[Angela Foster] (0:00 - 0:31)
For women who really enjoy just working in a slightly higher rep range, they don't want to do five by five. They enjoy going to the gym, lifting somewhere, depending on the exercise, between eight and 15 reps. They like mixing in a little bit of hit.

They like doing something that's low intensity. If they're, I don't know, they wake up more tired or they just want to go out for a walk in nature. Is there a reason that they need to go and lift five by five or three reps and get close to that one rep max?

Do we need to do that?

[Eric Helms] (0:31 - 4:39)
I would say, frankly, no. The main way that we stimulate bone to grow is higher mechanical tension on those bones. But the amount that it takes to actually stimulate that bone growth is not necessarily the most amount you can put on your body.

Right. I would say that especially if you're getting out and doing things like hikes, walking, and you're getting some degree of some type of impact, it doesn't need to be like jumping or plyometrics, which is sometimes proposed. And just so long as you have for the other bones in your body, besides like your spine and your hips and your legs, you have some ability to generate force.

Because the way that we primarily produce tension on bone is by the two tendons that attach to it, pulling towards the centre of the muscle contraction. I think here's the litmus test that I would ask the audience to ask themselves. Let's say I do like training in the eight to 15, maybe even 15 to 25 range.

Are my loads changing over time? Or am I doing kind of the same eight to 15 or 15 to 25 reps? Is it still the same weight that's on the bar, on the cable stack, same band tension, whatever load I'm using?

When was the last time I opted? And if that number is, you know, progressing at the pace that you can, and it hasn't been stagnant for a while, you're doing it right. That means that there is some type of adaptation occurring.

You are getting stronger. And if you're getting stronger, that means you're upping the load within that rep range. That means it is steadily providing that higher tension stimulus to your bones.

And that is fabulous. And you can get stronger in any rep range. Is gaining strength slightly more efficient if you're lifting heavy weights?

Well, if you define strength as say, you're one rep max, you know, absolutely. You know, when I was still competing in competitive strength sport, powerlifting, which I've done, like, you know, 20 meets, and I've coached 100 plus people to the platform. If they said, Hey, Eric, if I prefer to lift an eight to 15 rep range, could I do that?

I'd say, I mean, we could, but you realise when you get on the platform, you're gonna have to do a one rep max on squat bench and deadlift. But I think the thing is that a specific sport performance goal or achieving maximal strength are not necessarily the same thing as getting your body to continually adapt. And that really comes down to progressive overload.

And that just means that as you gain more fitness, you kind of have to meet your body where it's at. And now it's at a higher place, which is a wonderful thing. But if you are new to lifting weights, and you're not used to it, it can kind of be a little bit of a difference in mentality.

It's like it's never meant to get easy. The weights are never meant to get light. It's meant to always be continually challenging.

It's just that each time you build more strength, then you go, All right, well, now I get to up the challenge. So I think you have to learn to get addicted to the dopamine hit, and the self efficacy building of going like, Oh, wow, my old 10 rep max is now my 20 rep max. How cool is that?

But that's totally fine. And there is no data to indicate that that is insufficient to prevent like the age or hormonal change related losses of bone mass that people can get and subsequent impact on sarcopenia. All the data would indicate that if you're in there and you're training progressively, and all the trials would show interventions that that does have massive impacts.

So could I make an argument that maybe would be slightly better if we wanted to maximise bone growth to be, you know, a competitive master's powerlifter versus someone who consistently like to get their pump on? Sure. But now we're talking about trying to, like major in the minors.

You know, if you're trying to win the bone mineral density Olympics, that's a little different than I want to like live healthy and never have to worry about this. If I fall, I'm strong enough to catch myself. And even if I wasn't, I probably wouldn't wouldn't get hurt if I if I did hit the ground.

[Angela Foster] (4:39 - 5:39)
If you're getting value from this show, the single best thing you can do to help us keep bringing you the highest calibre guests is to subscribe or follow wherever you listen or watch it takes 10 seconds, but it genuinely makes a difference to the quality of the guests we bring you week after week. That's a great point. And I think for women listening to this, that would be their concern is the longevity aspect around bone.

