![rest time between sets hypertrophy rest time between sets hypertrophy](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1b/86/e6/1b86e6620756a5fe74c2259c0caf0701.jpg)
In short, anecdotal observation is an extremely crude tool to determine how to train or diet for muscle growth. Because people grow at such different rates and there are so many variables to control that the field of exercise science suffers from very low statistical power: it’s hard to isolate the effects of one variable with confidence. Exercise scientists face this problem every day. Hell, even if all your friends at the gym join in for the experiment and you randomly split them up into 2 groups, one training with style X and the other training with style Y, and you meticulously control their diets and track their muscle growth with an MRI machine, it may still not be clear what the best training style is. Did your former program work better because it was actually better or were you just reaping newbie gains with it? There are strong diminishing returns to training as you approach your genetic muscular potential.
![rest time between sets hypertrophy rest time between sets hypertrophy](http://img.youtube.com/vi/fY2rnfxkM98/0.jpg)
You think those stiff-legged deadlifts are the best hamstring builders? Maybe they just caused major muscle soreness and you mistook the swelling for muscle growth. You think partial rep curls are the key to a big biceps? Maybe they just gave you a big pump which you mistook for muscle growth. Yeah, you think you can, but it’s too slow of a process that takes too long and is too subjective to observe. You know what you cannot observe well? Muscle growth itself. That means they base their training on what they can concretely observe and feel, in particular the pump and burn you get during training and soreness the days after. Lots of partial reps, training to failure, moderately high rep sets, training a muscle infrequently with short rest periods (or they try if they’re not too gassed). In my observation, gym bros and bodybuilders all train pretty much the same way everywhere. People often ask me how they train in Taiwan or Ecuador or some other exotic location. And after having lived and trained in over 50 countries, I think I know why. Ok, not everything, obviously, but quite a lot of “everyone knows this” ideas turned out to be wrong.
![rest time between sets hypertrophy rest time between sets hypertrophy](https://outlift.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/short-rest-times-hypertrophy.jpg)
Everything the bros told you about how to train was wrong.