Ep. #111: Greg Nuckols on the Best Way to Get Jacked

Mike Matthews: [00:00:00] Hey, it’s Mike. And I just want to say thanks for checking out my podcast. I hope you like what I have to say. And if you do what I have to say in the podcast, then I guarantee you’re going to like my books. Now I have several books, but the place to start is bigger, leaner, stronger. If you’re a guy.

And thinner leaner stronger. If you’re a girl, these books, they’re basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build muscle, lose fat and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or live in the gym, grinding through workouts that you hate.

Now you can find these books everywhere. You can buy them online. Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes Noble, Kobo, and so forth. And if you’re into audiobooks like me, you can actually get one of them for free with a 30 day free trial of Audible. To do that, go to www. muscleforlife. com forward slash audiobooks.

And you can see how to do that there. I make my living primarily as a writer. So as you can imagine, every book sold helps. So please do check out my books if you haven’t [00:01:00] already. Now, also, if you like my work in general, then I think you’re going to really like what I’m doing with my supplement company, Legion.

As you may know, I’m really not a fan of the supplement industry. I’ve wasted who knows how much money over the years on worthless junk supplements and have always had trouble finding products that I actually liked and felt were worth buying. And that’s why I finally decided to just make my own. Now a few of the things that make my supplements unique are One, they’re a hundred percent naturally sweetened and flavored to all ingredients are backed by peer reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself because we explain why we’ve chosen each ingredient and we cite all supporting studies on our website, which means you can dive in and go validate everything that we say.

Three, all ingredients are also included at clinically effective dosages. Which are the exact dosages used in the studies proving their effectiveness. And for there are no proprietary blends, which means that you know exactly what you’re buying. Our formulations are a hundred percent transparent. So if that sounds interesting to [00:02:00] you, then head over to legionathletics.

com that’s L E G I O N athletics. com and you can learn a bit more about the supplements that I have as well as my mission for the company. Cause I want to accomplish more than just. Cell supplements. I really want to try to make a change for the better in the supplement industry because I think it’s long overdue.

And ultimately, if you like what and you want to buy something, then you can use the coupon code podcast, P O D C A S T. And you’ll save 10 percent on your first order. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let’s get to the show.

Hello, boys and girls. Welcome back to another episode of the muscle for life podcast. I am your host, Mike Matthews. And in this episode, I interview the one and only Greg knuckles. Now, if you’re not sure who Greg is, there aren’t very many people in the fitness space who I think everyone should follow.

And he’s one of them. I myself have been reading his work for about a year now, and I really appreciate what he’s doing. Whenever I have a question, his site, which is called stronger by science is one of the first places [00:03:00] that I go to check for an answer before venturing off to other websites, books, and so forth.

And so as you can guess, I was really excited to get Greg on my podcast and talk to him about what he specializes in. And that is the science of getting bigger and stronger. And specifically, I reached out to Greg because I wanted him to address a hot topic these days, and that’s the relationship between strength and size.

This is something that I get asked about all the time from people wanting to know if maximizing muscle strength also maximizes muscle size or if strength training is actually a rather inefficient way to get bigger muscles This is something that Greg has researched and written about extensively and I knew he could knock it out of the park Which I think you’ll agree he does As you’ll see, Greg breaks down the relationship between strength and muscle growth and he gives simple practical insights that you can immediately apply to your training [00:04:00] to get bigger and stronger faster.

Greg also touches on a number of other interesting topics in the interview, such as how motor learning affects our progression in the gym, how important adequate sleep is to muscle growth, how to manage personal expectations and breakthrough plateaus and more. So if you want to get stronger and gain muscle as quickly and enjoyably as possible, then I think you’re going to this interview.

Here it is. Hey, Greg, thanks for taking the time to come on the show. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Absolutely. So I’m excited to have you. Cause like I was saying just before we started, I’m legitly a fan of yours. Yeah, I read everything that you put out and I admire your level of technical knowledge and your ability to break things down and make them understandable.

And also I really liked that you come at, you create you very unique content. You’re not just doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, which is refreshing to see. 

Greg Nuckols: Thanks, man. 

Mike Matthews: Absolutely. All right. So specifically I wanted to get you on to talk about something you wrote about [00:05:00] recently. And that’s the correlation of size and strength.

This is something that I get asked about fairly frequently. Actually, I’m a guy or a girl, I want to get bigger. Should I just get stronger? Should that just be my thing? Should I, just follow the strength training program, just get on a barbell and get my big lifts up. And is that all it’s going to take to, to get really big?

That’s kinda that’s usually from the people that are newer. And then I get questions from people that are a bit more experienced and a bit more, more like intermediate advanced lifters who now, they’ve their newbie gains are long, long gone. And now it’s actually quite hard for them to continue to gain strength.

