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-: So what is volume?
One of my favorite ways to explain this
is from the movie The Expendables.
And if you haven't seen that
then I guess you might as well just stop watching
the course now, just forget it.
But anyway, so there is a part in there where Jet Li
is trying to get more money for his role on the team
and he says like, "Well, I'm smaller,
"so I have to work harder."
And that's what we need to think
about when we're looking at volume is actually
it's like, well, it's not the outcome, right.
So the job that's being done is irrelevant to us
in terms of volume.
So if I like press X amount of pounds
or I bench press X amount of pounds
when we look at it like the pounds mood,
how far it went through space et cetera
whatever the physics of what happened to the implement,
that's easier for us to measure
but what we actually need to be concerned
is what our body had to do in order to make that happen.
So the job ends up being somewhat irrelevant
and it's the labor of us,
the demand of the task that was on our body
that actually matters in terms of volume.
So when we look at volume,
what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out
how much muscular work did that take, right.
And so that's okay from a tension perspective it's like,
well, how much we can look at force generation
how much mechanical work was done all the way down
at the individual muscle fibers versus the whole muscle
how much biochemical and neurological work did it take
to make that happen, energy expenditure,
how much just systemic energy expenditure versus local
how much, what are the resources and fuel consumption
that was taken up?
These are all valuable things for us to know
in terms of volume of training.
Doesn't really help us to say like,
well, okay, you moved X amount of pounds
this much distance this much time,
how do I know, well, what does that mean
for my biceps or whatever it may be.
I need to know how much my muscles have worked
and as we get through this,
we are gonna have to start with looking at the job
like the physical thing that moved,
the implementer or whatever
and figure out how because we can measure that,
we can measure weight, right.
We can look at resistance profiles, we can look at distance,
we can compare the effects and loading some
of different exercises
but how do we then extrapolate muscular work
from that so that we can get a better idea
because if I do leg presses and leg extensions,
you're gonna see that that doesn't quite,
it doesn't come down to the same amount of
like we've moved the same amount of weight, the same amount
of distance in those things
even though we may have done some similar work
on the quads for example.
So when we look at stimulus,
that's what we're looking at the outcome
of what that volume is doing well
or I should say what that muscular work is doing
from a physiological standpoint.
So my goal of knowing what volume is
is that if I'm being specific,
if I have constrained like the type of volume
that I'm doing to a specific type of work,
I can then say, well,
the more volume of that type of work is gonna give me more
of this particular type of stimulus.
So stimulus is when that volume of work contributes
to a cascade of events that leads
to this desired outcome, right
'cause hopefully that is then a cascade of events
that leads to either increase protein synthesis
and repair for hypertrophy
or metabolic adaptations for recovery or performance
or increased strength whatever it happens to be,
the stimulus is those physiological events
that are gonna lead towards that desired outcome.
So we need stimulus to progress.
Simply doing work does not make you progress
especially in a specific direction.
You can't just go walk 10,000 steps,
a hundred thousand steps or whatever
and then all of a sudden you're going to squat more.
What you need to do is you need to work in a specific way
to achieve a stimulus and that stimulus is what leads
to the physiological processes
and the recovery that allows us to then adapt
and to move forward with that or to accumulate
an outcome like hypertrophy.
So when, if we just do work and we recover,
we're just gonna return to baseline.
We need the stimulus to improve upon where we are now.
And if you look at kind of the old school thought
of progressive overload, it's like, well, okay,
you have to constantly do more
to be able to like continue to get an adaptation.
There's kind of a two way conversation
about how accurate or inaccurate that statement is
but the base thing is that when we're looking
at progressive overload,
it isn't gonna come down to not increasing work necessarily
but focusing on increasing stimulus
to the degree of stimulus that we need
which may not always be more than the previous session
or more than the previous week.
And we will get into that
into the progressive overload section.
Okay, so just recapping this stimulus occurs
when volume of a certain intensity and specificity
reaches a threshold, right.
So that means we're gonna have to have
a certain amount of work that's done
at a certain amount of intensity, right
in a certain, it's gotta be done
in some sort of specific fashion, right
that is then going to lead to this cascade of events
that's gonna give us the outcome that we want.
And that's essentially what we're kind of trying
to extrapolate from measurable volume.
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