TRAINING VOLUME
If you have not yet heard, listen here, and listen closely …
Training volume has been shown to be the most predictive marker of muscle hypertrophy (growth). A dose-response relationship is what the current body of scientific evidence suggests.
Dose-response: “of, relating to, or graphing the pattern of physiological response to varied dosage (as of a drug or radiation) in which there is typically little or no effect at very low dosages and a toxic or unchanging effect at high dosages with the maximum increase in effect somewhere between the extremes” - Merriam-Webster.com Medical Dictionary
In short:
Little to no training volume = little to no growth.
More training volume = more growth.
Until….
Too much training volume = at best, no additional growth and, at worst, muscle loss. (see Fitness-Fatigue Model email for more detail on this concept)
So now we have theoretical / general parameters in place: There is “too little volume” and there is “too much volume”
…. But you may be asking;
What the heck is “volume” anyway??!!
And herein lies a number of ways to define and quantify it.
Essentially, volume is the amount of work performed.
From a physics standpoint we know that
Work = Force x Distance Traveled
When talking about strength and resistance training that can logically be thought of as the “Amount of weight lifted” x “Range of Motion lifted through”.
But that’s just not a very practical way to quantify your training.
The following are metrics that are/have been used instead:
VOLUME LOAD
Up until recently, this was likely the most common way to quantify volume. Essentially you would calculate total “tonnage” using the following equation:
Load x Sets x Reps
And this number would be what you try and increase over time by manipulating 1 of the 3 variables;
weight lifted, reps performed, or sets completed.
The main downfall of this strategy is that you could get to the same tonnage by doing 1 set of 100 reps with 5 lbs or 2 sets of 5 with 50 lbs and those two scenarios could produce very different stimuli.
It also doesn’t take into consideration how “challenging” that work is.
Thus another approach came about….
EFFECTIVE REPS
Some argue that only the last few reps of your sets “matter” in regards to generating a stimulus that elicits muscular adaptions; that the reps leading up to, say, the last 5, are just “primer”/ “activation” reps and the last 5 are the only ones that “count”.
So the number of “effective reps” would be what you quantify and aim to increase overtime.
If you’ve read my email on “Intensity” you will probably think this thought process has some merit; we do know that your sets have to meet a certain threshold of “difficulty” in order for them to be effective. And in that sense, the reps towards the beginning of a set are “easier” and may not be as stimulative.
Unfortunately, there is no definitive evidence to tell us where that “cut off” point would be; there isn’t an applicable approach to discerning which reps “count” and which reps don’t.
NUMBER OF HARD SETS
Recently, the literature has taken an adaptation of the “effective reps” theory and has essentially adopted # of hard sets as the “standard” for quantifying training volume.
And this is because we know that, as long as they are taken to a close approximation to failure, sets with “heavy weight” and low reps all the way up to sets with “light weight” and high reps produce the same amount of muscle hypertrophy.
So essentially, you don’t have to “distinguish” between reps within a set that are “activating” vs “effective” and we can group them together via “effective sets”.
This is where most of the scientific evidence roots its guidelines for “how much you should train”; giving a range of HARD SETS per week.
P.S (it's somewhere between 10-45+ per muscle group … but that’s a discussion for another day)
Until next time - Coach John