Ep. #953: Research Roundup: Shortest Effective Workouts, Activity Trackers Inaccurate, Foam Rolling for Recovery, and More

Hey there and welcome to muscle for life. I am Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for another Research roundup where I am going to break down several studies for you That can help you get fitter and healthier faster My goals with these episodes are to give you a little bit of insight into the scientific method, help you understand a little bit better how scientific studies are conducted and also to give you practical takeaways, things that you can implement right away to gain more muscle, lose more fat, achieve more health, achieve more happiness and so forth.

So in today’s episode, I am going to be talking about time efficient training, how to gain muscle and strength on just 30 minutes of training per week. And then I’ll be sharing a study on partial range of motion deadlifts and how using partial Ranges of motion can help you get stronger. Then I’ll be talking about foam rolling and answering a question that I often get, which is, can it help you with recovery?

And finally, I’ll be talking about activity trackers and how accurately they can measure your calorie expenditure. But first, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of people over the years, and the biggest thing I see with the people I have helped the most is they’re often missing just one crucial piece of the puzzle.

And if you are having trouble reaching your fitness goals as quickly as you’d I’m going to guess it is the same thing with you. You are probably doing a lot of things right, but dollars to donuts. There’s something you’re not doing right. And that is what is giving you most of the grief. Maybe it’s your calories.

Maybe it’s your macros. Maybe it’s your exercise selection. Maybe it’s food choices. Maybe you are not. Progressively overloading your muscles and whatever it is. Here’s what’s important. Once you identify that one thing, once you figure it out, that’s when everything finally clicks. That’s when you start making serious progress.

It’s like typing in your password to log into your computer. You can have all the letters, numbers, and symbols, except just one. And what happens, you can’t log in, right? But, as soon as you get that last remaining character right, voila, you’re in business. And I bet the same can be said about the body you really want.

You are probably just one major shift, one important insight, one powerful new behavior away from Easy Street. And that’s why I offer VIP one on one coaching where my team and I can help you do exactly that. This is high level coaching where we look at everything you’re doing and we help you figure out that one thing that is missing for you.

And it can be a couple of things too, that’s fine, there’s no extra charge for that. But once we figure it out, That’s when you start making real progress. That’s when you start looking better and feeling better. So if you’re ready to make more progress in the next three months than maybe you did in the last three years, and yes, that has happened for many of our clients, head on over to muscleforlife.

show slash VIP. That’s muscle F O R life. show slash VIP and schedule your free consultation call, which by the way, is not a high pressure sales call. It’s just a friendly chat where we get to learn about you and your goals and your lifestyle and then determine whether our program is right for you.

Because sometimes we do speak with people who just aren’t a good fit for our service, but we almost always have Other experts and other resources to refer those people to. So if you are still listening to me and you are even slightly interested, go schedule your free consultation call now at muscleforlife.

show slash VIP. Okay. First up is a study on time efficient training. If you have very little time to train, how do you make the most of it? And my source here is a paper called no time to lift question mark designing time efficient training programs for strength and hypertrophy, a narrative review, and this was published on June 14th, 2021 in the journal sports medicine.

So the number one excuse that I hear from people for not. Training at all is I don’t have time. And unfortunately for procrastinators, maybe it’s fortunately actually for procrastinators everywhere, researchers at Norwegian university of science and technology decided to torpedo this idea with some science.

So specifically the researchers performed a narrative. Review, which is where they compile evidence around a topic, and then they share their opinions about what it means. And they did this to identify the most time efficient way to train and based on their understanding and interpretation of the data.

Here’s what they recommend for a minimum effective dose of strength training. So I’ll share their insights first and then talk a little bit about what you can expect from doing something like this. So here’s what they recommend for volume and frequency. Do at least one workout per week with at least four sets per major muscle group.

And as for intensity, they recommend anything between six and 12 reps per set with sets taken close to muscular failure. You don’t have to train up to muscular failure, but you should be probably a rep or two shy of it in most sets. And as far as percentage of one rep max goes, that’s the range of 70, 65.

