What we refuse to tell you about training

Any training app can put a number on a screen. Three sets of eight, ninety seconds rest, four exercises. The number arrives with no history and no confidence interval, and you have no way of telling whether it came from a meta-analysis, a coach's habit, or a designer needing to fill a row.

So for the Bodybuilding and Powerlifting programs we did it the other way round. Both are built from a specification written before the code: every variable stated as a range with a default, every range attached to the studies behind it, and every study graded by how much weight it can carry. If a number appears in your session, it appears in the app's Sources screen with the grade of the evidence next to it, and on this site with the papers.

That was the easy half. The hard half was the list each specification ends with: the things commonly prescribed with confidence that the research does not currently support.

Six things we could have shipped and did not

An optimal bulking surplus. Every app has one. Plus 300 calories, plus 500, a quarter of a percent of bodyweight per week. No dose-response trial establishes any of it. A surplus is required to maximize lean gain and the magnitude matters, and the literature does not say what the magnitude should be. So MVIII has no lean-bulk rate cited to this evidence, and the specification marks that entry not established rather than filling it in.

Maximum recoverable volume. The idea that there is a weekly set count past which you stop growing, or start going backwards. No meta-analysis has located one. What the dose-response research shows is diminishing returns across the entire range studied, with the curve flattening rather than reversing, and gains continuing past twenty sets a week. A hard ceiling is a coaching heuristic wearing a lab coat.

Return-to-training protocols. Nothing. No systematic review or controlled trial establishes evidence-based return-to-lifting progressions or load management for injured lifters, in either sport. This is the gap we were most tempted to fill, because it is easy to write a plausible eight-week ramp and nobody would question it. It would have been invented.

Meet-day nutrition. Also nothing, and also tempting, because once the app knows your competition date the feature writes itself. The nearest evidence is a combat-sports position stand built around a twenty-four hour window between weigh-in and competition. Powerlifting federations commonly weigh in two hours before. Extrapolating one to the other is an assumption, not a finding, and a bad assumption at that.

Training at long muscle lengths. Currently the most repeated claim in hypertrophy content: stretch-position work grows more muscle. A meta-analysis of twelve studies found trivial regional differences, with most of the posterior distribution inside the region of practical equivalence, comparing muscle lengths that differed by only about 22% on average. There is a directional trend. There is not an established effect.

Sex-specific programming. No difference in hypertrophy between sexes on identical protocols, and none in lower-body strength gains. Programming women differently on physiological grounds is not supported for either outcome, so MVIII does not branch on it, and never has.

Where the evidence argued against the obvious change

Two cases were genuinely surprising, and both went the way the research pointed rather than the way instinct did.

The first is dieting. The intuition is that you should train harder to hold onto muscle in a deficit. A trial that tested exactly that, five sets per exercise against three, at thirty calories per kilogram with protein held constant, found no difference in muscle thickness, body composition, contractility, sleep or mood. Lean mass fell equally in both groups. So when a member on either program is in a deficit, MVIII withholds the block's extra set rather than adding one. It is volume the evidence says buys nothing, taken at the moment recovery can least afford it.

The second is carbohydrate for powerlifters. Low carbohydrate availability does appear to blunt hypertrophy. It does not appear to affect strength. The review that establishes the first point makes the second explicitly, which cuts against loading a maximal-strength program with carbohydrate for its own sake. So the powerlifting macro defaults are carb-forward but deliberately nowhere near the glycogen-maximizing figures an athlete-focused position stand would suggest.

Where we could not do what the evidence asks

Being honest about the research means being honest about the program too.

Ten direct sets per muscle per week is the hypertrophy default. Two training days a week cannot reach it: twelve movement slots at five sets is sixty direct sets, and ten muscle groups wanting ten each is a hundred. That is arithmetic, not programming. So the app says which muscles fell short rather than quietly under-dosing and looking complete.

Two sessions per muscle per week is the frequency default, and three training days cannot deliver it either. Here the specification settled it for us: frequency is described as a way of distributing weekly volume rather than a growth driver in its own right, and the effect disappears once volume is held constant. Volume is the stronger finding, so volume wins and the frequency gap gets stated.

And the taper. The peaking timings for a powerlifting meet, the ones the app counts down to, come from a review of what competitive lifters report doing. The two controlled trials behind any of it had sixteen and twelve participants, with effect sizes trivial in magnitude even where statistically significant. A 2020 review concluded that how to peak maximal strength from strength-athlete data has not been established. So the countdown ships, and it ships with that sentence next to it, because somebody peaking for a competition is owed it.

Why bother

Because the alternative is what everything else does: state a number, imply a study, and never let you check. Every prescription in these two programs can be traced from your session to a row in a table to a DOI. Where the evidence is strong the app says so. Where it is one small trial in fourteen men, it says that too.

The full specifications are published here: bodybuilding and powerlifting. Both include the numbers, the grades, the caveats and the refusals.

General fitness and wellness information, not medical advice. Nothing here substitutes for assessment by a qualified clinician.

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