I’m going to post one of these per week. These are questions that I received either through Instagram, Facebook or Email and that I’m using to write a new e-book.
Q 1. Did you ever have any issue with too much volume in your own workout? I struggle with loving to work out and so on. I also struggle to know what too much volume is. I generally get stronger and show improvement, but I’m definitely over on sets. I include lots of super sets and other intensity techniques, usually after a couple heavier key movements.
A. You and me both!
Excessive training volume has always been my nemesis ever since I first picked up a barbell at 12 years of age!
I remember once I got hooked on training my parents got me a weight training set (bench, bar/weights, adjustable dumbbells) and I would train every morning before going to school. Then I would train at the school’s gym during lunch break and do another session after school if I didn’t have football practice.
I also remember my Olympic lifting days when I would typically train twice a day, 5-6 days a week.
Heck, I even did as many as 100 sets of bench press in one workout!
The thing is that I still got results. Which let me believe that what I was doing was fine. And I eventually became convinced that the more I did, the more I progressed.
What I didn’t see, or refused to see, is that I was gradually feeling worse and worse. Mostly from a well-being perspective. I would start to have more frequent mood swings, became impatient, suffer from anhedonia (significant decrease in pleasure response) even up to the point of being borderline depressive.
But the fickly thing with gradually feeling worse is that you don’t notice it. Your body just adjust, and it becomes your new normal. You don’t notice that something is wrong until you hit the bottom of the barrel.
It also happens that the body is built for survival. Even under a state of severe fatigue and under-recovery it is possible to turn in good workout performances. Heck, I’ve had elite level athletes who showed all signs of overtraining beat PRs in the gym! I suspect that it’s kinda like the “last ditch effort” from a deadly wounded animal: when the body feels the most vulnerable it may increase adrenaline production, in an effort to survive, which momentarily increases performance, compensative for the drop in performance due to fatigue.
Of course, some people enhance that or recreate it artificially by (ab)using stimulants pre-workout.
In fact, that’s the main reason why I don’t like chronic stimulants use: they mask fatigue and gives you the illusion that you are recovering properly from your workouts; not allowing you to properly evaluate your training volume and intensity.
For the longest time I would even refuse to acknowledge that the increased gains I would get when I was forced to reduce training volume and/or frequency was a sign that more was not always better.
But the reality is that for maximal gains, the proper modulation of volume, effort level and load is very important.
Volume refers to the amount of work performed. Most people only look at volume in terms of total sets. And that is indeed a big part of the equation (increasing set is the fastest way to increase volume). But in reality, volume, or volume-load (also called tonnage) is a function of Total reps (sets X reps) and the weight lifted.
For example, if you do 3 sets of 10 reps (30 reps) with 200lbs your volume-load is 6 000lbs. If you do 5 sets of 5 (25 reps) with 250lbs your volume-load is 6 250lbs. If you do 4 sets of 12 (48 reps) with 125lbs your volume-load is 6 000lbs. As you can see, there are several ways of increasing (or decreasing volume).
I will say three things about volume:
- A gradual increase in volume-load is likely necessary to keep progressing. In fact, the whole concept of progressive overload is about increasing volume-load over time. Progressive overload means making your muscles work harder or more than before to keep stimulating gains. But people assume that this automatically mean putting more weight on the bar. Not so! Adding weight while doing a similar number of reps is certainly progressive overload, but so is doing more reps per set with the same weight or doing more sets with the same weight for a similar number of reps.
Don’t forget that simply being able to use more weight while doing the same number of sets and reps is an increase in volume.
- Volume is more important for muscle size development than for strength. I’m not saying that it’s not important for strength, it is, but to a lesser extent than volume. For example, Mike Mentzer (who happens to be my favorite physique of all time) was a lower-volume guy than his bodybuilding peers. But at the apex of his career, he was still doing a decent amount of volume (he believed that he was doing less than he was because he only counted the very hardest set of an exercise as a work set).
