#6 - From the Gym to the Lab; the Science of Building Muscle and Staying Fit [JEREMY PEARSON]

Chris Miller: Okay, well, we're officially rolling.
Jeremy Pearson: Okay, let's do this.
Chris Miller: You're on the mic. Welcome to the podcast studio.
Jeremy Pearson: Thank you, Chris. Thank you for having me.
Chris Miller: Yes, and you did one before, but it was across the globe.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah, funny story. So I got an email from this researcher out in Finland, and he liked my master's thesis. And he reached out and said, hey, Jeremy, I'd love to have you on this podcast I'm starting. I would love to have you talk about, uh, your master's thesis and your study that you did with exercise and muscle growth.
Chris Miller: Nice. Yeah, I liked his what's it called? Just to give him a little coaching cues.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah. So he is kind of this sports performance coach, and he also does research on the side. And what he does, he has a lot of researchers come on a lot of sports performance coaches. Kind of, um, a slew of people, kind of just like your podcast. And he will have them talk for about ten minutes and they'll answer one question specific to what they are good at or their specialty.
Chris Miller: And what was the question?
Jeremy Pearson: That what is repetition tempo with exercise and how would I utilize repetition tempo with strength and muscle growth?
Chris Miller: So we hear repetition tempo and I'm thinking I'm doing bench press. And that is how quickly I bring the bar from up top down to my chest and then back up.
Jeremy Pearson: That's one rep 1000%. Yes. So basically the time in seconds, usually from taking, like we'll use your bench press. So having it up at the top, and then I'm going to lower it. Let's say that's the negative part or the eccentric part for my science listeners. So the eccentric portion and then I stop at the bottom and then I move up, and that's the positive or the concentric portion of the lifts.
Chris Miller: Nice. And this applies to everything, like the bicep curls and the push ups.
Jeremy Pearson: That applies to pretty much every exercise you can think of.
Chris Miller: Nice. And it was how does rep tempo affect muscle growth or muscle growth and strength?
Jeremy Pearson: Because there's kind of two different ways that you can go about it. The way I train for muscle growth is going to be different from how I train for strength.
Chris Miller: So explain that. Because a lot of people would think those two are the same thing. Like, if my muscle is bigger than I'm stronger.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah, definitely. And that usually there is a correlation there. And if I get stronger, I'll typically get bigger. If I get bigger, I'll typically get stronger. But not necessarily. We'll see that throughout the literature, uh, throughout the research, that sometimes I will train or I will exercise for a couple of weeks and I might get stronger, but I might not get bigger. So usually when we think of getting stronger with exercise in the first couple of weeks, we attribute that to neural adaptations. So greater motor unit recruitment and just kind of greater neural signaling going on versus if I train for a long period of time, maybe four or five months, we will typically see, obviously, an increase in the neural component, but also an increase in muscle size.
Chris Miller: Yeah. And you had said you had a quote in there that I laughed at, and I think you'll have to remind me if this is your original or if you attributed it to somebody. But this idea of whenever somebody isn't working out, even if they sneeze, they're going to get they sneeze and grow. Right. They sneeze and grow. Like, their body is so not used to it that any movement, essentially, which goes to show whenever you're a beginner and you're working out, that's why you see fast results.
Jeremy Pearson: Absolutely. Yeah. People that are detrained or have never trained before, my professor, Dr. Eduardo de Souza, uh, he always would say that in class, that those individuals, they will sneeze and grow. And he would always say, he's Portuguese. He's a Brazilian mentor. And, uh, he would always have, uh, this little, uh, he would have that accent that go along with it. They sneeze and grow.
Chris Miller: Yeah.
Jeremy Pearson: So we will see that a lot, that the more the less trained you are, your adaptations or your muscle growth, your muscle strength, it just kind of flourishes. And then the more trained you get, those adaptations come slower and slower, and you kind of have to work harder for those adaptations.
Chris Miller: Yeah. I feel like a lot of people don't know that, and then they get discouraged because we're in January right now, and the gyms are packed with a lot of New Year's resolutions, and everybody's wanting to get their fitness metric, whatever that is. They want to hit it. And it's, uh, like after the first 612, 16 weeks, you see a ton of results, but it's been almost like you hit a wall. Right. Everything is much more slow. Is that the case on average, across the board?
Jeremy Pearson: Absolutely. Yeah. So when people start working out, like I said, they're going to get those newbie gains. They're going to go in the gym for a couple of days, and they're going to man, they're going to feel stronger. They might even look better in a few weeks. And then all of a sudden, they hit that plateau, that wall that it's just super annoying. They train maybe even a little harder. They eat a little bit more, and for a couple of weeks, they get nothing. Maybe they even put on some fat. They don't look like they're gaining any muscle, and it's so annoying. But my advice for that is you kind of have to just push through that. You're going to have to be consistent if you want to do anything. Let me start over with that. If you want to be good at anything, you have to work hard for it. So that's with anything and the consistency portion of this is key. So if you want to grow muscle, if you want to get stronger, if you want to get better at anything, you have to be consistent and you have to have that repetition.
Chris Miller: Yeah. Like, I was a runner in high school, and whenever you first show up your five k time, maybe like, 30 minutes, and then you train and train for a few months, and then you're shaving minutes off minutes.
Jeremy Pearson: Absolutely, yeah.
Chris Miller: Five minutes and almost ten minutes. Like, I've seen people go from 30 minutes to 20 minutes, five K time. But then once you start getting down to like, 1918, you see these people train and train and train just to take 10 seconds off their time, or.
Jeremy Pearson: Less than a second.
Chris Miller: Right?
Jeremy Pearson: When you're that good, absolutely.
Chris Miller: The metric becomes much more, uh, granular down to the very busy seconds, like you said. So, uh, it's fun to talk about that, because it's stuff that we've all experienced, yet we didn't know the science was there for it, you know? And I think that's a cool part about your research is so many people are interested in fitness, so many people are interested in exercise. And, uh, a lot of these things that people throw around at the gym, these sayings, for instance, if you go slower when you do a repetition, like, you're actually looking into that.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah, absolutely. No, that, uh I love that you said that, because that project, my master's thesis, I started that. I think I published it in 2021. But I started that project maybe in 2017, so research takes a long time. I was curious about how fast I should lift for muscle growth and strength when I was an undergraduate. So maybe as a junior and undergrad, I wanted to know, okay, these people at the gym tell me I should lift really slow because that will have more time under tension for my muscle to grow. And you're going to get more benefit out of that. And then we tested it. So I kind of drew up a design. I took it to my mentor, Dr. Roberto de Sauza, and he said, okay, it's no good. You need to rewrite it. Rewrite it, rewrite it. Then we finally got this perfect design. And, uh, I don't want to say perfect, but to me, it was just brilliant. He really helped me out with what to do. And I guess, in short, what we did was we took these well trained guys and we had one leg serve as a fast leg, and then the other leg serve as a slow leg. And all they did was do leg extensions for eight weeks. They would come in twice a week and they would do leg extensions. One leg was slow, so they would kind of go up normal, and then on the way down, they would kind of make sure it's lowering slower, so they would go up for 1 second, and then 3 seconds down. The other leg was the fast leg. And it kind of served as the control for just a normal speed. So they went 1 second up, 1 second down. And what we thought was going to happen was we'd see more muscle growth in the slow leg. Right. I mean, that's what I was always told. You got to go slow for muscle growth. And what was interesting, we found the.
Chris Miller: Opposite, um, which is same amount of.
