Barbell Shrugged - 95- Improve Your Strength: What You Should Know About Training Volume For Strength Gains

Episode Date: December 18, 2013

One of our most sought out topics from our fans finally gets its own episode!

This week on Barbell Shrug, we talk about adjusting your training volume so you can get insane results. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrug. For the video version, go to barbellshrug.com. I ate too much coffee. I drank too much coffee. I thought you were just eating the beans. I ate all the coffee. We're live. I ate all the coffee. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged, episode 95.

I'm your host, Mike Blitzo, with my co-hosts and best friends, Doug Larson and Chris Morgs. Thanks for that. You guys have been rather affectionate today, haven't you? I love you too. It's because we've all been traveling a lot. We haven't gotten to see each other very much. And yeah, before we got the show started, I just had to share with my friends how much I appreciate them.

It made me feel good. I made Doug feel good. On the inside. Empathy and compassion, man. Real quick. Namaste. Today we're going to be talking about strength volume. He doesn't know what that means oh he does strength volume all right all i know is i say it at the end of the yoga session namaste and shit thank you teach thank you for stretching me out my chakras

just just y'all want to get this out there. We're talking about strength volume today. We will get to it eventually. First, go to barbellstrug.com. Sign up for the newsletter. We're going to teach you about the eight snatch mistakes you might be making. Before we go any further on the actual content, content, where you're going to learn something, I just want to say I went to the American Open last week, last weekend, and it was awesome.

I had a great time. I got to hang out with people like Kendrick Ferris, John North, Travis Mash. Kanye West. Diane Fu, Justin Thacker, Christmas Abbott. Yes, I saw Kanye West in concert. It was a dope. It was pretty cool.

Yeah, I had a very full weekend. I hung out with some awesome people. One of the people I just listed off, Travis Mash, who I'd never met before. Got I hung out with some awesome people. One of the people I just listed off, Travis Mash, who I'd never met before. Got to have lunch with him one day. Man, we just hit it off. Had a great time.

Ended up going to a party that night. And I think one of our next episodes will be Travis Mash here. In the very near future, we're going to be traveling to North Carolina to hang out with him. When I was at the peak of my powerlifting years, he was one of the best lifters around.

He was like a new Ed Cohen type guy. Great, great, great, efficient lifter. So I'm excited about that. Yeah. I also met a little girl, Elle Farr. Yeah. That's not her first name is Elle. That's what she, her, like she goes by.

E-L-L-E. Yep. Her last name is Farr. Glamorous name. She's really, really cool. cool she came up her and her dad came and talked uh Russ uh and they came and talked to me and uh she does jiu-jitsu and crossfit and so I don't exactly remember how old she was but it's really cool talking to her because she you could tell that she was like really interested in everything going on she followed all the crossfit people all the weightlifting people you could tell she was really bright and uh I because she liked you she likes me she's really she knows where talent is she's got a good eye if you agree with me I

think you're smart let's go around took pictures with like with you and John North and Kendrick and everyone yeah I wouldn't have the balls to do that when I was 12. That's awesome. When I was a kid, I would be terrified. I'd be very intimidated. But she was really bright. I talked to her a few times over the weekend. I really enjoyed it. So if I see you again, Elle, come and say hi again. And it's so awesome to see a new dawn, a new era, if you will, where little girls are idolizing

weightlifters. I never thought I'd see that. It's so awesome. It is crazy, dude. Yeah. It's so awesome. It is crazy, yeah. It's ridiculously awesome. Times, they be changing. If you want to hear exactly what went on that weekend, I think I was on the Weightlifting Talk podcast

for maybe a total of three or four hours. It was split into two different episodes. You can find that on Spreaker. Just look up Weightlifting Talk. And you have a whole episode about it on your Brands Making New Awesome podcast. Yes. Let's up, yeah Awesome podcast. I actually did talk about it a little bit. I was really worn down

and I wouldn't advise listening to that episode. No, but go listen to Weightlifting Talk. Great commercial for your show. My show sucks. You should check it out. It's basically just the sound of my beard rubbing against the microphone for 45 minutes.

Just like this. If you want to be introduced to some new tunes and some of my ideas on life in general, Bloodsopia is the podcast you should check out. So there's your one. Yes. But I got to hang out with some awesome people. There were some moments where I'm staying in a circle of a lot of the younger weightlifting coaches, and we were having really awesome discussions about the future of weightlifting. It was a really exciting weekend.

There was more people registered for this weightlifting meet than any weightlifting meet in the world. I think we broke a world record. Was it 453 people were registered for the American Open this year? They didn't know what to do. With everybody, Spoon Barbell put on the meet. They did a fantastic job of managing it because it was a lot of chaos.

The weather was bad. How many people showed? There was quite a few people who didn't show, and I actually think that might have helped the meet go a little bit smoother because it was bad. That's a gigantic weightlifting meet. I'm talking, it started early on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and went into the late hours.

I've been up half the meet. The latest one I ever saw, one year at the IP Nationals, I lifted. My flight ended for the deadlift at like 11.45 p.m. We quit deadlifting. Oh, man. That's exhausting, man. We started like at 9.45 a.m.

That's when I showed up. The way powerlifting works is different than weightlifting because you're done in two hours. In powerlifting, it's all day long. It's too spread out. I don't like it. Yeah, and it's all this intense. It's 12 hours of rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, oh, come over loudspeakers and bald

guys with goatees being way too aggressive with each other. Yeah, heavy metal for 12 hours straight. It frees the nerves. By the time you get the deadlift, you just want to go home. Yeah, four hours in between events is way too long. Yes. All right, let's get on to the topic at hand. Now that we've talked about the American Open, powerlifting, all that mess.

So what was the original question that spurred this show? What spurred you? I actually didn't copy it down. Somebody was asking for how to adjust volume, increase volume for beginners. Someone who's starting in training, how do we adjust the volume? Where do you start with the volume? Today we're specifically talking about

how to adjust volume for strength. Maybe we'll come back another day and do an episode on how to adjust volume for your conditioning. The nitty gritty of how to add work. How to get better at doing work. Conditioning and strength are a little bit different. So yeah, we need to address just the strength today. And then maybe on the next episode we'll do conditioning.

