Exercise science professor Wayne Westcott (not bad at 67!) talks with chef Kevin Colby at the Quincy College gym. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)
Dr. Wayne Westcott has written more than 20 books, 400 articles, and 600 newspaper columns on the topic of muscle-building exercise. He has spent thousands of hours in the research lab, presented his findings to tens-of-thousands of seminar attendees, personally educated, tested, and certified many thousands of fitness trainers from around the globe and consulted to some of the most prestigious organizations interested in this business – including The United States Navy, The United States Air Force, several national League Football Teams, General Motors Corporation, The Nautilus Corporation, and the President’s Council on Sports and Physical Fitness.
Lawrence, Wayne is without question, the most impressive single individual in our field. He is prolific in his publication, original research, and writing… his knowledge base in resistance training is unparalleled. He worked closely with everyone at Nautilus in the old days but also has an incredibly academic background and an unbiased, scientific approach to exercise.
– Luke Carlson, CEO, Discover Strength
I loved recording this episode. Wayne is one of the most charming, delightful and modest individuals I’ve had the pleasure to interview. We had a lot of fascinating chit-chat on strength training in this edition.
In this episode, we discuss:
- Why is it important to do strength training?
- How to optimise and balance elevation in metabolic rate with strength training frequency
- Why Wayne advocates people train twice per week in most cases
- How effective is it to use the same routine over a lifetime?
- How to stimulate optimal gains (of course – mustn’t forget that old chestnut)
- What has Wayne changed his mind about regarding exercise and nutrition?
- … and much more
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Listen below:
- Listen to it on iTunes.
- Stream by clicking here.
- Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as”.
Would you like to hear more from a top Exercise Scientist on optimising muscular development? Listen to this episode with Dr James Steele, in which we discuss how increased workout frequency might be better for trained individuals, the pros and cons of training not-to-failure, and much much more. Listen to it here (stream below or right-click to download):
This episode is brought to you by the Resistance Exercise Conference – The science and application of strength training for health and human performance. You will learn from the top strength training researchers, connect with exercise professionals from all over the world, get a workout from an expert trainer and get inspired, rejuvenated and focused on your strength training business. You will get the chance to chat with guys like Dr James Fisher, Luke Carlson, and Jim Flanagan. I will be attending with many of the Corporate Warrior listeners and I’d love to meet you in person. The resistance exercise conference will be held on the 9th and 10th of March 2018 in Minneapolis, Minnesota at The Commons Hotel.
I’m very excited about this and have wanted to attend for years. Sign up now at ResistanceExerciseConference.com, get 10% off with promo code corporatewarrior10 and I look forward to meeting you in person!
Subscribe to my emails to get a FREE HIT workout progress sheet and eBook with 6 podcast transcripts with guests like Dr. Doug McGuff, Drew Baye, and Skyler Tanner – Click here
Selected Links from the Episode
- Throwback Thursday!: Fitness Candor Ep. 20 – Dr. Wayne Westcott
- Strength Training for Baby Boomers and Beyond by Wayne Westcott
- American College of Sports Medicine
- Mitochondrion
- Myokine
- Resistance exercise reverses aging in human skeletal muscle
- Body by Science: A Research Based Program for Strength Training, Body building, and Complete Fitness in 12 Minutes a Week ( Amazon US / Amazon UK )
- Nautilus ONE Four Way Neck
People Mentioned
- Dr. James Steele (Listen to my episodes with James here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
- Dr. James Fisher (Listen to my episodes with James here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
- Dr. Brad Schoenfeld (Listen to my episodes with Brad here: Part 1 and Part 2)
- Dr Mark Tarnopolsky
- Prof. Bente Klarlund Pedersen
- Dr. Doug McGuff (Listen to my episodes with Doug here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
- Luke Carlson (Listen to my episodes with Luke here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4)
- Doug Brignole
- Drew Baye (Listen to my episodes with Drew here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)
- Skyler Tanner (Listen to my episodes with Skyler here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6)
- Tom Brady
- Arthur Jones
- Dr. Stuart Phillips (Listen to the episode with Stuart here)
500 – What I’ve Learned After 11 Years of Interviewing World-Class HIT Experts and Fitness Entrepreneurs (Luke Carlson interviews Lawrence Neal)
499 – The Best HIT Protocol for Strength, Muscle Mass, and Hypertrophy (SuperSlow VS High-Volume HIT Debate with Dagoberto Vila and Dr. James Fisher)
498 – How to Fine-Tune Your HIT Workouts and Design A Great Client Experience (with Luke Carlson)
Ha, I’ve never heard before things explained that way…when doing a different exercise for the same muscle groups, we are stimulating different neurological pathways…which has little to do with actual increase of muscle mass…Cool! Cheers!