Jeremy Pearson: Reps, same amount of reps, same amount of weight, the same amount of rest period. We equated for all of that, which a lot of studies have not done, but because it was we call it a within subject design. It was one individual, and then their legs were varied. Not there was one group that did slow, there was one group that did fast. They were all the same individuals, just their legs were different.
Chris Miller: Well, and at the end, the fast reps was actually bigger than the slow reps or they were still the same, and the slow reps didn't make it any stronger.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah. So overall, our results were that we looked at muscle strength and muscle growth. Mhm so for muscle growth, we looked at you can measure it a couple of different ways. The way we did it was through ultrasound, and we call it muscle thickness. So we just take an ultrasound probe, we put it on the front thigh and we'll measure from basically, uh, right where the subcutaneous fat ends from all their muscle. Kind of what we call it the, um, sheath covering. So whatever's wrapping around that muscle will measure from there all the way down to almost the bone of where that muscle ends, and basically where you can measure in centimeters how thick is your muscle. And we can do that over time. But basically, what we found overall, for muscle strength, there was no difference. No difference at all. I would theorize that if we kept this study going for a longer period of time, we might see that strength would be higher in the fast condition, just because the slow condition, they were a lot more fatigued. However, for muscle growth right. And for strength, I should say, if you want to get stronger, you want to limit fatigue. Fatigue is not your friend. So a lot of people ask me, should you exercise to failure if you want to get stronger? And I would say definitely not. Because your sets going forward, or your next exercises that you do, you're going to be really fatigued and you won't be able to keep that strength going.
Chris Miller: That makes sense. Yeah. I've heard somebody mention, uh, something similar, they say, like the idea of soreness.
Jeremy Pearson: Sure.
Chris Miller: That similar to fatigue. If you work out so much to where you're so sore that it dampens your workout the next day, like it actually has long term negative effects compared to what it could.
Jeremy Pearson: We call that overtraining and actually we call it overreaching to begin with. And that's kind of where you're training through some sort of pain, uh, or soreness. And then if you keep consistently doing that, you're basically overtraining and overtraining that muscle. Your adaptations will, one, your strength is going to be super inhibited. And also we're actually seeing atrophy of the muscle, which we say or muscle decrease in size.
Chris Miller: Wow.
Jeremy Pearson: So if you're sore, depending, uh, on, uh, I guess it's use your best judgment. But if you are sore beyond belief, I would take a rest day, train a different part of the body, do some sort of other physical activity. So on my rest days from working out, I like to go do something active. I like to be active every day. Just because we sit for most of the day, we sleep for most of the day. So doing something physical, taking your, uh, dog, Sunny out for a walk, for a run, for a jog.
Chris Miller: He loves this.
Jeremy Pearson: Oh yeah. Okay, good. That's great. Good.
Chris Miller: He's like, keep it up, keep it up.
Jeremy Pearson: Doing laundry, just walking the stairs, walking around the house, walking around the environment, walking around outside. That would be something I would do instead of training through that pain or through that muscle soreness. Because what we're seeing and we can talk about this later, because muscle soreness, muscle damage. That's what I'm currently working on at University of Kansas during my PhD. But um, basically soreness is something you don't really want to train through mhm, depending on how bad it is.
Chris Miller: Wow. Yeah. And before we get to that, as far as muscle fatigue goes so you said you want to avoid muscle fatigue. How do you navigate that? Because I know with working out, part of working out is pushing yourself.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah, definitely. So what I would say is when you're doing those, let's talk about strength training. So if I'm going to do those bench press that, uh, you were talking about, and I want to get stronger, we refer to this as repetitions in reserve. So if I push myself, and I push myself to maybe, um, if I get ten reps and I could have done twelve or 13 more reps, we call that two to three repetitions in reserve from failure.
Chris Miller: Okay.
Jeremy Pearson: So I would not train to failure. I would train shy of failure, or even really shy of failure. Maybe five repetitions in reserve for strength. And there's not really, to my knowledge, there's not really a sweet spot for strength. I would just stay away from training close to that failure spot. Because your fatigue mechanism for multiple standpoints is going to be very much affected when you train to failure. Strength is not going to be, that's not, uh, great for strength.
Chris Miller: Right. It's like diminishing returns to a certain point. So if someone's doing squats and they're uh, like, I know I can do 15 with this weight, then what you're saying is they should get to about twelve or ten even and do more sets, not necessarily more sets.
Jeremy Pearson: And I like how you said that. So if I can do 15 and I fail on that last rep at 15, then absolutely I would train to eleven or twelve. That would probably be my max for strength. And on certain exercises, maybe that last set of your final exercise, or one of the last sets of the end of your workout, then you could maybe go to failure. That makes sense. But right away, I would stay away from it. If my first exercise, if I'm doing bench press right away, I don't want to train to failure because it's going to affect the rest of my workout.
Chris Miller: Yeah. Uh, how do you feel about the burnouts? Like, at the end, you see the people doing forty five s and taking off ten and doing 35.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah. So we call that a drop set. And I think it's a tool in the toolbox. I probably will use that phrase a lot. And I would just say that drop sets, they're great. If you're in a time crunch, maybe you, uh, are only going to work out for, uh, like ten minutes. Today you could do one set of a drop set and still have we've shown this in the literature? I actually just published a paper yesterday, and I included a paper that showed one drop set to failure, to muscular failure resulted in significant muscle growth.
Chris Miller: Wow. So what is the drop set?
Jeremy Pearson: It's just like you said. Uh, let's do a bench press, per se. And let's say I load the bar up with multiple ten pound weights. So the bar is stacked with all these ten pound weights on the side. And I start, and I start benching, and I lift off and I start benching. Maybe I get eight reps and I'm exhausted, but I could do more. Okay. Then I have a friend that's spotting me. They take off each ten. And now I have, uh, on each side. Maybe I had five tens on each side. So now I have four tens on each side. And then I'm going to go at it again. I'm going to do more reps, and I'll maybe do five reps this time. And I'm getting exhausted. I could do a little bit more, maybe. So then my friend will take off the other tens, and maybe I have two or 310 pound weights on the side left. And then that final pole, I will go to failure and he'll have to grab the bar off of me so I don't die.
Chris Miller: Yeah, it's like one giant set, and you're doing all of these reps, but the reps have varying weight and they decrease each time.
Jeremy Pearson: Exactly, uh, with very minimal break.
Chris Miller: And when you're doing those, would you say the same thing? And the idea of even if I could do twelve at the very first set, maybe just do ten. That way I can have a longer workout.
Jeremy Pearson: It depends on your entire workout. If you're going to do a lot more exercises after that, then I would definitely stay away.
Chris Miller: But if it's at a book end, then it's just kind of like ten.
Jeremy Pearson: You could probably do that.
Chris Miller: Go to broke, right?
Jeremy Pearson: Exactly. Go till broke. Yeah. But I will say that it depends on your goal. So if you want to get stronger, I don't think drop sets are very effective for doing that. You can get stronger, but it's just not specific. In short, and it's pretty simple, if you want to get stronger, you have to lift heavier weight.
Chris Miller: Okay.
Jeremy Pearson: However, if you want to get bigger muscles, you don't have to lift heavy weight. You can lift a, uh, multitude. So that was basically a common misconception.
Chris Miller: Right.
Jeremy Pearson: I've heard a couple of years ago, absolutely.
Chris Miller: If you lift light, you get cut, and if you lift heavy, you get big.