So why is adjusting training volume important then? For progress, Doug. We all want to get better. Yeah. So you got to embrace change. If you're that person that has a hard time just walking up the stairs uh obviously walking up two flights of stairs is better than and then uh walking up one flight of stairs yesterday that's progress and when should that person start two days yeah it's uh you know in uh when i was in college we had this class where we had to talk. We were coming up with. They made us talk.

They made us talk. It was terrible. But we had to come up with like these discussions. Like if we were to go on the news or something and discuss something, what would it be? What do these people need to hear in this? This one girl. You're going to be a pundit? It's a punditry exercise?

Yeah, this one girl was like, I would talk about the risks of overtraining. And I'm like, no. Oh, great. Thank you no great this is not zero zero one percent of athletes need to hear about that more than likely nobody is overtraining that you're talking listen up America you could be doing too much work no one recognizes that as a problem but it does happen in CrossFit people I wouldn't say they're overtraining in their volume overall. I think frequently they train too high a volume in a very small, I guess, domain. Too much of one thing and a whole lot of not a bunch of other things that they need to be doing. They either do too much weightlifting or they do, more than likely what the case is,

they're doing too much conditioning or they're doing too much long conditioning not enough short conditioning not enough speed work so there's there's a lot of variables there and it's important to uh not over train a specific area but more than likely the total volume is not that high yeah the easy thing to do as a beginner is to come in do blog programming just metcon all the time strength train maybe once or twice a week and then eventually you kind of get sick of metcon and realize that strength is your limiter and then you kind of backtrack i can get on a regular strength program that seems to be the kind of the the standard development or stage stages of development that i see with brand new crossfitters yeah i think it's because when people discover cross a lot of times the metcon is just that's

what's so different and so fun and you're right sexy right yeah you're right like it doesn't take very long you get so good at the conditioning aspect and all of a sudden what is limiting you is your strength it does seem to be the thrusters does seem to be the the psychological hook for new crossfitters even if that's not ultimately what they need to be doing is just metconning every day if you want to get someone started on crossfit just let them met con a whole bunch. They'll get plenty of progress on just doing that progress. They'll get some quick progress though. They'll get the experience of really pushing themselves to the limit, which a lot of people just simply aren't used to doing. And they'll be like, this is super, super fun. And then they'll keep doing it. And then they have to

go through that, that process of met conning too much, realizing they're not making progress in the, in the long run because their strength isn't high enough. And then they'll cycle back on their own from having that experience. And then they'll decide that they need to focus on the calibration process. Yeah. And you, you don't get there until you've had the experience. So, you know, we, we do this all the time on the show. We try to convince you, you need more strength. And the people that have had that experience are like, yeah, that's what everyone needs to hear. And the people that haven't had that experience don't listen to you at all because they don't they don't understand. I have a perspective on why that's important. So if you're a very unique person, you could probably skip. You probably skip that phase and go, OK, well, I don't need to worry about my conditioning, and I can just start on mostly strength and some conditioning, but most people need to have the experience of doing it wrong first before they'll backtrack and focus on strength in the beginning.

No matter, it's more likely. Unless you're coming from a strength sport already. Right, and I think that actually doing Metcons is a way to get that initial volume. I mean, if you're doing really light front squats in a conditioning session, that's probably a great thing. If you're doing you know really light front squats in a conditioning session that's probably a great thing if you're not someone who squats a lot so that's a practice on a new thing it's a great way to get a lot of reps in so and and it's a lot of fun so it can

be a good way to kind of intro even though you may feel like you're focusing on conditioning if you do a lot of thrusters at 95 pounds and your best front squats you know 165 pounds you're technically you're almost there at strength work yeah beginners can make good strength gains off as low as 40 of their max well if you are truly brand new to to any type of weight training if you've already been doing other types of lifting if you come out of bodybuilding or powerlifting or weightlifting well you know you're not in that category if you are just playing brand new to training you've been sitting on the couch for 10 years then you don't have to go in and lift you know five sets of triples on back squats you can just yeah you can just you can just met con and

get stronger it won't matter it won't matter for like months probably you could pick up medicine balls and set them down and probably get better right so in the beginning you don't need a progression if you are truly brand new you don't need a progression you just need to train get used to doing work that's it and so just starting is more volume for you right yeah just working out at all is way more volume than doing nothing i think people need to go okay i'm gonna train three times a day or three times a week and then your next step shouldn't be like, what reps and sets and how much weight should I be doing? Maybe you should just try to train four days a week at that point. Yeah.

And then five days a week. And then once you get to four and five days a week, that's probably when you need to start really considering those progressions where you're talking about. I think the simplest way to describe it is you get in shape to then train. Like you prepare yourself for what comes later, which is this more regimented thing that once you've sort of polished off all the big chunky edges, now you start doing the refined work. You're counting more often and the math is more important.

And that's actually one of the big arguments that CrossFit's been making for a long time. If you check out the CrossFit Journal, they talk about GPP, general physical preparedness. And people, a lot of coaches, if you look at like a lot of sports specific coaches, football, you know, there's people that are doing speed training or something like that. A lot of times the GPP is not there. And if you just raise the GPP, everything else rises with it. And I think a lot of times people are too quick to move out of a GPP program and move into something that's sports specific, or they specific or they're trying to improve this one little aspect of their fitness

when if they just get better general physical preparedness, the whole potential rises. That goes for advanced athletes too. I know football teams now that are starting to dabble in things like CrossFit. They're not doing anything fancy. They're just doing basic like when you play football, you do one kind of thing for so long

so intensely. Like the same strength and conditioning type approach with the sprints and the lifting and the bad power cleans. And these guys have been doing that for so many years that at some point for them, you get a big benefit from going back and being a beginner again. And just doing things,

like a guy who's been playing NFL for five years, he did a big bang for his buck by learning how to do just the most basic crossfit movements because he's he's doing a whole lot of new things on underdeveloped qualities yeah new for him yeah he's a beginner in this regard and this work the simplest thing does him the best good even if you're not i mean and getting outside of that so for football players you know they need to be really strong and fast for 10 seconds you know i think a lot of people get caught up in that you

know we need to train for those 10 seconds. It's like, it might be beneficial to do a 10-minute Metcon for that guy. He may raise his potential in this other aspect of fitness if he just focuses over here for a little while.

