-: If we look at some characteristics with volume,
volume tends to go up more when we're focusing on
those intensity or neurological-based adaptations.
So when we're doing heavier loads, higher intensity work,
we tend to need to progress the volume fairly fast in those.
So that's the most correlated training phase or style
towards increasing volume, especially at a fairly high rate.
When you start getting to other things
that don't have as much of a dependency
to hit that threshold, then you can probably get by
with the same amount of volume longer
or by adding volume at a slower rate.
But because with intensity, that threshold goes up so fast,
because you're getting those neurological
adaptations and now it's like, man,
I have to stimulate the nervous system harder.
I have to hit peak power to a greater
degree than I did the last time.
So in order to do that, I'm going to need to
increase my volume fairly significantly.
And it's a specific type of volume.
It's volume with intensity work,
which usually means additional sets.
So that threshold goes up really fast,
that's why intensity work has to go really fast.
It doesn't matter however, though, if you can't recover.
So you can only progress in volume
if you can recover from it.
And that's where this trainability thing
is going to come in that we're going to talk about
for the entire program design course.
You have to use styles of training
where you have very good recovery.
Otherwise, you have no room for progress.
So if volume is the only trick that you have,
what happens is you get to a point
where you start running out of recovery room,
you run out of room to grow within the phase.
Not muscular growth, but progress.
And then you simply hit a wall, you plateau.
Or even worse, you regress because you start over-training
in a sense, because volume is going up
and recovery is not going up in that same fashion.
We do have some limits to our recovery.
I mean, there's only so much food that we can digest,
there's only so much stuff we an assimilate,
only so much nutrients that we can absorb,
only so much time of the day to sleep
and everybody's got a lifestyle
that they have to kind of deal with.
So recovery and, in a sense, even though there's
a lot of things that we can do to improve it,
is finite and to how good it can become.
You can't just get to the point
where you could do an infinite amount of volume.
Same thing for frequency,
we do have to be able to recover from it in order for it
actually to be beneficial and to make progress.
Volume is overused, again, this is kind of a repeat,
because of poor program design.
So if you're not specific,
if you're not getting the stimulus
that you should be getting out of the sets and reps,
the only way to try and achieve it
without improving program design is to simply do more.
And that's what most people do.
And they brag about it, too.
They brag about oh, I'm in the gym longer,
I'm working harder, and it's just more, more, more.
I'm in there more frequently, doing more volume.
And guess what?
That probably means that you're not working smarter.
You may technically be working harder.
In reality, I would say it's you're not working harder.
'Cause if you were making the quality of the reps better,
every rep would be harder,
but you're working longer and you're doing more
instead of putting more thought into your program design.
When we look at some more things with volume, okay,
it does not increase linearly.
So it does increase, but it's not linearly,
especially when we're talking about hypertrophy training.
So with intensity-based training,
it pretty much increases linearly with training age.
But when we get into hypertrophy,
because you will be getting better at execution,
you will be getting better at neurological efficiency,
your quality of reps goes up.
Remember we talked about that bell curve
when we were talking about sets
where the number of sets you need,
you may hit this peak of that curve
where the quality of work you're doing
now is adding so much more to the stimulus
that the amount of work could actually go down.
And the specificity of the work is what needs to go up.
So as you become more adapted in terms of
execution and your nervous system
and you're able to contract muscles better,
you're able to contract more fibers, more fast twitch,
you're able to work at more aggressive tempos,
all of those things are going to get to the point
where it's, all right, we can now get more done with less.
And especially this last part here,
as long as we take the appropriate de-loads.
So on the previous slide,
we said you have to be able to recover.
A very important thing to understand,
especially for hypertrophy-based training
and the metabolic-based training,
is that we don't always want to be
the most adapted individual.
Like, having the greatest hypertrophy adaptations
does not mean you're going to grow muscle the fastest.
The same thing for metabolic.
So being the most metabolically efficient person in the
world does not mean that you could burn fat the fastest.
You may want a certain degree of insufficiency,
a certain degree of de-loading or de-training to happen.
And that's why it's important to periodize.
Because when you do that,
then the stimulus that you now need drops back down.
So the longer I stay away from a stimulus,
the more, or I should say the less
I have to do when I go back into it.
So if I take weeks or maybe even months
away from a specific type of stimulus,
the next time I try and achieve that,
I will probably be able to get that same benefit
at a lower volume than the last time that I trained it.
