, for five sets of four reps. Four reps definitely over a long term will increase your strength better than if you just do sets of six, so it's better than concurrent. And it's five sets, way more practice, right? Still the same number of sets here, but it's way more practice at the actual lift. This will get you stronger faster than concurrent, but it won't optimize muscle gains at the same time, which is why if you did the strength quad focus for a few mesocycles after that, After an active recovery phase, you would do hypertrophy focus with strength in mind, which would look like squatting for two sets of eight reps, right? Two sets of eight is not going to get you a ton stronger, but eights are pretty heavy and you're ready to transition to strength right after you stop that.

And it's just two sets. We have more fatigue left over, more volume. Our next three sets are going to be 12 in the leg press, probably a better distribution, better hypertrophy than any of these other samples.

But not very good for strength training, but remember, we have a whole other series of mesocycles in a phase-potentiated pattern to not just recover our strength, but to elevate it further and further and further. So, which one of these three approaches is best? I mean, Two of the approaches have to be done at the same time. You can optimize strength or you can optimize hypertrophy.

But ideally, if you want both size and strength, you do several miles cycles of strength with hypertrophy in mind, with the back burner hypertrophy, and then several miles cycles of hypertrophy and so on and so forth. You basically just stagger them with some active rest in between. For sure, that's the optimal.

But it's really more about who's going to notice optimal versus who won't. Here's the deal. Beginners can just do sets of basically five to 10 reps. They build so much hypertrophy and so much strength off such a minimal stimulus, they literally just get the best of both size and strength.

So beginners, people that have been training for less than a few years, there is no discordance between size and strength training. Fundamentally, it's really just the same thing. Sets of five and 10. or sets of five to 10 reps, boost their strength and size like crazy, just leave them. And actually they can make the decision after the first couple of years when they begin to be intermediates, which way to go, mostly size, mostly strength or somewhere in between. Intermediates, many times can benefit from the low complexity and very good effect of a hybrid concurrent program, just like we described.

Hybrid concurrent approach can have them sort of mixed strength and hypertrophy in the same weeks, in the same sessions, and that's okay. But as you become more advanced, as a later intermediate and early advanced, you need to be increasing the phasic bias a little bit more. So you still can do a concurrent program, but like I said, you can't do a hybrid.

Some mesocycles will be a little bit more biased towards hypertrophy, and then some mesocycles will be a little bit more biased towards strength. As you become advanced, that split really starts to happen where you have dedicated hypertrophy phases, dedicated strength phases, then you truly get the best of both worlds. Because if you're advanced, true hybrid programming starts to work very poorly for you, and you have to split it up to get the best of both worlds.

Folks. I must have said get the best of both worlds at least 20 times here. I'm going to stop saying that shit, and I'll see you next time for the next video.

Transcript for:Strength Training vs Size Training by Dr. Mike from Renaissance Periodization

Transcript for:
Strength Training vs Size Training by Dr. Mike from Renaissance Periodization