alt Hacker News> Healthy, recreationally active but untrained young males
Yeah this is why. Anything you do as an untrained person is going to get you newbie gains. It's just really easy to improve initially. Doesn't mean it'll work after the first 6 months
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Perhaps there's some unmeasured influence, but this study was looking only at the difference between growth within subjects vs between subjects. If the subjects were all "newbies", then that doesn't explain the results.
They're essentially saying that individual genetics explain the majority of the variation seen as a response to muscle stimulus in their test subjects, not the mass used, because the variation within the test cohorts was greater than the variation between them. You can argue that, if they didn't test experienced lifters the results might be different in that population, but you can't dismiss the results on those grounds.
exactly. when you're new, virtually any type of lifting you do is going to create sufficient stimulus to trigger maximum muscle growth, because you're going from 0 to 1. unfortunately, since the only people that researchers can usually convince to participate in their studies are untrained, this has led to an enormous amount of junk studies where they try to extrapolate the results to people who are not untrained.
This paper isn’t saying that it doesn’t matter what program you do, it’s saying that other variables, not directly related to the method of weight training, matter more. It also assumes that you can extrapolate data from one individual training each limb with a different program to if that individual performs either program on both limbs. Maybe there are carryover affects to the lower load limb that you get from training heavier with the higher load limb that you wouldn’t from training both at a lower intensity.
Yeah. When was powerlifting seriously I spent months with my deadlift stuck on 525 pounds. I would measure progress by how many times I could just get the weight off the floor, then how far off the floor, etc… The newbie gains were long gone.
From my recollection, this is a quite common issue with studies in this topic area.
Also, it's more difficult to reach true failure with lower load, people tend to stop too early.
this wasn't a study of absolute growth (sure - newbie gains), but rather the difference between high and low load programming within individuals.
"HN dismisses study without understanding it"
this is peak gym bro science
> Yeah this is why.
Guys, the study has been refuted by AstroBen. No need to read it.
Brad Schoenfeld felt the same way, so he did the study on trained participants, and made the same finding: https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/fulltext/2015/10000/Effec...