The High Volume Workout Plan for Natural Bodybuilders

I did this program a year or two ago. Let RPE be your guide for rests between sets.

Hello, I have a question please.
How does look training plan, if I choose option B, that means 4 workouts in the week.
Do I go at Friday only for two exercises or do more?
Thanks for answer. :slight_smile:

I donā€™t really understand the question

@Stepan I think he means that with option B you would do lower body on friday and upper body on saturday.

Workout 3 (the moderate neurological workout) is to be done on friday and saturday if you pick option B.

The thing is, workout 3 is a full body workout and option B uses lower and upper split for workout 3. Hence his question if he should be doing only 2 leg exercises (as prescribed on the full body workout 3).

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If I want to train 4 days in a week, which means 2x Fullbody + 1x lower + 1x upper body. How should look the lower and the upper body workout. I can not find it in the article.
Sorry for my English, I am trying hard. :smiley:

My experience with high volume training - It worked way beyond my expectations. I easily added at least 10 lbs of LBM and all my lifts went up. First a little background on my lifting experienceā€¦

Iā€™m well into my 50ā€™s, starting lifting at 15 years old (lifted logs in the backyard!). In my late teens, early 20ā€™s lifted at gyms without much of a plan. Got strong almost benching 400 lbs at 200 lbs body weight but could not add LBM beyond this no matter how hard I tried. At about 30 years old started reading and after realizing that all the muscle mag and Weider programs were for non natural lifters settled on HIT. I did gain on this, reaching a best of 218 lbs at 10% bf, but may have been more because of structure than anything else and also the availability of protein powders. Mike Mentzer and the Brawn guy got a lot of things right but they got the frequency part dead wrong. From 35 years old or so until a few years ago I lifted to maintain and for health, figured it was impossible for me to gain more but in any case I had a very good physique.

So 3 years ago I started seeing the high frequency lift program from Christian. It went against everything I learned from HIT so I was very skeptical, but I had nothing to lose. Immediately I started gaining strength and mass and it continued for 6 months or so. I have been doing it for 3 years now and I recently made another tweak and starting gaining again! I believe the 36 hrs between same muscle workouts is optimal but easier with a home gym of course.

I think conventional wisdom is that you cannot do this workout forever because it will wear you out. I experienced this during the first 3 months. Significant fatigue and any additional manual labor killed me. However, something miraculous happened at the 3 month mark. All of sudden the fatigue completely disappeared. Its as if some long term adaptation had taken place. I even experimented with doing each upper body workout 5 times per week and it did not help much but did not hurt either. However i do a very limited set of exercises - squats, RDL, pullups, dumbell bench and military press. No direct arm work at all, its a waste of time for me. Also, I usually only do 2 or 3 max effort work sets. For first 3 years I only did the RDL and squats each about every 5 or 6 days because I thought 36 hrs would be too much for lower body as squats made me sore. I recently increased the squat/RDL frequency and those lifts immediately went up even though I was sure I was at my genetic limit on those. I realized the reason I was getting sore from squats was precisely because I was not doing them frequently enough.

Apologies for the long post but I wanted to make readers understand that these are in no way novice gains and I never thought I could make gains like this. My advice is to limit the number of exercises, try for 36 hrs between same muscle workouts and limit number of work sets. Going beyond this when starting out may wear you out. If you get fatigued maybe back off a bit for a day or 2 but try to push through for a few months. I have no idea if others will experience the same disappearance of fatigue (or maybe you are not fatigued) as me but in any case you should make dramatic gains.

Christian is definitely a master in his field.

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Thanks for sharing this!

If Iā€™m reading right, in your own experience, it seems like youā€™ve gotten big boosts out of switching things up when you got stale? Like each style of training got you so far, then stopped stressing your body, then you found a new way to challenge yourself and boom?

I definitely find this for myself and itā€™s sometimes hard to get out of our own way. If something has helped us be successful, itā€™s hard to leave it for something that hasnā€™t (yet) helped us be successful. Kudos to you for taking plunges!

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We all seem to get attached to things that we thought were the silver bullets. I believe that anything new can be a silver bullet, but drastically or even slightly changing your approach away from something thatā€™s worked so well can be scary. Then thereā€™s people who seem to plateau, find something new, progress again, and think ā€œOh this is the way I should be training!ā€ and then stay there for way too long.

Iā€™m the kind of guy that doesnā€™t like change too much so get around this with ā€œtweaksā€ that allow me to keep moving forward on the same core program. Seems like this guy does the same.

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Some of itā€™s pretty logical, because thatā€™s how the rest of life tends to shape our heuristic: ā€œif I did X and got big, not doing X means Iā€™ll get small.ā€

We also know training is a long game, and the key to success is just putting your head down and doing the work.

Actual hypertrophy is a long enough process that there are likely to be many life variables during any time period that results in multiple growth, making it even more difficult to nail down what that ā€œmagic thingā€ was.