70 percent to about 80 to maybe 85 percent and as for exercise choices, the researchers recommend that you prioritize compound barbell exercises that train your body bilaterally, so both sides of your body at a time. No surprise there, of course, because that’s. It is a great way to involve large amounts of muscle mass.

So think of a bilateral compound barbell exercise like the barbell squat and how much muscle that involves or the barbell deadlift versus maybe a leg extension, right? Isolation exercise for your quads or say a lying hamstring curl for your Hamstrings. Next up we have a recommendation on programming, which is to do at least one pushing exercise, like maybe a bench press, one upper body pulling exercise, maybe a pull up, and one leg pressing exercise, maybe a squat every week.

So push pull legs. Basically, as for rest intervals, if you’ve been training for less than 12 months, you can rest one to two minutes in between your sets. And if you’ve been training for longer than that, you should rest probably between two and three minutes. And my advice here would be to rest as long as you need in between sets to feel ready for the next set.

But that is about what the researchers recommended for most people. And the reason why more experienced weightlifters need more rest is they are lifting heavier weights than beginners. And that is of course harder on the body and takes a little bit more time to recover from. You can also incorporate.

More quote unquote advanced training methods to save time, like super sets, drop sets, rest, pause sets, but you do want to know how to do those things correctly, because there are many wrong ways to use those techniques and only a few right ways. And if you want to learn the right ways, Just listen to episode number 427 of my podcast, which is an interview I did with Eric Helms on supersets, drop sets, forced reps, and more.

And we don’t talk about rest pause sets, but I do have an article on that. And if you head over to legionathletics. com and search for rest Pause just two words, you’ll see it. It’s called how to use rest pause training to gain muscle faster. And I’m just seeing here, actually, I do have a podcast on it as well.

Episode three 34. So you can read about it or listen to it, whatever you prefer. Okay. Moving on here to talk about warmup. The researchers recommend exercise specific warmups only. So don’t do long, complicated warmup routines, with exercise bands, plyometrics and other stuff like that. Just stick to warming up for the exercise that you are going to be performing.

And that’s it. Remember, you don’t have to warm up a muscle group twice. You just have to warm it up once. And then when you move from one exercise for say your chest to another, of course, you don’t have to let’s say you’re going to start with the bench press and you warm up with that. And then maybe later in your workout, maybe not exercise number two, but later in your workout, you’re going to do some pec flies.

You don’t have to warm up for the pec flies because even if it has been 10 or 15 minutes since you did your bench pressing, your pecs will be warmed up. And lastly, the researchers don’t recommend spending time stretching unless you want to improve your flexibility. There’s nothing wrong with stretching, but again, we are looking to get the most out of the least amount of time possible.

And when that’s the goal, don’t bother with stretching again, unless you want to, or need to improve your flexibility or mobility to train properly. So basically what we have here. Our traditional strength training fundamentals and just sticking with those, except using a lower frequency and a lower amount of volume than you might use if you’re trying to gain muscle and strength.

And that’s it. My only quibble with these recommendations would be that drop sets are probably not the best use of time and rest pause sets can be difficult to do with compound exercises, but those are minor I Points. And if you have used those techniques before, and if you are an experienced weightlifter, you probably know that and you know that you can take those things or leave them.

And so the key takeaway really here is that you don’t need that much time to get fitter and stronger. If you are new to strength training, just doing that one workout per week will produce noticeable results for at least a couple of months. And once it stops producing results, you could go to just two workouts per week.

And that would get the needle moving again. And let’s say one workout per week produced results for a few months. Let’s say it’s three months and then two workouts per week might buy you another one and a half or two months before you need to change something. You don’t necessarily need to go to three workouts per week, but you might need to make those two workouts per week a little bit more.

Difficult, so they might get a little bit longer instead of 30 minutes per workout. Maybe it’s 45 minutes per workout, but the point again is you do not need to get in the gym for four or five, six plus hours per week to gain muscle and strength. And especially not if you are brand new, if you are very experienced, if you are a guy or gal who has gained most of the muscle and strength that is genetically available to you.

