(ominous tone)
(rock music)
-: Welcome everybody, we're going to begin
a comprehensive journey to look at volume,
progressive overload and how to navigate
those two topics with autoregulation.
So, a lot that we're gonna cover throughout this course,
a lot of, both, background information,
a lot of application and then maybe some
special considerations and things like that
that we can talk about
in terms of individualizing some of these things.
We will be looking at a ton of information
over the course of this
but it will continue to build upon itself
and come together over the course.
So, what will seem like a lot of, just like,
"Oh my God, this is just maybe a lot of numbers
or spreadsheets or whatever,
eventually, as they start piling on top of each other
the principles will start to make sense
of all of the details.
So, let's start really quickly with
why are we making this course?
Why did we make this course?
We want to give you guys the big picture with context,
the most important thing there being context.
To be able to formulate principles
that you can apply in the real world.
So, if you're not able to look at something
like progressive overload with a critical thinking process,
a lot of times you will just add things haphazardly
or you won't necessarily know
what kind of decisions to make,
you'll be following landmarks or something like that
that may not apply to the individual
or that maybe you're progressing in the wrong direction.
And I think the reason that there's a lot of confusion
over such a, we'll say, novel topic
is that, in our experience,
from what we've been researching
and we consume about everything that there is
on the market, from courses to podcasts
to educational offerings, et cetera, books, research.
And from our research the existing content,
the explanations on there,
the commentary around progressive overload
either touches a few points and it's incomplete,
sometimes it's just outright incorrect
or it lacks context, so while the information
may be good in the context that the author
or the presenter is discussing it,
without that context it's hard to apply
to an individual situation,
it's hard for the guy on the gym floor
to understand whether or not
this is actually applicable to them
in this specific case, in this specific scenario,
or there's just some combination
of all that above that we see.
Now, that's not to say that there hasn't been
some great discussion on this topic,
that's by far and above not what we are saying,
but I don't think anybody has really taken
and a to z comprehensive approach
of really helping people utilize volume
and progressive overload,
understanding what these concepts are,
understanding how to apply them
and breaking down how they can be interweaved
into that autoregulation kind of scheme.
So, we'll be covering a lot of things.
So if we look at what we're gonna learn,
you're gonna learn how to assess progress
or how to assess and progress volume and stimulus,
which are not gonna be exactly the same thing.
We're gonna look at those as kind of like
two overlapping but not necessarily always
the same thing in terms of just sheer volume of work
versus the volume of, say, stimulus,
with context and specificity.
And then we're gonna look at how do we apply
autoregulation to progressing that volume
and that stimulus.
We'll cover why all the progressions are not equal
and how they work together.
So for instance, when adding load
versus reps, versus sets, versus tempo,
our varying different degrees of progressions
and they are progressions in different directions
and so, based off of what your goal is
and how you're performing,
some of those are gonna make more sense than others.
We're also going to learn how to relate
the volume of work to mechanical tension,
which is gonna help you kind of understand
the principles that you need to understand,
well, how should I be thinking about this volume equation,
how should I be thinking about
whether I should be adding sets,
whether I should be focusing on intensity, et cetera.
We're gonna dig deep into that mechanical tension thing
and I should say, deep in the context
of this conversation because in terms of
all the physiological stuff, as you'll see,
like mechanical tension, we could go,
like that could be a course on itself,
a little bigger course than this.
But we're going to give you the principles
that you need to be able to make the decisions
in terms of the sets, the reps,
the tempo, et cetera, et cetera.
We'll be covering a lot of key principles.
Okay, so we'll talk about quantifying volume of work
and then qualifying the volume the work
versus stimulus because there's one thing
for us to just be able to say, like,
"Okay, this is how much volume you're doing,"
but we really need to qualify and quantify
what that volume is so that we understand
how it's going to impact us and then
how we would manipulate that volume in a direction
that is going to take us towards our goal,
whether that be strength,
whether that be hypertrophy fat loss,
whether that be progressing in intensity
versus progressing in, you know,
say, maybe more of a skillset basis
where a certain type of repetitions that you're going for.
So many different things that you can be
trying to program for and it's very important
to understand how we can manipulate
the volume of work we're doing
in a direction that takes us closer
to that specific goal,
rather than just an ambiguous, this is more.
