More volume = more growth
After a few decades of careful scientific study, we’re pretty certain that higher volumes cause more growth on average than lower volumes.
With two caveats.
First is that “lower” volumes here mean volumes around 5, 10, and 15 working sets per muscle per week and that “higher” volumes mean 20, 25, and 30+ working sets per muscle per week. In some studies, growth gets even more pronounced with even higher set numbers, like into the 40s, but we’re less certain that applies to most people in the real world of whole body, 4+ day per week training.
The second caveat to the “more volume, more growth” relationship is that this volume must be within the individual’s ability to recover from. If you’re doing more and more volume and recovery falls behind, you’re almost certain to grow no more muscle. You could even grow less muscle, no muscle, lose muscle, or get hurt if you insist on chronically pushing volume past your MRV, aka your Maximum Recoverable Volume.
Raise volume until your performance dips
Because low volumes cause amazing gains (though not the best) but at very low levels of fatigue, and because you can get hurt if you just rush into high volumes, it’s usually best practice to start on the lower end of training volumes and scale them up over time to higher ones.
For example, you can start with 10 sets of back per week and add 1–3 sets per week to aim for the best gains. Now, this is assuming you’re still within your MRV, because adding sets beyond it is, as noted in the first paragraph above, unwise.
The good news about the MRV is that it’s pretty easy to detect when you’re well over it. When your volume is higher than your MRV, your performance will almost always begin to decline. So, if you’re weaker than your usual rep strength for the last two sessions for a given muscle in a row, and this is at higher than usual volumes, it’s very likely that you’re above your MRV and that adding more sets will more reliably get you worse gains than better gains.
At this point it’s a good idea to deload for a week, go back to significantly lower volumes, even ones that are similar to where you started your last mesocycle at, and begin to climb up slowly from there.
So far, so good.
But what if performance just flatlines?
In some instances, your training can hit a bit of a grey zone. Instead of continuing to climb week to week or fall off due to excession of MRV, your performance can just flatline. Like, the same rep/weight conversions every single week for weeks on end.
This is a strange place to be, because without performance improvements, you can’t be sure you’re getting bigger, and without performance declines, you can’t be sure you’re training too much and in need of a volume reset.
What to do???
Assess if your fatigue is high or just adaptation slow
What you must do in this case is assess if your fatigue is actually high (and the rising fatigue is cancelling out your rising fitness from effective training) or if your fatigue is actually low and it’s just that your rate of fitness gain is too small to measure on a several week or even several month timescale.
How can you tell if your fatigue is high or if your rate of gains is just slow?
A few ways.
First, how are your pumps after multiple sets of near-failure training? If they are pretty damn good, it’s unlikely that your fatigue is high. If they kind of suck, even though your diet and rest are good, you might be fatigued.
Second, how’s your mind-muscle connection (MMC)? Can you feel your muscles ripping under high tension or burning to a crisp at the end of high rep sets? If yes, fatigue is probably low. If you feel super out of touch with your target muscles and just kind of feel like you’re going through painful motions, your fatigue might be high.
Third, how’s your desire to train, especially your desire to train that muscle and with the exercises you have chosen for that mesocycle? If you’re as psychotic as usual about hitting your muscles with the same movements as you did last week and the week before, it’s probably not fatigue. But if you just want to rest and not train, or train but not that muscle, or that muscle but anything other than those exercises you’ve been doing, fatigue is likely pretty damn high!
Lastly, how are your joints and connective tissues feeling? If you feel like you’re made of rubber and magic, you’re unlikely to be highly fatigued. If you feel like you’re made of thin glass, fatigue is likely pretty gnarly for you.
If fatigue is high, do this…
If you run the above analysis and you conclude that your fatigue is in fact very high, then you’re best bet is to deload, lower the volume substantially when you come back, and slowly raise it again.
When some folks train a lot, their neural, technical, and fiber-type adaptations can help them keep their rep efforts up even when fatigue is crushing them. Your brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves can get really good for weeks and weeks and weeks at a movement you practice often, so even if fatigue is high enough to stall muscle growth completely and make your nervous system fundamentally weaker, your efficiency can improve so much that your rep strength stays elevated.
Weeks and weeks of practicing a movement, especially if it’s new or you have come back to it recently after a long layoff, can make you substantially better at the movement, even as fatigue rises to levels that are prohibitive to your best gains. And, because of this improvement in movement efficiency, you can hold onto rep strength long after your muscles have stopped their best growth.
Lastly, your muscle fibers can transition to behaving more like slower-twitch endurance fibers rather than faster-twitch strength/power fibers when you train with high volumes and under high fatigue states for weeks on end. This means that you become better at endurance while becoming worse at growing muscle, leading to a stall in performance where a dip should have been because the fiber transition adds reps, especially in higher rep sets, as fatigue takes them away.
Continuing to train in such a high fatigue state is analogous to spinning your wheels. In fact, it’s extra ironic because you’re training more than ever, but growing less.
Fuck that… deload and re-set at lower volumes asap if you have high fatigue with a performance flatline.
If fatigue is low, do this…
If you have great pumps, great mind-muscle connection, psychotically high desire to train and joints that feel like Wolverine’s, you almost certainly don’t have a fatigue problem.
This means that, in most theoretical predictions, you’re likely to experience two things if you add more sets week to week from this state.
First, you’re likely to grow more, which is like, you know, the whole point.
Second, you’re likely to finally accumulate enough fatigue so as to actually see detectable decline in performance and thus be able to know for sure it’s time to deload and reload.
So if you’re in this boat, keep adding volume until your performance falls or at least until you’re in the above “performance stalled, but your fatigue is damn high” mode.
Are you already doing a lot of volume and scared to do more?
Well, I’m scared to.
Together, we can hold hands and walk into high volume hell.
If you want the best results, you have to test the water. That’s right, by getting in all the way to where your balls are submerged, not just your toes!
And ladies, I have no idea how your cold tolerance is down there.
Ok, I’ve said enough, see you guys next time!
Find more from Dr. Mike on…
YouTube: RP Strength