The Differences Between Training for Size Vs Strength

hey folks dr. Mike here for Renaissance period ization let's talk about strength training versus size training the match of the century Jake a lot of folks think these are the same you ask someone what they're training for they'll say all 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 we're gonna 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 is easier workouts well then your hypertrophy trainer because there's no such thing really but for strength training you're like oh use your 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 gonna 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 act

only small at your static Dodoma technical sense is the fact that bodybuilders at a high level professionals and power lifters at high level professionals don't train the same yes they both training gyms yes they both use barbells but the differences are G really massive if you've been in a gym for longer than a few months you could start to tell them apart not just in their appearance but how they train maybe there's something to that and they're really absolutely is so let's find out what there is to it and start with the most obvious loading

differences basic strength when we have sports science called basic strength the fundamental ability to produce force not peaked for competition which is like sets of 1 2 3 rep so the basic foundational getting stronger and stronger type of training is best done in roughly 3 to 6 rep range per set ok it's so like sets of 3 sets of 5 sets of 6 stuff like that that those sets build basic strength the best right however overall hypertrophy overall hypertrophy not the kind of a per trophy that translates to strength the best which we'll get into

later overall hypertrophy is actually best stimulated in the 5 to 30 rep range right when I used to be a power lifter and I was dabbling in some hypertrophy training I would do dumbbell presses 4 sets of 20 and my powerlifting buddies correctly were like dude what are you doing like that's not gonna make you stronger and fundamentally they had a really really good point if it was gonna make me stronger it was gonna 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 4 sets of 3 to 6 you get your best strength results if you train 4 sets of 5 to 30 reps close to failure you get your best size results gee-whiz I'm no mathematician it's a really small overlap you can do sets of 5 you can do sets of 6 and that's it ok you have two types of sets - dude - rapper not even ranges to 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 4 sets of 5 and 6 and get a decent measure of hypertrophy shake yes your variation is gonna be very low so after a while your results are gonna suck because you're not mixing it up enough but fundamentally you're just missing out on a lot right so I'm gonna be like why don't you do sets at and someone's like why don't you do sets of 3 to get even more peak strength relative to what you have now yeah well I kind of want both but it's a very very tiny overlap in

sort of that's not the greatest thing in the world right we can do better if we're gonna optimally get for hypertrophy where 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 a like a clean food only diet and you're like I'm having fish and chicken like bland like it was white rice like is they happen to have that at the buffet but they also have 50 trillion other things

you know maximize your buffet experience don't go there a diet can you sure if you're gonna maximize your diet stay at home you don't have a little smells distracting you so on and so forth just the same the strength rep ranges for here I perturb your brain just tiny overlap but it's really large it's way over there and truthfully if you stick to the five to six reps negative that's a five in sets of six you're just sort of in that general range or 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 ten or twenty then the fatigue accumulates are really fast and really messes you up so even if you get pretty good or close to optimal short-term hypertrophy results doing let's say sets of six and great short-term strengths results you can't keep that going in the hyper tree front so because the volumes are too high for those

low rap 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 gonna 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 ten or something like that especially overtime 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 your best of 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 I approach of your 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 live for any reps anymore okay you were doing them for such a fore last week you got too much fatigue now instance of one it's just Hannibal right so at the same time while strength training fatigues you more percent it actually is optimal for you to never do with 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

which is great because you can do a lot of it but it doesn't also require rights it doesn't also require a high degree of preparedness so not only can is the fatigue allow you to get more productive sets in but also you can get even more fatigue because you don't have to be spot-on for I purchase between to work well you can be pretty fatigued and it still works are a great so essentially hypertrophy sees higher stimuli with way higher volumes and strength training or does and the result to get a little bit technical real

