[00:02] they train the most, which ones they prioritize, people will give you all times, they're giving you the answers they want you to think. Time to get >> [music] >> Now, we have data for both males and
[00:19] females, which is super interesting. Most people think females train upper >> and lower body more than males. And that while females love training glutes and abs, males love training chest and arms. But almost everyone just intuits this
[00:34] from their own experience or cultural memes. What does the data on actual memes. What does the data on actual training say? Hypertrophy app. I I can only say it like that, Scott, from now on.
[00:49] and since then, you guys have logged over 1 million workouts and have created over 200,000 mesocycles. mesocycles. More specifically, 231,741 total
[01:18] our YouTube audience because most of y'all are male. Sausage party, my favorite. But on a serious note, that's still an unreal amount of female training data. I mean, that's 30,000 damn near female mesocycles. That's
[01:31] tons. It's way more than enough to learn something from. And overall, this amount of data, selfishly to RP, is simply unprecedented in exercise science. No data set remotely compares to this one. As a matter of fact, most of the data
[01:47] sets in exercise science are like 20, 30, 40, 50 people per study. Hundreds of nothing like this exists. When you guys are choosing muscle making your programs, you get three options: emphasize, grow,
[02:03] >> and maintain. Our big question today is, what muscles do the two sexes choose to emphasize the most? Which ones are they putting at the front burner? here are the numbers. Chest is the most prioritized muscle
[02:19] group for men. Okay, duh, intuition confirmed. But, if you look at the next four muscle groups after, they are almost identically emphasized. Chest is emphasized 64.5% of the time, while back, the rank five
[02:34] emphasis muscle, is prioritized by men at a very close 61.3% of the time. With biceps, triceps, and delts filling in the two to four rank slots in between in that order.
[02:48] All of them in the mid-60s emphasis percentages. So, the real story with men here isn't chest above all else, as much as it is upper body above all else, and damn near equally so for all of the major upper
[03:02] body muscles. Notice, I said major upper body muscles were roughly equally emphasized. That's because one of the minor upper body muscles, the forearms, are next on our list with rank number six. Instead of being in the 60s of
[03:17] emphasis percentages, they come in at 29.4%. What a drop! Guys, there's no muscle between 61% and 29%.
[03:30] This means that guys care way less about forearms than the major muscles of the upper body, which kind of makes sense because forearms kind of get to train with everything else anyway. But, what's crazy, at least to me, is
[03:42] that guys are so upper body interested that forearms outclass every lower body that forearms outclass every lower body muscle by a long shot. Only 3.4 percentage points separate the preference for training quads, 22.2%
[03:56] rank seven, and hamstrings, 18.8% rank 10, with abs and glutes filling in the eighth and ninth ranks in between. That's right. [music] Guys prioritize That's right. [music] Guys prioritize their legs and abs fully 1/3 as often as
[04:11] they do their chests, backs, delts, and arms. Any denial of peg leg syndrome is now refuted by the data. Repent, you small-legged bastards. Poor calves and traps at 15.7
[04:26] traps at 15.7 and 10% respectively. No love for these, huh fellas? I can't say I'm surprised about the calves cuz like honestly, who gives a about calves? I'm kidding, sort of. But traps, I'm actually glad
[04:40] you guys barely ever emphasize them because delts, back, and even leg training, stiff-legged deadlifts, leg presses with handle grabbing, dumbbell lunges with Bulgarians, and proper retraction on
[04:52] high bar squats already hits [music] those traps so well. Every time I see someone focus on traps, I get confused and then sad. Okay, that's the male story. Now, what about the female story? Women emphasize glutes
[05:07] the most. Surprise! But to me, the real story here is similar to the male version. Glutes are number one at 75.1% of emphasis, but quads and hams are right up in that cluster with 70% and 69.7%
[05:21] respectively. So, the more accurate story isn't women equals [music] glutes, it's women prioritize their glutes, quads, and hams way more than the rest >> [music] >> Well, hams are ranked three at 69.7%
[05:36] emphasis. And the next muscle down, abs, are ranked four with only 43.5% emphasis. You guys, that's It's universe of emphasis. Women, at least the RP
[05:48] Hypertrophy app ladies, are leg obsessed. And look, you'll never ever hear me complain about that. Remember all those women with gross over muscled neither. The next cluster down for women is
[06:02] actually like most of the rest of the body. Starting with calves at 30.4% [music] in rank five and ending with triceps at 23.9% in rank nine. And shoulders, biceps, and
[06:14] back filling in the interim in that order. The picture here is clear. Calves and most of the upper body are way less important for women than for men. Actually, by ratio, they are basically
[06:28] an exact reflection of how men prioritize their lower bodies. About as bodies. With one exception. Chest is out of the cluster at rank 10 and only 16.6%
[06:42] I honestly didn't see that one coming. I thought chest and especially back for here we are. And last and least, women emphasize
[06:54] their forearms and traps at 4.1% and 2.1% [music] respectively. I mean, this is basically a rounding error. Though to be fair, because of the massive sample size here, literally hundreds of women are going to
[07:07] gyms with their RP Hypertrophy app in tow and telling dudes, "I'm here to >> [laughter] >> I'm here to blast my traps and forearms, bro." Ladies, don't let anyone stop you. All right, that's a deep [music] dive
[07:20] into our RP Hypertrophy app data set. But what about published research from other data sets? Well, for that, we bring in our A-team of scientists, Dr. Milo and Dr. Pack. >> So, how does our RP data compare to the
[07:35] published literature? The honest starting point is that there isn't that much to compare it against. So, research on everyday lifters and which muscle groups they actually prioritize is surprisingly thin. So, we have to work
[07:48] from a couple of indirect lines, not a stack of studies. On one hand, we have a classic study by Mealey all the way back in 1997, good times. They found that men
[08:00] trained their upper body much more than they trained their legs. Shocker, I know. On the other hand, we have a much more recent study published in 2026 by Baz Valatal, shoutout. They found the following. Back led by wide margin at
[08:16] around 15 to 17 sets a week, chest and shoulders were next at about 12 sets per week, quads around 10 sets above direct arm work, and lastly, hamstrings were the lowest muscle group averaging about eight sets per week. So, overall, the
[08:32] outside literature is mixed, indirect, [music] and limited. But, that's where thankfully the RP data set can help. never actually touched one. Wait, that's not what I want to say.