He's not doing something so hard either. He's just moving for 10 minutes intensely but not beating himself up which is all he ever has experienced in his competitive career

and training career. I do think you're spot on about adding days per week first. Yeah. What we do at Faction is we put people through a four-week fundamentals course where it's three days a week. So it's three days a week for four weeks, and then we tell them to start the regular classes.

And then they're kind of up to their own at that point. They can do five days a week or two days a week or whatever fits their schedule. But what we recommend for them is to stick with three days a week because the regular classes at our facility are going to be more volume than the fundamentals classes already. So that's, that's an increase in and of itself, even though it's still three days a week. And then we recommend they do two days on one day off, two days on one day off. And then once they start to not be so sore, uh, they're, they're sleeping just fine. They feel like they, they hand, they are handling that volume just fine, usually we tell them maybe another three or four weeks at that volume. Then we tell them to bump up

to either two days on, one day off, three days on, one day off, and they alternate back and forth between those two, or just to go straight to three days on, one day off, which is kind of like the standard CrossFit recommendation. That way they're training most days of the week. If you're training less than five days a week, then getting to at least five days a week probably is the very first thing that you should be shooting for. You don't have to skip to it right now,

but that's what you should be building to first. I think you touched on a really important point, which was sleep and recovery. And I think a lot of times people are quick to increase their training volume when they haven't mastered recovery yet. You know, a lot of times people, you know increase their training volume when they haven't mastered recovery yet. You know, a lot of times people, you know, they want to get more results. So they want to improve the results by improving their volume.

Minimum effective dose and then dose response and recovery. You got to keep that in mind. It's not the work. It's getting over the work. Yeah. That makes you better. You know, if you're not getting, if you're getting five, six hours of sleep a night, going from four days a week to five days a week of training is probably not your next best step.

You know, it's, it's getting eight hours of sleep a night and eating high quality foods. So just keep that in mind as we, as we talk about this, adding volume may not be the next best answer for you. Yeah. If you're a more advanced athlete, granted, this show is kind of catering to beginners, but if you're a more advanced athlete, your program should probably, probably be the last thing that you change. You should be making sure everything else in your life is on point and you're recovering to, to your full extent or to recover as best as possible, whatever that means for you. And then changing your program is the last thing you should do. Yeah. I don't know how many times I've had athletes you know i've got say for instance 20 athletes on a on a training program and 19 of them are make you're getting stronger they're getting faster

they're breaking records and then uh you got the one walks over is like i think there's something wrong with the program he's usually one not sticking to it. It's funny. But then I go, well, how much you sleep in a night? Are you getting high quality food? We're like, well, this thing came up in my life. I'm like, okay, the program's the last thing we're going to talk about today. And my girlfriend blew up in a fireworks accident. But I wanted the Fran time, man.

I had this thing in my mind, like, get that time. I hate it when that happens. Those firework accidents, you know. Oh, they were cheap and, you know, water damaged. All right. I had a point. I was going to say something so important. I'm like, well, I got the fireworks thing came to my mind.

All right. So once we're training five days a week and, you know, and we're showing up and we've got our recovery mastered, what's our yearly plan look like? You gonna have fluctuations based on competitions or? So assuming you're a guy who wants, or guy or girl, who wants to compete, sorry ladies, almost left you out. They're like, wait a minute, oh, okay Doug, this time.

Doug tends to do that. Very sexist. Ladies, I'll never leave you out, I promise. They don't trust that dude, though. Good luck. Assuming you want to compete in the open and you are basically treating this like a sport and you have a season, which is usually kind of that March, April, May, maybe beyond that if you do really well, you want to cycle your training volume over time.

So we'll talk about kind of how we do it on a monthly basis and how we can even do that on a weekly basis here in a second. But for the most part, after the open or the regionals or whenever your season is over, then you're starting to ramp up your strength volume. And it's going to probably going to peak late in the year around November, December, maybe January, depending on how much strength you need to gain. And then your strength volume might go down a little bit and you're going to start ramping up your conditioning volume in the probably 12 weeks out from the Open or Regionals. This is something that, one of the big differences between I just want to look good naked training

and I'm preparing for competition, this annual competition. You know what you just reminded me of? What's that? Rip A Toe's article. You want to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of CrossFit? You see that?

I didn't read the whole thing, to be honest. Everybody likes to throw these out there because it stirs up a lot of shit, but one of them is that, hey, listen, everybody. Okay, you need to understand that CrossFit is exercise,

and training is training, and most of these guys who are really impressive at CrossFit, they're actually training. They don't do CrossFit. This is, I hear it a lot. That's the criticism people make a CrossFit is that it's just exercise.

And we're all talking about here is how for a lot of people, that's exactly what you need more than anything is exercise. It's motion, it's movement, it's accumulation of, of general movement patterns and work. And that, yeah,

there's a time for doing the training, which comes after you've gotten really good at exercising and you're getting in shape. Yeah. I just want to throw it out. Like if you're not obvious thing is true. Yeah. If you're not training for a specific competition or a season, then your training might look different. You might have a more even balance between strength and conditioning throughout the year. And for me personally, I, I prefer that type of training because it doesn't beat me up so much you don't get into these deep valleys and peaks and stuff like that and you feel more exercise is not a dirty word more stable throughout the year so yeah i definitely prefer

exercising to training but once you get to training like doug was saying you know there's parts of the year where there's a big focus on strength and then there's these big variations and to change gears can be painful sometimes and and the potential for injury there is really high too so what about each month so a mesocycle the fancy word for that usually we do four-week blocks we call mesocycles holy shit that's that a word people might not know the year long was a macro cycle the four- week block is a mesocycle. And then the weekly ones are micro cycles. When did we start educating people? I know.

This is crazy. It's craziness. So usually we do four week blocks. What are those four week blocks look like? For the most part. Just talking about volume. Just volume. How's it fluctuate from week to week?

What do little bars look like? Like a butterfly. Yeah. The volume thing is hard to talk about. It's definitely easier if you have a visual representation, which you can see a visual representation if you signed up for the six-month muscle gain or for the road to regionals. The launch videos, the videos that we had

that were informative to teach you about that, you can go to those pages, and we put together webinars where we had that were informative to teach you about that you can go to those pages and uh we put together webinars where we explain that so it's not you can go look at those is that your answer yes yes you can answer the question so people want to ask like what does it look like oh go online and search for a video don't worry don't worry about it i'm explaining this shit. What are you talking about? I'm about to answer my own softball questions.

