This plate has less holes in it than the McMaster study
A recent study from McMaster University claims heavy lifting is not necessary to build muscle. Don’t trade in your Nautilus machines and barbells for pastel rubber dumbbells yet, though, because the study is severely flawed.
From an article on the study at Science Daily;
“Rather than grunting and straining to lift heavy weights, you can grab something much lighter but you have to lift it until you can’t lift it anymore,” says Stuart Phillips, associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University. “We’re convinced that growing muscle means stimulating your muscle to make new muscle proteins, a process in the body that over time accumulates into bigger muscles.”
The biggest problem with this claim is the authors did not directly measure muscle hypertrophy. Rather than a long-term training study, this was a basic experiment where changes in muscle-protein synthesis were measured by muscle biopsy at 4 and 24 hours post-exercise and the authors assumed this would correlate to hypertrophy.
The 15 subjects in the study were tested for their leg extension 1 repetition maximum, then assigned to perform two of three protocols:
- 90% of 1RM to failure
- 30% of 1RM “work matched”
- 30% of 1RM to failure
By “work matched” the authors meant they tried to set the number of reps used in the second protocol to match the mechanical work performed using the first protocol. For example, if your 1RM was 100 pounds you would use 90 pounds for the first protocol. If you get 4 reps with 90 pounds you’ve got 360 units of work (assuming range of motion is consistent between protocols we can factor out distance). If you divide 360 units of work by 30 pounds you get 12 reps. [...]
21. August 2010
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