They have to work, you get to that point where adding 20 pounds to any lift, you have to work very hard for it. So then that question turns into, so what do you do? What does that mean for them? Are they just are they just going to plateau basically in terms of size because there’s not that much more strength they can gain or do they need to dramatically change their training?

So as to gain more strength or what to do, 

Greg Nuckols: I gotcha. Yeah. So in a general sense, there is in most populations, a [00:06:00] pretty big disconnect for not like a huge disconnect, but a reasonably large disconnect between muscle mass and strength. So in studies just looking at simple correlations between either fat free mass and various measures of strength or muscle cross sectional area and various measures of strength you tend to see that muscle size explains roughly half of the variation in the data.

If you take a simple correlation, you’d get a correlation coefficient of, 0. 7 to 0. 75. And so like to get an idea of how much of the variation that explains you just square that number. So a nice, easy round numbers that muscle size explains roughly half the variation in strength.

So in general, if you’re getting stronger, you’re probably getting bigger. And if you’re getting bigger, you’re probably getting stronger. But it’s definitely not a one to one relationship. However, that does change a bit in people who are more well [00:07:00] trained. So in studies that look at the relationship between changes in muscle mass and changes in strength with completely untrained people strangely, there’s basically no relationship whatsoever.

The proportion of the variance in strength gains that gains in muscle size can explain are like three, 4%, basically no relationship. Like some people get way stronger, but don’t gain all that much muscle and vice versa. However, in pretty much every study that I’ve seen thus far, that’s been been conducted in people who had at least six months of training experience, gains in size and gains in strength were pretty closely related.

With anywhere between, Forty up to 80 percent of the variance in strength gains explained by gains in size. 

Mike Matthews: So for new people, I guess that, anyway, that spent some time in the gym and just around people that are into weightlifting, that kind of, that, that meets with experience that you’ll see people when [00:08:00] they’re brand new, they can do just about anything.

In terms of a program and gain a fair amount of size, at least for the first six months or so. And even though, their whole body strength may not even change that much because they’re just doing a bunch of bicep curls and peck deck and stuff and whatever. But then they, that, that approach plateaus and if they don’t, 

Greg Nuckols: There are a fair amount of people who get interested in powerlifting.

And maybe get their deadlift up to four or five and still don’t even 

Mike Matthews: look like they lift. 

Greg Nuckols (2): Yeah. 

Mike Matthews: My brother actually ran into that funny enough. We look very different. Genetically I would guess like I got one of those DNA, I think it was DNA fit was the company, one of the tests where you can look at a bit of under the hood, so to speak.

And so I get, I would guess that our profiles are, would be different in, in, in significant ways in terms of athleticism, especially muscle building because he in a year or so he got pretty strong. He was, I want to say pulling after a year, he was pulling in the mid threes. He was squatting. He may have put three 15 up for reps.

He at least got into [00:09:00] the two 95 range for reps and two 25 on bench for for me at least four or five reps, but he barely looked like he lifted. 

Greg Nuckols: And so that can happen as well. People who gain a lot of strength and not all that much muscle, but then, once someone’s being, once someone’s like benching four or five or head lifting 600, they’re going to, they’re going to be jacked like, yeah, to that level without looking pretty big.

Both in terms of just, Like looking at a cross section of people, not with training, the proportion of strength variance that muscle mass can explain is higher with well trained people than untrained people. Throughout that roughly 50 percent of the variance explained statistic for like general population before when you look at elite athletes on the other hand study was done on like national and world class power lifters.

Another one was on national and world class junior weightlifters. They found that muscle mass could explain [00:10:00] up to 90 percent of the variation in strength. So essentially if someone’s lean body mass was the only thing you if you knew someone’s lean body mass. And you knew that they were like a really serious power lifter.

You could just based off of that, you could predict their squat bench and deadlift within about 15 to 20 kilos. So can we bet on these, 

Can you bet on powerlifting? Unfortunately, no. I don’t know that would see all that much action with the bookies. But yeah, so it, it becomes much, much more predictive.

In well trained populations. And I’m sure we’re going to get into this more as the podcast goes on. But the basic reason for that is That was 

Mike Matthews: going to be my, that was going to be my question now. Okay, so why is that? 

Greg Nuckols: Yeah, so there are a lot of things that contribute to strength. One of, one of the ones that I think most people are aware of is that there’s a strong skill component to it.

First time you try a lift, it feels weird, unstable. Next time you do it, I promise you your muscles haven’t gotten bigger just in that one [00:11:00] training session, but you’ll probably already be able to lift more. And that continues for a bit. And that’s just from learning the motor pattern of a new lift.