What have I been reduced to? Week one, you'll have low volume, lower volume. Week two, medium volume. Week three, high volume. What happens on week four? Oh, fuck. I forgot. Week three, this is where you might start feeling beat up.

This is where you don't feel real. You may not feel your best and all that. And then week four is a deload. Or as Chris likes to say, unload. Because he says there's no such word as deload. But during that deloading week. Hey, can you help me deload the truck? No, I can't, weirdo.

What the fuck is that supposed to mean so yes uh the computer will try to we'll try to tell you that deloads not a real word when you when you type it out i'm wearing that like microsoft knows what they're talking about it's a bunch of nerds but no nerds gonna tell me how to live my life so the fourth week you know you go from you build up this progression. You have lighter volume, medium volume, high volume. And then on the fourth week, that's where you actually adapt. You take a break. You're still doing the movements. You're still doing about half as much as you did in that third week.

But that's your time to rest. You might go into the deload week, unload week, feeling a little beat up. By the end of it, you should feel really good and ready to start ramping back up. And it's not set in stone. You could do two peaks to make yourself a little bit more tired and take two weeks of down to kind of play with how you respond. And see, for you, for the sake of knowing when you peak and how you peak best, play with those. Maybe three weeks is enough. Maybe five works for you better.

You could go six. There's no golden rule. I find younger athletes can go five, six weeks without that unloading week that's not you and me and older guys like two weeks so after two weeks sometimes i'm old man we're tough we're gristly that's not us i was gonna say also i would share another so he does that classic ramp uh easy moderate heavy and that's when the fatigue starts and you drop and then you get the balance that's the classic great thing that works most of the time for most people. When I was powerlifting, my favorite thing to do is actually a little bit of a tweak.

And Jim Wendler recommends a similar thing in 551 for powerlifting. So he makes this same switch, which I thought was amazing because he found the same thing independently, which means we must have totally found something worth writing down. And he must be a genius. Yeah, right? So it's actually week one is the medium. Week two is like a light, like a speed week, primed week. And you go really heavy, and then you rest.

So it's a slight dip in the ramp. Yeah, you see that with some weight. It's more traditional than what I've done over the years. Like medium, very high, high, and then low. Dr. Andy Gap and I used to really talk about like hit it really hard

and then rest and recover and do like a speed week where everything needs to be exposed as possible and then come back

up and then crush what you did the week one yeah see a lot of weightlifting programs that do that it's a

you know moderate light heavy and then you take your deload yeah

so you can get really complicated or you can just ramp up and then deload. I think it works best when you need a break from the constant, like you've been doing four blocks for a year of the same ramp up and down.

It's a good just change. I don't think that's a problem for most people. All right, so we took something that was very easy to follow, and we added a bunch of examples, and now it probably sounds confusing. So let's back up to the original example. You basically ramped up.

You did one week here, one week here, one week here, and then you had a deload week. So maybe did three sets of five and then four sets of five the next week and then five sets of five and then that deload week maybe you just did one tester you hit a five rm right and then you were done yeah actually one set of five basically yeah that's exactly how i like to do it right now a lot of times it's just that you know fine let that deload week be when you look for that new five rep max or something like that so usually you're resting and at the end of your deload week that's when you're testing yeah yeah so you were saying something similar but but slightly different so using that same uh you know sets of five

example like how would you do the the example you could start with like a good hard tough three by five session and then you could do a session where maybe did like three by three or like four by two like you know on week two yeah like this less work but you know maybe with the focus being moving a little quicker and like you know but week four or three then you could do like a five by five week a really tough week and then you got week four to recover so you can do a little more on that hard week if you do that like there's a little bit less of a of a cumulative where you can hit it really hard acute and strong in week three if you do that like that way so for you to to oversimplify this in your example you're going up up up down right up up up down and in your example you're going kind of up down up down up down but every fourth

week the down is a little bit more down yeah Yeah. And then more down, more down the second week. And then highs, you can get a little higher, you know, it's a little bit, you know, more spiky. That makes sense. So if we use the same example, it might be like three sets of five and then five sets of five and then four sets of five and then two sets of five. That makes sense. You're kind of medium, very high, high, and then low. Yeah. And then medium, very high, high, and then low. And then medium, very high, high, and then low.

Okay, so that's what monthly looks like. You can do a million different variations within that little system or within that concept. But really, the easiest way is just to go up, up, up, down, deload, up, up, up, deload. However you want to think about that. The principle is that you ramp up and then you deload. Ramp up and deload. That's never gonna change. What can change is week to week,

like what you were talking about. What can also change is the duration. You don't have to do three weeks and then the fourth week. It can go five weeks, six weeks. You might need it after two weeks. Yeah, I think it's really important you keep that. You've got to be very observant and write a lot of things down, take a lot of notes, collect a lot of data for yourself.

When you add a week, if you go from three to four or four to five, you extend things, you shorten things, you pay attention to how long it takes you to warm up, how your strength is responding, how you feel, how you're recovering, your perceived soreness. You got to keep notes of all this so you know, okay, for me, it really does look like three seems to work a whole lot better. That's how you start getting into the real data.

No one can tell you exactly all these potential possibilities we're describing. No one can tell you exactly which one's optimal. There's no such thing as a perfect blend of these things. You play and you get, okay, I really like this pattern. It seems to work for me. I'm making good progress. It can change. Say you start getting more sleep or you change your diet

and you start getting more calories. Then you might be able to go another week before you deload or something like that. Especially for beginners. I just used the example of four-week blocks, but beginners might not need to do a four-week block. They might not need to deload every fourth week because they're not as beat up as some of these more advanced athletes might be during that fourth week they might be able to go six weeks or eight

weeks before they really need a deload yeah uh and another thing i like to mention as well is you know if you're feeling if an athlete comes to me and goes oh my god i feel like i'm about to this is i'm really being pushed mentally here i'm like well it's the fifth day of the third week and deload starts tomorrow go ahead and hit this training session as hard as you can you know and then next week you'll get to recover if that same athlete comes to me in the middle of week one there's a problem that's when we know we we probably dug the hole too deep. Or they're just mentally weak. And you need to get them out of your gym.

