In your opinion, are there any added benefits for muscle hypertrophy with more volume (more excercises/sets) - training only once weekly? Where lies the upper threshold?
This considering both the older Nautilus programs as well as your recent M3 program have more volume. Also, other non-HIT programs feature a lot of volume for hypertrophy, in support of recent science. The question also seems relevant in respect of not training til failure.
Unless someone is the Active Lifestyle person, with lots of hiking and biking and the like, I don’t see once/week being a good option. Especially, if you have to crank up the volume to make that work.
Perhaps if you do serious* martial arts, or some other sport, I can see once/week workouts in those instances too — BUT, the weekly workout would be focused on the muscles you DON’T use in those other endeavors! (obviously, off-season would be an entirely different matter…)
(* when I say “serious”, I mean multiple days per week. People with hard physical jobs would fit here too)
For sheer variation, once in a while I do a full body workout 2-3 times a week (6-7 exercises for one hard set each) for maybe 6-8 weeks or so.
But most of the time, I use splits.
To Simon’s point, I like to use more volume and exercises…just way too hard with full body. And I find training legs with anything else gets fatiguing.
To further explain, I’m experimenting with mini-sets with the same weight throughout (ladders, cluster sets) in a strict form 4-5 sec pos and 4-5 sec neg. This not til failure. Allows for volume and intensity to build up over a prolonged set (consisting of several mini-sets). Autoregulate rest as needed in between mini-sets. As this takes more time to perform, I stick to one excercise for legs, chest, back and shoulders respectively (powerlifting strategy). This workout takes about 40 mins to complete.
Oh. 40 mins for once/week is not too bad. When I go 2/wk, my workouts avg about 25 min ea.
How many reps per mini-set?
How many mini-sets?
Sounds a lot like the 8x3 or 10x3 we were talking about in another thread, except for the Rep Style/Speed. Rhythmic (8x3) vs Almost-SS (yours). My 8x3 rep style is X/1/3/1
I either do 6x4 (clusters a la Scott Stevenson) or 2-3-5/2-3-5/2-3-5 (that’s 9 minisets, ladders a la Dan John).
Yeah, the 8-10x3 from the other thread got me inspired. My idea was to add more volume and reach enough intensity without sacrificing form. You do get close to failure in some sets, but autoregulate rest/recovery to be able to continue with the same weight. That said, I would never take more than 2 mins rest at most. More often up to 30 secs.