How Often Should You Really Lift Weights? Feat. Dr. Stuart Phillips

Dr. Spencer Nadolsky and Dr. Karl Nadolsky sit down with Dr. Stuart Phillips, senior author on the newly updated American College of Sports Medicine position stand on resistance training, to break down what 137 systematic reviews and over 30,000 participants actually tell us about building muscle, getting stronger, and improving function across the lifespan. The last version of these guidelines was published in 2009 and the science has come a long way, even if the fundamentals have not.

In this episode they cover why lifting weights twice a week is already getting most of the available benefit and three times is better but not by as much as you think, why the hypertrophy rep range is far broader than the classic 8 to 12 and what that actually means for your training, why getting stronger still requires lifting heavy things regardless of what anyone tells you, how power training is about moving with intentional velocity and why it matters more as you age than most people realize, why periodization showed no statistically significant advantage over non-periodized programs in the systematic review and what that means in practice, why eccentrically biased training produces slightly better muscle growth but is an optimization tool not a fundamental one, why time under tension does not have the evidence base people think it does, why blood flow restriction remains a niche tool rather than a strategic advantage, and why the best workout is simply the one you will actually show up and do consistently.

The Docs Who Lift podcast distills and simplifies the complexities of exercise, medicine, and weight loss. Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

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