So that’s definitely one of the And 

Mike Matthews: people can think of that as like any athletic activity. It could be throwing a football or whatever. Yes. 

Greg Nuckols: There’s a skill component to it. Like people don’t look at a deadlift, like you’re just picking something heavy up off the ground and think all that much motor skill goes into it.

But there there’s more to it than you may think. So yeah, learning the skills. Here’s actually a good example from one study. 2012 paper by Mitchell compared training just knee extensions, like simplest movement in the world with 30 percent one rep max versus 80 percent one rep max.

And so they train these people, they were completely untrained and before and after the study, they measured one rep max knee extension. And they also married, they also measured maximal isometric knee torque. So basically like how hard you could kick into the knee extension without actually moving it.

And so [00:12:00] these people were doing like regular knee extensions, like full eccentric, full concentric for the whole training period. And the 80% group did gain more strength with like regular one rep max knee extension because training at 80% was more similar to oh one rep max test than training at 30%.

Greg Nuckols (2): Sure. 

Greg Nuckols: So unsurprisingly, they are one Brett Max increase score, but they actually had like identical increases in maximum knee tor. So that’s something that like absolutely no skill whatsoever into an isometric. Yeah, you can see the influence there of it’s the skill component of strength and something as simple as a knee extension.

Obviously something like a squat deadlift and especially something like a clean and jerk or snatch way more technical than that. The skill component is going to play a much larger role. So yes, people get more efficient with the motor patterns of new yield of new lips, something else that people posit is that you get more efficient with better at [00:13:00] activating more of your muscle tissue to produce force.

That’s probably not true. So you can study that by looking at something called percentage of voluntary activation. And that sounds really technical, but it’s pretty simple. Basically what you do is you get people in a lab and you see how much isometric force they can produce. Just voluntarily.

Again, if you were using leg extensions, you get someone in a knee extension machine make sure that the arm couldn’t move and just have them kick into it as, as hard as possible. And then you have electrons hooked up to their femoral nerve, which is what innervates their quads and you run a current through it to force their quads to contract as hard as their quads are can possibly contract.

Which is Yeah, it’s about as comfortable as it sounds. I was gonna say, that sounds like no fun. Yeah, and then you compare the force that we’re capable of producing voluntarily versus the evoked [00:14:00] contraction from the electrodes. And even in completely untrained people, percentage of voluntary activation is 95 percent plus.

So yeah, it seems like untrained people can activate all of their muscle tissue just fine. They’re just not good at putting that together efficiently to move external load. So yeah, that’s probably just a pure increase in muscle activation probably doesn’t explain the rapid increase in strength you see early in training.

So something else that’s curious is you don’t see an increase in muscle activation, or at least not like a meaningful increase, but you do see in a pretty big increase in what’s called normalized muscle force. And again, that sounds really technical, but again it’s pretty simple. So basically you see what someone’s cross muscle cross sectional area is.

So for example, like your biceps, you take like a MRI image at the midpoint of the bicep and it would roughly look like a [00:15:00] circle and you just see what the cross sectional area of that is. So you see how much force a muscle can produce divided by its cross sectional area. And that. does actually increase quite a bit with training, even though muscle activation doesn’t seem to be fully increased.

So what that tells you is that there’s some stuff going on in the muscle itself to make it better at producing force, independent of muscle activation. Something that makes it even more curious is there’s something called specific tension, which is the exact same concept as normalized muscle force, just force divided by cross sectional area.

but of individual muscle fibers instead of the entire muscle and normalized or in a specific tension doesn’t change with training. You’re individual muscle. What does it mean, Greg? No one’s sure. And so that’s that’s a super interesting open question. That like the disconnect between fiber [00:16:00] specific tension and normalized muscle force.

Which are the exact same concepts, but on different scales, so individual muscle fibers versus the entire muscle. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, just so everybody understands, we’re talking about cross section, we’re talking about the size of the muscles, or the size of the fiber individually. 

Greg Nuckols: So the disconnect between the two was first noted in a paper in 2012.

And when I first read that, I was like, What? That doesn’t make any sense at all. And just since then, no one else has really even looked at that, which is so frustrating to me. So yeah, anyway, no one’s quite sure why that happens. 

Mike Matthews: But the takeaway is that we just know that as you continue to train, 

Greg Nuckols: We do know that normalized muscle force increases.

So looping back to what put us down this road to begin with talking about why there would be a stronger relationship between muscle mass and strength in trained populations and untrained populations. The biggest reason for that is that there are these other factors that contribute to strength development beyond muscle mass.

[00:17:00] So you have the skill component, you have normalized muscle force. A couple other small things as well, but those are definitely the two other biggies apart from purely the amount of muscle you have. And those adaptations take place really early in training. So you know, like the skill component can keep increasing with more training experience.

