There Is A Method to the Madness
This is a podcast where I will be discussing all aspects of physical fitness. I am an exercise physiologist and personal trainer and owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs for the last 25 years. My passion is health and fitness and I am excited to share my views, some stories, interviews and much more with you.
There Is A Method to the Madness
Complex muscles, simple rule: overload wins
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Welcome to There is a Method to the Madness. My name is Rob Maxwell, and I'm an exercise physiologist and personal trainer. I am the owner of Maxwell's fitness programs, and I've been in business since 1994. The purpose of this podcast is to get to the real deal of what really works and most importantly why things work. Hence the name, There Is a Method to the Madness. Before I get to today's show, I want to thank Jonathan and Lynn Gilden of the Gilden Group at Realty Pros. They are committed to providing the highest level of customer service in home sales. Why don't you give them a shout and figure out what your home is worth? 386-451-2412. All right, let's talk about some fitness here. When somebody says, Well, it's complicated, or they might go in the other direction and say, Well, it's really that simple. And have you ever thought that these two totally contrasting ideas are actually a big part of being the same thing? Well, I'm going to talk about that, how it relates to a subject today on physical fitness. I had a client like something I sent them in response to a text kind of like explaining the difference of morphological hypertrophy and breakdown of muscle cells and all this like complicated stuff because he really kind of likes that stuff. Like he's interested in it. Um, he's one of those types of people that if he understands like what's happening, then he is more able to comprehend what he needs to do. And not everybody's like that. I mean, I've been uh and there's not a right, there's not a wrong, there's not a good, there's not a bad. I mean, I've been doing this a really long time. And uh everybody's different, you know. Some people are like, you know, I don't give a rat's fanny about any of that. Just tell me what the frickin' do. And other people are like, want breakdowns, right? And I'm good with it either way. The only time I'm not good with it is if somebody's like purposely being passive aggressive and uh, you know, challenging things. And then maybe I know them already, and so I know they're not really like asking the information so they can get better, they're more or less asking the information so it can stall them to get better, if that makes any sense. So, in other words, they might be stalling, and I just know that they're really just not coming from a good place when they're asking me questions. I mean, for the most part, like I said, I love questions, but I've been doing this a long time. And I know that some people just like to waste people's time, and I'm one that does not like my time wasted. I don't think anybody is on that. So he is one of those that likes to know, and I never feel like he's wasting my time because he legitimately loves the breakdowns, whether I do it like via podcast sometimes, or if I will send him some information, you know, and if I'm able to summarize it in a text message, which I'm not always able to. I mean, sometimes there's deeper things. I might be able to say, you know, when I see you, I'll try to explain that a little better, whatever. But whatever the case may be, he absolutely is the type of person that gets motivated to do more when he hears it. And that's a big part of what I like to do. Like, that's a big part of my job is how can I facilitate somebody getting better and what works for them? Because everybody is different. All right. So I told him, I said, yeah, I mean, I'm gonna do a podcast, but keep in mind that like not everybody really likes the technical stuff. But then again, they have the right to go, I don't want to listen, right? So we're gonna talk about why things can be super complicated and then why it's really not that complicated and why these two things are the same thing. So this all comes up because we were talking about soreness and we're talking about DOMS, which stands for delayed onset muscle soreness. And there's been all these theories through the years as far as what DOMS is, and it's been kind of quite entertaining. Um, you know, most research has always pointed to the fact that DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness, you know, that feeling in your muscles after you've had a particularly different kind of workout, I wasn't gonna say hard workout because that doesn't always do it, but something different, or oftentimes happens with an eccentric load, meaning a lot of negatives, or if you're a runner and you did a race or you ran on a different terrain that requires a lot of downhill running, then that's a lot of eccentric loading. We tend to get more sore from that than we would going up a hill. So it's not always the hard workout, and that's kind of what got us into the subject. It's not always the hard workout that's going to create DOMS. All right. Now, but getting back to this, so the ultimate belief through the years has been that it's been tiny little microfiber tears in the muscle, which creates the DOMS, the soreness in the muscles. And, you know, that's pretty much widely believed, and that's what it is. Now you've had other people come out and say, no, no, no, no. It's inflammation around the muscle. It's like, well, okay, that's kind of the same thing. Like, it's just there's going to be some micro tears, just like you would if you overstretch, and kind of that's what you're doing when you strength train. You're creating little micro tears. So inflammation is going to come whenever there's going to be any form of micro tears, okay? But then you've had these kind of like, oh, it's leftover lactic acid. You had that kind of theory bouncing around for a while. That's what DOMS is. Oh, no. So lactic acid is a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism. So it's in the bloodstream, it's that feeling you get when you're doing