So the more often we're doing these things,
the higher and higher that threshold is going.
So it's important that we de-load or periodize
to be able to get that threshold back down.
So we don't need such high volume all the time.
So that's another reason proper periodization
and taking time off, taking some time to de-load,
re-sensitize is crucial for making sure
that you don't get to the point
where you need so much volume that it's past your recovery.
Volume past what's needed for stimulus,
so that's simply just doing more than
what you needed in that given workout,
results in slower recovery.
So not just slower, but sometimes just
less overall recovery altogether.
So basically, once you hit that switch
where your body is going to go to those biochemical
and possibly even genetic signaling to get that adaptation,
anything extra is depleting nutrients,
it's taxing your nervous system,
maybe stressing out your body more,
stress on the hormones are being needed,
more things are getting agitated,
more micronutrients are getting depleted.
All that's going to do is say that's that much more
we have to recover from,
but the switch was already flipped.
The switch does not get flipped again.
There are some stimuli that do have a gradient,
meaning that there is like, okay,
if I go a little bit harder,
it's like the switch turns on,
it's like a dimmer switch rather than an up and down switch.
So there's like a gradient too,
like getting a little bit stronger effect
by doing a little bit more.
But there always will still be a point
of diminishing returns where continuing to do more
is only going to take away from recovery,
it's not going to add to the benefit
that you're getting from that particular workout
and can actually dig yourself a hole so deep
that you end up either not getting any benefit
or actually over-training.
So we want to make sure that we're programmed
in a way where we're adding enough volume
to get the benefits, but not excessive volume
that's going to take away from our training.
If there's any reason to add something,
it would be for a personal, a mental,
a psychological benefit for yourself or your client
to be doing something because you just love doing it.
That's really the only reason to do more
than what's needed for a stimulus.
And even with those things,
then you've kind of gotta be smart
on how you implement those things and make sure that you do
the things needed to enhance your recovery.
So recovery is greatly influenced by hormones,
especially hormones that control nutrient partitioning.
So where nutrients come out of,
where nutrients are being stored,
and how we're able to digest and assimilate that stuff.
So anabolic hormones like testosterone,
metabolic hormones like thyroid,
and nutrient partitioning hormones
like cortisol, catecholamine, insulin,
all of those have a huge impact on recovery,
both internally and externally.
So like, this is where performance enhancement drugs
and stuff like that can really have benefit for certain
athletes and people doing certain types of training.
It's because a lot of the drugs that people use,
a lot of the anabolics or whatever the people use,
tend to have a strong effect on nutrient partitioning.
They're affecting the way we're using nutrients
or where that nutrient is going.
So in doing so, a lot of times that will
improve our tolerance to higher volume.
But what I will say is when this isn't being managed
by yourself, when people are using these things
in an artificial manner, in an external manner,
you do sometimes overlook the systemic effect.
Because you could be partitioning nutrients
to the muscle tissue, but other things like the liver,
the pancreas, the brain, the adrenals,
those things could be getting taxed
but are essentially getting pushed to the wayside
and you have this illusion that your health is better
and that the progress you're making is better
and that you're dealing with the volume and the stress
so much better than you really are
because you have this strong nutrient partitioning agent.
But that may actually just allow you to dig
a deeper hole in terms of how over-trained you could become
or how depleted certain nutrients
or certain systems in your body could become.
Now this isn't a pro or against in terms of the use
of performance enhancement drugs or supplements,
this is just a word of caution saying that anytime you do
something that shifts nutrients in the way that you use it,
you remember, nothing in life is free.
If you're taking nutrients to give to the muscle tissue,
likely what these things are doing,
they don't make nutrients out of nowhere,
they're taking it from somewhere else.
Something else that may have needed that
is sacrificing that because you've put your body in a
hormonal situation where it says the muscle needs this more.
And that's not always the case from a health perspective,
that's not always the case from
a long term results perspective.
So you have to understand that at some time,
you're going to have to pay the piper.
You're going to have to pay homage
to all of the things that you have been partitioning away
from, with the exception of fat tissue, right?
So just keep that in mind, keep that in context
as like a little gem in case those situations come up.
Like, as you need to do you due diligence.