Like, you know what? You can't take the training. You're not good enough. Leave. Leave this place and never come back. He's joking, folks. I'm hoping I was carrying. Let me hold my quotation for you. I don't know.

I'm being serious. The voice of someone who's never owned a gym. Disregard everything I say. Chris, what do you like to change? Sets, reps? What is your way of increasing or decreasing volume? I mean, we were talking about the example was three sets of five, four sets of five, five sets of five. Do you like to stick with sets of five?

Or how do you like to change things around? I think I'd rather add more. I tend to add more days than sets and reps like i usually work up as quickly as possible something that's really heavy like for squats so instead of going like instead of three to five go to five to five well usually i always work up to a single or double or triple and i'll just add days when i want to do more work so instead of doing it two days a week i'll go to three days for squatting and then when i really want to do work maybe in the summer when I'm feeling better and the days are longer and I'm eating a little more food and everything's more optimal, I can

try to squat maybe five days a week. So I would say I had frequency, not, not sets, uh, like in one workout because I found it easier to recover from. So with adding something like, like more days a week of squatting, you're not building up to a 5RM five days a week. No, no. I believe in doing as much as you can in the most balanced way possible. So when I'd add a day, let's say I do a back squat on day one. Day two, if I want to squat on Wednesday. If I'm going from Monday to Friday to Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the workout I would add in the middle of the week would be the easiest thing to recover from.

So that's a perfect day to add like a front squat because if I'm still tired from back squats, I get tired in a little different way for front squats. So I'd add the easiest thing to recover from. So I'll add a lot of front squat work if I want to up the volume because it's hard for me because mechanically I have a tough time

being vertical and working that position. But for that same reason, I don't get too beat up. So I can add more and ensure I can recover from it. Yeah, I think you'll see something like that in a lot of weightlifting programs, too. You'll see Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, you're doing the full snatch, the squat snatch, and you're doing a squat clean and jerk. But on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you're doing a power clean, power snatch. You're still practicing the movements, but the total volume that you're doing is lower. For one, you're going to do lighter weight with a power snatch or a power clean versus the squat.

And the range of motion is different. I think Glenn is good at doing that, Glenn Finley. If you look at a group of lifters, you say, those guys always max out. That's one thing you're seeing. They're doing as much weight on an exercise as possible. But the type of exercise is so important because if you go from doing, if every day you did clean and jerks to max twice,

it'd be really tough. But if you do clean and jerk to max day one, and then like a high hang clean to a max day two or three, or whatever, you do a lot less weight on one, it's quotation marks max effort for you, but you can recover from it better. Maxing out a lot. It's like different movements.

It's not this idea people have about Bulgarian training where it's like every day you show up to gym and you lift heavy barbell. No excuse. No walk away. No life after a barbell. You know, all this fucking shit. It's too intense, right?

You can go heavy all the time on exercises that are tougher so you're not you're not getting so beat up from it it's a very important detail to understand all right so if i wanted to get bigger and stronger what how would the reps look for that verse or bigger 10 by 10 training there you go yeah that that doesn't not work that's exactly what i'm about to say that's a great way of describing it right it doesn't not work yeah it's not the funnest training in the world but uh you know if you want to get bigger does how the reps and sets work for that versus you want to stay the same size and get stronger how would you change that doug getting bigger versus just getting stronger and

not getting bigger at the same time. Right. So you could play that game two ways. The training could differ or maybe it maybe it could not differ and you could just change your diet. Some people, when they're trying to get big or get or get small, they might keep their training the same and just adjust their diet. In one case, they gain muscle mass and get a little bigger. In one case, they lose a little bit of body fat and get smaller that's super common in my case if i'm training for an mma fight usually off season i'm trying to get as big and strong as possible and then when a fight approaches my training pretty much stays the same i'm trying to stay as strong and as explosive as possible leading up to the fight i suggest my diet and then i make weight yeah so you don't necessarily

have to change your training program. Um, but, um, changing your diet is a, is a huge factor there. So, um, if you're a beginner, like I said, at the very beginning of the podcast, um, training with as little as 40% of your max can still help you get stronger. So sticking with the kind of the hypertrophy or the bodybuilding rep ranges, if you're doing back squats for, you know, four sets of eight or three sets of 10 or whatever is this kind of cliche as that is. And we make fun of that a little bit. Um, not because it doesn't work just because we like to, you know, poke fun at like the old ways of doing things, even though kind of like, uh, you guys were just saying those ways still work. So, uh, if you're a new person sticking with something

like three sets of 10 will still work. So you can do those hypertrophy rep ranges and get really good progress off of it. You don't necessarily have to jump to like three, five sets of three heavy to gain body weight. You can do lighter weights as strength training. Yeah. I think athletes can see years of results from that in the beginning, you know, not, not increasing, you know, increasing the reps, you know, in that eight to 12 rep range. And if you want to increase more, if you want to raise the volume out of another set of 8 to 12,

maybe we don't want to drop below 8 reps per set, and we can go pretty high on the reps and increase the volume that way. If you're going to make a bad mistake, it's that you start adding too much weight too soon before you do the work, before you put in the effort. With a more advanced athlete, I would prefer to add volume by adding, uh, you know, the sets instead of the reps, maybe keep the reps say at three, we're going to do three squats.

You know, we may do five sets of three today and we're going to do seven sets of three next week and the next week, nine sets of three or something like that. And so, you know, the more advanced athlete and the athlete that doesn't want to gain as much weight, maybe they're not looking to be in a hypertrophy phase. I prefer to do it that way. That's my favorite way to add volume for kind of like the big bilateral movements for heavy cleans, deadlifts, squats. I like adding more sets, less reps, like you're saying. So stick between kind of three and six or three and eight, three sets of, excuse me, three reps to eight reps per set for the big lifts, so to speak.

And then for the hypertrophy references, like I was just talking about, I like to do that for the assistance movements. For things like lunges and glute ham raises, strict overhead pressing, things like that. Especially for beginners. So cheesy. All right, let's take a break real quick. When we come back, we're going to talk about how we can actually put all these program stuff together. Are we going to whisper at the second half of the show? We're going to whisper.

