Volume & Recovery: The Brutal Truth

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:16 A new study

01:42 Lesson #1

02:57 My Online PT Course

03:28 Lesson #1 (continued)

05:20 Lesson #2

10:23 Outro

Transcript:

We often learn more from failure than from success. That was also the case in this new study. The researchers tried to investigate the effects of a taper on strength performance, but what they learned was something much more profound.

The researchers had a group of well trained athletes, squatting about double body weight, do an overreaching phase followed by a taper. During the overreaching phase for 5 days, they did 5 sets to failure or close to failure of squats with 80% of their 1RM. Proximity to failure was standardized by a 40% velocity loss, which on average corresponds to either failure or something very close to it. This made sure that all the lifters were indeed very fatigued, because many people, when they squat to failure, especially with squats, they don’t really go to failure, they go to what’s called volitional failure, which means they just stopped when things got hard. Squats are always hard, so most people have a lot of reps in the tank if they don’t consistently monitor their efforts to train close to failure. After these 5 days of planned overreaching they had a two week taper.

However, it turned out that this taper was completely unnecessary. They did not actually overreach. In fact their strength improved during the five days of brutal squat training. All measures of recovery capacity were either stable or indeed improved. Squatting and pulling strength both went up instead of down. So the planned overreaching phase actually turned into a highly productive training week. Yet this didn’t stop the trainees from actually feeling like they were overreaching. Perceived recovery status tanked by 11% during the training phase, and it took almost two full weeks before they felt recovered again. And again, these were highly experienced lifters squatting almost double body weight on average.

This study teaches us two important lessons. The first lesson is that how recovered you feel can be very different from how recovered your muscles actually are. Neuromuscular fatigue in exercise science is measured as a decrease in force production in the muscle. That is literally the definition of fatigue. And this physiological fatigue is very different than psychological fatigue: -how tired you feel or how unrecovered you feel. This is an emotion, a feeling. And it’s not based on some internal thermometer or meter that we have inside our muscles that just tells us: “Oh, this is our recovery status, let’s send a signal to the brain to tell the brain how recovered we actually are, and if you can train.” No. It’s much more crude than that.

The brain uses a variety of signals to determine how we feel, and these feelings that arise from that are often more related to stress, expectation effects, or a host of other factors that are social, cognitive, or whatever than our actual physiological readiness to perform. Now, I’m not advocating for completely dismissing how you feel, but I think programing decisions should primarily be based on objective metrics like actual strength recovery. Over the long term your strength progression and changes in your body composition are arguably the most useful metrics to determine how good you are progressing, and as a result, whether you should adjust your program or not.

Multiple prior studies have found that perceived recovery status is a very poor guide of how recovered you are, how well you can perform, and it’s a very poor indicator of whether you should decrease or increase training volume. For example, one study found that even in powerlifters and very well trained athletes, athletes could not predict based on their subjective recovery status what their performance that they would be. So he had them do 1RM attempt every day, and then they asked them, how recovery do you feel? How well do you think you’re going to perform? And there was a very poor correlation between how recovered lifters felt and how well they were actually going to perform. If you’ve been training for a while and you’re a serious lifter, you should know that this is true. Many days you feel like crap, but you go to the gym and you kick ass anyway. Other days you might be feeling great, you go to the gym and then your performance is just normal.

And another study looked at using perceived recovery status as a tool to change training volume on a day to day basis. So basically, the lifters were allowed to add or subtract up to two sets of their training volume. So when they felt very well recovered, instead of 4 sets, they could do 5 or 6. And when they didn’t feel recovered at all, they could do 3 or 2 sets instead of the planned normal 4. They made no better gains than a group that just did the fixed training volume every day. And again, these were all very well trained lifters. So the argument that, oh, you know, these were untrained individuals that didn’t know what they were doing, they didn’t have the mind-muscle connection or the introspective sense yet, those arguments really don’t hold here because these were highly competitive lifters in all of these studies. While there might be some special snowflakes among us who can actually tell how well recovered they are and just have an extremely good intuition, chances are – you ain’t that.

So lesson #1 is basically facts over feelings. Using metrics like strength to determine if you are recovered is a much more reliable metric than just basing it on how you feel. Feelings like soreness or just some subjective sense of how recovered you are, does not necessarily correspond to actual neuromuscular recovery.

