I’ll start off by saying I have really liked Brad’s work for sometime now. I present on hypertrophy a lot, and I cite a lot of Brad’s work. Brad has an immense amount of published work outside of this book: Brad Schoenfeld Hypertrophy. I have looked at and cited so many of these articles that I have lost track at this point. 

I would say that this book is simply his means to organize all of his published literature. It takes all of his research articles and formats them a way that makes a cohesive book appear to be the goal. If you really wanted to just bypass the book, you could probably piece together all the articles in a manner in which you could form some sort of conclusion yourself. But in the end, you will probably buy the book, so just get it and save yourself the time. 

One of the areas I always got from his research is his focus on intensity mediated drivers of hypertrophy. A large amount of his research was published by the NSCA, which strongly leans towards compound, free weight, and closed chain exercises. Intensity is easily one of the most important factors when using this style. You can see the rationale behind this with his writing. 

The other side he was always kind of down on was cellular swelling as a mediator of inducing hypertrophy. The knock on it was that it was temporary and did not lead to long term morphological changes. I always took exception to this because the Blood Flow Restriction research was definitely showing lower intensity, higher volume, cellular swelling focussed training induces incredible changes. 

The book definitely went into how cellular swelling is in fact an important thing to consider with hypertrophy. Not to get too causation-correlation on this, but the simple truth is that most bodybuilders utilize a lower intensity and higher volume approach. Not to say that some bodybuilders do not use a more intense approach with great results. It’s undeniable that the preferred method is ‘pump’, which is synonymous with cellular swelling. Not to mention that the BFR research is clear on the efficacy. 

A huge piece of this was Zatiorski’s claim that it was sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Just the visual of a cell swelling without increasing the functional diameter of a muscle cell makes it appear inferior. It’s hard to escape this notion when evaluating the downstream effects of a blood flow restriction routine on the internal chemistry effects. 

In the end I was really happy to see the book showing a more balanced approach when looking at intensity versus volume based drivers of hypertrophy. I would say that Brad did a really good job with selecting a lot of research out of his own library to show a full spectrum of evidence against and for specific methods. 

Really good book. Filled with resources and research. This was a good read; definitely worth your time.