I donā€™t know that I have a real point. I guess just pick something that fits your life and crush it as long as your general gym performance trend is improving. When either of those two indicators are off, thereā€™s no fear in a tweak or a wholesale change (good point you made above).

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Well I was stuck for 15 years or so but reasonably content with my physique. My post may seem a bit dramatic but I was shocked how well the high frequency worked - nearly every week for months I had a strength gain and LBM gain. I would not do it unless you have totally exhausted all other methods which for me was just increasing intensity and reducing sets. Reason I say this is doing high frequency in a commercial gym means going to the gym almost every day. Actual workout time is very low, for me 15 mins or so per body part max. However, when you figure in travel time to the gym etc. for a 15 or 30 min workout its not very efficient.

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Itā€™s shocking how long it took me to appreciate this.

Even more shocking is how many friends and coworkers say, ā€œHey Barley, how can I get in shape?ā€

I say, ā€œPick a program. Put in the work.ā€

I see them weeks or months later and they still havenā€™t picked a program, let alone made it to the gym.

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Thibs, Iā€™m interested in giving this a go but have a few questions about exercise selection, I train in my garage gym with limited equipment ie rack, a few different barbells, bench, dumbbells, kettlebells, a wide selection of bands and a plate loaded high pulley so when a machine/isolation exercise is on the plan Iā€™m a bit limited as to what to go for. Any tips?

Thatā€™s pretty broad. Are there any movements in particular youā€™re struggling with and maybe we can give suggestions?

Most of workout 3 really. I figure for B I can go for hip thrusts and for C2 I can use a cable row of some description but Iā€™ve got nothing that would fit the bill for anything else. I have zero machines and have always trained without them. Would I be correct in thinking that using barbell/dumbell exercises for workout 3 would affect the programs efficiency as it would be neurologically too stressful.

@Garethv1

A. Machine compound quad-dominant exercise (leg press, hack squat, pendulum squat, etc.)
======> Landmine Squat, Goblet Squat
B. Glutes or hamstrings, lower stress compound lift (hip thrust, reverse hyper, glute-ham raise, etc.)
======> Hip Thrust
C1. Horizontal press machine (machine bench press, Smith machine bench, Smith machine incline, etc.)
======> DB Bench, Weighted Push Up ?
C2. Horizontal row machine or pulley
======> Cable Row / Chest Supported DB Row*
D1. Vertical press machine
======> DB Shoulder Press ?
D2. Vertical pulling machine or pulley
======> Rack Chin

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Probably not because If you have always trained with only bbā€™s and dbā€™s and youā€™re technically efficient, the neurological stress will actually be a lot lower.

Thatā€™s why professional weightlifters can get away with high frequency on the olympic lifts because they are so efficient that these movements do not require lots of neurological output anymore.

You may have to reduce the total workout volume slightly because neurological stress will still be a bit higher due to stabilization demands.

Good suggestions by @jibb.

My $0.02 on the neurological question is to reduce the stability/ technical requirements as much as is reasonable. A landmine squat is less demanding than a squat, DB press more forgiving than barbell, and so on.

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Thanks. Iā€™ve got a lot of years under the bar (I started lifting whilst I was boxing in 1995) and have competed in bodybuilding, powerlifting and strongman but now Iā€™m getting old and 5-3-1 isnā€™t really working for me as well as it did in my mid to late 30s Iā€™m looking to change tack somewhat and figured this may work well for me as Iā€™ve never really explored high-volume work so may give me a new stimulus.

Looking at this program for my brother potentially. Heā€™s a volume fiend and is looking for a new program. He really enjoyed your Type 3 routine, heā€™s run it twice now, but heā€™s wanting to do a program with more direct arm and shoulder work. What would the volume and intensity look like on the isolation/Assistance exercises? Do they follow the same volume/intensity scaling as the main lifts?

These types of High Volume High Frequency workouts were all the rage back in the Weider/Bob Hoffman days of circa 1960ā€™s-until the deaths of these two people. Why, because it WORKED. But not in the way that you think. Truth is that this type of training will lead you to end up as total orthopedic WRECKAGE! A human body cannot tolerated this degree of constant stress and damage. Not to mention the lack of time allowed to get a body to HEAL and then ADAPT to the stress loads. Multiple weekly workouts just compound the damage. But that was the idea. When a foolish trainer began to degenerate. Then the Marketing B.S. train went into full throttle. You need to up the volume and use supplement X,Y & Z to start growing. Because that was what Star bodybuilder, just insert a name is doing. Forgetting to explain that said model was a Freak of Nature and using PEDs. All you have to do is see a current former Bodybuilding/Wrestling star in an honest shoot interview. They will tell you about the pain and therapy they must undergo weekly. But the weirdest thing is that many continue with the High and Frequent training. They NEVER learn!