Like I’ve been squatting for probably 15 years now and I’m still like fine tuning my technique little by little, but my spot isn’t. Actually, no. Squat’s not a good example because I actually really sucked at squats for a long time. Binge press. I’m still trying to refine my binge press technique little by little, but for all intents and purposes, it looks about the same now as it did when I’d been training a year.

I may have made small improvements since then, but more or less, you pick up a movement within a few months. Maybe a couple years if it’s really technical but then past that point the [00:18:00] contribution of perfecting motor patterns it, it still plays a role, but it plays a much, much smaller role.

Exact same thing with normalized muscle force. Like it’d be 

Mike Matthews: more, more maybe relevant to, in a competitive kind of setting as opposed to just working out. 

Greg Nuckols: Yeah, for sure. and same thing with normalized muscle force. So in the first month or two of training, you get really big, really rapid increases in normalized muscle force, but past that it’s pretty much flat.

It can fluctuate a little bit on like short time scales. So maybe it’s going to be higher after you like tapered and peaked for a competition. Versus just in normal day to day training when you’re fatigued. But in terms of like your kind of average baseline level of normalized muscle force doesn’t really seem to meaningfully increase with training after a couple of months.

Mike Matthews: How does that work though? Because, for your first year, I’d say guys can gain, probably somewhere around about 20 pounds of muscle. If they, if their body responds well to, and they do a good job, it should be going up as [00:19:00] they gain size, right? 

Greg Nuckols: Yeah. Yeah. But so you’re 

Mike Matthews: saying though the relationship doesn’t, it just tends to, it sits once after a couple months you have now as, as muscle size increases, it’s just going to go up in a linear type of fashion.

Greg Nuckols: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, the fact that those adaptations from skill development and for normalized muscle force since those things mostly take place during the first, to a year of training. That explains why you don’t see that strong of a relationship between gains and size and gains and strength in untrained populations, because they’ll have different baseline levels of skill, different baseline levels of normalized muscle force, which really weaken the relationship between muscle size and strength.

But in more well trained populations, their normalized muscle force is, Basically plateaued their level of skill, maybe gradually increasing, but it’s essentially plateaued. So then muscle size does explain much, much more of that variation. 

Mike Matthews: [00:20:00] And that also, and just a practical takeaway for everybody listening there is, I’ve Over the years, I’ve been in touch with thousands of people.

So I’ve, seen a lot, especially people new to weightlifting where seeing the scenario where they got into, again, they got in maybe doing some, magazine workouts, doing whatever. And they thought Oh, this is easy. You know what I mean? They don’t, they can just do stuff and you just basically, it’s just you just jump in and volume is out the roof and you just do whatever.

And but then they get confused because they come through the end of that. I’ve made some progress but they’re not strong at all. And they’re not even used to training like that. So they’re in a weird place where then they’re just confused, so would you say then that it’s best for people that are new to focus on just training?

Gaining whole body strength because they’re gonna, they’re gonna, they’re gonna gain size regardless. And then it’s, that’s going to become very important once their newbie gains are all washed up. 

Greg Nuckols: Yeah. So with new lifters, I think. I think there are three basic [00:21:00] things you need to focus on and to varying degrees based on what your athletic background is.

So I think the first is just developing full body strength by learning like the core compound movement. So squat, bench, deadlift, rows, pull ups, overhead, press, dips, pushups, all the fun stuff. Yeah. Just fundamental compound lifts. I think that should be one of your top priorities early on.

Another thing especially like if you’re focused on building muscle and hypertrophy I really think you should get into isolation lifts relatively early on just so you get an understanding of what it feels like to use the muscles you’re trying to build. So many new lifters just don’t know how to feel their lats when they’re doing like pull ups or something like I had that problem.

Yeah. So something like pullovers or straight arm pull downs, which are going to be all lats or like essentially all lats they can be good just to get a feeling of what it [00:22:00] feels like to use your lats, which you can then carry over into the compound lifts. Yeah. 

Mike Matthews: I had that with shoulders as well side raises, rear raises to actually get form and feel it where you’re supposed to feel it.

Greg Nuckols: Yeah, for sure. For sure. So that’s number two. And number three and I have no scientific evidence for this whatsoever, but just my own my own observations on this is people tend to make better progress long term if they’re just generally athletic and have a decent proprioceptive sense and understand how their body moves and where it is in space.

So I think a lot of new lifters should also be doing some sort of like calisthenics. Or like I, or I’ll offer up yoga. I felt like I got benefits 

Mike Matthews: from yoga. 