Yeah, that’s what it takes. It’s going to take somewhere between probably four and six hours of strength training per week to get in enough volume for not even necessarily all of the major muscle groups, but at least the handful that you most want to Focus on and that’s just what it’s going to take to continue producing results.

But at that point, you’re basically jacked and wanting to get really jacked. And if you already are jacked, if you are an experienced weightlifter who has gained a lot of muscle and strength, what you can take away from what I just shared with you is you don’t have to do much to maintain more or less all of your muscle.

And. Most, if not all of your strength, you can drop down to just three to six hard sets per major muscle group per week and retain basically everything. You will certainly be able to retain your physique. You might lose some strength. If you’re going from, let’s say squatting. Nine to 12 sets per week, plus some additional lower body volume.

And then you drop to squatting just three sets per week. Again, you will maintain all of your muscle. If you continue to train hard, use heavy weight, push close to muscular failure, but you might see your performance decline a little bit over time. Whatever decline might happen would quickly reverse. Once you started training more.

Intensively. So just to make this very practical here, for example, is a 30 minute workout that you could do once per week. If you are brand new to strength training to start gaining noticeable amounts of muscle and strength. And if you are not brand new, This would be enough to maintain a lot of what you already have.

So you could start with a barbell back squat or it could be a front squat or some sort of variation. It could be a safety bar squat, but some sort of squat and do four sets of six to eight reps. Again, pushing close to muscular failure, maybe Two ish good reps left in the tank, and then you would fail. So the final rep in each set is difficult.

The bar is starting to slow down and you are getting close to failing, right? And then resting two ish minutes in between each set, maybe up to three if you are Strong and then move over to the barbell bench press do the same there four sets of six to eight two ish minutes Of rest in between each set and then finish with a pull up four sets of six to eight reps with two ish minutes Of rest in between sets and if you need to add weight By snatching a dumbbell in between your feet or using a dip belt to work in that rep range then You can do that.

Or if you want to just replace that with a lat pull down, for example, that would be okay as well. And if you want to make that workout even more time efficient, you could alternate between the sets of the bench press and the pull ups and you could rest one minute or so, one and a half minutes in between each.

So do a set of the bench press, rest a minute and a half, go do your. Pull ups or your lap pull downs rest a minute and a half, go back to the bench press. And that might negatively impact your performance in those exercises slightly, but it is not going to make nearly as much of a difference as say resting 60 to 90 seconds in between each set of an individual exercise.

So let’s say you’re bench pressing and you rest just 60 to 90 seconds in between each set. Unless you are brand new, that is not going to be enough time to fully recover. Your performance and you are going to have to probably take weight off of the bar or minimally you’re going to lose a number of reps per set by say your final set.

So anyway, that’s it for time efficient training for now. Let’s now talk about performance. Partial range of motion deadlifts and how this can help you get stronger. So my source here is a paper called the efficacy of partial range of motion deadlift training, a pilot study, and this was published on February 22nd, 2022 in the journal international journal of sports science.

Now, we have all heard how important it is to use a full range of motion in our strength training, and that is true, but there is an application for partial range of motion training, and this study is an example of that. So this was conducted by scientists at Southwest Minnesota State University, and in it, researchers split.

nineteen college wrestlers with at least one year of weightlifting experience into two groups. So you had a full range of motion deadlift group and a partial range of motion deadlift group. Now, both of these groups followed the same three day training routine that included the bench press hang clean and back squat.

And the only difference was that the full range of motion group did Two sets of three to five reps of full range of motion deadlifts, whereas the partial range of motion group did one set of three to five reps of full range of motion deadlifts and three sets of heavy partial range of motion deadlifts for a single rep.

Now, those partial range of motion deadlifts were basically rack pulls, so the bar started on the safety pins of a squat rack about one inch above their knee height, and so what we had here is we had one group doing just normal deadlifts, and then the other group splitting their sets between normal deadlifts and rack pulls.

