Dr. Duncan French

So if the load was too high and an athlete or a participant had to drop the weights on the sixth repetition, we would unload the bar and make sure they completed the 10 repetitions.

Bringing me back to the point of it's an intensity and a volume derivative that is gonna be most advantageous for testosterone release.

Yeah.

And I think it comes back to that intensity factor then.

You know, what we saw with that 10 by 10 protocol really sees pretty significant drop offs in the load.

And again, we're trying to stimulate with intensity, with mechanical strain through intensity, as well as metabolic strain through volume.

And I think that's the paradigm that you've got to look at is that the mechanical load has to come from the actual weight on the bar and the volume is the metabolic stimulus.

How much are we driving lactate?

How much are we driving fat?

glycogenolysis in terms of that type of energy system for executing a 10 by 10 protocol.

And what we often saw was just a significant reduction in the intensity capabilities of an athlete to sustain that.

So we shortened the volume to try and maintain the intensity.

The rest is often the consideration that's overlooked out there in general population and in many sporting environments.

The rest is as important a programming variable as the load and the intensity, the load, the volume, etc.

If you extend the duration of your rest periods, what you're ultimately doing is influencing that metabolic stimulus again.

You're allowing the flushing of the body, the removal of waste products, lactate to be removed from the body, and then the metabolic environment is reduced.

Correct.

And in layman's terms, if the same objective, the same training goal is just muscle tissue growth, and we're not talking about maximal strength or any of those type of parameters, we're just talking about growing muscle.

If there's an athlete A and they do six sets of 10 with two minutes rest and there's athlete B that does six sets of 10 with three minutes rest, athlete A will likely see the highest muscle gains because of the metabolic stimulus that they're driving with the shorter rest periods.

Yeah, I mean, I think that comes back to your training age and your training history.