Today's article is coming from the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in the April 2014 edition and it was done by Brad Schoenfeld and colleagues.
The title of the study is, Effects of Different Volume Equated Resistance Training Loading Strategies on Muscular Adaptations in Well-Trained Men. Now this study sought to compare essentially your standard power lifting program to a body building program and seeing if essentially, you know, you would see the expected changes in strength and hypertrophy, whereas, you know, you might expect a body building routine to be more geared toward hypertrophy and a power lifting routine to be more geared toward strength. In this study, they looked at well-trained subjects and also they equated for volume.
And in this case, they're talking about total weekly volume and the way that they calculated that is essentially looking at the repetitions times the sets times the weight lifted. And what they did is prior to the study, they got the rep maxes for the individual groups, strength and hypertrophy groups, and they calculated essentially what kind of set and rep scheme they would need in order to ensure that the volume would be more or less the same between the two groups in the study. So that brings me to the next point.
What were the two groups in the study? Essentially they started off with 20 well-trained males and by well-trained, that means they had at least one year of training experience with the average training experience of four years. So in the strength group, they essentially performed a split routine using three sets 10, 90 seconds rest in between each set. In the power lifting group, they performed seven sets of three using three minutes rest in between each set.
Both the strength and hypertrophy group performed each exercise to failure and the study defined failure as essentially the point where correct form starts to break down. That pretty accurately represents what many power lifters and bodybuilders train to. You know, it's not frequently that you see people going to absolute failure where they actually can't crank out one additional rep.
Now the fact that the bodybuilders use a split routine and the power lifters use a full body routine is simply there to more accurately represent what goes on in the real world. Now one potential flaw is the fact that bodybuilders tend to hit each body part more than one time per week, you know, but in order to make that happen logistically in the study would just not have really been possible. The study period was eight weeks long and subjects performed all the exercises under the supervision of the trainers.
One of the biggest flaws of the study is that the nutrition wasn't really well controlled. Essentially the participants filled out a diet log towards the beginning and the end of the study and they were also given a whey protein supplement post-workout. Both groups received that.
You know, obviously it would be nice to see controlled nutritional data where the meals were completely controlled and you know, you could ensure calories and protein, etc. were adequate, you know, but in a study like this it's just really hard logistically to make that happen. Cost is a big issue.
Compliance is a big issue. So all things considered you can't really give the researchers a hard time for that one. So after the eight weeks of the study they essentially compared their baseline measurements to the end measurements and in this particular study they measured two aspects, strength and hypertrophy.
Strength was measured using the one rep max on the back squat and the bench press and hypertrophy was measured using ultrasound measurements. So let's talk first about muscle thickness. In this study they reported data of the biceps muscle on ultrasound and both the strength and hypertrophy group increased roughly the same amount.
The hypertrophy group increased 12.6% and the strength group increased 12.7%. So more or less the same amount of increase between both the strength and the hypertrophy group which is pretty interesting because a lot of times you don't consider that a powerlifting routine can add some size. Now you might say why did they just choose the biceps muscle? Why are there no leg muscles? So I actually saw Brad Schoenfeld at the ISSM conference, the International Society of Sports Nutrition and I asked him that question. He was nice enough to talk to me and essentially the issue was that they did measure some of the quadricep muscle but their ultrasound machine wasn't good enough to essentially penetrate deep enough into the muscle to measure the full thickness of some of these bigger guys who like I said are well-trained individuals and have pretty substantial leg mass.
So as a result of that they just didn't have enough data to sufficiently present so they only presented the biceps data. Alright so how about strength? Let's talk first about the bench press. In the hypertrophy group, the bodybuilding kind of routine, they increased their one rep max bench press by 9%.
The strength group on the other hand increased theirs by 13%. How about the back squat? The hypertrophy group increased that by 22% and the strength group increased by 25.9%. Those numbers might seem quite similar to you but when the authors of the study did some statistical analysis and compared for some of the baseline numbers, there was a significant difference by significant I mean statistically significantly difference between the bench press in the strength group as opposed to the hypertrophy group and in the back squat although the numbers were not statistically significant, it was trending more towards in favor of the strength group. Now what are the practical applications of the study? There are basically two things that we need to look at here.
One is the time it takes to complete these workouts and two are the effects on the body. So you know more or less the results are showing us that you can get hypertrophy from doing a strength routine and you also get stronger but if you do this more only hypertrophy routine then you will gain muscle size but you won't necessarily get as strong so why don't we all just do the strength routine so that way we can get both strong and big? That sounds great to me.Well it comes with a caveat.
The caveat being that in the hypertrophy group the average workout only took 17 minutes. How about for the strength group? The average workout took well over an hour. Now as a result of that you know there are obviously practical implications you know not everybody has the time to perform you know when you're using those longer rest periods and your warmups might take longer time because you're using heavier weights etc. etc. which is one of the potential downfalls of doing strictly strength training program. The other thing to consider is how it affects your body.
Of the people in the strength training group there were two people who had to drop out secondary to injuries and that's you know a big deal. The fact is when you're working with heavier weights you know higher intensities there's just a greater risk for injury. So in the end I think what we can take from this is the fact that you know you kind of have to incorporate a little bit of both a little bit of the strength a little bit of the hypertrophy work regardless of what your goals are.
You know obviously if you're a powerlifter you're probably going to do mostly powerlifting style routines but you know you very rarely see any anybody who trains strictly in one rep range. So that's basically the take home that I would say from this study it would be nice to see additional research done in this area looking at maybe something more realistic like comparing maybe a higher frequency training but again it's very difficult to do that kind of research with compliance and researchers and things like that. So overall I think this was a great study there are really no significant flaws aside from the nutritional data.
And yeah that's basically my thoughts on the study. Please comment below if you guys have any questions if you have any thoughts.
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