quick from volume landmarks and you can google all the stuff just google hypertrophy is route al guide and you'll just go right to the RP website and read of all the 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 Ungerman and effective volume all 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 and that's like full-on well into that you know maximum to have two volume that's and meat potatoes work where on the other hand that might just be a little bit above what maintains your quads for hypertrophy and something like sixteen sets of quads for that same person is totally possible and close to optimal for muscle growth but sixteen would just not even be survivable for a week on strength training 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 gonna 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 both optimally at the same time progression differences this one's super straightforward intensity loading progression is everything in strength so you get stronger not by doing more sets of 200 pounds you will put on some muscle and your work capacity will go off and that's nice and it will make you stronger for a while but not optimally this

is the least rocket science shit I'll ever say it 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 on each week but when you are asked for key you have to present a bigger stimulus and strength training where is that bigger gonna come from is it going to be more reps is it going to be more sets 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 there 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 to next week zero the week after they start how you're recovering 2 again 1 again and then all of a sudden you've traversed a

huge progression and set numbers and that got you a lot of growth that does not work very well for strength because your fatigue or what was it and you'll do a whole lot of nothing and why the hell you adding sets to begin with you get fundamentally the most strong by adding load so 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 5 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 they're adding 15 pounds definitely the right choice for strength in this example but the 5 pounds in one set probably the right choice for hypertrophy now and in 15 pounds will add hypertrophy it it's good but not the best the best hypertrophy probably come 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 that 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 could increase it's either one of 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 5 by 5 4 by 4 3 by 3 great strength progression but then decrease and 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 ten on Tuesday you can do the same exercise four sets of ten to twenty and you're probably not gonna get hurt

and you 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 ten 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 twenty

to thirty again your muscle has recovered each time your joint significant issues if not but that's that's the twenty to thirty they don't even they're too light to beat up your joints to connective tissues the 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 connective tissues tissues beat up as much because the rep ranges are on average or higher

that 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 then 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 their strength along and they're certainly not pushing our Jaffee long what would that look like so

for example a better strength sort of weekly undulated pattern would be on Monday doing like sets of 2 to 4 reps at a nine RPE really really tough really really heavy Wednesday new sets of four to six reps still strength this time at an 8 RP it's a 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 2 to 4 again but at a 6 RPE leak you basically doing the same loads you did Wednesday for 4 to 6 but now you're doing 4 sets 2 to 4 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 isn't directly enhance strength either so in this example you have to stimulate of strength sessions per week fundamentally in one recovery session to get ready for

next week whereas in the hypertrophy example you have 4 stimulative hypertrophy sessions you can't really do the same heart training frequency for both ok 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 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 your

training like at a decent frequency but nothing to write home about and you're gonna be hanging out on optimal hyper to result someone could say for that Friday work out they watch you do you know sets of two to four reps and at a 6rp 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 as that'll beat me up too much for an axe 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 you look right sweet we're gonna focus on hack squats and leg presses if they've been in any sport there's relator string sport long enough to be like don't you mean like lower squat and

like well no you said stronger legs it doesn't really matter which exercise like well I'm mad at stronger squad 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 are 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 actually as 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 then if you do squats squats squats right if you're training for optimizing strength optimizing strength and you want your squat to go up your programs probably gonna look a whole lot like squat squat squat and someone who 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 power lifters train with like two or three exercises like squats front squat maybe one or the derivative occasionally I'll do a leg press and my bodybuilders trained with nine or ten different exercises because they get better overall development plain and simple next strength training is just not ideal with some exercise right you don't develop strength on cable push downs you don't develop strength on lateral

raises you more compound variations you might develop strength better on JN presses you might develop strength better on upright rows so if you're choosing exercises there's gonna be at some point we have to give up the best hypertrophy exercises to do more strength or give off the best strength exercises 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 the interest the intra week variation right so if you're sticking to hypertrophy training you do a

lot more exercises usually than strain training that's a downside for strength training Observatory per trophy 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 squad up there in strength what about in hypertrophy the high bar squats are great exercise but there's only so many you can do until your lower