When we're looking at shape, I think it's something different, right? So I think when women, women listening to this, women's clothes are tailored, right? What everyone wants.

And I think this is where women can feel that their body starts to betray them is they feel like they don't have the same shape, the same curves, the fats being redistributed, right? So they're not getting their waist come in, they might not feel like their glutes are developing at the same rate that they want them to. So when we're looking at that from an aesthetic perspective, because I think that's important to many people, what kind of rep range and frequency should we be looking at?

[Eric Helms] (5:39 - 12:39)
Great question. Yeah. So this is where the the data on just how to build as much muscle as possible and, and which, which is for sure, the best way to change your shape and your aesthetic more specific place, but I think a lot of people have shame around their body don't like what they see in the mirror, and they want to change that.

And I think the first thing to really acknowledge is that good things sometimes come from a place of unease, dislike. But ultimately, you want to get to a place where it is a joy to feel like you have the agency to change your body and move. And even though you might be doing that for the purposes of aesthetics, that's ideally where you want to get to for this to be a long term enduring habit that does really become part of your life and give you the functional but also awesome looking cool body that you have.

I see it like my continual art project as a bodybuilder. So with that little bit of cautionary tale on the front end, just because I can see how this can always become a negative, it's easy to focus on the part that you don't like, which is often I don't like the body fat, I don't like the body fat here, and I want it to go. And you can find people telling you to do certain things to get it to go.

And then you will often become focused on repeated diet cycles, cardio, and kind of like the fat loss part of this. And my recommendation would be to really invest in the muscle building side of things. Because if you haven't seriously approached lifting weights or trying to build a whole lot of muscle mass before, you can make some pretty awesome changes in the short term.

The newbie gains are something that all of us bodybuilders look back on with with fond memories of how we gained, you know, 80% of the muscle we ever built in the first couple years of weight training. But we did it eating a sufficient amount and coming into it with optimism and our wide eyed bushy tailed, young lifting, you know, mentality where we are excited every day about the ability to put just another rep in that set or another, you know, two and a half kilo plate on the bar. And I think that mentality is really, really important and fun.

So the amount of muscle mass that someone can build is much higher early on, it doesn't matter that you're this now in your, your late 30s, 40s, early 50s, even later than that, we have robust data showing that in this age range, you can build a tremendous amount of muscle relative to your total potential and strength with progressive regular training. So what does that look like? Well, it should basically be a relatively balanced cross muscle groups approach, where you are training anywhere in the six to 20 rep range, I would say in most cases, and coming close to muscular failure on most of your sets.

So what you should see is an actual visible, and you should feel that the bar speed or the cable speed or the dumbbell speed is slowing down by the end of that set, even though you're trying to move it faster. I think when people are new to lifting weights, it's difficult to tell when they're at their max capacity. And if you have a spotter or if you're using a machine, it's good to actually test yourself do as many reps with that load as you can do until you can't even move it, you're actually failing a rep.

It's not unsafe, you know, if you do have a spotter, if you can maintain form, and especially on machines where it's, you know, only going to move in one plane or direction. And that'll help anchor what does failure look like? Because ideally, you're doing most of your sets in kind of that one to three reps from failure range, and occasionally, when it is safe to do so training to failure.

And that's how you know whether or not you're training quote unquote hard enough on a per set basis. So in that rep range, pretty much anything can work, you're going to find that certain combinations of exercises, rep ranges and proximities to failure make a whole lot more sense than others. If you're doing a full body compound lift, like a deadlift or a squat, and you're training to failure in that 20 rep range, that is also now a huge cardio metabolic challenge that is going to be very, very tiring.

And it will be a challenge in other ways, which if that's your jam, go for it. But if we're looking to put together the most effective training session for building muscle, you probably want to be more in the moderate range, a few reps from failure on something like a squat or a leg press or a lunge initially. And then as you move through other exercises that train a little bit less muscle mass at once, so it's not as much of a cardio respiratory challenge, that's when you can push closer to failure, do higher reps.

