Question about "Training for Strength and Hypertrophy..." articled linked by Austin

Training Q&A [Moderated]
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Hi guys,
I have a question for you regarding the article named “Training for Strength and Hypertrophy: An Evidence-based Approach” linked by Austin on the BBM FB page.
I recognize that the conclusions drawn by the authors of the paper are coherent with your line of thinking, however there is a particular sentence that got me wondering: “In conclusion, volume appears to be an ostensible mediator of RET-induced muscular hypertrophy in resistance-trained individuals [10,18], and it is clear that individuals should perform well over 10 repetitions/muscle/week [7]** but less than 15 sets/muscle/week [12, 13] to amass a weekly training volume that is necessary for RET-induced muscular hypertrophy” (something similar is said for RET-induced strength).
Even though I realize that this treshold of 15 sets/muscle/week is not a magical number but it’s an average quantity derived from statistical observations, it looks rather low to me, for a number of reasons:

  1. The 4 day Hypertrophy templates calls for ~20 sets of squat+deadlifts (combined) at week 4, without considering myoreps and sets at RPE < 7
  2. Jordan often challenges people to overtrain, in an attempt to make them realize they are probably undertrained and not under-recovered
  3. In episode #51: “Interview with 63kg National Powerlifting Champion Samantha Calhoun”, Austin said that he threw at her an exorbitant amount of work to achieve those results. I’m worried this “15” might steer people into thinking that they are not progressing because they are doing too much, something like what happened to Alan Thrall before meeting Austin: he thought to be under-recovered, but instead was undertrained.

Therefore, what you guys think about this?
My answer is that as long the weekly volume is increased gradually, and that every training session is not an RPE 10, I wouldn’t be worried too much about that threshold, but rather I would expect doing more to be beneficial, because the amount of work you are adapted to should be considered in the equation as well.

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Yes, there is substantial inter-individual variation here – so much that it’s pointless to prescribe an absolute threshold like this across the population, so I would probably ignore those “hard numbers” for prescriptive purposes.

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Hi Austin,
Thank you for the answer.
Since there is a significant inter-individual variation, how would you assess whether the volume you prescribed to your clients is too much? (assuming they are not overshooting the RPE of their sets)

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Performance trends, training. history, subjective feedback, sRPE, aches/pains/injuries, trial and error … lots of things go into this assessment.

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