We'll get into RPE/RIR and these kind of
proximity to failure measures
and talk about what happens
when we train closer to failure,
we'll even dig into the effective reps theory
and we'll expand on that a little bit
with kind of our N1 version of how we apply
the effective reps theory
in terms of how that correlates
to the stimulus of what you're doing.
And then we'll cover a lot of practical applications
for progressing and regressing stimulus,
volume, intensity, et cetera.
The other things that we'll do,
in terms of looking at those practical examples,
is we're gonna go through a lot of spreadsheets
so you can see through a formula-based
how changing these variable differ from one another
and we're gonna cover some principles of like,
okay, this is the relationship
between progressing in reps versus sets
and things like that.
But they're not necessarily going to be rules
that you have to use 100% of the time
because again, it's gonna come down
to those individual principles.
So, we're gonna give you a lot of examples.
We don't take any particular example
is that's the way to always do it,
we're gonna try and help build the principles
behind why we chose to go through that
specific example and then go through enough of those
so that you can understand
when I would want to use which approach.
These numbers and charts, they're here,
they're to improve your understanding
to kind of give you a visual of what's going on,
in terms of some of these volume and stimulus calculations
and increase your ability
to navigate and apply these principles.
So, you still will always need to take
and N of 1 approach to all of the principles,
even though that we're gonna give you guys,
like, we're gonna walk through
some specific examples of how to progress.
There's just so many ways to do this
that this is why you want to choose
principles over rules, or over templates, or whatever
is because if you understand the principles that we cover
you'll be able to do what we're doing
in a more individualized manor,
either for yourself or for your clients, et cetera,
and so you'll be able to take the best
of this information and apply it
in the best way possible.
So, when it comes to program design,
myself, and therefore N1,
we have our own methods, in terms of program design.
You could say what we do is kind of
a block periodization method
but we do it where we vary different stimuli
and I'm not gonna be covering all of that
in this course, that's a whole big
set of principles on top of itself.
So if you're interested in that you can jump into
the N1 Program Design for Trainability Course
and that's where we break down
all of the different types of stimulus.
Here, we'll be going to magnitude of stimulus,
I may drop some hints, you know,
if you've taken that course
you're definitely gonna see
how a lot of this stuff overlaps.
If not, if you take this course
and then you go to that one
you'll also get a lot of benefit from those.
But, I won't be going into
all of the individual stimuli
and I just wanted to put that out there
for anybody that has already taken
our trainability course coming in to here,
that we're gonna be talking about this
on a more foundational level
because I want anybody that hasn't learned
the N1 way of program design yet
to be able to apply these principles,
because you don't necessarily,
you don't have to program
the way that we program at N1
to get the benefits of what we're gonna talk about
in terms of volume, progressive overload
and autoregulation.
You can basically try and formulate this course
in a way that everybody,
no matter what your preferred type of style
of programming, whatever, these principles
are going to be tools that then you can
incorporate into that.
Obviously, I believe what we do is the best,
otherwise we wouldn't do it that way,
but I want this to be a flexible source of information.
We'll cover high/low frequency, volume intensity,
a bunch of these things,
in terms of like special circumstances.
We'll talk a little bit of how these things
would affect your decision making process
and I'm gonna try and make the assumption
that as we're discussing this topic,
that you are approaching this with good exercise selection,
good exercise execution,
that you're performing things.
So, we're not gonna cover all of the examples
of like, well you're just simply doing things wrong.
We're gonna assume that when it comes down to
your execution of your program that you're doing it well.
Because then when it gets into
people not doing things properly,
that introduces a whole bunch of other variables
that take away from what we want to focus on here,
which is like, let's just talk about
volume, progressive overload, autoregulation
and how we can utilize these things
to get the most out of somebody
that's doing things properly, right?
If you're squatting poorly, or eating poorly,
obviously these are not the biggest concerns
or the biggest interventions that you should be making.
So this is gonna apply to those people
that are performing their programs well.
A general syllabus, and I will say
that this is subject to change
because we constantly update these courses.
But, we're gonna start with
looking at what volume is,
how we're classifying volume,
which is gonna be very important,
that goes into that context thing.