Oh, we're going to talk about it. I didn't like a, all right, sound effect at the end of that or something. Chaka bra. Fire it up. Welcome back. I'm here with Doug, Chris, and CTP. Your friends. My friends.

Oh, you know what? I really want to say that we're all friends because I did have someone come up to me at the American Open. It was really, really funny. And he goes, are Doug and Chris friends? Which Chris? Chris Moore? Yeah, yeah.

Well, what's the most famous? I was like, I think everyone recognizes that the two of you are so different from each other they're like do they actually hang out I was like yeah we all hang out we're all friends there's no way those guys like each other it was funny because I was like it never occurred to me that we wouldn't all be friends

but I guess some people out there think that maybe we just meet up do the show and then we're like we go our separate ways and like fuck those guys but no we all hang out we were hanging out last night we had a good time so just want to throw that out there because it was the best opposite track and that's true in this case intimate relationship actually to the people who would question our relationships very intimate

very kind of loving we go to each other's houses we we hang out yeah you don't see anything fake here I mean yeah we're throwing it out it was it just it just really blew my mind when when he asked I was like why would why would you think otherwise we can probably feel like when Doug's like Chris shut the fuck up his brain energy is sitting out that kind of that's probably what it is that's fine because he's right don't worry we all discuss this off the air. So Doug, how do you know if we're training enough already?

How do we know if our volume is where it needs to be or save us? I suppose the simplest answer is, are you making progress? Which means that you should be testing something and measuring your progress. Things should be changing in some ways that are discernible to you. What about using my Fran time? There's nothing wrong with using your Fran time. You just need

to pick something and use it consistently, but today we're talking about strength specifically. You should probably pick something that you want to get better at. That's your benchmark test. That way you know if you're getting better at it. Don't pick a random benchmark wad and make that your benchmark for success when you're doing strength work. I've been squatting so much and this thing's not changing.

I'm squatting so much, my Helen time didn't get better. You don't squat in Helen. You don't need to pick Fran just because Fran is a CrossFit standard. You need to pick something that you specifically need to get better at. Something that you give a shit about. Whatever matters to you, human being. For strength, I'd recommend picking one lower body lift so a squat a deadlift clean snatch pick one just one and then for upper body i would pick one type of pressing and one

type of pulling so maybe pick weighted pull-ups cleans and strict overhead press or seated behind the neck press or something something that's really that or seated behind the neck press or something, something that's seated behind the neck. I like seated behind the neck press because it's, it's very raw. It's very hard to cheat. You got to have a lot of mobility to do it at all. It's, it's a,

it's a great test movement training it. Maybe shouldn't train it all the time. It might beat you up a little bit, but, uh, that's a whole nother track. Now that you bring that up, I want to do that more often.

It's a good test. Since you and I can't do that, so. A seated behind neck press. Well, Graham and me like, that hurts so bad. It's like, we should get better at that. Wait, I can't press. You can't reach behind your neck.

I find the isolateral seated hammer press is really great. I can do those. I can do those. Of course you can, because it sucks. It's stupid. You can do those. I can do those. Of course you can, because it sucks. It's stupid. You can also shit and make Cheerio bowls.

Right. I don't even know what that means. I'm skipping past it. Bowls of Cheerios. We have too much coffee, man. Are the bowls made of Cheerios? In my dreams, they are. Think of it. A bowl that is made of Cheerio that contains Cheerios.

Oh no. You went meta just then. So you know what that means? Sorry guys. That was a good old fashioned D-mail job. So if you're tracking your progress, if you're writing down what you do, if every Monday you do something, you know know five by five back squats the first working set of five you get to you're probably trying to hit a new five rm each week so

a common thing that you like to do or you like to program is build to a five rep max and then take ninety percent of that and do four more sets of five or something like that so every week you're hitting a new five rm if you're tracking your progress and writing down what you do every week you should be able to see every week if you're hitting a new 5RM, even if it's not a tester. In that case, I really encourage people to be conservative and going higher each month. Sometimes I program that and people go, they try to go for a 20-pound PR over the last weeks, 5RM. I'm like, go for 5 pounds.

Don't get crazy. You only got the rest of your life to get stronger. Relax. Hey, man, chill out. It doesn't have to be a one rep max necessarily. It can be a three rep max or five rep max, or you could pick the same weight you did last week and see if you can get six with it instead of five or whatever you want to do, whatever, whatever you feel like you need to get better at. If you, if you can program that at least every four weeks maybe every eight weeks at the end of your deload week test it see if you got stronger and then then you can make some type

of adjustment and it might not even necessarily be more volume more volume isn't the answer forever you're not going to go from five sets of five to six sets of five to ten sets of five twenty sets of five thirty sets of five my favorite way of making progress right now and it's such a an obvious beautiful thing is actually to do to go for the same weight or the same amount of work like the same thing five sets of five squat or a heavy front squat single or a snatch but to do that to perform that rep uh more and more perfectly so do it better and better and more crisp and more crisp and also do it more and more in a relaxed state so more and more of. So do it better and better and more crisp and more crisp and also do it more and more in a relaxed state.

So more and more of a routine. Like the best lifters, I was showing Doug some lifters pregame, you know, that's what we call the, before the show period. This Russian guy, Berestov,

this Russian guy, 2004 champion, but he lifts the hugest weights, huge weights, bro. Oh God, the huge weights. But he does it so calmly and so reserved. like he'll put

he'll do like a 200 kilo uh push press triple and he'll drop and he'll go yeah all right but see when you do that when you get used to lifting if you can get used to lifting the thing that's heavy for you now in a routine way then once it's time to compete or once your boys come over for training session or once you go to a competition and the energy gets picked up, you're expecting that for just a little bit more to be hard. But then when all that energy hits, because you get this huge reserve now, you're so, you have a surplus. You can draw that out and you can really surprise yourself what you're capable of.

Like when I go, like if I train in the garage, you get really, really focused and really, really reserved and get strong, keep my strength. But going to the gym, man, man makes for a really great workout so i think doing things more and more simply more calmly is also a way to make progress this is an idea yeah i mean if you're if your snatch went up faster and smoother that's progress and it was easier for you to do no i think a lot of times people get caught up in the weight and basically what you're describing it need not be just more you know improve your finesse yeah be a ninja be a ninja we need a t-shirt with that on it so how do you know maybe uh you're doing too much what if you're what if you're maybe trying to bite off more than you can chew like what's a

sure sign of that's happening how do you recognize that i don't know if you show up to the gym and the barbell feels heavy some days you the gym and the barbell feels heavy. Some days you show up and the barbell feels like nothing because it's basically nothing. And some days you show up to the gym, you pick up the bar and you're like, fuck. If you're Doug, the bar's like nothing. You came in whistling and you leave with your head hung low. Yeah. I mean, some days the weights just, they just feel heavier.

