Training Volume | What Is The Right Amount

all right higher body John Meadows here and I'm here again with Brad Schoenfeld leading researcher in the entire world on hypertrophy Brad has done some really groundbreaking work as it pertains to volume so how much volume should you train with you know do you do 20 sets 30 sets and and how do you split up do you do it all in one session and brad has done a lot of research on this and subsequently I think a lot of your colleagues like picked up on this and started doing some research as well one of the interesting things that I wanted to cover today with the group is first of all I wanted to get your general thoughts on volume and then I wanted to get your general thoughts on how you split it up because as a bodybuilder I honestly had never really thought about splitting up volume and equating it it was not like you know let's say we did on Tuesdays we did 20 sets four legs well if we want to increase our frequency it would have been just well then add another leg workout on Friday and add another 20 sets or tempered that was our concept and in a guy like you came along he said wait a minute maybe instead of doing 20 sets you do 10 and then maybe another 10 so you equate a volume and that concept and bodybuilding is actually pretty new in my opinion because it was just add mindless volume but before the research was done so I'd love to get your perspective because you're I think you're the leading guy out there on volume and how to manipulate it just in general what are your thought I can you educate us on in terms of training volume sure so we carried out our lab carry data made analysis on this topic animator analysis for those who don't know is when you pull all the data all the studies and basically make one big study out of all the smaller studies that have been carried out and it gives you a much more powerful way to look at what the body of literature shows and what we found is really interesting the there was a clear dote what's called a dose response relationship so as you increase volume you also increase the amount of growth but there was a number of caveats this a number of limitations number one virtually all of the studies have been carried out in untrained subjects so they're only two we had 15 studies that actually looked at this topic 13 of them were in untrained subjects and the ability again to recover for an untrained subject from volume higher volumes is not going to be what certainly what a high-level bodybuilder but even someone who was resistance trained who's been training for a year two three four years now even on a recreational level where they're use to it and also remember when someone is a newbie their gains are going to be expedited you're gonna see when I first started training I gained like 10 pounds of muscle in four months you know you you gain a lot of muscle quickly because your body is is adapting very quickly and then you start to plateau off I wish it keep then we wish like we keep gaining like when Ruby got it so that was one big limitation the other one is that there really hasn't been any studies that looked at very high volume so the most we can equate to was 10 sets per muscle per week so we looked at basically 1 to 4 1 to 4 sets per week 5 to 9 sets and then 10 plus but we couldn't really quantify if you went to 15 or 20 or were beyond and we did find this dose response so the for the 5 to 9 had greater hypertrophy than the 1 to 4 and the 10 plus had greater hypertrophy than the 4 to 9 meaning that there is a an effective volume here and it was fairly pronounced to where the gains were almost doubled when you went to the higher volume approach now what the nerdy scientists that I am do about it well we just carried out a study and scooped for your audience don't know whether this will be published or probably will by the time this video comes out but we just got it accepted in the journal medicine science sports and exercise were a really high quality journal and we looked at the dose response relationship in resistance training men so we took young pretty jack guys for the most part over had they had an average of 4 plus years of resistance training experience so they were that they weren't John medalist types but they they were experienced and we put them through either one set per exercise 3 sets and 5 sets so one group did one set one group did three one group did five it was a total body routine they did three days and we did mostly compound movements we did chest press shoulder press lat pulldown seated rows squat leg press and the leg extension so it was a total body seven exercises and what do we find well in resistance trained men we found this dose-response relationship held true and even more so we really push the volume here where the in the top volume for the arms it was 30 sets per muscle per week and in the legs it was 45 sets so it went from like in the legs it went from 9 sets to 27 set 9 sets in the 1 set per exercise group because they were doing three exercises three times a week to 27 sets to 45 sets and basically in the legs we showed the one set group gained if I remember around five percent in their quads whereas the five set gain 13 percent so it was more than double hypertrophy now some things to take away from this and trying to put this all together it does show that pushing volume is a beneficial strategy that there is and that it goes well beyond the 10 sets that we had shown in this maeda however you have to realize it's a short training study so it's an eight-week training study which is fairly short period of time I would certainly it's volume is going to follow on what's called an inverted U or hormetic curve where you achieve benefits up to a certain point you know if I would made it get a hundred sets per week would that get better no probably not