The Practicalities of Skyrocketing your Training Volume
Do more in less time and unlock progress
The volume that you train each week is crucial. Some school’s of thought, such as Pavel Tsatsouline’s Strongfirst, emphasise this as the fundamental variable in your exercise regime.
As discussed in the article below, strength is a skill. The amount of time spent honing your craft directly influences your competence at it. Equally, sustained interest in the highly successful Russian weightlifting program (dominant for decades), has shown the importance of training volume alongside sheer weight or intensity.
However, adding volume puts you at odds with your major limitation — recovery.
How can you recover from the maximum amount of training volume?
Let’s do a thought experiment. You train three times a week, and for sake of argument you only train pullups. At the moment the most you can do is 10.
On Monday, you bang out 8 in your first set. By set two, your seventh and eighth are a real grind, and by the third set you only manage 6. You are extremely sore as you’ve pushed yourself to the limit.
On Wednesday, with the soreness still there, you pull off 8 in your first set, but they do not feel good. You fall to 6 the next set, and only 4 the one after. As your performance has suffered, this is the first negative impact of overtraining.
By Friday, you have recovered somewhat as you did less work Wednesday, and you manage the same as Monday. In total you have performed 62 reps.
There are a few problems with this, and they hint at the underlying issues with the standard training philosophy of many western strength programs.
- You go full on in every session. There is only one approach to training, where you try hit a personal best on every day. This means you get more tired after each one, and if you don’t exceed your last sessions’ performance then you rack up failures quickly.
- You spend some of your training time getting worse. If 10 is your maximum number of repetitions on an exercise, then by definition, you cannot do it again straight away after. Most likely you won’t be able to do it again for a couple of days.
- You are not managing your recovery effectively. It may start to become clear that recovery is a critical part of your training. There’s no point running yourself into the ground if you can’t recover from it to make you stronger next time. The schedule set out above has you recovering in very sudden bursts after your sessions (and not always enough).
The way that progressive overload addresses this is to encourage you to take a week or two off from training periodically, to allow you to recover fully and start afresh. You might spend one in every seven weeks off.
Is there an alternative to this?
Returning to the previous example, suppose you want to get really good at pullups. You have the option to train how you like as long as it takes you roughly the same amount of time as the three-sessions-a-week crowd. The following example resembles something called greasing-the-groove (GTG).
On Monday morning, you do four pullups. This is easy, so you wait a while then do four more. In the afternoon, you do the same again.
On Tuesday, you are very slightly sore, so you do 2 sets of 3 pullups, then the same in the afternoon.
On Wednesday you are back to 4. You even do three sets in the afternoon, as you felt so good.
You can see how this works. Let’s examine their week. If this continues every day of the week, with reps going up and down based on their recovery, then they will have managed around 100 total reps that week.
They also won’t be anywhere near as sore. They have got a much greater training effect because they set themselves up to recover more.
In ten weeks time, the guy who’s done far more pullups will very likely be better at doing pullups. Where four was manageable but not difficult, soon six will feel the same. Because each session was so much shorter and required less overall effort, the impact on your time and energy is very likely going to be less. You might struggle to fit in a 2 hour workout a few times a week, but you might be able to squeeze half an hour in most days.
Crucially, not every session is your personal best. Training becomes a vocation, not a whim. You turn up every day to train not for the glory of beating your last session, but because it’s a part of your life.
How might you use this in your own training program? More here.
The above has focused primarily on the structure of your training and its influence on recovery. For information on methods to accelerate your recovery outright, follow our publication here.
For more reading, refer to the below.