Greg Nuckols: And I think stabilization work is also important. Things like unilateral carries like a suitcase carry where just like a farmer’s walk, which are only holding a weight in one hand, just you feel what it feels like to, or [00:23:00] so you learn how to stabilize your body laterally.

I think just calisthenics are like weird, off centered, or unilateral movements like that are good for just developing an understanding of where your body is in space and how it moves, and I think that’s important for, building a good foundation for further development.

Mike Matthews: That’s a good point. I actually haven’t, you’re the only person that I’ve heard talk about that actually, but it totally makes sense. I would say also something that helped me, and I’m sure it’s helped you a lot over the years is working on camera so you can actually see what your body is doing as opposed to what you think it’s doing.

And, I was a little bit surprised that even with a few like with squats and stuff where, At first, of course, it’s about reaching depth and then you finally get that, but then you start honing in on some of the finer points and being able to see what did I just do versus what did I feel like I did has helped.

Greg Nuckols: Oh, for sure. With motor learning, there’s, there are a lot of things you can [00:24:00] do, but two of the easiest, most basic things you can do is either have more feedback. So that would include things like videotaping yourselves, comparing what it looks like on camera to how it felt when you were doing it.

And also less feedback. So if you generally squat in front of a mirror, don’t spot in front of a mirror. Then once you get reasonably good at any of the core ellipse try doing them with your eyes closed. And if possible with noise canceling headphones on just because that’s taking away like audio feedback and visual feedback.

So it’ll force you like to rely on kinesthetic feedback. Yeah. 

Mike Matthews: Really be aware 

Greg Nuckols: of your body. So yeah. Manipulating how much feedback you’re getting either by giving yourself more by taking video or by taking some away can help with mastery. 

Mike Matthews: That’s a good tip. That totally makes sense.

Okay. So let’s shift gears now and talk more to the intermediate and advanced people. And so they’re at a point now where let’s say they’ve been training reasonably well for a few [00:25:00] years, and they’ve gained a fair amount of strength. And you’ve already maybe answered some of the questions that they would come into this podcast with, but they are, as you do run into where it’s not as easy.

It feels much easier. To gain strength, at least for the first year or two, where, just if you’re, if your calories are at least in a range that makes sense and your macros in a range that makes sense and you’re recovering and so forth, and you’re just putting a lot of work into the barbells where you just, you know, you gain reps every week or two and eventually you turn that into weight and so forth.

That, that gets harder though, as time goes on. So what advice would you have to, or do you have for those people and how, cause okay, so they need to make sure that they’re getting stronger, even if it’s just a slight increase and what got them there won’t necessarily get them to where maybe they want to be, if they really want to achieve, let’s say a large percentage of what’s potential, what’s possible for them genetically.

Greg Nuckols: Yeah. The first thing is just patience. This is something I’ve seen more times than I can [00:26:00] count. And it’s happened to me probably three or four times just in my own training career. Like someone will get to a given point in like strength and or muscular development and then they’re training hard, they’re training smart, they’re eating well, they’re sleeping well and just for six months or a year, just literally nothing happened.

And then I’ve been there. Yeah. And then just out of nowhere over Two months, you put on, six or seven pounds of lean body mass and your lips go up 10%. Like I have no idea why that happens, but that just happens. Like you just grind away for a while and eventually you reach a break.

Break breakthrough. So yeah, that one thing is just patience generally, if you keep training hard, good things eventually happen in terms of things that are within your control once the easy games are in the rear view mirror stuff outside of the gym starts playing. An increasingly large role.

So making sure [00:27:00] you’re sleeping enough, making sure you’re eating enough protein trying to manage stress outside the gym Oh, if I can give a quick sales pitch really quick for my favorite thing for augmenting training, it’s this thing called sleep. Like sleep. People so undervalue sleep for everything.

So just two, two quick studies to read about you. One, it was a metabolic ward study. So that means that the people were living in a lab, so every. Part of their day was controlled. There were like outside influences. You’re 

Mike Matthews: not relying on journals and so forth. Yeah. 

Greg Nuckols: Yeah. So yeah, it’s a metabolic ward study.

People living in the lab, all of their activity, all of their food intake very tightly controlled and it was a diet study. So basically they had people in a pretty big calorie deficit, like a 40 percent calorie deficit. And they compared sleeping eight and a half hours a night to five and a half hours a night.

And when the people were sleeping [00:28:00] in either condition, they lost the same amount of weight. So the number on the scale went down the same amount, but for the group sleeping a five and a half hours a night, that was something like 60 percent lean mass and 40 percent fat mass was what they lost. Like they just, you just hemorrhage to lean body mass.

