Minimalism: One set training study design is often faulty

 When it comes to to weight training the most iconic recommendation is: 

-Do 3 sets of each exercise with breaks of 60-120 seconds in between with repetitions anywhere from 8-12 per set!-

This is mostly based on a strange mixture of “Broscience” and the studies of Richard A. Berger.

Those studies he performed gave us a lot of information on which training style to use for specific goals.

Since time is money it astounds me to how little we really understand in order to trigger muscle growth and in this case, those studies have failed to some degree.

Most of the time those studies compared regular one set training to regular three set training in a way that the test subjects did everything the same and only the set number varied.

Surprise, surprise: 3 sets were the better solution in strength and muscle gains.

Problem is: in practice single set training in the form of HIT or ECT is used until failure (and often with very slow cadences).

What is really interesting however is: whether HIT/ECT produces similar results to the regular volume approach with three sets.

Because of monetary limitations it is often not possible to perform a study that looks at the hypertrophy results, as this is usually done viá body scans, which are rather expensive.

As a result most studies looked at the strength comparisons between those two training philosophies.

The problem lies within the fact that strength does not necessarily correlate to muscle mass.

There are neural adaptations on the central nervous system and acquiring the skill to perform an exercise in an improved manner, which leads to a higher weight being lifted.

A good example is a compound movement such as the Deadlift. Perfecting the Deadlift from a movement standpoint often takes a long time.

The central nervous system also has to learn the skill to activate the most amount of muscle cells for each part of the lift as well.

As a result the strength gains in the Deadlift viá those adaptations will be far greater than the strength gains caused by an increase of muscle mass.

This also explains why three set training showed greater promise in many of those studies:

Repetition creates masters. 

It can not be ruled out that the improved strength in many exercises in the three sets studies is mainly because of such adaptations.

Another factor is that even when studies consider the slow repetitions in the HIT/ECT protocol, this even worsens a comparison to other training systems in terms of strength since participants will be more adjusted to the slower cadence and then have to adjust to cadence in which the other group has performed their strength tests.

Therefore strength gains are a bad instrument in measuring the effect of those rivaling training systems.

So how can be determined which training is effective in causing hypertrophy?

First off it is needed to set the correct question to be answered in each study and therefore design it that way.

Open questions are:

Which training shows greater hypertrophy results?

Which training system builds the most muscles in the least amount of time?

Careful study design is crucial but not hard.

Here is one example on how it could look like:

20 men get assigned to two groups. The HIT and the volume group with both groups being as similar in composition as possible, meaning mostly comparable age, height, training experience etc.

The HIT group does only one set until positive (or even negative) failure and every time the participant moves the weight more than 8 times the weight gets increased, the volume group does every set  for 8-12 repetitions three times with the general 60-80% load of the 1 RM and the weight gets increased, when a person is able to lift the weight more often than 12 times each set.

Both groups use the same exercise protocol.

At the beginning of the study the muscle mass gets measured and after the study again with some break between training and measurement to exclude “pump” effects of any sort.

Muscle mass gets determined by body scans such as DEXA.

After the study it also needs to determine how strong the effect size is, meaning which training resulted in the greatest hypertrophy per time invested.

This could lead to some interesting insights in parameters, which increase hypertrophy such as cadence, volume, workload etc.

Too much time has been wasted in the past to settle those easy questions and both systems were often compared by people with a bias towards one or the other.

There are studies, that as I wrote earlier, compared doing only one set with doing three sets and just that, by comparing strength improvements.

Another study concluded HIT to be more effective than volume orientated training, yet the HIT group had more men in its group, leading to greater overall hypertrophy. 

The colorado experiment most likely had an involvement in steroids and worst of all: The list goes on and on.

It is time to end this debate after several decades!