Jeremy Pearson: Exactly. It doesn't work like that. So M mainly from body composition, that is a lot to do with diet. But for muscle growth, you can build the same amount of muscle with four reps, all the way out to 30 reps I've seen. Wow. Uh, so you pick whatever rep range you want to do. That six to twelve rep range of that's the key for muscle growth. That has been very much debunked. And I'm going to use that because that was just in a paper. Basically the muscle myths or, uh, debunking the muscle myths. I like to tell people, they always ask me when I work out with them, they're like, okay, what rep range we're going to do? Are we going to stick to the eight to ten? We can pick whatever you want. As long as for muscle growth, it's really about the intensity that you train at or the effort. So the physical effort that you put into basically that repetition and reserve metric that we utilized. I want you to train around two to three reps in reserve. I, uh, don't want to say it's the key for muscle growth, but that's where you'll find the most consistency with growing muscle is when you're training closer to failure.
Chris Miller: Okay. Got you. Yeah, I've heard that a lot is all right, do the little weights. That way you can get cut up. And one of the things that I hear are guys who will say in the wintertime it's bulking and they'll lift really heavy weights, but then in the summer they want to get cut up, so they lift lighter weights. Uh, so it's that same misconception of depending on the size of the weights, it's going to completely change the way it impacts your body.
Jeremy Pearson: Right. I would not agree with that statement that if you want to lift light weights, it's going to translate to more people use the word toned. I call it body recomposition. So losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time. And it's not really going to translate like that. Your body is very smart to where if I lift heavy weight, if I lift lightweight, if I want to grow muscle, it just matters how close you're training to failure.
Chris Miller: Okay, so you talked on this, you touched on this, but I'm still going to ask the question because I think a lot of people are curious whenever you mention there's no difference between 30 and like, six reps. So some people probably hear that and they're thinking, so are you saying these 24 reps that I did to get to 30 didn't even matter?
Jeremy Pearson: I would say it's under preference. So if you like training with higher reps, I would do that. And we've seen studies that show if you're training with higher rep ranges, people think that you're going to burn more calories doing that. When you resistance train or when you strength train for an hour or 2 hours, you're not burning that many calories. A lot of people are like, oh, I'm burning thousands and thousands of calories. You're not. You're actually, on average, you're probably within, uh, an hour session, you're probably burning 400 to 500 calories. Which is kind of mind blowing when you think about it.
Chris Miller: Right. Because it's hard work.
Jeremy Pearson: Exactly. I'm sweating, I'm gassed, ah, at the end of the workout. And I'm like, wow, 500 calories. I can get that in a Twix bar. Yeah, but yeah. So to answer your question directly, if choosing between six reps and 20 reps, it's really just a preference. And some people, they might want to lift the heavy weight and get it over with and do that four, uh, to six reps and they're good, that's fine. But if you want to lift lighter weights and still approach closer to failure, you can do that with lifting to 20 to 25 reps.
Chris Miller: Okay, that's good to know. Mhm. So how did you get into all of this?
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah, great. Yeah. So Chris probably knows me as I'm a third year PhD student at the University of Kansas, and I've been studying exercise and muscle specifically for probably over close to ten years now. But I was not always like this. And I told Chris before this podcast that I'm not the smartest guy in the world. Um, I'm pretty average, but I have a hard work ethic and a strong passion for what I do. And that was not in existence when I was in high school. So in high school, I was kind of the class clown. I didn't really care about school at all. My first report card was all DS and FS, which is just crazy to think about. My family is still like, jeremy, we have no idea how you're doing a PhD right now because your high school, uh, I guess your lifeline through high school was not right. It was very different.
Chris Miller: Different trajectory.
Jeremy Pearson: Exactly. I probably should have been in jail or yeah. Anyways, through high school, I was always involved with sports and just interested in athletic performance, and I always liked to lift weights. And I was just very active in high school. It wasn't until my junior year of high school that I went to this bodybuilding centered gym, and I met my bodybuilding coach, Sam, and we hit it off right away, and he said, hey, I would love to coach you for a show coming up. And I saw this flyer, uh, for the state fair, wisconsin Bodybuilding Championships, and I need to do this. Uh, it was just I think it was just a sign from God, I have to do this. Sam is going to coach me. And that's what happened. So I started training. I think I did we call it a prep. I think I did, like, a 14 week prep for this competition. So I lost maybe 20 to £25 and, uh, tried to keep as much muscle as possible. And, yeah, I competed. I was so nervous. I guess the day before the show, I had my coach, Sam Tan, uh, me up. It's kind of like this paint that you kind of paint on someone.
Chris Miller: Uh, why do they do that?
Jeremy Pearson: Great question. So when you're on the stage and you're under very bright lights, I guess no one can see me right now, but I'm very pale. And for most individuals, if the light would hit them, you would barely see any definition. You would see basically nothing. You would see my hair, and that's pretty much it. So you get super tanned up because when the light hits you, it's going to show all the definition, all that hard work, all the lines, all the cuts, all the definition that you've worked so hard for in that prep of 14 to 20 weeks.
Chris Miller: Okay. Uh, yeah.
Jeremy Pearson: So anyways, I do this bodybuilding competition, and I have a blast. I had so much fun. And I am in prep for another one for my senior year, and I compete for bodybuilding for another five years down the line. And I think after my second show is when I watched a documentary on bodybuilding. Basically, it was called Generation Iron. And if you're interested at all about bodybuilding, the sport of bodybuilding, or just want some motivation to go to the gym, I highly recommend watching this. And there's one part in there that showed this professional bodybuilder who is all about the science. And he goes to this school, the University of Tampa, and he goes and gets his blood work done. He does his body comp. There's a bunch of different tests that he'll do, muscle activation, all this cool stuff that I'm like, wow, this is a thing. I can go to school for this. Wow. Very cool. At the time, I think I wanted to be a physical therapist. And at the time, I think actually, yeah, I was a first year student in my undergrad back at Carol, and I was studying exercise science, but I wanted to go to physical therapy school because I wanted to make a lot of money, and I liked people. And then is, uh, when I signed up to be a nursing home, uh, like kind of a PTA or a physical therapist assistant, and I hated every second of it. And my colleagues are my friends in undergrad. They're like, Jeremy, yeah, I don't think physical therapy's for you, it's not working, so and they were right. They were definitely right. So actually, what happened was, after I saw that that movie, I was really interested, but I didn't really know what to do with it. I didn't know, oh, like, do I do I have to go to this school? What do I do? What's my next step? And actually, what happened was I was invited to be a research subject at the grad school where I went to undergrad, and I got to be a research subject for the study. And it was very, very cool. So I walked in, and they hooked me up to all these electrodes. They put a breathing mask on me so I could breathe and they could measure basically my breathing rates and how much oxygen I was taking in, how much carbon dioxide I was expelling. And then they had me do this test called a wingate test. And my students, if you're listening, you know what that is. It's basically I get on a bike, and I pedal for 30 seconds as hard as I can against a weighted resistance, which it basically feels like I'm just pushing against the wall for 30 seconds as hard as I can. It's not fun, but I really enjoyed it my first time, and I just thought to myself, this is so cool. This is what an exercise scientist does. And, um, after that, during my undergrad, that was the switch, I guess bodybuilding was the switch that got me passionate and got me, uh, excited to do more with my life than just play around in high school. I got really serious during, uh, I think that last year of high school when I competed, and I kind of went all for it. So my grades from DS to FS, I went straight A's, straight A's. Uh, I got into my undergrad, and then from there, I think I you know, I probably ended with close to a 4.0, but that doesn't really matter. I'm just saying that there was a switch. There was a switch, a clear switch, and it was kind of a new me. And, um, I get into undergrad. I know physical therapy is not for me. I want to get into this research area. So what I do is I reach out to one of the guys at the University of Tampa. Networking is key. That is so huge. It's the people that, you know, I would not be where I'm. At today if I didn't reach out to a lot of these individuals.
