What’s the key to progressing your strength under the bar?
Intensity or Volume?
An age old debate that will never go away.
Reality is that both are important, neither are solely responsible for progress, and there are of course a multitude of other factors, independent of volume or intensity that are important considerations.
But first, it’s important to understand that this isn’t a binary choice between picking one or the other. Almost all successful strength programs include a mix of intensity based work and volume based work.
In Concurrent Programming models there might be a steady mix of both every week, and in Block Programming models you might move between phases of mostly high volume work to phases of mostly higher intensity work.
But even in those phases, neither is ever truly absent.
So it’s always a question of bias.
I’m a minimal effective dose type of guy when it comes to programming volume.
Although it’s nearly impossible to ascertain exactly how much volume you need at any given time, I think most lifters do best by trying to do only as much work as needed to keep progress moving.
As you advance in biological age, training age, and strength, you become more capable of creating more stress with a given stimulus, and therefore have a bit less wiggle room for prolonged periods of time of overtraining.
The old adage of “there is no such thing as overtraining, only under-recovering” is complete and utter bullshit.
Recovering from prolonged bouts of overtraining can be a deep hole to dig out of.
So you must learn to structure programming in a way that manages the accumulation of fatigue that builds up over weeks and months of hard training blocks.
But what do we do when we’re not progressing? What do we add and how do we add it?
Here is my thinking…….
All training stimuli are basically there to turn one of two different dials:
1: Increase the amount of muscle mass you currently possess, or…
2: Increase how “efficiently” your current amount of muscle mass operates (neurological efficiency)
That’s pretty much it.
The most predictable way to add more weight to your lifts, long term, is to increase the amount of muscle on your frame.
It’s like if you want your car to drive faster. Put a bigger engine in it. That works every time.
However, more muscle means more bodyweight.
If you are 185 lbs and want to add 10 lbs of muscle to your frame…..you cannot stay at 185 lbs.
This means that the volume of your food intake must go up, not necessarily the volume of your training.
But……..a lot of the guys I work with aren’t super keen to add more bodyweight, for a variety of reasons.
So how do you make the lifts go up without making your bodyweight go up?
The answer is usually with volume. More sets, more frequency, etc.
More repetition of the lifts you want to focus on will help increase neurological efficiency, and this is the primary role of submaximal volume.
It’s “practice” for the nervous system.
This is why Olympic Lifters perform Clean & Jerks and Snatches almost daily. Highly demanding neurological events require a lot of “practice.”
And Squatting, Benching, or Deadlifting an extremely heavy weight at 2-3 times your bodyweight is an extreme neurological event!
This is why you often see elite power lifters in lighter weight classes using very high volume, high frequency programming models. And it’s much less common among the heavies and super heavies.
Here is an example……
Take a lifter who is Squatting heavy 1x/week. He has been making progress but gets stuck at a given weight.
One of the easiest programming tricks in the world is to add in a second light squatting session for the week.
Maybe 3 x 5 @ 70% of 1RM.
This isn’t hard work. There isn’t a lot of mechanical tension created by this workout and thus the potential for hypertrophy is low.
Additionally, the results are seen almost immediately. The heavier squats feel easier within 1-2 weeks sometimes.
And we know that significant muscle growth isn’t going to occur that rapidly anyways.
So it’s neurological. It has to be.
Just that single submaximal workout placed in between heavier workouts keeps the lifters nervous system more “trained” and prepared for the heavier work to come the next week.
The take away is this.
If you want to get stronger and you don’t want to get bigger, then you will need to push the volume/frequency needle harder.
The downside is that high volumes and high frequencies can lead to rapid overtraining.
So don’t add it all in at once!
Additionally, the effects of high volume, high frequency don’t tend to “stick” that well.
In other words, as soon as you back off the volume and frequency, as you will eventually need to do, then your lifts come tumbling back down.
You simply become “out of practice.”
That’s why I stated earlier that the better long term means of improving your lifts is to add more muscle to your frame.
If you are stuck in your training and not sure where to go, let’s work together. I can help.