And some days the bar just seems to move effortlessly. But even on some of those days where the bar feels heavier i mean i find that some i've hit prs on days where like as i'm warming up i go oh no this is this is a scotch that's definitely true sticky situation you know your body definitely can trick you you feel like you're tired and you pr that day and that does happen but if you show up every day and every day you're like, fuck, I have to train again feeling like this. Too many days in a row, it eventually will come to bite you. So if you feel like shit consistently day after day after day, not just one day where you come in and it feels heavy. Handy tip.

You should only feel like shit and then anchor it into the bowels of despair only some of the time. Some of the time. Other times should be all right. But again, the real answer answer is are you making progress if the weights keep going up then keep doing what you're doing there's no need to make a change if it ain't broke don't fix it that type of thing so measure your results if you're getting stronger keep doing what you're doing i think uh also chris brings us up he's brought up a few times on the show but i say we bring it up again the canary in the coal mine the jump test could you inform people of this test that you can perform to see maybe today might not be the best

day that you go crazy yeah so the problem with strength is that if you're not getting weaker that's a good sign if you're getting stronger it's a real good sign but if you're not getting weaker that doesn't mean you're not you know suffering or not recovering the way you should and a more sensitive way to test how things are going. You know, it's not definitive, again, because sometimes you're going to be a little tired, fatigued, and that's okay. But in general, you can use things like a vertical jump as a metric, as a quick temperature check for how you're doing.

So if you find, you can easily measure your vertical jump. If you've got something fancy like a digital pad, great. That measures the time you're off the pad and down. If you've got just... That's the best way. You've got a Vertec thing with got something fancy like a digital pad, great. That measures the time you're off the pad and down. If you got just... That's the best way. You got a Vertec thing with little plastic things, you jump and hit, great. If you just have a mark on the wall, you put some chalk on your hand, you jump up and you slap it and you can get higher or lower and you just measure the difference.

But if you see that going down, if it's just one... Like, I always make a point. If it's one transient thing, like I feel like shit and I don't jump as high, that's okay. Just make note. Plot it out in an Excel spreadsheet. Like, put the inches up. How high did you jump? Make a little scatter plot. If you see it going down in time and all the strength

things are staying the same, that's your sign that the overreaching is settling in. You're okay, but you might want to plan some rest. If you see that going up, then you're seeing the underlying fatigue coming and going like a wave, like a tide in and out. I think it's a great plot vertical jump.

Just do that as you do whatever training you're doing, just as a way to objectively assess if you're getting better or not. Because if that's going up, you're getting more explosive and fast. The Barbara Albuta barometer. Hey, hey, hey. Whoa, man. But you can see if your program is working by, it should go up and down, up and down, but trend up.

If it's not, then something's wrong, man. That's the most sensitive way I think you can see that happening. I really like that. The fitness and fatigue effect is the most sensitive way. By the way, that little pad that tests the time of flight, it's actually cheaper than a Vertec. So it's like people who buy Vertecs, I'm like, what are you doing? Just buy that pad.

That's way easier. Way easier test. You know what we should do? The only thing I don't like, the only thing I like the Vertec 4 better is the fact that you're like trying to reach and hit a little bit higher than you did last time. So that's a benefit.

It wouldn't be surprised if it was like an iPhone app for like holding your hand and jump and it could know how quickly you're coming up and down. It'd give you reading. I heard if you tape, they have an app for that. You tape the phone to the bottom of your shoe. I had a hard pee there.

Sorry. I put coffee into the microphone. Wear military boots. Tape your phone underneath the boot. Well, you've heard about someone tried to play a joke and they made an app

for your iPad that's a scale. And you just stand on your iPad and I'll tell you how much you work. Well, there was another one too. It had something to do with throwing it or something.

You throw it and it will tell you something. How far can you throw your iPad? Let's find out. Oh, shit. This is a dumb idea. I get it now. No, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could make that.

Okay, I'm going to hold my phone and jump. Oh, and it says you're fat. All right, so more volume isn't the answer. Did you leave? What else can you change? Oh, sometimes, sometimes you might want to go with less volume and you might want to change the intensity that you're training. And what I mean by that is the percentage of your one run max. It might be more beneficial for you to do that.

Another thing you can do is change the amount of time you're resting between sets. A lot of times you say, hey, rest three minutes between sets. Right now I've got a lot of the weightlifters, we're in a little bit different phase of training. We're not about to compete anytime soon. A lot of them are doing every minute on the minute lifts. Which I love, man.

We're building fatigue, it's density training. That's all that is. Yeah, so even if you're even if you're not changing the total volume just switching up how you do the movements might really help so instead of doing three sets of five with a three minute break maybe you do doubles every minute on the minute for it for seven or eight minutes it's basically the same thing but not quite the same thing and maybe your body reacts to that slightly different stimulus and you spur a little bit more progress. Yeah. So for there's two, there's two methods that I kind of like for changing that aren't

the reps and sets type of thing. Uh, one is the density training. And I like that for a more advanced athlete, somebody who has really good movement patterns already. Yeah. You gotta get, be able to get tired and not have your form breakdown. Exactly. And then for the people who, you know, for the newer people, tempo, uh, squats, tempo presses, doing tempo work is kind of the other way to do that. And that's, I like that better for newer people. And in fact, we still do tempo work, you know, pause squats, stuff like that. It's not just for newer people, but I prefer that density training model more for change for an advanced athlete. But the tempo, that's something like, you something like take four seconds on the way down,

pause for two seconds, come up as quickly as you can. And so you have time for your down portion, a time for the pause at the bottom, a time for your up portion, and then a pause at the top. So you have four different segments of time for your tempo.