Chris Miller: Is this the same guy on Generation Iron that you saw?
Jeremy Pearson: It was actually one of the scientists that worked with him.
Chris Miller: Cool.
Jeremy Pearson: Exactly. So to this day, I've actually never met that professional bodybuilder. But the individuals or the scientists that worked with him. I've met all those individuals, all those people. They're close friends of mine now.
Chris Miller: Wow.
Jeremy Pearson: I reach out to his name is Chris Barracat, and he is a master's student at the University of Tampa. And I just say, hey, Chris. Uh, I'm Jeremy. I'm a competitive bodybuilder, just like you. And I know at this point he is a coach. He is a, ah bodybuilder, and he is a master's student or a research assistant at Tampa. And I just hate I'm really interested in what goes on there. I would really love to meet you. And that summer, my professor in undergrad back in Wisconsin, he's like, hey, Jeremy, would you like to come with me to this conference? You can stay in my hotel room. Which is kind of weird, but, uh, I'm so appreciative of him. I texted him last night after our paper was published and just said, thank you for everything, because without you, I wouldn't have been here. Right. Uh, so he said, hey, Jeremy, I want you to come to this conference with me. It's a great networking and just place where you can meet all these people. And it just so happens that Chris from Tampa was also going to be there, along with other researchers from University of Tampa.
Chris Miller: Wow. Uh, yeah.
Jeremy Pearson: It was just great. It was the coolest thing ever. I think the first conference was in New Orleans. So we went to New Orleans, and I met Chris. I met all those guys, and it was just the coolest thing. From there, I met my mentor, I met Dr. Dasa, and I said, hey, please wait for me. I got one more year of undergrad. I want to go to Tampa for my Masters. I want to do this thing like that. I don't think there's any other place that I want to go. So my undergrad is coming to an end. I know I have one semester left, and I have to do an internship. And I didn't want to do it where a lot of the other people do it. A lot of my, uh, colleagues or my peers in undergrad, they just kind of went to some random local place and just worked as, like, a personal trainer or something like that. And one, I know I'm not a good personal trainer. I don't have the patience for it, and I'm just not good at that, I think. And I knew of an independent lab in Tampa that worked with a lot of, like, sports performance, and they worked with pro athletes. And I was just talking to you before this, and this place is pretty cool. So it's the Applied Science Performance Institute. It is not affiliated with the University of Tampa at all, but I knew that I wanted to go to school there, so why not kind of I, uh, could work there and collaborate or just kind of network a little bit at the school while I'm down in Tampa. So that's exactly what happened. I reached out to my supervisor, Matt Sharp, at, uh, the Applied Science Performance Institute. And he's, you know, he's a great guy. Great. One of my one of the best mentors I've ever had. And I flew down there, and I basically was I was a sports scientist for them for about six months, five months, and I got to work with all these different individuals. So I got to work with a lot of the Kansas City Chiefs, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Tampa Bay Lightning, and then just it was kind of a well known it was a world renowned lab. So a lot of people would come in, like, Tony Robbins would come in, randy Moss, Busta Rhymes, which, weird, why is Busta Rhymes coming here?
Chris Miller: Was he getting worked out?
Jeremy Pearson: He was.
Chris Miller: Wow. And what were you doing with them?
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah. So we would test a lot of their metrics for body composition, blood. We, uh, would test their jump height. We would test their biomechanics. So a lot of these players would come in their off season and just see if they're improving. So they come for eight weeks, ten weeks, and we train them. We give them nutrition advice. We give them all the stuff, and then we'll test them from as soon as they get here to, uh, eight weeks later, ten weeks later and see if they're improving. So after that, I m made the decision. They actually offered me a job, but I said, you know what? I want to do my Masters. I want to continue this education. I love learning. I love what I'm doing here. But I know Tampa, or University of Tampa is my next step. So I actually head back home. I collect all my things, and I reached out to the graduate assistant, I guess, the, uh, student in charge of the lab at UT. And he says, hey, there's an opening that I want you to apply for. And during my Master's, there's only one lab position. There's basically just one student that's in charge of the lab. And 50 students get admitted to this program every year. It's kind of a professional master's degree, not just where there's one or two seats like it is now for me. So I reach out to Dr. Desauza, um, I reach out to the current graduate assistant, and I apply for it. I meet with them. I do an interview. And I actually got it, which I was so surprised, and I had a blast doing it. It was so fun. But I was selected to be the graduate assistant. I ran the lab and helped coordinate all the teaching and all the research. It was very stressful and, ah, it was very, um, fun at the same time.
Chris Miller: How did you get notified you got it?
Jeremy Pearson: Great question. I remember that day I got a phone call from Dr. De Souza as I was driving in Wisconsin and he says, hey, Jeremy, I just want to let you know that you were selected to be the graduate assistant. And I remember I almost drove off the road. I had to stop. I've never stopped driving before, like on the side of the road for anything. That was the only time I've ever done it was I got selected to be the graduate assistant. I got accepted into the University of Tampa. I got the graduate assistantship, which basically they paid for my school and they gave me a stipend to work.
Chris Miller: Which you were being paid to go to school.
Jeremy Pearson: I was being paid, yeah.
Chris Miller: How cool is that?
Jeremy Pearson: Very fun. Yeah, very cool. Yeah, I'm blessed. I'm blessed. But again, it's just a culmination of just hard work and just being genuine person to these individuals.
Chris Miller: Yeah, like you said, there's 50 people there. Only one person gets to be only one the grad assistant. And did you feel like you're going to get it? Or was there already part of you thinking, oh, I'm not going to get it?
Jeremy Pearson: I definitely did not think I was going to get it because I wasn't an inside candidate. Usually the graduate assistant is someone that does the undergrad at University of Tampa and then they go right from undergrad to their Masters. I think I was one of the first ones that happened.
Chris Miller: Well, uh, what would you have done had you not gotten in?
Jeremy Pearson: I would have still gone mhm, but I would have probably had to take out a loan or just work.
Chris Miller: Yeah, but you're going to go regardless.
Jeremy Pearson: That was my dream school.
Chris Miller: Okay.
Jeremy Pearson: And it still is. University of Tampa is just beautiful. It's right on the water. It's a very cool place.
Chris Miller: That's awesome. But you're in Kansas now.