So I urge you, that if you listen to podcasts,
you watch YouTube videos, you take other courses,
you follow other mentors, or whatever,
anytime somebody talks about these principles
is try an pull the context
from which they are talking about
because if they're qualifying volume differently
or progressive overload differently,
if they're not qualifying what these things are
when they talk about it, that's already a problem
because you don't know, really, how to take that in.
So, we're gonna make sure that we define these things
so that you really understand what we're talking about
and that's how we're gonna be able
to build the principles on top of these things
so then you can take something you hear
from somebody else, if they give the context with it,
then you'll be able to figure out
whether or not that information is good,
valid, useful, et cetera.
So we'll go over what volume is, we'll qualify it,
and then we'll cover the principles
of progressive overload in sort of a basic fashion
on just kind of like getting through
everything that is progressive overload
and then we'll cover the methods
that we can use for progressive overload,
because there's a lot of misunderstanding out there,
maybe, I think, certain people try and make it seem
like people are dumber then they actually are
when it comes to progressive overload
and a lot of people like to use click-baity terms.
If you've followed my career
you know I used to work with a bodybuilder
that was kind of infamous for using click-bait terms
or whatever and one of the things he did
was he had this thing called progressive overload was BS,
and I've seen a lot of people do this,
where they'll use that to get you in
and then all they do is they just say like,
"Well, I just do progressive overload different,"
but progressive overload isn't really BS
and so it's kind of a misleading,
it's kind of a confusing conversation.
So, we're gonna cover all the different methods
of progressive overload, 'cause what you will see,
if you YouTube progressive overload,
you'll see a bunch of people be like,
"Oh, progressive overload is crap,"
and usually what they're doing
is they're talking about progressive load,
meaning that there's more ways to progressive overload
than just adding weight on the bar,
which seems like it should be common sense
if you're following us, you signed up for this course,
it probably is common sense.
But, we're gonna cover all of the other methods
of progression including load
but in additional to load
and we're gonna compare and contrast those
so you can understand how they actually affect
volume, stimulus and when we want to use
which type of progression.
So we'll cover volume of work versus volume of stimulus,
which is gonna be important
because one of those is gonna be a very tangible measure
and one of them is gonna be a more,
we're gonna have to include some subjective data
to kind of get a better idea
of how we qualify and measure that.
And so that's why it's gonna be very important
that you look at both of those
if you really want to be a little bit more precise
with how you use volume and progressive overload.
We're gonna talk about that proximity to failure.
So we're gonna qualify what failure is
and then look at how we use that
with all of the volume measures
to then auto regulate how we would progress
or maybe when we would take a deload, et cetera,
and how we would look at the progression
in a single exercise versus a single workout
versus a whole week.
So, once we really understand
how to use proximity to failure
and we understand the principles,
this is where we're gonna sneak in those
effective reps conversations and talk about
how that is gonna affect the volume and the stimulus.
Then you're gonna see how we can start applying that
to the volume equation and looking at,
"Okay, I'm adding more but more what,
"and is that the right type
"of increase or progression that I need."
Once we get through there
we're gonna take a little bit of a step back
and we're gonna look at some of the current research
that right now there's a lot of generalized
mean based research so we're gonna go through that
and kind of help you understand this is what it really says
so that you don't get confused
by what we're discussing in the course
versus what somebody may be extrapolating from
a certain research paper or what not.
So we're just gonna try and be extremely transparent
about what conclusions we can actually make
with the research that's out there
and hopefully that'll help you understand
why we have used the foundation that we have.
And then we will dig into some bonus considerations
and applications where it kind of cover
some specific scenarios or specific variables
that won't be quite as common.
What we won't be covering, like I said,
is the different training stimuli
that we do in the N1 Program Design for Trainability Course.
We won't be covering special set methods here.
We won't be talking about cluster sets
and incomplete rest methods
and super sets and drop sets and tri sets
and all of those things.
Once we start getting those
that's a much more advanced discussion
so I think, for most people, looking at this
and kind of getting familiar with these principles
is gonna be a great way to improve your skillset.
And then, if you really get the principles
it's not too much of a leap to kind of figure out
what some of these special set methods
or extended sets or past failure methods, et cetera,
would do for you but we will cover that
in a more advanced course later.
