A prolonged capacity to increase muscle size & strength in males without sufficient (pubertal) testosterone levels is a myth sold to us by the fitness & supplement industry. It’s a myth that’s been bought into by scores & scores of individuals, and nowhere is this more evident than in IG comments sxn’s, wherein armies of adoring observers rush to defend the natty claims of influencers sporting extraordinary fizeeks, the procurement of which they attribute to years of disciplined training.
The advertised formula for natty success assumes that discipline, married to a significant investment of time, will get you the fizeek you want eventually, and honorably so. You just have to persevere, and over the years, you’ll get your dream fizeek despite abstaining from juice. And while I respect this formula for all that it stands for, this isn’t a Disney production, and not everything plays out this cleanly.
Counts et. al.
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Counts et. al. reviewed several studies that measured muscle size at 3 different time-points b4, during, and/or after a resistance training regimen. These studies specifically included presumably post-pubertal individuals, since the inclusion criteria required >17 years of age for all participants. Counts et. al. found that, for one, muscle growth occurred abruptly in the regimen, and for two, muscle growth stalled out relatively soon;
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Not only were plateaus evident within 3 months of the commencement of these resistance training protocols, but they developed despite efforts for progressive overload.
Further evidence of the sheer difficulty in ongoing muscle strength & size gains experienced by trained individuals comes in the form of a study carried out by Gentil et. al. in college students (all w/ >/= 1 year of continuous resistance-training experience). The study itself sought to determine the difference that resistance-training frequency would make on both muscle size & strength adaptations when volume is equivalent. Group 1 condensed all their weekly volume into one longer resistance-training session, while Group 2 distributed the workload across two sessions per week. The study found that neither group increased their strength after 10 weeks. Hell, Group 1 even had negative delta values in peak torque (a surrogate for strength).
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It’s worth noting here though that Group 1 did experience significantly increased elbow flexor muscle thickness despite the negative delta values for peak torque, but the study authors go on to suggest that the novelty of the training stimulus may have been causative therein;
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You see, all study participants had been training each muscle group twice per week for four months prior to the commencement of the study. So while Group 2 simply went on to continue at this frequency, Group 1 instead experienced a novel stimulus that consisted of their weekly volume being crammed into just one longer training session per week. It is tempting to speculate that the increased energy demand associated with accumulating all the volume over one single session would increase the demand for energy storage in the muscle, which would then result in an adaptation wherein glycogen load increased. And since every gram of glycogen associates with at least 3g of water3, this sort of adaptation would indeed trigger a potentially measurable increase in muscle thickness for this particular group, even in the absence of actual myofibril hypertrophy. As such, the results of this study are not suggestive in any way of the strength-capacity-increasing myofibril hypertrophy.
Counts et. al. suggest that muscles are metabolically demanding to maintain, and that’s why plateaus are hit so abruptly after beginning a resistance training regimen;
![[1]](https://i0.wp.com/fizeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/image-2.png?resize=586%2C210&ssl=1)
While this might just be accurate to some degree, I don’t believe this explains it all. I think there’s more to it, that it’s about the evolutionary significance of puberty relative to the rest of an adult’s lifespan. I think humans are wired to become flexible in terms of strength & size during the pubertal, heavy-activity, developmental years, and from post-puberty onwards, with declining testosterone as the cue, the body shifts into strict maintenance mode. No more growth, only maintenance & survival. It’s a theory that insinuates that failure to put size on during puberty means that you’re relegated to a certain ceiling of muscle size & strength forever after. That is, of course, unless you hack your endocrinology with some sauce.
References
- Counts BR, Buckner SL, Mouser JG, Dankel SJ, Jessee MB, Mattocks KT, Loenneke JP. Muscle growth: To infinity and beyond? Muscle Nerve. 2017 Dec;56(6):1022-1030. doi: 10.1002/mus.25696. Epub 2017 Jun 11. PMID: 28543604.
- Gentil P, Fisher J, Steele J, Campos MH, Silva MH, Paoli A, Giessing J, Bottaro M. Effects of equal-volume resistance training with different training frequencies in muscle size and strength in trained men. PeerJ. 2018 Jun 22;6:e5020. doi: 10.7717/peerj.5020. PMID: 29942690; PMCID: PMC6016534.
- Fernández-Elías VE, Ortega JF, Nelson RK, Mora-Rodriguez R. Relationship between muscle water and glycogen recovery after prolonged exercise in the heat in humans. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2015 Sep;115(9):1919-26. doi: 10.1007/s00421-015-3175-z. Epub 2015 Apr 25. PMID: 25911631.