Heavy rack pulls and the researchers measured full and partial range of motion deadlift one rep max strength at the beginning and the end of the six week study. And what they found is that neither group significantly increased their full range of motion deadlift one rep max, but despite not being statistically significant, the full range of motion group did experience a small decrease in one rep max strength.

So down about 12 pounds and the partial range of motion group experienced a small decrease Increase in one rep max strength. So plus about 10 pounds. The partial range of motion group also significantly increased their partial range of motion deadlift one rep max by about 100 pounds, while the full range of motion group did not increase their partial range of motion deadlift significantly.

So about 26 pounds. So on the face of it, you could conclude then that doing a mix of full and partial range of motion training is just better than full range of motion training for gaining strength at least. But that would be getting hasty. After all, the only significant difference between the groups in this study was The partial range of motion deadlift strength, which is not entirely surprising because of specificity.

You get better at what you train, right? But what this study does suggest is that partial range of motion exercises can have a negative Place in a training program, and this isn’t a surprise to people who have done a lot of powerlifting or just pure strength training, of course, because many programs utilize partial range of motion exercises.

Now, the key, though, is good programs don’t utilize partial range of motion exercises to replace full range of motion training. They use it to supplement it. Often partial range of motion exercises are used. To help you train specific parts of exercises that are most difficult, where you tend to get stuck on, say, a deadlift or a squat or a bench press or an overhead press.

And in the case of a deadlift, let’s say you struggle to lock out on the deadlift. And, of course, this is most applicable to people who are pregnant. Pushing the envelope who are really trying to get as strong as they can on this exercise. I’m not one of those people really. I’m happy to make slow but steady progress.

And so even someone like me might notice that the deadlift is most difficult, maybe in the lockout phase. And if that’s the case, then the rack pull, which is basically what was done in this study I shared with you would be useful for that because now you are training that specific Portion of the exercise that you find most difficult the lockout and because it is a partial range of motion you can use more weight than you normally can write in a full range of motion deadlift and There is a physiological benefit to that but there’s also a psychological benefit to that where you get more comfortable handling very heavy loads, whatever very heavy is for you.

Again, it’s going to be much heavier on the rack pole than it is on the full range of motion deadlift and on the bench press, let’s say, or the overhead press. If you find those last few inches are really a grind, then you could do something like the pin press a useful partial range of motion exercise for getting stronger through The end of those exercises.

And if you’re squatting and you find it very difficult to get out of the hole, you could do the pin squat or you could do pause squats. Very helpful partial range of motion exercises that help you build that strength where you are weakest. And for what it’s worth, there was a time when I was really Trying to push for a one rep max on the back squat of 405.

And I got close. I got to, I want to say 365 for two or three with zero to maybe one good reps left. So I was pretty close to failure. That was about max strength. And one of the techniques that really helped me with that was the pause squat. I was doing, I want to say three or four. Four sets of pause squats every week.

So I would start a warmup and then I would do three or four sets of heavy. Sometimes it was a back squat. Sometimes it was a front squat, usually just back squatting though, because I wanted to see if I could get to four Oh five on the back squat. So I would do my three or four heavy sets of the barbell back squat.

And then I would follow that up with three or four heavy sets of pause squats. So that’s a slight pause at the bottom. Maybe two or three seconds pause at the bottom and then push back up out of the hole. And the highest amount of weight that I can remember doing on the pause squats, probably two 75 to two 95, something like that for sets of probably four to six.

And that helped a lot as I was getting stronger on the pause squat. I was noticing a steady increase on my full normal. Squatting. And so then the key takeaway here is partial range of motion exercises can be used strategically to help you get stronger on key exercises. That’s their best use but they should be used sparingly and as needed.

And if you don’t use any, that doesn’t mean you are doing anything wrong. If you are not too concerned with trying to maximize. Your bench or squat or overhead press or deadlift, you probably don’t need to be doing any partial range of motion training. Hey there, if you are hearing this, you are still listening, which is awesome.