Jeremy Pearson: I'm in Kansas now. Yeah. Well, I'll get to that. That's actually a funny story of how that happened. But finishing up with Tampa, I got involved with. So I was working in this lab under Dr. De Salza and he studies basically the the macroscopic or the, the big adaptations that happen with muscle growth. So how does this exercise, how does this nutritional intervention and when I say intervention, I'm talking multiple weeks. So my study was eight weeks. We've done six to eight weeks studies before where it's kind of a chronic period of time and looking at muscle growth over time. And so I'm in this lab and then I also know that I wanted to get involved with my PhD. I really wanted to learn more about the mechanism of how is that happening, how is muscle growing, what genes are expressing what proteins are being modified, um, what proteins are coming together to build more muscle, how is the muscle actually growing? All these thoughts in my head, all these questions in my head, I'm like, okay, I think I need a PhD for this. I need more training. I need where I was in Tampa, they didn't have a PhD program, and they didn't have the equipment to do that. However, right away, when I got to, uh, the University of Tampa, I got in contact with a professor from the biology department, and we worked together for actually two years on a stem cell project. So I was actually a research assistant in his stem cell lab. And we worked with all these different types of stem cells, and my project was differentiating, umbilical, um cord stem cells to skeletal muscle tissue, which is a very hard thing to do. It took very long, and we still didn't actually perfect the technique. But that is kind of where my molecular background came into play and helped me acquire my PhD. So as soon as I'm done with the University of Tampa, I get done, I graduate. I started teaching for them. I was an adjunct professor, and I was still working in the stem cell lab. I got the opportunity to go to a conference in the Czech Republic, of all places, which it was great. It was very cool. But anyways, I go there, I walk in the door of the building, and I'm the only American there. My lab mates it was funny. I was the only guy from America. My lab mates are from England and, uh, Northern Ireland and India. And I walk in and I see this guy that has a blue polo on, and there's a bird on it. And I'm like, okay, I swear that is from the US. It looks really familiar. I, uh, think that's a sports team. And so I go up to him, we start talking, and it's one of the PhD students at the University of Kansas. And he's telling me, hey, Jeremy, there is this professor there that does exactly what you're interested in. It's skeletal muscle physiology, what makes muscles grow. That professor studies that. And I was very surprised because at the time, I applied to a couple of different places, and I unfortunately did not get in. And it just it wasn't because I really was, uh well, I guess it doesn't really matter, but when you're applying for a PhD, it is not like the master's program to where they let 50 people in. You basically have to apply at the right place, right time. Because the place I wanted to go was Auburn. And they that professor had a line for, like, three years in advance.
Chris Miller: Wow. And, yeah, so you can only come in when there's a vacancy.
Jeremy Pearson: I can only come in when there is maybe one spot open for a place.
Chris Miller: Yeah.
Jeremy Pearson: So it didn't work out. And that's fine. So I, uh, reached out to this professor in Kansas. It's funny, he's actually from Wisconsin, just like me. So we kind of connected right away. I toured the place and I applied. He let me in, and here I am. As soon as I got to Kansas, I knew I wanted to study muscle on the molecular level. And to do that, you need a lab that does muscle biopsies. And I think the first time I met you, Chris, is I showed you my biopsy video of, okay, here's my professor. He's going to inject this lidocaine into your leg and we're going to make, um, a small incision all the way into the muscle. And he's just going to punch me with this huge, big metal needle. And we're going to take some muscle out of you and I'm going to study it. So not many labs in the US. Do this. And that's why I wanted to choose Auburn or choose, um, Penn State, because there's only a few labs in the country that do this. It's more prevalent in Europe. Dr. Gallagher, dr. Philip Gallagher is the professor that I'm working under, and he is, I will say, an expert at doing this procedure. So his lab is dedicated to studying the immune system and skeletal muscle tissue in response, or I guess the adaptations that come from that at the microscopic level to exercise or nutrition generally. Exercise has kind of been his focus. He's also done a lot of NASA, uh, space flight stuff in his PhD and postdoc work, which is very, very interesting. He was kind of one of the first people to do that to make.
Chris Miller: Sure the astronauts are in good shape.
Jeremy Pearson: Well, just to think that when you go up in space, you're not loading your body anymore, your muscle is really going to atrophy. So they actually do a really good job of that. Now they have squat machines and different technology that helps them work out in space.
Chris Miller: Wow.
Jeremy Pearson: Which is so cool. Yeah, if you want to Google it or YouTube at some time, there's some really crazy stuff that they've been doing. But in general, when you have an astronaut go up in space, their strength and their muscle quality, their muscle size, it shrinks.
Chris Miller: Wow. Because they don't have that gravity that's constantly pushing against us.
Jeremy Pearson: Exactly. I mean, just think about if you sat in bed for 84 days, what do you think is going to happen?
Chris Miller: Mhm.
Jeremy Pearson: But anyway, so I get to Kansas, I start working in his lab. Immediately. It is me and another PhD student. He usually has two. So one that's studying the immune system and then one that's studying skeletal muscle, that's me. And he has this collaboration or this network with the microscopy lab or the microscope lab at Ku, which is right across the street. And he introduces me to them and he wants me to train under them. And this lab has just been this has been my favorite part of Ku by far. I don't know if they're going to listen to this, but these researchers in this microscopy lab it's the Microscopy and Analytical Imaging Core Research Group, led by Dr. Rosa Molinardo. Rosa Molinar and these colleagues of mine, or, uh, I guess the supervisors. There's a big smile on my face if you can't hear it in my voice right now. They've made my time at the university just so worthwhile. I've learned so much stuff from them, and I just enjoy being around them, being outside the lab with them. They're my family. So they have been training me for the last two years, two and a half years in all things microscopy or microscope related. So from start to finish, what I've been doing at Kansas is we take a biopsy out of someone's leg. I take that chunk of muscle and I go run it over to the microscopy lab. And I'm going to cut it kind of like a meat slicer. So we section it. I section it in these cross sections, and I put each section on this glass slide. And then I can label it or stain it with these antibodies that are specific to muscle stem cells. So muscle stem cells are kind of my. That's my niche at Ku. I put these antibodies that are on it that are specific for muscle stem cells. And then I put it under a microscope and I image it and I can see it blown up on the big screen, which I'm a very visual person. I'm not a numbers math. Like I said, I am not that smart. My math skills are probably high school at best. My professor will vouch for that. I am a very visual learner. And microscopy is dealing with images. It's all, how is this cell affected? How is this I can visualize it. It's not a number on the computer, which is really cool to me.
Chris Miller: So what is a stem cell?
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah, definitely. So what is just a general form of a stem cell? A stem cell is this undifferentiated cell. It's the cell that basically doesn't know what it wants to be. It's just kind of there. But it has the ability to differentiate into different tissues. So it can differentiate into muscle. It can differentiate into bone or fat or a, uh, skin cell. But it can also self renew. So the stem cell can activate and it can turn into muscle. It can turn into bone or fat. However, it can activate and then also, or instead of differentiating, it can self renew back to its undifferentiated state.
Chris Miller: Wow. So it's like a wild card.
Jeremy Pearson: Exactly. Yeah, it's a wild cell, wild card cell.
Chris Miller: And it can do anything. And we all have stem cells in us. And those stem cells, depending on what the demands of our body are, then those stem cells are assigned wherever they go.
Jeremy Pearson: Definitely yeah, I'm going to specialize a little bit more. So muscles, uh, or just a stem cell in general is a very broad thing. We have stem cells all over our body, so I can get them from bone, um, marrow, blood. We can take an already differentiated tissue, so muscle, bone, or skin, and we can actually convert it back to its stem cell formation, which is called an induced pluripotent stem cell, which is really cool. So I used to work with those at the, uh, University of Tampa in that stem cell lab. But my specific project is looking at muscle specific stem cells. So just the stem cells that are involved in your muscle and what those do, I always like telling you, I tell my sister this because she's like, what the heck do you even do? So what are muscle stem cells? Well, when you exercise, or when you don't even have to exercise, when you just do any physical activity, any yard work, or you go for a hike and you know you're sore the next day, and then the next day you're sore, the next day you're a little less sore. And then maybe that fourth or fifth day, you're not sore at all. You're like, well, you probably don't think about that, but I'm like, how does that happen? Those are your muscle stem cells that are activating due to the muscle damage that you have that you've acquired through the exercise or that hike or whatever. Taking Sunny for a, ah, run, and you ran maybe a little too fast or something. So you had a little bit of muscle damage. Those muscle stem cells are going to activate and they're going to kind of latch onto that damaged part of the muscle tissue and it will regenerate that tissue.