And any time you're going to use anything,
even on a supplemental level or partitioning nutrients,
is making sure that you're also taking time
to address the health of anything that you may have
starved off by partitioning those nutrients.
When we look at volume,
it should be calculated specific to the stimulus.
So volume in an intensity-based workout
versus volume in a metabolic-based workout
are going to be calculated completely differently
because what actually matters
for that volume is completely different.
In intensity, it's all about how much
time at peak power did we get?
Which is, you know, not very much time.
So that's why you need a lot of sets.
Whereas with metabolic, it's like, okay, how much time
was I spending where the cell was
in a very high demanded energy state,
or possibly a depleted energy state?
So we'll get into the biochemistry of this stuff
in the program design course, course two.
But understand that you can't have,
like you can't do an advanced treatment volume program
doing 10 sets of three and then say okay,
well I was doing 10 sets or I was doing 30 reps
and then switch over to a super set, tri-set,
giant set-based metabolic program and be like, okay,
so I was doing 10 sets before,
so now I'm going to do 10 sets of these metabolic things.
Absolutely not.
Well what about reps, 30 reps?
Well if you're doing a metabolic session, guess what?
30 reps, that's going to be one set.
So they don't even compare,
you can't compare these things by sets
or reps across stimuli very easily.
So the most important thing to do is as you're periodizing,
as you progress and you go back
into that same category of stimuli,
so the next time you go into another
neurological or intensity-based phase,
you can look back at the last time you did that
and figure out, should you be making a progression
based off of how much time you spent away
and what you chose to do in between
there in terms of programming.
The significance of the reps and the sets,
so the quality, okay, the resistance profile,
the intensity, the load that you're using,
all of those things account for
how much quality there is in there.
The higher the quality, the more significance,
well then the less actual volume you need.
So this is the example I was giving at the beginning,
if I'm doing the workout today
and all I do is increase my quality of work
from week one to week two, that may be enough.
If I significantly improved my execution,
if I get neurologically that much more efficient
because I have, say, a good example would be somebody
that had been training in the past, took time off,
and then came back, that would be a prime example.
They are probably going to get wired in quickly.
What we often coin as muscle memory
is really nervous system memory.
The muscles aren't remembering anything,
but our brain is remembering and so it learns
to be efficient at contracting that tissue again.
And so that strength comes back really fast
and that fluid and all of the things that come from being
able to stimulate that tissue tends to come back faster
because that motor pattern was at one time wired in.
It's not completely forgotten,
my body has just switched over
to being a little bit more conservative to save fuel.
Now I start creating the need for that motor pattern
to be efficient from an output standpoint
and it's going to start dedicating
more nutrients to those muscle tissues.
You need to make sure that you account
for outside stressors with volume.
So volume only matters if we can recover from it.
And life stress, stress outside of the workout,
has a huge impact on the amount of volume
that we can handle within a workout.
So when I'm choosing whether I want to use volume
or whether I want to use frequency for stimulating somebody,
for getting a result, whether it's body composition
or hypertrophy or whatever it may be,
I have to look at how much other stress
do they have in their life?
Okay, you have some people where it's like, man,
like you walked from your car to the gym today?
Good for you, right?
That's like, they have that much stress.
Now if your programming is good,
training and exercise can become a positive stress,
provided they can recover from it.
So when we get into the next course with program design,
we'll talk about making sure that the stress
that you're doing here does not overlap or add on top
to the same biochemical pathways and whatnot
that the life stress is giving.
So there are things where it's like okay,
if you have a lot of this particular stress in your life,
you should avoid these types of training
because they're going to compound on top of that.
But you do have some room for training stress
in this particular type of programming
where it's not going to over-train you,
it's actually going to add a positive impact
and help make you more resilient.
So when we look that, we just have to look at that
compounding effect and maker sure we're accounting for
total stress on a person in terms of
how much volume they can tolerate.
'Cause if you treat everybody like they're
an Olympic athlete that has nothing to do
other than eat, sleep, and live
for this particular goal, well guess what?
They're not all going to be able to recover
from the same level of volume because they're going to have
drastically different lifestyles than that.
Most people are not going to have that lifestyle.
Most people have a fairly over-stimulated,
over-stressed, under-slept,
nutrition quality, micronutrients
are under-intaken or under-absorbed,
so their recovery is far from optimal
and their stress is usually in quite a bit
of excess from where it should be.