The other thing that we'll talk about,
very briefly, is some of these landmark things
as opposed to the research
but this isn't a course talking about, like,
"Here's the rep range that you use,
"here's the volume thing that you should use,"
'cause our take on that is that a lot of what we have,
in terms of those landmarks,
can be very misleading to what is actually effective
because basically every individual has their own landmark
within what we see as the research landmark
and we'll cover that.
I'll mention a few things, undoubtedly,
and we'll cover a little bit of that
when we get towards the,
what does the research really say,
but I'm not gonna say, like,
"Hey I think that everybody should be doing
"between this many and this many reps
"and between this many and this many sets."
What I'm gonna try and do is arm you
with understanding whether a person needs
to do more or less.
So, I mean, but I don't need to repeat
what the research currently says,
we'll cover that, but I'm gonna show you
our approach to finding the right sets and reps
for an individual, and we cover a lot of that
in the Program Design for Trainability Course
because those landmarks
and all those training variables shift
depending on what stimulus that you want.
So, even when we talk about, say like,
what's the volume landmarks for hypertrophy,
well hypertrophy is an outcome,
it's not necessarily a stimulus
so there are things that we do
that can have a certain amount of hypertrophic outcome
and in order to understand what we need
to learn from training we need to figure out,
but what am I trying to stimulate,
like, what is the physiological thing
that I'm trying to get that is going to result
in that outcome of hypertrophy
and we have different ways of doing that,
there's some that we can combine, some you can't,
and a lot of that's, you know,
a lot of heavy mechanistical stuff
and really understanding the difference
between exercises and tempo
and a lot of the small variables
and understanding a lot about
the cellular biochemistry and stuff like that.
You don't need to memorize pathways
but you need to understand the different principles
between having incomplete rest versus full rest
versus doing a heavy set and a length in position
versus a short position with higher reps and pauses.
All of these things are drastically
gonna shift the stimulus and that's why
we don't give generalized landmarks
without being very specific on a stimulus.
So, that will be one thing that we'll be covering
in terms of looking at what the research says
and kind of trying to provide some context
around that but you won't see like,
this is Cassemer N1s rep range for hypertrophy
or volume set landmarks for hypertrophy
'cause they don't exist.
We just get (audio glitch).
So, disclaimer here.
So this is, we'll say it's a theoretical model
based on what we know,
or I shouldn't say what we know, but what we see
in the existing scientific literature and evidence
and our observations in practice
as well as a bunch of non, like you know,
a lot of it will say like mechanistic data.
So there's a lot of physiology, a lot of neurology
and things like that that kind of help us
take what there is in our observations
and what's in the current literature
and present a more, we'll say,
like system based model that you could use in the gym.
My disclosure here is that, while right now,
there are pretty much no research papers
that do things exactly the way we do it,
that's why we're buying our own lab,
but this is what we have found
training tons and tons and tons of people
and educating coaches to train
tons and tons and tons of people.
This is the stuff that we found
to really really work
and we're always constantly trying to improve it.
So if we find something new, if it changes,
you will see that reflected
in the information that we provide.
And like I said at the beginning,
it will seem like it's getting a bit complicated,
maybe, as I start kind of qualifying,
well this, volume is really,
you have to be this specific with it
and failure, you really have to be
this specific with it,
but then once you see the principles
it'll all of the sudden click, like,
"Ah, now this makes sense because if can qualify
"that and I can qualify this,
"now I can make decisions based off
"of some of these principles,"
and as that big picture starts to unfold
it almost gets easier to understand at the end.
It's kind of one of those things
where you might have a bunch of pieces
to the puzzle but if you're missing a few
it's harder to put the puzzle together.
But as soon as you have enough
that you can actually kind of see the big picture
and what that image is gonna be,
all of the sudden it becomes easier.
It's like being able to actually have the picture
of what the puzzle is versus just having
a bunch of pieces that you don't know
what the final picture is going to be.
So hang with me, we'll go through some of this stuff
so if you feel like, you know, it's like,
"Well, why is all this important,"
trust me, it's gonna come together
because all these details are gonna be
what allows us to start making more,
we'll say, scientific or more logical based,
reasoning based decision in terms of how we use volume,
how we use progressive overload,
and how we use autoregulation. (rock music)