Chris Miller: M so do different people have different amounts of stem cells? Because I've heard that some people recover quicker than others.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah, that is a great question and I honestly don't even have a, it's still unclear why that happens. But yes. So actually between men and women, men, uh, typically have more muscle stem cells, and we call them satellite cells. But in terms of this, we'll just call them muscle stem cells. But muscle stem cells are generally more prominent in men. And my reasoning for that is because men have larger fibers, they have larger muscle in total. So you're probably going to find more muscle stem cells with larger muscles, right? Yeah. So there's a couple of different studies looking at, uh, muscle stem cell populations. It's not crazy difference between men and women, but there is a difference.
Chris Miller: Uh, generally, like, I think about I've heard this before, but LeBron James people say one of the reasons why he's so good sure, there's many reasons, but one of them is he recovers quicker than the average person. And he's able to get back to the next workout and in total, be able to do more workouts and not be as limited by muscle fatigue. Now, I don't know, I've never worked with them directly, but that's something I've heard of. So it makes me curious as to how people recover quicker than the other people.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah, that is such a good question, and I really don't have a solid answer for you. In research, we have this thing called high responders and low responders to exercise that some people we give them, and this happens with my research studies. All these people, all these different people will do the same protocol, the exact same thing. Half of them grow an insane amount of muscle growth. Half of them don't change at all. Some of them lose muscle mass. There is just so much variability. And I think a lot of this has to do and I'll answer your question with the recovery thing. Why do individuals recover faster than others? We don't really know. There might be a genetic component of these muscle specific genes are activating and creating more proteins that are allowing for muscle, uh, regeneration to happen quicker. There might be more muscle stem cells that are activating and are regenerating that tissue quicker. I wouldn't say because I've seen LeBron's trainer, and some of the stuff that he does is just downright crazy. And I think, uh, Stuart Phillips, which is a professor in Canada who's a profound muscle research, he always said, if you feed LeBron or Tom Brady twigs or bricks to eat, they're still going to perform at just an insane level. It's just something, uh, it's just a LeBron thing. Uh, we don't know what makes them so good.
Chris Miller: Right. And I think a lot of people love looking into that because we love the outliers and a lot of research. A lot of people, particularly, for instance, with podcasts, people build podcasts and bring the most successful people on, right? And they want to know why Elon Musk is like this, or Mark Zuckerberg is like this. And oftentimes it's hard to explain points, right? It's just they're doing quite well. Here's a question that I'm curious about, and this may be completely, uh, ludicrous, but it's something I've heard in the gym. And I feel like as you were talking about busting the gym myths, this is one of them. So I've heard the legs are so big that if I work them out, they produce more testosterone, like these big muscles, like the legs of the back. And I've heard people tell me, hey, say you're working out your biceps. If you go work out your legs, like do a set of squats and then go to bicep curls, then you're more likely to have more muscle growth because by working out your legs, you emitted this testosterone that is much more than the amount that you'd get from just doing the biceps alone.
Jeremy Pearson: Chris, I love it. That is not a ludicrous question. It's a question that has been asked so much. There's a smile on my face right now because I got that question last week from one of my friends back home in Wisconsin. If I train my lower body, isn't there going to be more of a hormonal response that's going to affect muscle, um, growth in my upper body, in my arms, and what we're seeing time and time again. And actually, Stewart Phillips, the one that I mentioned from Canada, he has done so many studies on this, looking at when I exercise and I have a growth hormone, a testosterone, a cortisol, an IGF, uh, all these hormones, when I have a hormonal response after I work out, what does that mean for muscle growth? And what we're seeing is time and time again, it really doesn't mean anything. There's not really a correlation at all. So I guess what I'm saying in terms of I exercise and then we take your blood or we take your muscle sample, and we look at, okay, how much testosterone went up, how much growth hormone went up, how much cortisol, how much IGF, how much of this insulin went up. We're seeing an increase. We're seeing no change. We're seeing a decrease all over the map. So, long story short, to put it in perspective, acute hormonal responses to exercise don't really mean much for muscle growth or chronic adaptations. So that myth. Hopefully, I just busted that one, that if I train my legs, I'm going to have a greater testosterone response. It's going to help with muscle growth in my arms. There might be something there with something. We call it's kind of a cross education. So basically, if I train just one arm, is, uh, that going to kind of help with my other arm? We're seeing a little bit of that from a neural standpoint, but from like, a muscle growth standpoint, I don't think we have anything there. I would say if you want to get big arms, you have to train arms. I wouldn't train legs and then do a little bit of arms. If you want to get big arms, you have to train arms. It's kind of that principle of specificity. If I want to get good at walking sunny, I have to walk sunny. I can't just sit there with sunny. If I want to get good at water skiing, if I want to get good at bench press, or I guess for this, i, uh, should probably say if I want to get good at squatting, I can't just do leg press. I can't do leg extensions and leg press and leg curls and all that. It might help with squatting. But if I really want to get good at squatting, I have to squat.
Chris Miller: Okay. Yeah. I have another question that I want to ask you about your paper, but talking about specificity, I have had different seasons of my life to where I'm more specific about working out than I am other seasons. For instance, I've had some seasons in my life where I do push pool days, and whenever I push, I can do a whole bunch of different exercises. But as long as they're pushing exercises, like the press, leg press, bench press, pushups. But then I've had other seasons in my life where I dedicate a day to a muscle, like my arms, my biceps. Today my triceps tomorrow, my chest on Thursday, my legs. DA DA DA DA. So you, uh, mentioned specificity, like, how specific is optimal? And optimal is a funny word, right? But how specific is optimal? Does that make sense?
Jeremy Pearson: It absolutely makes sense. My question for you is, what is your goal?
Chris Miller: My goal is to get really strong and to look like Chris Evans.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah. 1000%. I love it. Yeah. So what I would say for the specificity portion of if you want to train just one body part, um, a day throughout the week, the research is kind of showing you want to train each body part twice a week, so whatever allows you to do that. And this is for someone that's very well trained, like, you work out all the time, I can tell. So I would say, for you, you want to train twice a week, each body part, twice a week. You could do an entire full body workout twice a week, or you could do an upper body day twice a week, or a lower body day twice a week. Or you could split it up to that push pull movement, or adding in biceps at the beginning of your workout or end of your workout, doing something more of like a smaller muscle group, doing calves at the end of your leg day, something like that. So there's all different ways that you can do it. The specificity component comes in to where, if you want to get stronger with a certain exercise, if you want to get stronger with squatting, stronger with leg press, stronger with bicep curls, you have to do those exercises. Um, that is only for strength, for muscle growth. Well, I guess I'll say if you want to get stronger in those specific exercises, you have to do them. There's no way around it. If you want to get good at something, you have to do that. But for muscle growth, it's actually pretty interesting that you don't have to do, um, specific exercises. So, me, for instance, it's kind of funny. I don't deadlift, I don't barbell back squat. I don't do any bench press. I don't like doing it. And it's worked for me. I think I did a little bit of that during my competition days. But I'm actually bigger than I am, than I was now. And I'll tell you that it's not from squatting. I find ways around it. So I really like doing machines. I like leg press. I like using dumbbells for bench. I like, uh, doing lat pull downs and all this other stuff that's just it's. More enjoyable for me, it's less fatiguing for me. And when I get to the gym, I don't look at myself and go I don't think to myself, oh, I have to barbell back squat, or I have to, uh, deadlift today. I don't want to do that. I never do that. I'm actually excited to go to the gym. I pick the exercises I enjoy doing.
