Many gym goers have the need to prove that their training methods are better than other types of training styles, and so does the science-based lifting community.
But is it really the best and most effective way of growing muscle while losing fat? Today, I will answer all your most common questions on this topic.
What is a science-based lifter?
A science-based lifter is a lifter that devotes their time to tracking their progress and always going by schedule, never missing a rep or doing a rep extra. By that, I mean that by having a science-based lifting program, you can never know if you ever went beyond failure, because if you go beyond failure, that won’t be called a science-based lifting program. Science-based lifters are always precise in their rep range and their RIR (reps till failure).
Did Mike Mentzer know what he was talking about?
Popular lifter Mike Mentzer preached a lot about science-based lifting and its benefits; he was also infamous for doing short-duration workouts while maintaining the intensity that many science-based lifters do not do. Mentzer made this kind of style popular by showing his competitors that they didn’t need to do long-duration workouts to achieve maximum muscle hypertrophy.
He believed that to achieve maximum muscle gains, you must put in maximum effort with maximum intensity while keeping the form proper. While many science-based lifters neglect the importance of going to failure, Mike Mentzer commanded that it should be every lifter’s end goal: to go to absolute muscle failure.
Should I go to absolute muscle failure?
In my opinion, combining science-based lifting with going to failure is a deadly combination for having maximum muscle and strength gains. When you go to failure, you will always get that extra one or two more reps that you usually won’t get if you stick to a science-based lifting program. So I can encourage you with my full heart that you should start applying failure sets to your workouts.
Do a combination of the two so you can achieve maximum muscle growth while maintaining a muscle-to-fat ratio, meaning you grow more muscle while losing more fat.
Benefits of having a science-based lifting program.
Having such a precise lifting program is really beneficial for seeing the growth and strength that you are able to track. It’s excellent for beginners, intermediates, and even veteran lifters. Also, you can combine this lifting program with the progressive overload lifting program to achieve even more efficient results.
By combining the two, you will always know how much you have progressed in strength and hypertrophy because the numbers will always go up. Science-based lifting can get even more beneficial if you apply failure sets to your workout. I know that these types of sets are hard to keep track of, but I can guarantee that the benefits are subliminal.
Aren’t science-based lifting programs and progressive overload programs the same?
Well, some say that these two types of programs are the same, but I say that science-based lifting programs usually consist of seeing what exercises are the most “effective” and “beneficial” for muscle growth or strength gain and only using them. While progressive overload types of programs focus more on adding one or more reps or weights across a mesocycle, they also tend to focus less on the “effective” side of the exercise.
What is the negative side of having a science-based lifting program?
While there are many positive sides, there are also a fair share of negative sides to this type of weightlifting style. One of them is that if you combine a multitude of weightlifting styles, I am sure that you will never achieve your maximum potential. Also, by always going by the trend and thinking that you will miss out on the next most “effective” and “beneficial” exercise, you can stagnate the growth of your muscles by doing so much variety.
Most of the time, muscles need about a 7- to 8-week grace period before they get used to a type of exercise, meaning that you need to stick to one type of exercise for those 8 weeks so you can achieve the maximum of your muscle-building potential.
For example, if this week you are doing bench press with a barbell, you need to keep doing barbell bench press for at least another 7 weeks until you reap all the benefits from the exercise, meaning that when the 7 weeks pass, you can change the exercise and then continue the cycle.