In the group sleeping eight and a half hours a night, it was, Like, again, this is an untrained population, so you wouldn’t expect them to lose all that much muscle. But they essentially held on to pretty much all of their lean body mass and any of the drops that occurred were probably just water from glycogen depletion, because it was a pretty low calorie diet.

But yeah, they lost almost entirely fat mass and basically no lean mass. So yeah, same calorie deficit, same change on the scale. Do you want 

Mike Matthews: to touch on quickly, just so everyone is listening, why that is? 

Greg Nuckols: Just on a purely mechanistic level, one of the, one of the shifts that they did note is there’s this thing [00:29:00] called respiratory exchange ratio or RER.

Again, that sounds like a very technical term, but it’s pretty simple. Basically when you breathe in oxygen and your body uses that oxygen to break down carbohydrate or fat or protein, the amount of carbon dioxide you exhale for every amount of oxygen you take in and utilize is different based on what macronutrient you’re using.

With carbohydrate or protein, you essentially exhale one molecule of carbon dioxide for every one molecule of oxygen you take in. But for fat, it’s 0. 7 molecules of carbon dioxide for every molecule of oxygen you take in. So that’s basically what it’s measuring. By knowing your respiratory exchange ratio, it gives you a pretty good idea.

The fuel breakdown that you’re using. And so the people. Who were sleeping a lot had a lower respiratory exchange ratio. So what that tells you is just at rest, just day to day life, they were [00:30:00] burning more fat and less carbohydrate and protein. The total energy expenditure was the same.

Sure. Where was 

Mike Matthews: the energy coming from? 

Greg Nuckols: Yeah, but more of that was coming from body fat versus the group that wasn’t sleeping very much. They had a higher respiratory exchange ratio. Which means less of the energy they were burning was body fat and more of it was carbohydrate and protein. So yeah, sleeping not enough is bad.

Hopefully people understand that. In terms of sleeping more like more than the typically recommended seven to eight hours a day. Taking naps or whatever on top of. This is something that hasn’t gotten all that much research attention, but, The stuff out there right now is very promising. All of the studies looking at sleep extension so far, so going from seven to eight hours a night to nine or 10 hours a night all of the studies have been done at Stanford thus far in a researcher named Sherry Ma’s lab.

And all of her subjects are B1 [00:31:00] athletes. And over the course of just two or two to four weeks, they’re seeing like really big improvements in performance. With absolutely no change to training or nutrition or anything else, just by getting the athletes to go from sleeping seven to eight hours a night to nine to 10 hours a night.

So yeah, that hasn’t been tested on like bodybuilders or power lifters, but I would assume the same general thing, like the same general factors are in play there. Athletic, at the end of the day, athletic performances, athletic performance. Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. 

Mike Matthews: Okay, so we have sleep more.

Any other? 

Greg Nuckols: Oh yeah. 

Stress management. 

Mike Matthews: So we have the patients and I think there’s also a bit of expectations in there as well. I don’t know if you it’s related to patients at least, but I know I ran into that myself when, so after. A nice kind of upward trajectory, especially for the first couple of years of doing things right.

And then when things slow down, I had to consciously, reset my expectations and [00:32:00] realize that, year three is not the same as year two and year four is not the same as year three and so forth. 

Greg Nuckols: Yeah I agree. I think, so I think expectations can cut two different directions.

Largely based on a psychology idea known as Locus of Control. So essentially if you have high expectations, I think that can pretty dramatically impact the results studies on that. One and these were both like super cool studies because, there are placebo steroid studies.

So essentially the researchers telling the participants they’re giving them steroids when they’re actually just giving them sugar pills. So in one of them they got a group of people trained them for four weeks and recorded their strength games over that or no, they trained them for seven weeks recorded their strength games over that time period and then gave them a sugar pill and told them, Hey, this is steroids.

They’re going to make the jack. 

Greg Nuckols (2): Yeah. 

Greg Nuckols: All right. And [00:33:00] they trained them for another four weeks over the first seven weeks across four lifts, which I think was squat bench seated overhead press and standing overhead press. Over the first seven weeks, they put an average of, I think 20 kilos on the, across those four lifts.

And these were pretty well trained guys to begin with. They were average bench was like 275 and average squat was like 360 or something. That’s pretty solid. 

Greg Nuckols (2): Yeah, like not 

Greg Nuckols: people you’d expect to make like super fast strength gains, but yeah, 20, 20 kilos, 44 pounds across those four lips for the first seven weeks over the last four weeks when they thought they were on steroids, exact same training.

They put 45 kilos, which is like right at a hundred pounds across those four lips. Over the first seven weeks, it was 10 kilos, not 20 kilos. So they made more than four times the gains in basically half the time just because they felt they were taking steroids. [00:34:00] And then another study, and this is my all time favorite study, I think just because When you actually think through it from like a human perspective, it’s hilarious.

