Why Your Brain Stops You Before Your Muscles Do - with Professor Alan St. Clair Gibson

How many sets does a muscle need to grow, and how much does each extra set add? In this episode of Stronger With Time, I speak with Dr Jake Remmert about volume, frequency and effort, and what the research means for how you program for muscle growth. Jake is an exercise physiology professor at Illinois State University and a strength and physique coach. He did his PhD in Dr Mike Zourdos's Muscle Physiology Laboratory at Florida Atlantic University, is one of the primary authors of the recent meta regression on per session training volume, and co-authored the dose response analysis on weekly volume, frequency and proximity to failure with Josh Pelland and Zac Robinson. Throughout, Jake makes the case that the big rocks (effort, recoverable volume and consistency over time) matter more than the fine details.

Professor Roger Enoka is one of the world’s leading authorities on the neuromuscular system and has spent more than four decades studying how the nervous system produces movement, strength and fatigue. He is the author of Neuromechanics of Human Movement, now in its sixth edition. In this episode of Stronger With Time, we discuss why Type II muscle fibres are not simply high-threshold motor units, why light and heavy loads taken to failure can produce similar muscle growth despite differences in motor unit activity, and what can limit your ability to continue a set as you approach failure. In this episode, we discuss: What a motor unit is, and why muscle fibre type and recruitment threshold are not the same thing

How much of what we do in the gym today is genuinely new, and how much has been around for decades? In this episode of Stronger With Time, I speak with Dr Conor Heffernan about where many of the training ideas we now take for granted came from, how they changed over time, and what their history can teach us about how we train today. Conor is a historian and sociologist of sport at Ulster University whose work focuses on the history of strength training and physical culture. He is the author of The History of Physical Culture and When Fitness Went Global, and writes at Physical Culture Study.

VO2 max matters, but what else determines endurance, and how should you train for it?

Two people can have similar muscle mass and very different levels of strength. What accounts for the difference? In this episode of Stronger With Time, Tony speaks with Professor Paul Comfort, one of the world’s leading strength and conditioning researchers, about what influences strength beyond muscle size, and what that means for training. Paul is Professor of Strength and Conditioning at the University of Salford in the UK, where he leads the Master of Strength and Conditioning program. He also holds an adjunct professorship at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. His research focuses on strength training, force production and the assessment of physical performance. In this episode, they discuss: How strength is assessed, and whether a true one-repetition maximum is as fatiguing as people think