@goliathliftzz: It’s very useful to look back at previous enthusiast and masters of the Sport to understand things that maybe we have trouble explaining today or do we have trouble understanding the main foundational concept. The “therapeutic window” analogy gives us a surprisingly simple way to think about something we tend to make extremely complicated in bodybuilding. In medicine, we can think about a drug as having a range where the dose is high enough to produce the effect we want without the cost becoming unnecessarily high. Within the HIT tradition, a similar idea was applied to training, and it eventually became strongly associated with Mike Mentzer’s Heavy Duty philosophy. The premise: Training is the stimulus, not the growth itself. We go into the gym, expose the muscle to mechanical loading, create fatigue and initiate a series of responses that we eventually adapt to. If we don’t provide enough stimulus, there isn’t much reason for our body to adapt. If we provide enough and recover from it, we can grow. We now have quite a bit of evidence showing us that muscle can grow under a surprisingly wide variety of conditions. We can grow using relatively LIGHT OR HEAVY loads, we don’t have to take every set to FAILURE, we can distribute our weekly training across different FREQUENCIES, AND, when we look at VOLUME, more sufficiently hard sets tend to produce more hypertrophy on average, but that doesn’t mean every additional set gives us the same return. (PubMed) That last part is makes the therapeutic-window analogy really useful for us: Instead of imagining one magical amount of training that sits between “not growing” and “overtraining,” we can think about a productive range (between minimum effective volume and maximum recoverable volume). And that range isn’t necessarily going to stay in the same place for us all the time. Training doesn’t happen independently from the rest of our lives! This is also why I don’t think soreness or simply feeling destroyed after a workout tells us much about whether we found the “perfect” dose. Muscle damage and hypertrophy aren’t the same thing! Work from Damas and colleagues helps show why an enormous acute response to unfamiliar, damaging training shouldn’t automatically be interpreted as more actual muscle growth. (PubMed) For us, the goal isn’t to find the least amount of training we can possibly do, and it isn’t to accumulate the most work we can survive either. We’re trying to find enough high-quality work to create a progressive stimulus while still allowing us to recover, adapt and come back capable of doing it again. Sources: Schoenfeld, Ogborn & Krieger (2017) — Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Pelland et al. (2026) — The Resistance Training Dose Response: Meta-Regressions Exploring the Effects of Weekly Volume and Frequency on Muscle Hypertrophy and Strength Gains. Grgic et al. (2022) — Effects of resistance training performed to repetition failure or non-failure on muscular strength and hypertrophy. Schoenfeld et al. (2017) — Strength and Hypertrophy Adaptations Between Low- vs. High-Load Resistance Training. Schoenfeld, Grgic & Krieger (2019) — How many times per week should a muscle be trained to maximize muscle hypertrophy? Damas et al. (2016) — Resistance training-induced changes in integrated myofibrillar protein synthesis are related to hypertrophy only after attenuation of muscle damage. Stults-Kolehmainen & Bartholomew (2012) and Stults-Kolehmainen, Bartholomew & Sinha (2014) — psychological/life stress was associated with impaired recovery of muscular function after strenuous resistance exercise, including effects tracked over 96 hours in the latter study. #goliathliftzz #hypertrophytraining #gymknowledge #sciencebasedtraining #buildmuscle

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Monday 28 September 2026 19:50:05 GMT