And this week you might do three seconds on the way down, two second pause, come up as quickly as you can, one second pause at the top. And then you could keep the same sets and reps for next week, but just change the tempo. Yeah. You can just say, Hey, we'll take four seconds on the way down this time. And so you can add volume over time or you can make it raise the intensity by making

the total time, uh, with the tempo smaller and adding a little bit of weight. So those are a couple of ways. I also like doing it within a set. So I've done squats where I'll do that speed rep weight, kind of like maybe 75, 80%. Heavy enough to be heavy, but not too heavy. And I'll do two sets, two reps as fast as possible, in a squat where I'm trying to get a good rebound and time it good.

And then I'll do the third rep where I go down slower and pause and then come up explosive. So changing the tempo even within the same set there's so endless ways to play with it yeah if you're if you're doing five by five and you end up plateauing after a while you just said a second ago doing less volume that doesn't mean you're working less hard if you do right five sets of three instead of five sets of five with heavier weight you're doing less reps but it might be potentially even a harder workout and you get even more benefit from doing five sets of five with heavier weight you're doing less reps but it might be potentially even a harder workout and you get even more benefit from doing five sets of three and maybe i shouldn't throw this out there but i'm going to we didn't really mention it you're a rebel we talked about volume

and basically that's the amount of reps that you do in a workout or a week or a month or whatever we should have put that we should have put that in the beginning. Sorry, guys. Yeah. How much you're doing. Sorry. Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, that's what all clicks now. Yeah. We'll just put it at the beginning. Go to the end first.

No. But I want to mention volume load. And that's the amount of reps you're doing multiplied by the weight you're doing. So if you multiply that, you're going to get a better picture of how much work you're actually accomplishing. And so if you're doing accomplishing and so you know if you're doing less volume but you increase the load you could technically be doing more a higher volume load total it's not the way it feels like you can feel like you did more work with like five by five but if you did like 20 sets of two with more weight each each set you

may not feel as tired but that's a lot more work done you know so we talked a lot about volume and that's a really a good way to get into it. But eventually you're going to want to start looking at volume load as well. Maybe we'll do a whole nother podcast on volume load. Yeah. Volume load. Hardcore volume load episode. Yeah. The reality of it is that changing your training volume really is just one of many different things that you can change about your program to spur progress. So it might be one of the first things you start with, but after a while you can't just do more. You have to do something else. And usually that means changing the exercises, the range of motion, the, like the intensity,

the speed, something else can change besides just doing more reps. Man, now I just can't get over the fact that we didn't define volume on the front of the show. At the very least you do the same thing. People are going to listen to the show and they're going to have to go back and listen to it a second time fact that we didn't define volume on the front of the show. At the very least, you do the same thing. People are going to listen to the show and then have to go back and listen to it a second time. If they didn't know what it was. Or they could listen to our other episodes where we talk about training volume. Great idea, Doug.

Thanks. I'm glad you thought of that. We had episode 44 and 54. Is that right? Yes. We talked about how to adjust your training volume. Or how to adjust your diet for high volume training. I think it was one of them too. Episode how to adjust your diet for high volume training, I think was one of them to episode 54 was, yeah, adjusting your diet for higher volume training. So, you know, volume is not an isolated thing to change. If you change your volume, you might have to change your sleep and eating and all that kind of stuff. And we talk a little this on that particular show, but how we like to think about sleep with regard to training volume is that for the most part, every day you want to sleep roughly eight hours.

And then for every training session you do that day, you want to add an hour of sleep. So if you train once that day, nine hours is more ideal. If you train twice a day, 10 hours is more ideal for that day. So that's an easy way to cycle your sleep with respect to your training. Way harder to do in reality than, than to say just like that. Cause life kind of gets in the way. Sometimes getting 10 hours of sleep is very unrealistic for a lot of people.

I slept two hours. Unless you're trying to be a professional athlete. I slept five hours last night. Awesome. Three hours a night before. Right on. I know. I woke up,

but he was traveling a lot. Folks. Yeah. I was flying back from Australia. Everybody. I'm jet I know. I woke up. But he was traveling a lot, folks. Yeah. I was flying back from Australia. I think everybody. I'm jet lagged as shit right now, actually. I think everybody in this room probably gets a really good amount of sleep.

People are surprised. I was at a conference. I actually don't know. I'm being very. No, you probably don't. I get like two hours of sleep a night, really. It sounds terrible. I get like nine.

Do what we say, not what we do. I get like nine. And if I don't get nine, I know it. All right. We'll just cut it off there. We'll see you next time. Enjoy talking to you folks about volume. Is there anything we need to do?

Talk about? Oh, yeah. Make sure to go to barbellstrollig.com. Sign up for the newsletter if you want information about stuff that's going on, places we're going. Way past strong, barbellboota.com. That's right. Chris's new book. New book is out. Yeah.

Oh, the book, man. A second book. This one's right Chris' new book new book is out yeah I wrote a book man a second book this one's actually full length 260 page piece I think you'd like it if you're interested it's good

can I tell people if they're interested where they would find it go for it first do you remember yeah let's see

yeah you close your eyes and wiggle your nose in the mirror three times and say barbobudo.com. Amazon and Kindle version.

So if you've got it, do me a favor. Leave a little five-star. Whatchamacallit. If you've read it, you can do that. Go online and leave a comment. I probably should. Should go on there and leave my review. Apparently you liked it, right?

Are you being honest with me? Yes, it was very good. Thank you. I'm enjoying it. I'm happy about that. So Amazon. It's going to be on iTunes soon for the got the Apple takes a long time to approve it and of course you can get deluxe a deluxe ebook and deluxe paperback on my

site at store.barbellstruck.com but they're deluxe because I couple it with a little two-hour video that's a supporting like bonus strength seminar it's pretty cool we also have the six-month muscle getting challenge launching right now you can go to moremuscle dot barbell shrug dot com if you want to check that out. That's a good idea. Oh, yeah. Definitely. So if you want to get bigger and stronger, only if you want to get bigger and stronger.

I mean, who wants that? Don't worry about it. It's not just commercials like warning. This diet supplement is only for those in extreme need of weight loss. The ones for like if you're in financial trouble, it's like there's only for those in extreme need of weight loss. The ones for like, if you're in financial trouble, it's like, there's only for people

who are in more than $20,000 in debt. It's probably for anybody. It's only for people who are really worried about their finances. Not you. No. That's right. All right.

Thanks guys. See you next time.