leg extensions or whatever, and the muscles start burning. So what you're feeling is an influx of lactic acid into the bloodstream, which is in the muscles, and you're feeling it directly there. Well, as soon as you stop, as you know, that lactic acid goes away immediately. So then it's not like it just sits there in the cells, right? I mean, anybody with any sort of biology degree would go, oh, well, that's true. That's impossible. And it is impossible. So people would bounce around the idea that that's what it was. And then there was all these other things that people used to claim. I don't know why they argue about stupid stuff like that, because we know what DOMS is. But then he said later, and this is what sparked the important part of the conversation, is that he goes, Well, so I was surprised I didn't get very sore from these hamstring curls, the leg curls, because he's got incredibly tight hamstrings, and we often don't hit them isolaterally, and we decided to, or I decided to, and you know, he really felt it, but then he was surprised he wasn't as sore. And that's when I made the casual comment. I said, Well, you know, soreness isn't always an indicator of progress. And and he understands that, I think, for the most part. But then he said, But isn't it somewhat of an indicator? You know, I had to think, I mean, yeah, I mean, if we're gonna say somewhat, yeah, but not really. So, and then I explained to him like there's a lot of damage that goes on when we strength train. And like when we typically feel soreness in the muscle, so what happens often is that when you train heavier or you train at it's not even heavier, if you train at stretched positions, or as I said earlier, if you are doing more eccentric loading. So, what I mean by stretch position, so let's look at a fly for the pectoralis major versus a chest press. So, in a chest press, it's kind of more of a controlled range of motion, and you are not necessarily stretching the pectoralis major a whole lot unless you're really putting your hands out wide and trying to do it. So there is a normal range of motion, but you're not necessarily working that pec from an overly stretched position like you would with a fly. Now pretend you're supine, which means on your back, and you've got your dumbbells above you. But a client do flies today for the first time. So maybe she can picture that right now. And so now you're bringing your arms out to the side, which we call horizontal A B and adduction, and now you're bringing them back in. So as you're going down into abduction, you are now stretching the pectoralis major. So if you have not done resistance exercise in a stretched position, you are gonna get really sore. Does that mean now your pecs are gonna grow more than usual when you normally do like a bench press or a chest press? No, it doesn't necessarily mean that. Like there are other variables involved. So what tends to happen, so there's a difference between maximal strength, general strength, and hypertrophy. Now, and this is where it's like, well, it's more complicated than that, but it's also more simple, okay, or simpler, or at least the way we get there is simpler. But so there's a difference though between those three types of adaptations. Now, adaptations means a semi-permanent change. So that means that we have created the environment where if the person does what they need to do, an adaptation will occur. So hypertrophy, which is muscular cell enlargement, is an adaptation that many people want, many bodybuilders want, many guys want. And, you know, now in 2025, more women want. For the longest time, it was, well, I don't want to get bigger. Now they're understanding that. Well, that's not really what happens, but everybody wants to increase their muscle tone and size to an extent because it raises the metabolism. So now it's not as gender-specific as it used to be, thank goodness, because that used to be one of the real annoying things about my job. So there's that adaptation. Muscular cell enlargement. You say, well, that always happens when you're getting stronger. No, not always. It is not a direct one-to-one relationship. There's a correlative relationship more. So then there's general strength. So general strength is when the muscles themselves are stronger. And general strength tends to fall more in line with, say, hypertrophy. You can kind of get a you can't get any of it without the other, but you can kind of focus more on strength and less on hypertrophy. If you don't go to failure per se, because you're not going to create the metabolic damage that happens when we go through failure in a set. But they're more related to each other than not related to each other. And then finally, and there's others, there's also endurance, but I'm not even going there because it's not really relative to what I'm trying to explain to you today. Then there is maximal strength. Now, maximal strength means the most weight you can push, the highest load you can use to move one time. So that's what maximal strength is. So when you think of, say, a bench press, you know, a young man wants to say, Oh, I can bench press 300 pounds. He's talking maximal strength. Or I want to squat 500 pounds. That's maximal strength. That's what like power lifters care about. That's what high school kids often care about. That's what kids that play, you know, contact sports care about, or even non-contact sports like baseball, because scouts look at that and go, oh, he's he's strong. He's got weight room strength, he can bench this. So that's maximal strength. Now, in the real world, and in the adult world, that's not very practical, right? Because we don't walk around and do like one lifts often. You can say, well, if you do, then the 10 lifts are easier. That is true. But it's just also like maybe not the safest thing to do. And there's better ways to spend your gym time unless you want to be a power lifter or unless like that is your goal. Hey, knock yourself out. Like if you still make bench press as much weight as you can, your ultimate goal. I did that when I was 13, 14, 15 years old, probably a little bit older. Like that was the thing we thought was so important as teenage boys in the 1980s. You