I’ve heard that before plenty, paired with exercise induced BDNF release it’s really important for neuroplasticity in aging.
What a great interview Lawrence, and what a nice guy too – very inspirational! Wayne, if you don’t mind I have a question for you: since we know that our musculature does not decrease if we don’t workout for 1 week and the research you quote shows that at 4 days after the workout the trained muscles had only just begun to reach super-compensation, then shouldn’t all of us ‘normies’ be waiting at least 1 week between workouts? (By ‘normies’ I mean those of us who cannot recover super-quickly – ie we are neither genetically gifted nor on performance enhancing drugs…) After all, we all have a genetic ceiling that we butt up against eventually, so surely no need to attempt to rush things by working out more than once a week? The more research I do on this, the more I discover that the actual ‘work’ of hypertrophy/ strength gains is done by the body in the recovery period: so why not give the body an extended time to do all the recovering it needs to? The actual work-out stimulus appears to just be the starting pistol to get things moving – the body then needs to expend a lot of energy over several days to recover (Mark Sisson did a recent post on this if you are interested by the way). I understand that by working out 2 or 3 times a week then this may have superior ‘metabolic’ benefits, but for myself I feel that I can get those same benefits from cycling/ brisk walking and a low carb diet – I’d rather keep my workouts focused on pure strength/ hypertrophy goals. That said, I take your point that we are all here because we love strength training and going down to twice a week is hard enough, but once a week is really, really tough for me! But I have just had to bite the bullet on this one. Is this why you have remained at twice a week or do you really feel that twice a week is having significant incremental benefit compared to once a week? If so, what would be the mechanism there? Many thanks! PS I am 47 years old, so that probably also has a bearing on things!
I really enjoyed Dr. Westcott’s comments, especially his lack of variety in his personal workouts. A true blue chip iron man!
This was awsome. Wisdom, humility and just plain niceness! I’m hungry for more nuts and bolts now!
Another great podcast Lawrence. Brilliant. He sounds like a great guy.
Another enjoyable interview. I found it interesting that, despite his HIT leanings, he likes to do warm up sets before his work set, and will then do drop sets on occasion. I also found it interesting that for free weight exercises, he will do several sets. These are both things I started to do, after having done plain SSTF training.
He mentioned his two studies with slow repetitions. The limitation for both of these is that he only looked at strength, not hypertrophy (understandable, because hypertrophy isn’t that easy to measure), and he ended up comparing the strength gains at slow speed for one group to the strength gains at higher speed for the other group. In other words, Slow Rep guys improved X% at doing Slow reps and Fast Rep guys improved Y% at doing fast reps, with X>Y. What does that mean? Would have been instructive to test each group at both rep speeds, or with an isometric contraction. Perhaps slow reps have more of learning curve than fast reps, and hence take longer to master? Or maybe there are greater neurological adjustments that occur with a slow rep, just because it is a less natural movement pattern? Or maybe it really just is better overall? Kind of hard to say.
As you probably know, Discover Strength will be reporting on a study of rep speed at their upcoming conference. (Work done with Fisher, Steele, and Westcott). Counting on you, Lawrence, to keep the rest of us informed in a timely fashion.
Great interview Lawrence. I really like your podcasts. I especially relate to this episode because I work mostly with clients who are older and non-athletes. Wayne was one of my first exposures to HIT after being introduced to its concepts, and I was so happy to see that he’d be on your podcast. I’ve always felt that not enough people know about him and the work he’s done. You are definitively part of the reason more and more people will learn about a more accessible way of strength training. Thanks!
Great guy !