The second lesson is that most people can handle a lot more volume than they think. Training volume seems to be one of those nitwit scenarios where if you learn a bunch of things about exercise science, you actually kind of get worse at predicting some outcomes. If you ask some random person on the street how did Ronnie Colman or some bodybuilder get that big? They will probably tell you, oh, they’re probably in the gym every day, training half the day. But then when you learn a bit more about fitness, you learn about overtraining, stimulus to fatigue ratio, central nervous system fatigue, you’re growing where you’re outside of the gym, stimulate, don’t annihilate. But when we look at the actual research on training volume, the latest meta analysis found that’s basically more volume, if you look at all the studies combined, leads to better gains in most cases on average.

Up to about 43 sets per muscle group per week there’s no clear evidence of a plateau effect of the effect of training volume. There are very sharp diminishing returns, meaning that for many people is arguably not worth it to go up to such extreme training volumes as 40 sets per week per muscle group, or even half of that, but in most cases, on average, the gains tend to increase or at worst stay the same. We would certainly expect that at some points there has to be this inverted U-shape at which more additional volume becomes detrimental, we cannot recover from it, you get overreaching and overtraining, and this almost has to be true. But if we look at the research it’s exceptionally rare to find true overtraining. This was also the case in this new study in which they had the planned overreaching, but it didn’t actually work out. Of course, that was a five day study, but if you can recover from it in five days, those days are usually actually the hardest, and research finds that if you repeat a workout more, you recover from it faster. So if anything, you would expect that long term they should recover from it faster.

And indeed, this was the case in a previous study like this by Truls Raastad et al., where they looked at daily high volume training, and they found that doing these workouts every day with 6 sets for the quads per muscle group, their recovery capacity, or at least recovery speed improved after two weeks of doing this. So I’m personally not compelled at all by this idea of some unidentified fatigue which is not affecting performance acutely in any way, but it kind of sneaks up on you long term and then starts affecting things, even though we’ve identified no such thing in exercise science. in fact, the new study is not the first study that attempted to induce overreaching or overtraining syndrome in athletes and failed to do so.

Multiple prior studies have tried either via extreme training volumes or via extreme intensity, such as doing daily 1RM attempts in the squat and deadlift multiple times every day for 1 or 2 weeks, and they often resulted in either improvements in strength or maintenance of strength, which indicates that there was no accumulating fatigue and, by definition, no overreaching or overtraining. The number one criterion for overreaching and overtraining is loss of performance. So this is also useful because I see this all the time in clients and students when they ask, am I overreaching? Am I overtraining? And if you are gaining strength, you are by definition not overreaching, overtraining. If you know general adaptation syndrome, it means that you are going through the recovery and the super compensation phase when you are stronger than you were the last time you trained, by definition, you have not only recovered, but your muscles have super compensated.

Now, all that said, there is definitely something like a maximum recoverable volume. And annoyingly this varies significantly per person. So while on average we tend to see gains increase after a 20, 30, maybe even 40 sets per week per muscle group, in some of these studies we have to contextualize that this is often in students that are not in an energy deficit, that are young, presumably reasonably well rested and not too stressed because students usually don’t participate so well when they have very important exam weeks, for example, and therefore their findings may not apply to you as an individual. We know that recovery capacity matters a lot. I’ve made multiple videos about the importance of stress and sleep, for example, to determine recovery capacity, and that will guide how much you can increase your training volume.

I think for most people, psychological and logistical barriers are actually going to be the number one limitations to their training. At some point, the training sessions are just too time consuming or too effortful for most people to get the volume in, especially if you’re only training up to three times per week. After that point, I think for many lifters, neuromuscular fatigue is not the primary limiting factor for their gains, even if you are a very serious lifter. I think for many lifters, injuries are a bigger problem. That is certainly the case for myself and many of the clients that I train.

If your program is well designed with autoregulation strategies and reactive deloads, you can push up volume to very high levels in many cases. However, while the muscles may tolerate that volume, the joints and other connective tissues might not. And in general, research seems to suggest that as you get more advanced this discrepancy increases as the amount of force that you can produce per unit of connective tissue increases. So basically you become better at injuring yourself as you get stronger. And in fact, I would go so far as to say that many untrained individuals in the gym and many people in the gym in general that you see that are training with horrible technique and doing all sorts of craziness, the reason that they don’t get injured is primarily because they are too weak to injure themselves. Therefore, intelligent program design and fatigue management are crucial for more advanced lifters that really want to push the volume to their limits.

If you want to learn how to implement these strategies check out the other videos on my channel, in particular those about reactive deloads, autoregulation, and the importance of stress and sleep for recovery capacity. And if you like this type of evidence based content for serious lifters, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.

You still there? Get out of here!