2 Tips for MORE gains with LESS effort

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:37 #1 Intensity

05:10 My Online PT Course

05:35 #2 Volume distribution

08:48 Summary

10:07 Outro

Transcript:

For most lifters the number one reason that they are not getting the results that they want in the gym is not genetics, it’s not the drugs they’re not taking, it’s not the supplement that they’re missing out on… – It’s training effort. Most people simply get better results if they put more effort into their workouts. But working out is hard. So?

A recent meta analysis found that the average lifter leaves 6 to 7 reps in reserve during their average set in the gym. If you train like that, and most people don’t train to true momentary muscle failure, then the best thing you can possibly do in your workout is to add more training volume or get closer to failure. Anything that makes you train harder will increase your results. For this reason I think that fatigue management is a highly underrated factor in practice to get people the results that they want. Even if you are a super dedicated trainee that has no issues training to failure, you’ll probably benefit from being able to do more volume if your fatigue management is better.

As I’ve discussed in multiple previous videos, recent meta-analytic research finds that training volume increases gains to a significant extent, up to a very high point. The last meta-analysis found that there is no clear cutoff point above which additional training volume clearly becomes detrimental. And this includes multiple studies finding benefits of training volumes as seemingly extreme as 45 sets per week per muscle group. And you, my viewers, seem to be aware of this because you chose this video as the #1 topic when I asked you which type of video you wanted me to make. So without further ado, here are 2 fatigue management strategies you can use to get more gains with less effort.

The first strategy to reduce the fatigue you get in your workouts is extremely paradoxical and counterintuitive. – Go heavier. Yes! Training heavier reduces subjective and objective fatigue. This is an area where bro wisdom has simply been flat out completely wrong in the literal opposite direction of the truth. The conventional wisdom in powerlifting and bodybuilding circles is that going heavy fries the CNS and causes a lot of fatigue. The truth is exactly the opposite.

Higher intensity sets are less fatiguing, both subjectively and objectively. Just logically think about it for a moment. You do a set to your 20 rep max. How fatigued are you? You’re very fatigued at the end of that because at the last rep, you cannot even lift your 20 rep max anymore. Now do a 5 rep max. How fatigued are you? Well, clearly not as fatigued because you could still lift your 20 rep max at that point, just not your 5 rep max. You can also just calculate the total workload incurred, and you’ll see that at your 20 rep max, if you do your 20 RM x 20, the total work tonnage will be substantially higher than at your 5 rep max. Subjectively as well, if you’ve really tried high rep work you’ll know that the 20 rep max is a lot more fatiguing than a 5 rep max. The last 5 reps basically feel like your 5 rep max, and before that you’ve effectively done some cardio and some more work. Indeed, if you look at the bar velocity and some other factors, the last 5 repetitions of a 20RM resemble a 5 rep max quite well. If you think a 5 rep max on squat is fatiguing – try it through 20 rep max. They’re called “Widow makers” for a reason.

So if you struggle with pushing yourself close to true failure, and if you don’t actually fail reps in the gym, you probably are, then try going heavier. Doing a lower rep sets with higher training intensities makes it easier to push yourself closer to failure, and we see this effect in research as well. RPE values and RIR values are consistently lower with low rep sets. With high rep sets the set basically starts feeling like cardio and strength training at the same time, and it becomes extremely effortful to push yourself to true failure. You get to that point where you feel like – oh, now it’s extremely hard – but then actually you can grind out five more reps, at least if somebody puts a gun to your head.

Many of my viewers are European, so carrying a gun into the gym is not an option. And even for my U.S. viewers, this strategy has, i heard, not worked out very well. Even if you have no issues pushing yourself to really close to failure, high rep sets cause objectively less fatigue as well. Moreover, research finds that they cause less recovery time. Because the fatigue is less it also takes less time to recover from the workout. if you are pushing up your volume to maximum tolerable levels, then it makes sense that lower repetition work, you going heavier, actually allows you to do more sets per week per muscle group, and thereby get better gains.

However, this has one huge caveat. – Injury risk. Combining high volume with high intensity training, and especially if you also do it with high frequencies, the injury risk is very high. So you need to compromise somewhere. And for injury management, high repetitions are usually a very effective method of compromise because you can do high repetitions, and if you can push yourself, and you have the training effort, you know that you can still get close to failure, then high repetition work is often a lot easier on the joints and connective tissues. So you have to strike a balance here and decide for yourself are you being limited by injury risk and effort, or are you being limited by just how much effort you can do and how much training volume you can get into your workouts before you just completely gas out? If you completely gas out in your workouts, you have trouble pushing yourself to true failure, go heavier. If your issue is that you keep running into injuries when you push up the training volume, then consider doing some more high rep work and combine it with some low rep work. You’ll have to put in some more training effort, but that is the price you pay for lower injury risk.