And this gives you opportunities to deal with your own personal injury history, any kind of pain or discomfort you get in any given joints, you can reduce the load, increase the load, train slightly heavier, train slightly lighter. But yeah, you want to train across muscle groups. And essentially, what you're trying to do is give yourself a sufficient volume, which we describe as a total amount of work you're doing to produce an adaptation.

So the adaptation itself of hypertrophy is largely built on just having sufficient mechanical tension, which is a complex way of saying, getting that muscle to think it needs to grow. So it actually needs to reach the point of fatigue in moderate or high rep ranges, so long as it gets there, and then be exposed to enough of that to get a pretty solid growth stimulus. So in terms of reasonable ranges of volume and frequency, if you can train each muscle group, somewhere in the range of I would say a good starting place would be say, 6 to 12 sets per week per muscle.

Direct sets is a useful way of doing it. And taking those sets reasonably close to failure, having, you know, two to three exercises per muscle group, so you can train it and get different skills and different angles, because the body is complex. You have some muscles that do certain things, others that do others, and you have different compartments in them.

So a few different angles, unilateral, bilateral, you know, pick your poison and enjoy. And I find that if you're looking for that number of sets per muscle group per week as a starting point, you'd probably be training each muscle group one to two times a week. So you could have an alternating upper lower split where you train anywhere from two to four times a week.

That's a pretty basic and easy way to set it up. And then from there, you can just see if you can progress. And if you can't, you can kind of get a bit of an audit on different aspects of your life.

Is your nutrition supporting it? Are you being really restrictive, struggling with sleep, and maybe you don't have enough of a good enough recovery environment? Or do you think it's gotten quite easy?

Maybe you had a background as an athlete, you're doing your 10 sets, and you're not seeing much growth. And you know what I could do another day, it may be just a dosing issue. And you could just push a little more.

And nothing wrong with that either. So that's a good kind of generalised guideline starting point for most people.

[Angela Foster] (12:39 - 13:37)
If I can just drill into that a little bit, because I think people may have heard this, just so they really understand it. So if we take, for example, somebody's trying to get stronger, get their let's take pick an area of the body, they're trying to make their back, develop their back, right muscle strength and muscle mass. And so you were saying six to 12 reps, two to three different types of sorry, six to 12 sets, two to three different types of exercises.

So for example, that would include maybe a lat pull down a row. So now we're doing something else. And then maybe one other exercise, I don't know, a face pull or something like this, right?

That would be doing with that meet what you're saying. And then what would then be the gap if they were doing, say, three sets of each of those exercise, we get to nine. So we're not quite up to the sort of 10 to 12, we've got above six, would they then need to repeat that again that week?

Or is once a week enough? How much they need to from that?

[Eric Helms] (13:37 - 18:39)
Yeah, once a week is enough. Is it? Is it the best or the optimal way of doing it?

Not necessarily. I think it all depends upon how much time you have. So I really like taking a constraints led approach.

And how much time and effort does someone want? And will they enjoy and will they consistently apply to their training? So I mean, personally, I train almost every day.

Except when I'm like ill, and I alternate a full body push full body pull. So I do like back, and then glutes and hams. And then I do like press quads, calves.

And then there's some muscle groups, which I train almost every day. And I'm accomplishing more than 20 sets per muscle group per week. And most of them are close to failure.

But I'm also a competitive bodybuilder. And that is what I can fit into my life based upon my schedule. And also I love it.

But if someone else is like, yeah, I don't love training, but I enjoy the feeling and I like what it's doing for me. That'll look a little different, especially if they only started training six months ago. So what's your training background?

What's your injury history? How confident are you in the gym? How far do you have to go?

Are you sitting in traffic? So I think it's really important when you give guidelines like this that people understand that yeah, more is more, but there's diminishing returns. You're going to get a lot more from going from, say, five to 10 sets than you do when you go from 10 to 15 sets based upon the data.