However, he is best known for creating the Heavy Duty training system which was extremely low in volume and frequency. But high in effort (going to failure and beyond) and load (using heavy weights and focused on lifting more each time). He even eventually created a “Consolidated Heavy Duty program” which was essentially one set to failure on 2-3 exercises per workout and only training once every 6-10 days!
Well, people who did those programs would all report strength gains from session to session but very little improvements in muscle mass, especially compared to more traditional training.
- While progressively increasing volume-load is pretty much a prerequisite to keep progressing, it must be done very gradually and in a cyclic manner. That’s because your body has a limited capacity to positively adapt to training stress. Once you exceed it you will get diminishing results for the invested efforts and eventually stagnate or even regress.
It will also eventually have a negative impact on your hormonal, nervous and immune system. You start to feel worse and worse, have low libido, less pleasure in life and gains/performance decrease.
That’s why I believe in periodization, or the use of training cycles. And they don’t have to be complicated.
Essentially a training cycle (typically 10-12 weeks) will have a gradual increase in volume-load. This can come from an increase in sets, load (or both) or the use of more intense training methods. But you must go from a lower level at the beginning of the cycle (still enough to produce gains) then is increased over the cycle.
Then, when the cycle is over you deload for 1-2 weeks and start a new cycle. The new cycle will start again at a lower level of training stress, but slightly higher than the beginning of the previous cycle, and builds up again.
You do 3-4 such cycles per year. That’s how you can keep making progress over the long run without burning out.
Wow, I got off-track! I was still just talking about volume, effort and load. Let’s move on to effort level and load before I get back to this cycling/periodization idea.
So, effort level, how hard you push each work set on average (proximity to failure) is another thing you can modulate when you program your training.
Without getting into too many details, the close you get to failure to more effective a set is. At least when it comes to building muscle.
But the difference might not be immense.
For example, stopping a set with 1 rep in reserve is pretty much as effective as reaching failure from an individual set perspective. But in practice, keeping 1 rep in reserve is likely superior than going to failure because it allows you to do a greater number of quality sets in your workout (greater volume).
That’s because reaching failure causes a lot more central fatigue than stopping just short. Central fatigue has nothing to do with how you feel. It simply means the strength of the excitatory drive that the nervous system sends to the muscles to recruit and contract them.
The stronger the central signal, the easier it is to recruit the growth-prone fast-twitch fibers. If you weaken the signal you will recruit those fibers to a lesser extent, even if you do to failure again, leading to a less effective set.
If all you can do for a muscle is ONE set, then yeah, going to failure (or beyond) will be more effective than stopping short.
But within the reality of a normal workout, which includes multiple sets it is more effective to keep 1-2 reps in reserve on most of your work sets.
And here is a solid rule when it comes to effort level per set:
The more reps in reserve you keep on average per set, the more volume you will be able to handle (and need).
I mean, you can DO a lot of volume even if you take all sets to failure, if you are pig head, but that doesn’t mean that those sets will be productive. They are likely to become less and less effective as volume piles up and is done in a state of greater central fatigue.
All those sets to failure might make you feel good; both psychologically (feeling like you are the hardest worker, that you left no stone unturned, satisfying a stimulus addiction, etc.) and physiologically (big pump, more soreness) speaking. But the reality is that a lot of the volume will be non-productive and will not lead to greater growth.
Typically, you can either…
- Push each set to its limit and do a small volume of work
- Keep a lot of reps in the tank (3-4) and do a very high volume
- Keep a small/moderate number of reps in the tank (1-2) and do a moderate volume
The later solution is typically the most effective and the one that allows you to gradually increase volume-load the most through a training cycle.
And our last variable to look at is load. Which refers to the amount of weight you put on the bar.
I will say that if volume is more important for hypertrophy than strength; load is more important for strength than hypertrophy.
Just like volume still plays a (smaller) role in strength development, load still plays a (smaller) role in hypertrophy.
In theory, a training cycle in which you gradually increase the number of work sets (let’s say from a total of 80 sets per week at the beginning of the cycle to 120 at the end of it) but keep using the same weights, will still promote muscle growth at a near-optimal rate.
But the same is not true for strength.
