"A few notes about this data:

Pay more attention to the total than the individual lifts. Your bone structure can impact the individual lifts quite a bit, but usually a disadvantage in one lift becomes an advantage in another (for example, long arms make benching difficult, but make deadlifting a breeze). However, your build generally won’t impact a lift more than 10-15% or so. If your squat and deadlift are within 10% of the predictions, and your bench is 30% below the predictions, it’s not because you have long arms, it’s because you’re a weak bencher (likewise with the squat and femur length).
You can count an efficiency number between ~85-115% as “perfect.” Not everyone’s lifts will fall right on the trend line. About half of the elite-level lifters in the study had lifts a bit lower than those that would be predicted by the trend line, after all, and about half of them had lifts a bit higher than would be predicted by this formula. It’s entirely possible to get an efficiency score above 100%, and most people should be able to attain such a score for at least one lift. Likewise, you probably have a lift that’s naturally a bit more of a struggle, and an efficiency score of 90% would be a more realistic goal to shoot for with that lift."

"The ones who made great progress with at least one lift all had efficiency scores below 80% for that lift initially, and all plateaued with Bulgarian-style training once their efficiency scores had reached 92-106%.

The people who didn’t respond very well to Bulgarian-style training had efficiency scores between 88% and 102% for the lifts that didn’t respond well.

It’s the trend I expected to see, but before developing this model, I didn’t have a way to verify it."


"If you have an efficiency score above 80% for a lift, you need to get swole-er

If your lifts are already fairly close to where they “should” be, it’s not your nervous system holding you back; you just don’t have enough muscle mass to lift very much more weight."

"This article isn’t meant to be a tome about hypertrophy, so here’s the basic outline of what you should do:

"Train each muscle or movement 2-3 days per week.
Eat enough protein (around 1.8g/kg, or 0.8g/lb) and get in a caloric surplus. If you’re over 20% body fat, you’ll probably gain muscle better if you cut to below 15% first (if you’re curious about why that is, go here and ctrl+f “body composition”)
Do more sets to failure or close to failure. If you like leaving more reps in the tank for your main lifts, then this is a fine time for more accessory work targeting your prime movers, especially the ones that are most likely to be limiting your performance. If you’re curious what those limiters are, check out my “No Weak Links” guide."