Episode 19 - Does Work Output Even Matter?

Is 9,8,8,8 across four sets of your 10 rep max better than 10,7,6,5?If so I know at least one thing the difference is not going to show up in an 8-week study on recreationally "trained" subjects.I also don’t think you would see a difference in hypertrophy at even 16 weeks in highly trained individuals...you might see a significant difference in dropouts or injuries, but that is just conjecture on my part.But, I still think the majority of your training on compound lifts should be done in this manner. On isolation lifts you probably have more leeway to break out the fancy shit.Let’s face it, you can always do more volume. You can drop the reps and/or drop the weight and in theory train forever accumulating all the "effective" sets ever. But, there has to be a point where it just becomes junk reps and junk volume, where what you are doing is potentially worse than nothing...blasting up your RPE in the name of increased recovery time.We also don’t really know if you equate hard sets if actual work volume completed is critical or if so how critical, but given the research on strength and exercise order, it likely has some implications over the long-term in highly trained lifters.Therefore, we at BroResearch are willing to take the stance on albeit tumultuous ground that if you are training with the primary goal of increasing muscular tension it is likely best to structure your training in a way where you have the least amount of rep drop-offs at the highest training weight for your target rep range (especially on multi-joint high-skill movements).*It is worth stating that this total work volume over the session may not matter and likely none of this matters for untrained subjects because they have more or less cooked the system at one or two sets closish to failure per muscle group. References for Episode 19https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28965198/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29112055https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.00775.2016https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26308090https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14715039https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22510801https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4763829/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23438229https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17461391.2020.1733672https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31188644/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27941492https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30248269https://www.strongerbyscience.com/effective-reps/