Chris Miller: And you mentioned that in coaching queues, whenever you were talking, like, do the things that will get you to go to the gym.
Jeremy Pearson: Exactly. Yeah, you said it best. You absolutely said it best that anyone that's listening to this, if you don't like working out, I encourage you to try it again. Find exercises, maybe go grab, uh, a personal trainer and find exercises you enjoy doing. So I'm if you don't like running, if you don't like doing the elliptical, you don't like doing the StairMaster, find forms of cardio or strength training. If you don't like squatting, if you don't like benching like I do, I find ways around it, and I find exercises I really, really enjoy doing. And with those exercises, I push them, I go I go hard with those exercises that I enjoy. And that's really, to me, that's the key for that's the key for muscle growth.
Chris Miller: Right.
Jeremy Pearson: Finding those exercises you enjoy to be consistent with it.
Chris Miller: I see the people who hate running outside, or they hate the treadmill, but they love basketball. It's like, okay, cool.
Jeremy Pearson: Do basketball.
Chris Miller: Yeah.
Jeremy Pearson: Do it as much as you can.
Chris Miller: Yeah. Cross some people up, uh, break some ankles. Absolutely. So you just dropped a paper and I, uh, not physically dropped a paper on the floor, but you published an article. And is this the equivalent of a rapper publishing an album?
Jeremy Pearson: Wow. I, uh, think I'm going to steal that one from you, Chris. That is that is perfectly said. So yesterday I just published my 1st 1st author paper at the University of Kansas. And in research, it takes so, so long. I think I mentioned this before with my Repetition Temple paper. It took four years to get that thing done. This one went a little bit faster. I think it took about a year and a half, two years. But, yes, it it doesn't happen very often that we publish a paper, because it takes a lot of money to or it, uh, takes a lot of time to get the money to do the paper, to do the project. I guess it takes a lot of time to recruit the participants, to make the design, to have those subjects do the protocol, and then after that, I need to analyze the data, which takes forever. Writing that up. Afterwards, I finally get the results. I'm writing it up. I send it to my professor. He says, it's crap, it's no good. So I have to rewrite it, and I rewrite it again, and I probably rewrite it a third time, and finally it's good enough for him. And then we send it to a journal, and right away they're going to say, no, it's no good. So then I send it to another one. No good. So then you have to send it to it's just a lot of Fit. It takes so long. So anyways, we finally found our Fit. Every paper has its fit. And we found, um, actually a pretty good journal in our field, the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. So I sent it in and we had three reviewers, and they all said, grade paper, make these comments, make these edits, and we're going to accept it. Which, uh I was ecstatic. This doesn't happen very often. So a rapper dropping his mixtape. This is exactly what happened yesterday. So I'm pretty much on cloud nine right now.
Chris Miller: Dang. Okay, so I have a lot of questions about this, um, first being if someone's listening to this and they're like, oh, I want to read your paper. Now, is it one of those things where you have to have I know with a lot of academic work, you have to have access to the journal, and in order to access any of the academic articles, you have to pay? Is that the case? Um, or is this something that actually they can look at on your Instagram? I saw that you put up a little abstract on your Instagram.
Jeremy Pearson: Absolutely. So you can follow me on Instagram. Uh, I'm not super active compared to some of my colleagues who I would absolutely follow. Christopher Barracat, the one I initially made contact with in Tampa. So he's the best. I know I'm biased, but he is a bodybuilding coach. He's a scientist, he's a professor. Uh, he's a pro bodybuilder now. He won his pro card a couple months, uh, ago. So I would follow him. He just puts out great content. There's a couple of other people, too. Uh, Brad schoenfeld. Maybe we can put this in the comments.
Chris Miller: Yeah, for sure.
Jeremy Pearson: I, um, want to make research as available to anyone as possible. And for my undergrads that are in my class that I teach, I actually show them this website called SciHub. So it's S-C-I It's a little scary, but it's this website that allows you free papers.
Chris Miller: Cool.
Jeremy Pearson: And basically what you do is you find this paper that you like, you take the website address or the title of the paper, and then it's just basically like a Google. So you go to Sci Hub, you type in that, um, website name or whatever, boom. Or the paper name done.
Chris Miller: And you get it. How cool is that?
Jeremy Pearson: Uh, yeah. So Sci Hub, I don't know if it's illegal. I think it's frowned upon.
Chris Miller: Sure.
Jeremy Pearson: I mean, obviously journals aren't going to like that if you're kind of stealing their papers. But I want education. I want knowledge to be available, uh, to everyone.
Chris Miller: Right. The fact that you have to pay so much money to get access to a journal article. It's quite odd, particularly the amount of time researchers like yourself have spent invested in that paper. And then it gets put behind a paywall.
Jeremy Pearson: You wouldn't believe how much we have to pay the journal to make it open access, to make it free.
Chris Miller: Wow.
Jeremy Pearson: So we did that once, and the fee was $4,000, which is insane.
Chris Miller: Got to get in the business.
Jeremy Pearson: I don't even know what to do at that point. I think I have to rob a bank.
Chris Miller: Well, I think you're on a pretty good trajectory, so I don't want you to get thrown off yeah, true. By robbing a bank. But we've talked about a lot of things, and I imagine you have mentioned this, be it tangentially or maybe you really nailed it on the head, but this paper you just published, what does it contribute to the scholarship of muscle research?
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah, so this paper looked at different volume. And when I talk about volume, I'm talking about the number of sets, times, the number of reps that are performed, volume, and how it affects muscle signaling, kind of on a microscopic level, on kind of a molecular level. And in the literature right now, there is a lot of debate, a lot of arguments about how much volume should I perform in the gym to increase muscle size, to optimize muscle size? Because I could probably build muscle with a lot of different volumes. But what's the best volume? So what we looked at was having one group do one set of leg press to failure versus a, uh, different group that did three sets, two sets that were close to failure, and then the third set or the final set to failure. What we found was that one set of leg press versus three sets of leg press, there was no difference in this muscle signaling response, which is we call it the AKT protein kinase B signaling pathway. And what that just means is that when I exercise, when I strength train, usually this pathway is turned on, and it's going to, over time, lead to more muscle growth. So it's kind of a mechanistic point of view that, okay, I exercise, I strengthen, I do this exercise. How is it going to affect this signaling cascade? So we looked at three different proteins. We looked at I don't even need to give you the names because it's just a bunch of mumbo jumbo, but we looked at three different proteins that are down this pathway, and we found no differences from one set of leg press to three sets of leg press. So what I take away from that is something is absolutely better than nothing. And what we're seeing is that one set might be as important as doing three sets, or it could be comparable to doing three sets. So I think you can get for someone that doesn't like working out. I think you can get a lot of muscle growth and a lot of muscular adaptations from just doing one set to failure and just going in, hitting it, hitting one muscle group. Um, hopefully you can do more than one muscle group, but one set of that muscle group to failure and you'll still see some benefit from that.
Chris Miller: Wow.
Jeremy Pearson: Actually might be as comparable as doing multiple sets, which is really cool. For someone that doesn't like exercise, that would be fantastic.
Chris Miller: That is awesome. So research shows and we can say that now because this is a published paper, research shows that one set can give a lot of benefits and that doing more sets, there's a chance that it could give you a little bit more.
Jeremy Pearson: I would say the more trained you get, you're going to have to do more sets than one. I would say to optimize muscle growth for you and me, we have to do more than one set. However, for someone that doesn't maybe your mom, she doesn't like strength training. She could go to the gym and do one set for legs, for arms, for chest, and have major benefit from that.