only would it not get better you're gonna see a negative effect from an overtraining response and what this kind of tells me is that you can push the body for certain periods of time and then you're gonna start to see this negative effect so the body is very good at adapting over short periods so if you push yourself for a short period of time you're not going to over train at what point people start to over train it's going to be genetically oriented as well as lifestyle oriented but what this tells me is there might be a benefit trying to wrap this up to period izing volume where you do let's say a block of very high volume training or higher volume training whatever that is and then periods of lower volume training you kind of build up especially for competitive physique competitors bodybuilders where you're building up to to a peaking to a competition where you're peaking towards hypertrophy what's interesting too because the like although all of the stuff that I've always read hint was in terms of maximizing like for an event was around strength so you tapered volume and strength peak but this is interesting because I haven't really seen much of this and until your work has brought it up what about volume because it's completely the opposite of the strength type science I have seen and I would say from a practical perspective the way I feel about is I don't think people generally speaking push yourself hard enough I don't think they do enough now the other side of that is then you get the crazy people who push really hard but they never know when to back so I think you know I've always felt like as you mentioned people's ability to tolerate this kind of stress that's pretty variable I've got people that can go just balls out for six weeks eight weeks and then pull back and then I got people can handle it literally for only like two weeks so I think I think it's pretty cool because what you're showing is don't be afraid to push yourself like push you get some volume in increase it intelligently a little bit a little bit more a little bit more then when you start to see okay now maybe you know the size the sizes gains are stopping the strength gains are stopping I'm think I'm not sleeping as well maybe you know you just you pick up on all these signals that says okay maybe it's time to pull back and I think in bodybuilding that kind of stuff it's so instinctive whereas in like strength training there is very you know you do this for this amount of weeks this for just this very plan it's very methodical and it's been proven to be very effective but in bodybuilding I think it's a little bit more complex until you know when people talk about what about somebody who's natural versus not natural and I would tell you that I coach both some of the guys who are natural actually recovered at her better than a guys who are not and like that defies logic but it's just because of the individual response and to that point it's such a great point when we look at studies like this training study like I carried out we report the mean so when I say there was 13% growth that's pulling everyone together if you actually look at the individual responses which we have we're actually gonna have another paper out of this and where we're looking at that we're gonna actually investigate that it's much more interesting in the sense that some people we don't know we didn't test their overtraining response but there some people are down here and some people are up here and then you get this middle so that would indicate that we can only give research can only give basic guidelines as John really points out and very eloquently you need them to understand your own individual response or if you're coaching someone their response and then tailor this I can't tell you that 45 sets with 30 sets or 20 sets would be optimum only the individuals can know that what I can say is is that there is this on a general level this dose response at some point pushing volume has an effect and how that translates to the individual that is where the true art of training comes in that's where we bridge the gap between science and and art and sign some practice yeah absolutely alright guys I hope you enjoyed that for me the takeaway is like listen push yourself methodically increase your volume look for look for signs that you're progressing and keep going but if those kinds of things dissipate and you're going the wrong way then you pull back but listen don't be afraid to push yourself it's Brad mentioned we've got 40-plus sets that's a lot you know for anybody okay but there were people who responded well so you might be one of those people and maybe you can handle for a week maybe two maybe four so finally guys don't be afraid and what I'm just in closing with that remember too that that 40 sets was spread at 45 was spread out over three it's not 45 sets in a session so that was spread out that was actually over three days so three sessions so they were doing 15 sets per session not 45 sets the legs in the training session that's an important day and that was that's so cool she did that because back in the old days we never said we're just gonna do a whole back so all right guys thank you for coming again if you have some questions by the way comment below and we'll do our best to get them answered we will see you next time [Music]

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Keywords: Training volume, training volume vs frequency, powerlifting, build muscle, bodybuilding, athleanx, burn fat fast, what to eat to lose weight, jeff cavaliere, athlean x, diets for fat loss, keto diet to lose weight, squats for bad knees, wrong way to squat, how to squat properly, bar path on squat, best way to squat, low bar squat, john meadows, mdd, gr

Id: PFB21oIDwmU

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2018