Thank you. And if you are enjoying this podcast, or if you just like my podcast in general, and you are getting at least something out of it, would you mind sharing it with a friend, or a loved one, or a not so loved one even? who might want to learn something new. Word of Mouth helps really bigly in growing the show, so if you think of someone who might like this episode or another one, please do tell them about it.

Okay, now let’s talk about foam rolling. And my source here is a paper called The Influence of Foam Rolling on Recovery from Exercise Induced Muscle Damage. And this was published in September of 2019 in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Many people claim that foam rolling can help your muscles recover after training by squishing out all of the ooey gooey metabolites and acids and stuff that accumulates when you train and breaking up adhesions and trigger points and other bad things that hinder recovery.

And years ago, when I started to look into foam rolling, I was encouraged by some of the research that I saw. It wasn’t conclusive, but it suggested that foam rolling might be able to do some of those things and do it enough to make it work. Worth it. But since then, in the last couple of years, I have seen more and more evidence to the contrary.

And this study that I’m sharing with you backs that up. In this case, researchers split 37 men. Who hadn’t foam rolled in 30 days into two groups, a foam rolling group and a non foam rolling group. And on the first day of the experiment, the researchers gathered baseline data by measuring the participants hip abduction range of motion.

So how far they could move their thigh out to the side away from their. Body’s center line. That’s AB duction, abduction. They also measured hamstring muscle length, agility, and muscle soreness in the quads, hamstrings, glutes, and calves. Then after both groups warmed up, the foam rolling group performed six foam rolling exercises, targeting the quads, hamstrings, glutes, and calves using a high density foam roller on both legs for two 60 second bouts each and the non foam rolling group did nothing.

Of course. Then both of the groups completed a sprint workout consisting of 40, 15 meter sprints. And yeah, you heard that right. 40, 15 meter sprints. That sucks. But anyway, so then after that, the foam rolling group did the same foam rolling protocol as they did before. The workout and the non foam rolling group again did nothing.

And to finish the first day of the study, the researchers assessed the participants recovery using the same methods that they used to gather their baseline data. And then they took the same measurements again every day over the next four days. And the foam rolling group also performed that same foam rolling routine before the Each of those daily visits and what did those people get for mashing and mauling their legs?

They didn’t get much. So the results showed that the participants in the foam rolling group did not improve measures of muscle soreness, hamstring muscle length, hip abduction, range of motion, or vertical jump performance more than those in the non foam rolling group. Now. One exception was that the foam rolling did seem to help these people maintain their agility slightly better than doing nothing.

Of course, you have to wonder if you get the same benefits from other stuff, like maybe doing some leg swings or maybe an active recovery workout or two. Maybe just going on a couple of walks, doing, I don’t know, five minutes of yoga. Or. Were these benefits truly unique to foam rolling? But what this study and several others like it show is that there is a growing body of evidence that shows that foam rolling is not going to help you recover faster from your workouts.

Getting a massage that can Going for a bike ride or a walk that can taking certain supplements like creatine and protein powder. If you struggle to eat enough protein. Yep. Those things can help, but foam rolling seems to be a waste of time in that regard. All right. Last up, I have a study for you on acne.

activity trackers and why they are not a good way to estimate calorie expenditure. So my source here is a study called wrist worn devices for the measurement of heart rate and energy expenditure, a validation study for the apple watch six polar vantage five. I’m assuming it’s a V, but no, I’m assuming it’s Roman.

Numeral five and Fitbit sense. And this was published on January 21st, 2022 in the European journal of sports science. And I wanted to discuss this because people often ask me about these activity trackers. And one of the main draws of these devices like the Apple watch and whoop Band and Fitbit products is that they claim to accurately measure the calories you burn throughout the day and from exercise in particular.

And that sounds nice for those of us who understand energy balance and would like to be able to easily calibrate our eating to our moving. But how accurate are these devices really? Scientists at the university of Quebec in Montreal attempted to answer this question by testing the accuracy of three popular Wearables, the Apple watch six, the polar vantage five and the Fitbit sense.