know, now I'm like, uh, who cares, right? Um, well, I was gonna tell a funny story that one of my professors in college looked at me one time when I was talking about it and literally said that to me, Maxwell, who cares? If you had that and a million dollars, you'd still only have a million dollars. And I started laughing. Anyway, God love Mr. Gurgly. So um, yeah, I mean, who cares? It doesn't really matter. It's it's more important, I think, and I think most health experts would say to have general strength. Like you generally want to be strong. So what happens though when you're training really heavy, like when you're doing loads like less than five reps to failure, that's that's what we call heavy, heavy loads. What happens is you get a lot of damage to the actual muscle fibers, like literally damage to the muscle fibers. So there is there are proteins that are within every muscle fiber called actin and myosin. All right, they are the myofilaments within the protein fibers. What happens is they cross-bridge each other. That's what a muscular contraction is. The actin crosses over the myosin. I shouldn't say crossover, they come together, all right? They meet in the middle, so to say. Now, when they cross a certain point, that's like that point of no return. So if they're going to contract, they contract all the way, right? That's what muscle fibers do. If it's going to fire, it's going to fire all the way. It's not going to fire halfway. All right. So what happens is when the actin is moving towards the myosin and the myosin is moving towards the actin, eventually it reaches a point called the Z-band. When the Z-band crosses, you can think of a railroad track kind of a deal. And when they cross-bridge each other, the muscle is as contracted as it can be. So what happens then is the actin and the myosin, because of that explosive failure, like really being brought together, it gets kind of like destroyed. The actin and the myosin break down significantly. So the muscle's got to repair itself to come back stronger. And so that person will get maximally stronger. And probably training really heavy like that, you're going to get enough muscle damage where you're really sore. So you're going to most likely, not always, but most likely. And if if you do that along with doing something in a stretched position, for example, if you do like pec flies, really, really heavy, like sets of three or four, your pecs are going to be sore. I don't care how long you've been working out. All right. So if you do that, you're going to get a lot of muscle damage, you're going to be sore. So as I said earlier, it is hard to do one without the other. So most likely you're going to experience some hypertrophy as well. So muscle cell enlargement. Now, the ultimate goal is maximal strength, but most likely through damaging the muscle, the muscles are going to come back stronger and bigger. And so there will be some hypertrophy. But guess what, folks? Without the metabolic damage to the muscle, without the change in the metabolism, there isn't going to be the swelling of the muscle that you're going to see. You're going to see the mechanical breakdown of the muscle fibers, the actin and the myosin, which have to be repaired. And of course, how do we repair that? Principle of what? Recuperation. So you have to make sure that the fuel is there, the protein and the carbohydrates, and you have to make sure that the rest is there. So in other words, if you got up the next day, I keep using pec flies as the example, and you did it the next day, there is no way your pecs are going to grow because now they're the actinomyosin is, you know, I don't want to say destroyed, but definitely break broken down and injured, so to say. And if you continue to pull it, just think about like pulling skin, right? Pulling like a scab, right? I mean, literally your muscles are trying to scab over and heal, and you just rip the scab off again. So you're never going to grow. It isn't going to happen, all right? But you can train for maximal strength like that and not necessarily train for hypertrophy, all right? And vice versa. So let's say somebody only cares about muscular size, then they wouldn't worry about that muscle fiber damage as much. They wouldn't worry about the damage to the actinomyosin. So they wouldn't have to train as heavy. And when I say heavy, I mean heavy, heavy for them. Like heavy is relative. I mean, I once knew a guy when I worked out down in New Smyrna that could close grip 500 pounds 10 times. If you don't work out, maybe you don't know what that means, but let me tell you something. That is beast mode type stuff, right? So that is crazy strong to be able to do that. But for him, because he can do it 10 times, the 500 isn't heavy. In other words, for him to create that kind of damage. So let's see, let me do the math here real quick. So five, so 10 reps is typically equivalent to 75% of your one rep max. So let's see, the 75% of 500. So yeah, he would have to be upwards around 650, which he could bench before he really felt like he's in that three to four to five rep range. All right. So that 500 pounds, if he's used to it and he's not stretching, not going to get overly sore, right? So again, it's relative. So when we talk about heavy loads, we're really talking about your maximal lifts you can do like under five reps. That's what we really kind of call heavy. You know, maximal loads, which again, for 99% of the population, it's silly to do. General strength typically occurs like mostly between 8 and 12, which is why you so often see that rep range being used with a little bit higher and a little bit lower here or there. But that's like general strength ranges there. So when we say heavy, we mean like that 5 RM and heavier for anybody because it's relative, right? So if you wanted the hypertrophy, mostly like again, they go together, but you wouldn't have to train as heavy. You need more metabolic fatigue, which means that you're trying to get that lactic acid built into the muscles. When you're training with really heavy loads, like five and less, you're not gonna feel a burn. You're not into anaerobic metabolism yet. You're in what we call the immediate