It’s a 2001 Maginaris. That’s the year and author. If people want to look this up, but basically one of the researchers was the coach for the great Britain national powerlifting team like the one they sent to IPF competition. Drug tested powerlifting supposed to be drug free lifters.

But these guys decided, hey, we want to use steroids and get away with it. So they trusted their coach enough to ask them hey, can you hook us up with some steroids? So first the basic premise of the study is the athletes are trying to cheat and they think their coach will help them get away with it.

But the coach Also being a scientist was like, Oh, these go, these gullible fools, I will use them to study the placebo effect. So he like gave them sugar pills and told them that they were fast acting steroids. And so they [00:35:00] tested their maxes and then two weeks later they tested their maxes again being given these pills they felt were fast acting steroids.

And they put in average of four to 5 percent across their squat bench and deadlift, which just to put that in context, like these guys were strong, like average body weight, around 200 pounds, average squat and deadlift in the high fives, low sixes, average bench in the low to mid fours, like they were strong.

Adding four to 5 percent to that was like a. 70, 80 pound increase in the total automatically just because they thought they were being given fast acting steroids. Then they trained for two weeks still being given these placebo pills. And at the end of those two weeks, they the researchers asked them, or the coaches asked them like, Hey, how’s your training been going?

And everyone was like, Oh, best two weeks. Like I’ve been like hitting PRs, been handling more volume, recovering better. Everything’s awesome. [00:36:00] And then the coach told half of them, psych, it was a placebo. Now time to max again. And so they knew that they were drug free before when they hit those four to 5 percent PRs, they knew they were drug free over the intervening two weeks that they said was like the best two weeks of training of their life, but their post training one breath maxes.

Still regressed to like the levels they were before that four to five percent increase. Yeah, the other half They were like, yeah, you’re still on steroids. Things are awesome. They hit more prs on top of that These are like 

Mike Matthews: And then in the end did they regress though So they’re just still PR ing.

Greg Nuckols: Yeah, they didn’t do another follow up with that group. Oh, that would have been interesting. But yeah yeah, these are world class athletes making really big, meaningful gains in strength automatically, and then even more over just two weeks because they think they’re on steroids. So yeah, I think those two studies do [00:37:00] illustrate the power of expectations pretty strongly.

That, that is something that, that massively boosted these people’s expectations and their results dramatically increased because of it. If self esteem didn’t matter at all, I think like setting expectations as high as possible is probably the best thing for results. But then in terms of how that impacts people that’s where a locus of control comes into play.

Like I mentioned earlier. So if you have a really high expectations and also an internal locus of control. So basically anything that happens in your life, whether good or bad, whether or not you actually had control over it. Like you either blame yourself for it or take credit for it. 

Mike Matthews: It’s like a sense of personal responsibility.

Yeah, 

Greg Nuckols: pretty much. Yeah. As opposed 

Mike Matthews: to saying it was because of this or that, or it was this person or that thing or whatever. 

Greg Nuckols: Yeah. Yeah. So high expectations, good for getting good results. But if you don’t live up to those expectations and you have an internal locus of control, [00:38:00] that makes it really easy to get down on yourself.

And say I failed, like this is, yeah, exactly. Totally. Versus an external locus of control, then it’s just oh, something else influenced this. So just like purely on a psychological level, sometimes lower expectations can actually be beneficial for people who like have an internal locus of control and also just aren’t gifted.

And so wouldn’t meet those expectations and would be crushed if they didn’t. but just purely on a, if you want people to make the best gains possible, high expectations are very good. 

Mike Matthews: I like that. That makes sense. Okay. Anything else that you would add for this intermediate or advanced person that is now going to go, okay, I need to continue working on gaining strength.

Greg Nuckols: Oh, okay. So I also, I have just like a little flow chart. That will help people navigate pretty much any training decision they ever need to make. And it’s the simplest thing ever, but it works. [00:39:00] So first question you ask yourself, am I making progress? The answer is yes. What you do is nothing. Don’t change anything.

Even if it’s slow progress over months or years. As up to a crap ton of problems. Slow gains are still gains. If you’re improving, don’t change anything. If you’re not improving, the next question is How do I feel most of the time? If you’re not improving and you constantly feel pretty fresh, the issue is probably just that you’re not training hard enough.

So whatever that means for you, make your training harder. So it could be increasing intensity Increasing the amount of weight you’re lifting. It could be increasing volume, doing more reps, more sets, more exercises. It could be increasing frequency. So training more times per week or hitting each muscle group more times per week.