Chris Miller: Nice. I need to get it on our program. One set. Program one set.
Jeremy Pearson: One set to failure. Um, and you leave the gym and.
Chris Miller: You mentioned to failure because we're not doing multiple sets, so we don't need to worry about the fatigue that going to failure would impact our future sets.
Jeremy Pearson: For you want that stress at that point, if you're only doing one set, I would do it to failure. Wow.
Chris Miller: Uh, so that right there is super impactful because that one piece of knowledge that, hey, one set matters so much, can get people to go into the gym much more than this. Really intimidating and daunting. Hey, do three sets of this, three sets of that. Do five sets, do a drop set, do a super set. Right. It's just do one set. That's exciting that you just published an article that's saying that because it's so applicable to everybody.
Jeremy Pearson: Absolutely. Yeah. No, I appreciate that very much. I am on cloud nine. I really am. It's so exciting to see your work. You created this and now it's out to the world. The whole world can see what you did. And I feel like I'm an artist or a sculptor and just here's my work. Here's my it's, uh, pretty cool, but it's even more cool to me to when I can apply it to everyday people in the gym. Just people in life. And the big problem that I'm facing right now with a lot of the grants that I write, what problem am I trying to solve as a researcher? What am I trying to basically accomplish after grad school? After what am I trying to do? I basically want to educate people on how they can just live a healthier life and then they can live longer because what we're seeing is that when you get older, your muscle fibers are going to atrophy and that's going to lead to frailty. That frailty is going to lead to improper balance. And then when you fall, your quality of life is at a risk. And if you strength train, there's actually research showing that strength training is probably more important than cardio or aerobic exercise for just lifelong longevity. And I think both are important.
Chris Miller: Mhm.
Jeremy Pearson: However, if I had to pick one, I would pick strength training because as you age, your muscle fibers are going to shrink, your muscle stem cells are going to dwindle, and, uh, their regenerative abilities are going to be impaired. And if you strength train, you're going to kind of combat that and it's going to allow you to prevent this frailty or this risk of injury and immobilization.
Chris Miller: Wow. And does strength training impact bone density?
Jeremy Pearson: Absolutely. Yeah. As long as you're not doing it in the water. If you're doing any weight bearing stuff, that's going to increase your bone mental density. Um, and that's huge as you age.
Chris Miller: And that prevents brakes or fractures, it.
Jeremy Pearson: Will help to prevent that. Yes, absolutely. So diet also helps with that. But strength training, any weight bearing activity, so even just putting on a backpack and walking outside, doing that's huge. That is huge for bone marrow density. And just having a load on your back, you're probably going to gain some muscle with that.
Chris Miller: Something I hear from M, my wife, she doesn't want to do a lot of strength training because she doesn't want to get big and bulky. But I always tell her, hey, I don't think that's going to happen. I feel like you really need to look at all the professional bodybuilders. It takes a long time, it takes forever to get really big and bulky.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah. Uh, my sister even will say that, that I don't want to strength train. I don't want to look bulky and stuff like that. It does not happen like that. Trust me, it does not happen like that. Your adaptations, if you want to get big and bulky, just eat a ton of go to McDonald's, go to Dairy Queen and have a blizzard every day. If you want to do that, that's.
Chris Miller: The road to volume.
Jeremy Pearson: That's how it happens. Yeah. That's how it happens. What strike training is going to do, if your diet is in check, you're actually going to see the opposite. You're going to see a decrease in fat and an increase in muscle mass, which is kind of I don't mean to brag, but my colleague Chris, that I mentioned and I, we pioneered that term in the scientific literature. It's called body recomposition.
Chris Miller: Wow.
Jeremy Pearson: Uh, which is pretty sweet.
Chris Miller: You heard it here first.
Jeremy Pearson: Yeah, exactly. So we published a paper in 2020. It was called body recomposition. Can trained individuals lose fat and gain muscle? And we showed that people can so strength training is key. Having a high protein diet key. Sleeping enough. These are things that are promoting losing fat and gaining muscle. And just because you strength train and just because we talked about this, just because you strength train with six reps or four reps, really heavy. That is not at all. Your muscle is not going to think, oh, well, now I'm just going to turn into bulk. I'm going to turn into that, like soggy fat muscle. It does not work like that. It does not work like that at all. There's no extra benefit of training higher reps or lower reps for losing that fat. Because I told you that resistance, uh, training or strength training in general, it doesn't burn that many calories. However, if I'm increasing muscle mass, I can hopefully decrease that fat mass with my diet intervention. Or maybe I add a little bit of cardio, or I'm just more active. So one of the keys if I want body recomposition to happen is when I strength train, I have my protein intake high. Maybe I do a little bit of cardio. I'm sleeping, obviously. But something that people don't think about is the nonexercise activity. Something we call it as neat non exercise activity. Uh, thermogenesis or fat burning. So taking Sunny for a run walk, doing laundry, going up, just being active over time, that's going to expel a lot of energy, and hopefully that will translate to fat mass loss. So for all of the women listening, you're going to thank yourself later. You're going to feel better about yourself. Your posture will hopefully improve. You'll feel stronger, you're going to feel better about yourself.
Chris Miller: And you're not going to look like Dwayne The Rock Jackson.
Jeremy Pearson: You're not going to look like that. You're going to hopefully lose a little bit of fat, and you're going to build quality muscle. That's going to just help you with getting out of the bed in the morning, just moving. It's going to help you with that. It's going to help you live your life.
Chris Miller: Yeah. With all of this research, I love it because it applies to people who are experienced bodybuilders, experienced people who are working out. Because you talk about slow reps and you talk about the amount of reps, and then we talk about the aging population. And you have research that applies there. You have research that applies to both men and women. So I think you're really on to something, and I'm grateful to hear. Jamie, any final words?
Jeremy Pearson: I would just say I want to thank you for having me on. This has been a great time. Chris, you're a great dude. It's been awesome. My final thoughts are to just find exercise, find any physical activity. It doesn't have to be strength training. It doesn't have to be cardio. Increase your physical activity by any means possible and enjoy it. Don't do the things that you don't like doing. Find the things you like doing and stay consistent with them. Don't wait until next New Year's new Year's resolutions to do it. Do it now. I keep telling my dad this because he's had a major, uh, injury, and he, uh, now has a major medical condition that I'm really worried about. And I yell at him all the time. I want him to be active now. And he's like, oh, I'll be active when I retire. I'm morbid. But I tell him, you're not going to make it that long.
Chris Miller: Don't push it off.
Jeremy Pearson: Don't push it off. Find the physical activity that you enjoy doing and stay with it.
Chris Miller: I'm glad to have you on, and you are a natural on the Mic. You can communicate well, which is tough when you're talking about this granular scientific study. But I can tell your mom was a public speaking teacher. Shout out to Miss P. She trained you up well. Very few verbal fillers, and I was able to understand a lot of it. And I imagine you have a lot more places to stop on your media tour now that you just published your paper.
Jeremy Pearson: I appreciate that. Yeah. Hopefully, if you guys want to check it out, please follow me on Instagram or Google my name if you want to check out that other podcast that I did. Um, but please, if you are on social media at all and you liked my talk, you liked what am doing, I highly recommend you follow Chris and then a couple of other people that I'll put in the comments below. Yeah, some shout outs. Yeah, definitely.
Chris Miller: Cool. Okay, everybody. Well, we'll see you next time.
Jeremy Pearson: Thank you, Chris.