The second fatigue management strategy is also a little bit paradoxical. – Do more workouts. Yes, doing more workouts reduces effort for most people. For many people, workouts really start becoming very grueling when the workout starts exceeding about an hour. This is in parts of the time, and in part simply the total training volume. But this means that if you spread your volume out more equally across the week, most people, and multiple studies show that people have lower effort per workout when you spread things out. And you also see this with rest intervals. So it’s much more time efficient to spread your volume out relatively equally across the week because what we see in research and what you very consistently see if you’re a PT with your clients is that the more fatigued you get, the more rest people start taking. This means that as you start approaching that hour mark or so of your workouts and your workouts are already pretty long, then your rest intervals increase further, meaning that the number of sets you do per minute decreases, and the time efficiency decreases further. If you never get to that point of significantly decreased time efficiency, your workouts are a lot more time efficient.

Note that ideally you spread your volume out across the week more equally by actually doing more workouts. But you get some of the same benefits by spreading out your existing training volume over your existing training frequency. That basically means that you start doing full body workouts. Full body workouts are always the most equal way to distribute your training volume across the week, because you give every muscle some attention, every workout. And multiple studies have shown that spreading your volume out more equally across the week can improve fatigue management. Even given the same total training frequency, doing more full body type workouts has been shown to improve the testosterone to cortisol ratio, which is a measure of overtraining used in research.

Moreover, multiple studies have found, and you can easily tell yourself that when you start doing more full body type workouts as opposed to a bro split or push-pull-legs where you hammer one muscle one workout of the week, you get a lot less sore. Now, soreness ratings aren’t that informative, and that testosterone to cortisol ratio is also definitely not definitive when it comes to fatigue management, but we also have some direct studies showing that if you do say eight sets of bench presses, you will recover faster from that, more than twice as fast when you do four sets, two times a week versus one time per week 8 sets. Even when you do more total training volume, when you split the workout into two sessions. Because most people when you take 8 sets of bench presses and you turn them into 4 sets and 4 sets, they increase their total training repetition volume because now you’re less fatigued during your workouts, and you can either lift more weight or do more repetitions.

One study even found that if you have a workout with 8 sets of bench presses and you spread that workout into 2 workouts that same day of 4 sets of bench presses, the people that spread the workout into 2 sessions could do the workouts with a 10% higher training intensity, and yet still they recovered faster from that workout. A nice additional benefit of going heavier and spending your volume out across the week more is that you get better strength development and in some cases more hypertrophy when you spread the volume out across the week more. In fact, when you look at the literature on full body training versus body part splits, push-pull-legs, row splits, you see that in virtually every instance, especially in trained lifters doing higher volumes of training, higher frequency training, so more full body type workouts with the volume more equally spread across the week, get equal or better results. And if that is news to you, you should check out my video on full body workout and the greatest of all time training split – here.

In summary, fatigue management strategy #1 is highly counterintuitive, but very effective. Go heavier. Training with heavier weights – higher training intensities, and lower repetitions per set – induces less neuromuscular fatigue per set and makes it easier to recover from your workouts. This means that both the mental fatigue and the objective neuromuscular fatigue per set are lower, and you can probably tolerate a higher total training volume. However, do note that injury risk might be higher if you combine high volume, high frequency, and high intensity training. So you have to figure out what is really limiting your recovery. If it is your joints, your connective tissues, then going heavier might not be the solution.

Fatigue management strategy #2 is spreading your existing training volume over more sessions, meaning that you do more full body type workouts, or you even train more times per week. Spreading your volume out across the week more evenly with full body workouts reduces the fatigue accumulation per workout and makes it easier to recover from according to multiple lines of research. Even when you increase your total repetition volume because you are less fatigued and therefore can do more reps with the same number of sets, research still suggests that we recover faster from that volume if we spread it out more across the week, as opposed to doing a bro split or something where you dump all of your volume for one muscle group in one session.

If you like this type of evidence based content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe. And if you’re interested in really taking your fitness education and your physique to the next level, check out my online PT course. It will teach you absolutely everything you need to know to set up optimal training programs for muscle hypertrophy, strength development, fat loss, and everything that comes with it. Check the link in the description.