Just if you’re not making progress, but you generally feel good and fresh all the time, you have to do more. Yeah. You just need to train harder. That’s, what’s going to do it for you. If you’re not making progress and you [00:40:00] generally feel worn down. Then the next question is basically, am I taking care of stuff outside the gym as well as I can?

If you’re like a new father or a new mother, like you’re not going to sleep for two years and that’s just how it is. So that’s something that’s impacting your gains that you can’t really do anything about. But if you’re not sleeping enough, but you could sleep more if your diet isn’t great and it could be better then if you’re not making progress, you feel worn down all the time and there’s.

Stuff like that outside the gym that you can address. That’s where you want to put your focus. But maybe you’re taking care of business outside the gym or at least doing so as well as you can. When you’re not making progress and you’re feeling worn down all the time, then basically what you need to do is make your training a little bit easier in some way.

So we’re not talking cut volume by 80 percent over time. Drop a set here or there. Maybe don’t put quite as close to failure if there are a couple accessory exercises that don’t [00:41:00] really give you that much bang for the buck 

Greg Nuckols (2): bang 

Greg Nuckols: for your buck in the first place, drop them out of your training program.

So just like small tweaks to make your training a little bit less stressful. So it matches your recovery ability. And that’s really about all there is to it. 

Mike Matthews: That’s great. That’s perfect. Okay. I’m sure we could go another two hours cause a lot of things, which is awesome. And I covered all the points that I, those are my questions for you.

It addresses the questions that I get asked as well. So let’s just end with where can people find you and find your work. You also just released a research review. And so if you want to tell everybody about that I, and I, this is obvious, but I’ll say it for everybody that I highly endorse Greg and his work.

And again I’m a fan of his, like he, I check his site at least once a week to see when’s the next, when’s the next. So I’m going to give you the soapbox. 

Greg Nuckols: So you can find me at stronger by science. com. That’s where all of my content is. In terms of social media I’m pretty active on Facebook, just [00:42:00] Greg knuckles.

And then the business pages stronger by science. com or stronger by science. I’m also on Instagram also just Greg knuckles, but don’t really follow me there unless you just care about seeing pictures of my dog. So yeah, website and Facebook. And do you want to tell everybody about 

Mike Matthews: Your research review?

Greg Nuckols: I’m getting to it. I’m getting to it. So the research review is called MAS, which stands for monthly applications in spring sport. And essentially it’s me and Eric Helms and Mike Sordos. They are much more qualified than I am. Eric is defending his dissertation soon. So he’s soon going to be Dr.

Helms. Dr. Zordos is Dr. Zordos. They’re active researchers in the field of exercise science. Zordos is also a power lifter and Eric is a power lifter and natural body builder. So we have experience reading and doing research. And also from a practical perspective as well, all three of us are coaches.

We know [00:43:00] how to read and interpret research and we know how to identify the research that’s like most useful and relevant For people who their primary goal is getting stronger building muscle or losing body fat it’s a very narrow research review like if those are your training goals It’s perfect for you.

If your training goals are anything else. It is entirely irrelevant to you but yeah, so we go through 50, 60 journals every month, screen close to a thousand articles, and pick out the nine studies that are going to be most useful, relevant, and applicable to people trying to get stronger, get bigger, lose body fat and break them down on a technical enough level that you get everything you could possibly want out of a study, but also in a very readable and understandable and reader friendly format with practical applications to help you improve your training or if you’re a coach, improve how you train your client.

So basically trying to bring the [00:44:00] research to everyone who either just doesn’t have the time or the ability to follow it for themselves so they can stay up to date with the latest science. But not have to be overwhelmed with trying to read a bunch of studies and, burn dozens of hours of their time doing that on their own.

Mike Matthews: Okay, good. So where can they get it? Where can they, because the first issue you’re giving away, which I think is a great idea just to get people in and so they can see how high quality it is. 

Greg Nuckols: Yeah. Absolutely. You can find it at stronger by science. com slash mass dash issue dash one. And 

Mike Matthews: I’ll put that also, I’ll have that link put, in the description of the YouTube video and I’ll put it in the blog post and so forth.

So people can just quickly download it right there. All right. Perfect. Okay. Awesome. That’s everything. I really appreciate it. Again, you taking the time, Greg, it’s been very enlightening. It’s a, it’s fun for me to get people like you on the show because I just like to listen to you be smart and educate us on all kinds of good things.

So it’d be great. Also maybe sometime in the future we could do this again [00:45:00] on, on some other subject. 

Greg Nuckols: Yeah. That would be awesome. And thanks for having me. Mike. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. Hey, it’s Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness.

Also, head over to my website at www. muscleforlife. com, where you’ll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you’ll also find a bunch of different articles that I’ve written. I release a new one almost every day. Actually, I release four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I’m involved in over at muscleforlife.

com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.