Getting stronger requires the use of gradually heavier weights. For two main reasons:
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To keep improving the neuromuscular factors involved in force production
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Heavy work leads to different structural changes to the muscle tissue. And I’m not saying that heavy and light stimulate different types of hypertrophy, they don’t. BUT heavy work makes the muscles fibers more resilient, better at withstanding heavy loads. How? A muscle fiber doesn’t run all the way from one side of the muscle to the other in one continuous segment. A muscle fiber is actually several shorter segments connected together by micro-tendons. Tendons respond to load. The heavier loading will strengthen those micro-tendons more so than lighter work, thus making those fibers (and the whole muscle) better at handling heavier loads.
Ok, let’s get back to this cycling idea.
From your question I gather that you want to increase both size and strength (you mentioned using a couple of heavy movements and then do your main hypertrophy work with plenty of sets and advanced lifting methods.
I will address the amount you are doing and that you should be doing in a moment, but let’s first talk general concepts.
Concept #1 Hypertrophy is more dependent on volume
Concept #2 Strength is more dependent on load
Concept #3 There must be an increase in the key improvement factor to keep progressing
From a cycle perspective, it means that you will have to gradually increase training volume (mostly from a higher number of sets) over 10-12 weeks for the work dedicated mostly to muscle growth. Here you don’t even have to stress about using heavier weights. You can add weight if the previous weight is too easy, but I would rather that you focus on adding sets and/or reps.
And gradually increase the load over 10-12 weeks for the work specifically done with strength development in mind. And, opposite to the hypertrophy work, you shouldn’t increase the amount of volume you do for your strength work. In fact, it should decrease over the 10-12 weeks (mostly from doing less reps per set to allow for higher loads to be used).
Here is a very general example. Not necessarily a recommendation, it’s for illustration purposes.
For the heavy exercise (I only suggest one per session)
Week 1 – 4 sets of 8
Week 2 – 4 sets of 8 (with more weight than on week 1)
Week 3 – 4 sets of 8 (with more weight than on week 2)
Week 4 – 4 sets of 5
Week 5 – 4 sets of 5 (with more weight than on week 4)
Week 6 – 4 sets of 5 (with more weight than on week 5)
Week 7 – 4 sets of 3
Week 8 – 4 sets of 3 (with more weight than on week 7)
Week 9 – 4 sets of 3 (with more weight than on week 8)
Week 10 – 1 x 5, 1 x 4, 1 x 3, 1 x 2, 1 x 1
For the hypertrophy work (the volume is the total amount of hypertrophy work per week, including all muscles NOT for each muscle)
Week 1: 50 total sets/week, no intensity methods
Week 2: 50 total sets/week, 8-10 of which can use intensity methods
Week 3: 50 total sets/week, 12-15 of which can use intensity methods
Week 4: 70 total sets/week, no intensity methods
Week 5: 70 total sets/week, 8-10 of which can use intensity methods
Week 6: 70 total sets/week, 12-15 of which can use intensity methods
Week 7: 90 total sets/week, no intensity methods
Week 8: 90 total sets/week, 8-10 of which can use intensity methods
Week 9: 90 total sets/week, 12-15 of which can use intensity methods
Week 10: 70 total sets/week, up to 20 can use intensity methods
*Note that this is the volume for the hypertrophy work, it doesn’t include the strength sets.
** It’s up to you to spread that volume the way that better fits your goal.
After your cycle you would do a 1-2 weeks deload during which you significantly decrease workload. The ideal volume for the deloads is performing 1/3 of the highest volume you reached during your cycle.
NO this will not lead to muscle loss (you can maintain all size and strength for over 12 weeks if doing only 1/3 of the volume you used to grow). More importantly, it will resensitize your body to the stimulus of training (greater mTOR response) although 2 weeks of deload is better than 1 for that purpose.
Not to mention that it will make you feel better, get rid of fatigue so that you can start your next cycle with slightly heavier loads (for the strength work) and slightly more volume (for the hypertrophy work).
Do that four times a year and you will be able to continuously grow and get stronger without feeling like crap.