[08:46] What I meant to say was our findings in the RP Hypertrophy app data set line up research. More recent data from De Silva and colleagues in compared to physique athletes shows the same thing in a much more bodybuilding focused population.
[09:00] Men performed far more upper body work, especially for chest and back, while women performed a lot of lower body work, including exercises like squats, hamstring curls, stiff-legged deadlifts, and hip adductions. So, when the RP app
[09:13] shows women emphasizing glutes, quads, and hamstrings way more than chest, traps, and forearms, that's not some weird RP only cult thing. It's basically the same pattern we see in several previous studies, just with a much
[09:25] bigger, more specific, hypertrophy-focused data set. The key caveat is that this is descriptive, not prescriptive. Women absolutely train upper body, and many train it hard. But, on average, when women get to choose
[09:38] what to emphasize, the published research and the RP app data set both point in the same direction. The main event is downstairs. >> Okay. So, why do we see this pattern emerging in the RP data and in the other
[09:52] data so much? Certainly, the RP data is a bit biased to evidence-based series hypertrophy chasers. You guys are RP army. But it's not super different from the other data sets collected around the world over time. So, there's definitely
[10:05] something going on here. My take is that men love a jacked upper body because it's a signaling mechanism for strength and dominance in our primate brains. [music] And women love a jacked lower body because that's a
[10:18] signal for health and capability to our primate brains. And a bigger lower body and a small waist form that fertility-indicating ratio of waist and hips that almost every culture on Earth finds attractive. One thing we find is
[10:34] that, to begin with, males have bigger and stronger upper bodies than females. But, relative to body weight, [music] females have similarly big and strong legs to males. And it looks like when both sexes hit the gym, they just kind
[10:47] of lean in hard to making those genetic differences even bigger. Is cultural influence at play here? Almost certainly. But it seems to have only a marginal effect. Evolutionary psychology is still running the game.
[11:00] >> We are not saying men must train this way or women must train that way because frankly way less fun than watching people build whatever weird, beautiful, personally satisfying meat sculpture they want to walk around the planet
[11:14] inside. These are trends. Big trends. Really big trends. But trends are not dudes out there trying to turn their upper body into a Marvel movie poster room waiting for the text back and wondering what they said wrong in their
[11:29] last date, there are also plenty of men who love training legs, >> glutes, calves, abs, and so on. And for every thousand women absolutely annihilating glutes, quads, and hams with the grim determination of a Spartan
[11:43] warrior goddess, there are plenty of women who love training chest, back, arms, shoulders, traps, forearms, and whatever else. So, the point is not you should train like your sex tends to train. The point is it's really
[11:56] interesting that when humans are given access to modern gyms, apps, machines, dumbbells, barbells, cable stacks, and all the other glorious torture furniture of hypertrophy, men and women tend to use that technology to emphasize
[12:09] different things. In fact, different things that are very, very in line with evolved preferences. Men, on average, seem [music] to chase big upper body vibe, chest, arms, shoulders, back, strength, width,
[12:23] dominance. I can carry furniture, wrestle a bear, and maybe open this jar hard to open. And yes, by bear, I mean the opposite of twink in the gay community, not the animal. A real bear would kill you so
[12:37] goddamn fast, bro. Come on. But a gay bear, well, mhm, a man can dream. Let's all close our eyes together. Imagine that chest hair rubbing up against your face as you gasp for the tiny little bit of
[12:50] air he decides you get to have to keep you just awake enough to just disintegrate into a pile of pleasure beneath his 474 rhinoceros-like pounds. Am I erect, you ask? Yes, and I
[13:06] have been for this whole video. Women, on average, seem to chase the lower body and waist signal, glutes, quads, hams, abs, shape, curves, athleticism. I can
[13:18] leggings, and possibly kill you with a hip thrust. Oh, boy, death by hip thrust. I'm dreaming again. Neither is morally better. Neither is more correct. These are just different aesthetic games we're
[13:32] playing with the same equipment. So, at the end of the day, you do you. At RP, your look is the look we want to optimize. If you're a woman and you want congratulations, you're extremely normal. If you're a guy and you care way
[13:47] back than legs, congratulations, you're also extremely normal and the data says you are not alone. In fact, you are surrounded by millions of your brothers in Christ all bench pressing together while calves remain a rumor.
[14:01] you where calves are on the body at this point. They're like an organ under your abs or something, right? Now, most guys still train their legs and most women still train their upper bodies, they just don't emphasize them as much. Would
[14:14] app on something you don't normally do kill you? No. Might be worth a shot to see how you like but don't let anyone guilt you into thinking your priorities are automatically wrong just because
[14:26] stereotypes exist because people are lazy and biased and sometimes they exist because millions of people want a lot of the same thing. So, train for the physique you actually want. Train the muscles you actually care about. Train
[14:40] in a way that makes you proud to look in the mirror, move through the world, and keep showing up at the gym. Either way, give the RP hypertrophy app a try if you haven't yet. You too could become a statistic in our next data analysis. Uh,
[14:54] for drugs or get gunned down in East LA or something. But hey, hey, you'll be jacked. So, who cares, right? Peace, homies.