Avoid Weight Training Plateaus & Helping Nonresponders | Dr. Andy Galpin & Dr. Andrew Huberman

It's very common to , to have challenges , activating lots . Yeah , I've noticed that many of the muscle groups that were responsible for a large fraction of the work in the various sports that I played as a young child are muscles that are very easy for me to selectively isolate and induce hypertrophy . And um I suppose I'm one of those mutants where my lats happened to be one such of those muscle groups .

Avoid Weight Training Plateaus & Helping Nonresponders | Dr. Andy Galpin & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Um Yeah , good to do a lot of them . You've established that 10 really to 20 sets per week is the kind of bounds for um maintaining and , and initiating hypertrophy . If I were to like flag one of them , I would say 15 to 20 is the set that you want to get .

Avoid Weight Training Plateaus & Helping Nonresponders | Dr. Andy Galpin & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Um You see the same thing with plateaus . Um So typically it sort of just like , OK , the routine you're on , you've been on it for too long , we need to either go to the other end of the hypertrophy spectrum for intensity , which means like if you've been in the like 60 to 70% of your one or petition max range , maybe we actually need to go heavier . Uh take our repetitions down , maybe even our total volume down and go heavier .

Avoid Weight Training Plateaus & Helping Nonresponders | Dr. Andy Galpin & Dr. Andrew Huberman

And if so , um , so we'll always report those individual data because when you go to the train , you're , you're , you , you're not the group average that's very important to know , right ? So if you do that , you can see a beautiful line of these hyper responders , the bell curve in the middle of the normal responders and those folks who like through any training study just won't get any better . Um If you can tease out what you can't , but let's say in science , you could tease out all the extra factors , total stress load , hydration , sleep , et cetera .

Avoid Weight Training Plateaus & Helping Nonresponders | Dr. Andy Galpin & Dr. Andrew Huberman

It's not that they have a physiological inability , it's just that they , they need a different protocol and a lot of times it's , they just need more volume . So if they can handle that and they're not excessively beat up , just give them more volume and they tend to see a lot of breakthroughs . Um You see the same thing with plateaus .