And the researchers had 30 men and women sit, walk, run, lift weights and cycle for 10 minutes while they wore each of those devices. And to calibrate the accuracy of the. activity trackers, the researchers also had the participants where medical devices proven to accurately measure heart rate and energy expenditure.

And the long story short here is the wearables were about as accurate as Al Gore’s climate change predictions. Not only were these devices wildly off the mark, they were also. Inconsistently inaccurate, making them completely unreliable. And this distinction between consistency and accuracy is important because if say the Fitbit consistently under predicted your calorie expenditure by say a hundred calories from every workout, you could work with that.

That could still help you establish a baseline from which you could modify your eating and exercise habits, even though that number isn’t exactly accurate. Correct. Inaccurate data can still be useful if it is consistently inaccurate. And if you understand that it is inaccurate, and if you know how inaccurate it is and can adjust accordingly.

Instead, though, these devices were inconsistent and inaccurate. They were sometimes over predicting, sometimes Under predicting and in no discernible fashion. Now, one exception is that the Apple watch was actually fairly accurate at measuring heart rate, which is useful if you want to track the intensity of your cardio workouts of your endurance training.

It still did not accurately or reliably estimate calorie expenditure. And this isn’t the only study to show that commercially available activity trackers are not very good. At estimating how many calories that we burn and their accuracy, hopefully will improve over time. It’s something of a moot point, really, because a much better way to control your eating is to use math.

And if you want calculators to do the math for you, just head over to legionathletics. com slash. Tools, and you’ll find, for example, a TDEE, Total Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, and that has some tried and tested math that will allow you to accurately estimate how many calories you are burning at rest every day and how many calories you are burning based on your activity levels.

And then what you can do is simply adjust based on how your body actually responds. And then you will learn your body’s ranges of calorie expenditure. You will understand that when you follow your normal routine, you burn, let’s say, anywhere from Depending on your gender and size, anywhere from 2000 and maybe 3000 calories per day.

Now, of course, you wouldn’t be working with such a large range. Like I know, for example, when I lift weights five or six hours per week and do a couple of hours, two or three hours of moderate intensity cardio per week. If I eat around 3, 000, 2800 to 3000 calories per day, my weight more or less stays the same.

If I want to cut. I need to eat. I usually go down to 23, 2400 calories per day. That’s cutting. And if I wanted to lean bulk, I would start around 32 to 3300 calories per day. And because I know that those numbers work for my body and my lifestyle, it’s also easy to adjust them if my lifestyle changes. So if I am more physically active than normal, it’s pretty easy.

to estimate that additional energy expenditure and add in a couple hundred calories. Or if I am not as physically active, like for example, this week I am deloading and my deload workouts are shorter and easier than my normal workouts, of course. And so I’m burning a bit less energy in those workouts, a couple hundred calories less.

And so then I can. Easily adjust for that by just eating a bit less of whatever I normally eat or maybe removing a food or two in my meal plan, like maybe eating a bit less rice at dinner or maybe pulling out one serving of fruit because I eat probably three ish servings per day, which is fine, but two is fine as well.

So maybe I skipped the banana or I skipped the apple and I eat a bit less rice. For dinner and I’m still at my maintenance ish calories and I can make that adjustment without consulting a device or even a calculator. So again, if you are not sure how many calories you’re burning or how to figure that out, just head over to legionathletics.

com slash tools. Check out the total daily energy expenditure calculator. tool, and that will give you an accurate evidence based estimate of how many calories you are burning every day. And then you can work with that as a baseline and adjust based on how your body actually responds. I hope you liked this episode.

I hope you found it helpful. And if you did subscribe to the show, because it makes sure that you don’t miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you.

And if you didn’t like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have. Ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, Mike at muscle for life. com muscle F O R life. com and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you’d like to see me do in the future.

I read everything myself. I’m always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.