back gives out and maybe you switch to hack squats or leg presses but as far as making 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 and that most much of a neural Drive component usually can't load them as heavy safely it's just not as great for strength so some of the best exercises for hypertrophy are just not gonna make you as strong potentially if that's just like with lateral raises an 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 want to choose optimal hypertrophy versus if you want to choose optimal strength development it's gonna be like the power lifter is gonna be over there doing jam presses and you make butt cable tricep extensions they're good no not really 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 a little bit is actually possible for some groups of people to get good results with here are some recommendations as to how to structure plan to the best with what you have right first of all you're gonna choose as far as all of your exercises for any given session you're gonna choose more compound freely 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 there's many cables you're gonna

be doing more barbells more dumbbells so on and so forth in each session or almost each session the first thing you're gonna 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 all right accessory movements to enhance hypertrophy are going to be performed performed after in probably the 6 to 12 rep range because 6 to 12 grows a great deal of muscle but neurologically it's not as different as sets of 20 or 30 those would prepare a nervous system very

poorly for strength that actually sort of potentially make it even short-term worse at strength sets of 6 to 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 60 sets of 6 to 12 in the accessory movements but you want the accessories to be very related to your strength movements so there's still strength-enhancing for example a bodybuilder might do some squats and move on to like

extensions as a person who's doing a hybrid training concurrent program who wants to enhance power and strength as much as our 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 down scott 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 can definitely do more set of sets of leg press them then hack squat and they beat me up less well yeah an or a leg extension more on the hack squat yeah but you're definitely missing out you're not gonna be getting your optimal hypertrophy but you're going to be doing a decent job at it while getting as strong as you can give in that context number four you're going to begin at your hypertrophy minimum effective volume that means you're getting some palms you get a

little soul nothing to write home about you're not getting souperblast crazy optimum workouts and you're gonna stick close to it and you're gonna progress mostly in load week to week maybe you progress in sets a little bit that's a for example if your minima fective volume is roughly 10 sets per week for hypertrophy and maximum recoverable is like 20 if you're doing concurrent program you start at 10 and you just increase load more than you usually would maybe you end at 10 or maybe end to 12 you sure as hell aren't going to 20 that

is how a concurrent program at 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 face potentiate what does that mean it's a shoe per 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 want to be bigger and stronger in the long term you stick mostly in the 6 to 15 rep range but you start each session with strength building exercises 4 sets

of 5 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 are ready to transition a strength which is what you do next so after two to three ounces of hypertrophy training hypertrophy for strength you do strength training and what you do 2 to 3 mezzos mostly sets of 3 to 6 right at your strength maximum adaptive volume which could be like 7

you know 6 that's 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 delt 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 want to do we're relatively strength focus stuff but also keep the hypertrophy stuff on the backburner that's not going

to cost you a lot of fatigue is gonna cost you some but that's the price you pay being both as strong and as jacked as you can possibly be after that you take a 1 to 3 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 program would look those last two are in the context of getting as Jack 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 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 lack process so you're

biased pretty well into strength but you get some decent I per trophy as well early 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 little reps less accessory sets later in the week you could do less strength work in a little bit more hypertrophy work potential 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 for 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 of way more practice right still the same number of sets here but it's way more practice at the actual lifts 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 two strength quad focus for a few massive cycles after that after an active a car is days you 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 gonna get you a ton stronger but aids are pretty heavy and you're ready to transition to strength right after you stop now and it's just two sets we have more fatigue left over more volume our next three sets are going to be twelve 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 cycles 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 know you can optimize strength or you can optimize hypertrophy but ideally if you want both size and strength you do several math cycles of strength with hypertrophy in mind with a backburner hypertrophy and then several mouth 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 gonna notice optimal versus who won't here's the deal beginners can just do sets of basically five to ten reps they build so much hypertrophy and so much strength off such a minimal stimulus they literally just get the best of all 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 that's a five and ten or sets of five to ten reps boost the 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 sighs mostly strength or somewhere 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 mix strength and a per trophy 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 faceook bias a

little bit more so you still can do a concurrent program but like some messes cycles would be a little bit more biased towards hypertrophy and then some mesocycles would 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 seeing that shit and I'll see you next time for the next video