And then you get even less when you go from 15 to 20. It is basically a dose response curve in terms of the dose of training you do. But it's what we describe as diminishing returns.

You're getting a poorer, poorer, and poorer return on investment. There's a certain point where you're doing more, but it's imperceptibly better. And it is maybe not worth it for most people.

So in the example you gave, let's say they're doing a cable row and a lat pull down, three sets of somewhere in the 8 to 15 rep range on Monday. And if they had no more time to train that week, all good. You're kind of in that range.

You will see some pretty decent progress, especially if you're pushing those sets hard. But if you have the time, absolutely. Come back in a couple days later.

Generally, you could train on back-to-back days and train back-to-back muscles. You'd probably be a little bit sore, but you'd still progress. We actually have data showing that.

When you get information on lifting weights, just know that it often comes from that lens. Or you can't train muscle group two days in a row. Or then if you'd really drill down, it's like, well, you can, but it's not ideal.

And why would you do that? It's like, OK, well, maybe because that's my schedule. Fine.

So as a general rule, taking your volume and splitting it up across multiple days per week is the way to do it. Most of the time, I'd recommend training each muscle group two to three times per week to get to the volume you want to get to. And that's going to be dependent upon how long you have in the gym in each session.

If you have four hours a week, you can actually achieve a pretty high volume programme. You can be getting maybe 15 plus sets per muscle group, especially if you have good respiratory recovery. And then you can just have some type of alternating upper lower.

But yeah, in the example you gave, let's say you wanted to get to those 12 sets. Let's say on Tuesday and Friday, you come in and you do some variation of a horizontal pull and a vertical pull. So you're pulling in the vertical plane, like a pull up or a pull down, and then some type of row.

And you can switch up the exercises, or you could switch up the rep ranges, or you could repeat the same thing twice and just see if you can make a small incremental improvement. There's not a wrong or right way to do it there. But I think you do want to make sure that you get some good guidance on how to move if this is a new challenge and a new pursuit for you.

But yeah, the common splits or the approaches you'll see will be upper lower, or you can take a full body approach where you're kind of just dedicating maybe one exercise to each major muscle group. There's also more kind of bodybuilding centric approaches that are like body part splits, chest and back, legs and shoulders and arm, rinse and repeat, or a legs push pull, things like that. Or more creative splits, if you're trying to accomplish higher volumes like the one I mentioned that I personally do.

But really what you're looking for is just trying to find that balance between giving the muscle groups a little bit of time to recover. And then also being able to distribute the amount of total work you're doing across the available sessions you have in a day. And one of the more straightforward and often universally good fit ones are alternating upper lowers.

So four days per week, two uppers, two lowers. You can spread the exercises up a little bit differently. You can have a slightly higher rep day, a slightly lower rep day.

Those tend to be a little more palatable in terms of what's, you can see progress a little easier because you're training in two different rep ranges. You might find you trend better towards one versus the other, or you enjoy one versus the other. Certain exercises match one more than the other, et cetera.

n this episode, Angela speaks with Eric Helms about what the evidence actually says. Eric explains why progressive overload matters more than simply lifting the heaviest weight possible, how women can build muscle effectively across a wide range of rep ranges, and how to structure resistance training for both long-term health and body composition.

They also unpack training frequency, sets per muscle group, proximity to failure and why the best programme is ultimately one you can recover from and consistently follow.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

You Don’t Have to Lift Extremely Heavy — Bone health doesn’t require maximal lifting.
Progressive Overload Matters — Keep increasing the challenge as you get stronger.
A Wide Rep Range Works — Muscle can be built effectively across roughly 6–20 reps.
Train Close to Failure — Aim to finish most sets around 1–3 reps from failure.
Start With 6–12 Sets — Aim for around 6–12 sets per muscle group each week.
Frequency Can Be Flexible — Training each muscle 1–3 times per week can work.
More Isn’t Always Better — Extra training delivers diminishing returns.