energy cycle. You're not in anaerobic metabolism, so you're not gonna get the metabolic fatigue. To grow the muscles, hypertrophy, you need the metabolic fatigue because here's why. You need human growth hormone and testosterone. And we all have testosterone. Ladies, you just have less, but there we all have testosterone. When we're in the anaerobic metabolism and you feel the burn, we're also getting a big influx of human growth hormone, um, insulin growth factor F, okay, so that's another form of an anabolic hormone, and then um testosterone. They all are into the muscles, get secreted into the muscles, and we there we can't raise our resting levels of these hormones, which is why some people see depleted states, which is why some people take things they shouldn't take, in my opinion, shouldn't take. But like that's why people do that, all right, because we can't raise our resting levels. But while we're working out in anaerobic metabolism, we are getting an influx of those hormones. So say, so if you want to grow the muscles, you need to create the swelling in the muscle. You need to create the inflammation in the muscle, you need to get the blood in the muscle, you need to get the pump in the muscle. So, what that means is it's not about going really heavy. It's about using moderate loads and going to failure. So you can kind of get more hypertrophy, but less maximal strength. So you're not always going to get sore, but you're still having metabolic damage. And by the way, the metabolic damage can create as much problems with recovery as muscle soreness. I mean, a lot of runners who run a lot, they spend a lot of time in that no man's land, meaning it's kind of comfortably hard, and they create a lot of that metabolic damage, and then they don't realize they're getting so overtrained. And, you know, it creates a systemic problem. They don't sleep as well, they're not motivated, their testosterone levels change, their progesterone levels change. So, like you can create just as much fatigue problems by really metabolically blasting yourself, just as you could really doing training heavy and doing muscle fiber damage. So the bottom line is that you can kind of break it up. And so soreness isn't always a great indicator. And we have to think do we want maximal strength, general strength, hypertrophy? Because then the goal of the workout changes. So that's kind of like what physiologically happens, and it's kind of complicated, right? And I can go into more detail on that, and I like going into more detail on that. Like I like talking about that kind of stuff, it's kind of fun. Talk about percentages and all that stuff, but I promised you I was going to tell you how it's like also that simple. Here's how it's that simple. Overload. Like all this is true, but it really shouldn't change how you work out. That's why it's kind of like, well, yeah, here's the physiological like confusion of it and what happens in the muscle. But then it's also, well, so Rob, what you're telling me is if I want to build size and more than strength, again, I don't want to confuse you. They still happen together just to different degrees. So I want to focus more on being bigger so I can go to the beach and have all these big beach muscles. I don't care how much I bench press. So all I have to do then is focus on more moderate loads and go to failure and get a pump and a burn and all those good things. Yes. Oh, well, I was kind of already doing that. Okay. And you're now telling me though, if I really want to like, you know, change my program and work on total maximal strength, or I want to help my kids do that because he's 18 years old and he wants a college scholarship, and the scouts are saying he needs to see greater strength in his squat and his bench press, then he's wasting his time with high reps and moderate high reps, and he should focus on heavy loads, of course, safely and focusing on compound movements and things like that. Yes, it's that simple. Oh, I was already doing that. We were training kind of heavy, you know, by doing overload. So every time he came to the garage with me and we worked out, we always tried to bench press more weight anyway. Okay, there you go. So, see, all the practical advice you get out there, we still follow. Like it's all kind of true. Like, I don't think I told you anything you may not already know. I mean, we we probably know if we want to get maximally strong, we have to use maximal weights. And if we want to get stronger, we just have to use more weights or more load than we currently use. If we wanted to add bigger muscles, we're probably gonna have to target those muscles, you know, and and do a variety of exercises. So I don't think I've told you anything you don't know, but hopefully I kind of told you why. And maybe you're one of those people that really, really helps you to do that. Um, so there you go to our client out there that wanted to know this information. And as I've said before, if if you want to know something specific, I love answering questions. Email me, text me if you have my number, 386-299-0540. There it is. If you don't, text me and say, Hey Rob, what about this? Can you talk about this next time? I would love to do it. And something else I would really love is that you please send this to people and ask them to download it because then my numbers get better. And when my numbers get better, I get money back and don't have to spend as much money producing the podcast. So it is a win-win. And it's so simple that all you have to do is hit automatic download. And if you feel like it's clogging up your phone or whatever, then once a month, take it out, you know. So we both win. All right, see you next time. Thank you for listening to today's program. I ask you to please follow the show wherever you get your podcasts, and please select automatic download because that really helps the show. Now I want to thank Overhead Door of Daytona Beach, the area's premier garage door company. They have the best product, they have the best service. I personally vouch for Jeff and Zach Hawk, the owners. They are great people with a great company. If you have any garage door needs, please give them a shout at 386 222 3165.
