Optimal volume & deloading: 2 new studies for max gains

Chapters:

00:00 Study 1: Extreme volume

05:04 MH Physique App

05:29 Study 2: Deloading

Transcript:

What happens when you have a group of trained lifters that are already training with 12 to 20 sets per week per muscle group, and you increase their training volume by 120%? That’s what a new study investigated. The researchers had a group of lifters that were already training with 12 to 20 sets per week per muscle group, and then they increased the volume for one of their legs by 20% and they increased the volume of the other leg by 120%.

The idea with using a within subject design is that you control for dietary and genetic factors, so you have more statistical power. You basically, compare the gains within the same individual, which is much stronger than comparing the gains across different individuals. Moreover, the idea of increasing the training volume from their habitual training volume is that their habitual training volume may play a role in how they respond to the increased training volume. The volume consisted of leg extensions and leg presses, with all sets being performed to failure, and the resulting comparison was approximately 18 sets versus 33 sets of total training volume per muscle group per week for the quads.

So to reiterate, that’s 33 sets per week for the quads, with about half of that volume coming from leg presses, and all of that volume being performed to momentary muscle failure. Ay, ay, ay!

The researchers expected that this extreme training volume would produce overtraining. In reality, after eight weeks, there were no significant differences in muscle growth, which was measured as cross-sectional area both at the fiber level and the quadriceps vastus lateralis level. Moreover, quoting the researchers: “Most acute and chronic molecular markers related to anabolic signaling, proteolytic pathways, autophagy related signaling, as well as ribosome biogenesis and turnover exhibited comparable responses between protocols.” So basically, the anabolic signaling underlying muscle growth was also similar between the groups. However, similar does not mean there was no absolute difference. And here is where things get a little bit contentious.

In absolute terms, the 33 set leg actually grew more. Quad cross-sectional area increased 10.3% in the 33 set leg versus 7.6% in the 18 set leg, based on my reading of the very difficult to read graphs in the preprint at least. And the greater hypertrophy in the extreme volume leg was actually statistically significantly greater based on a main effect. Now, this is a little bit complicated, and this is something that even many researchers get wrong, but when you test whether there is a pre-post and a pre-post difference, you can test whether the total values in the total groups, both basically pre and post together are higher. And in this case that was indeed statistically significantly higher. Meaning there was an advantage in favor of the super high training volume. But it was not significant when you look at the difference in pre to post. So the interaction between the time, the effect of time and the main effect.

So the difference was not greater but the overall values were greater. Now this is very weird because this is a within subject design, so you’re looking at within subject, the same legs, so there should not be a difference in the baseline values unless they had a significant difference in muscle size between their own legs, which did turn out to be kind of the case in this study. But the take home message here is basically that depending on how you read these results, you could say that there was a marginal advantage in favor of the higher training volume, certainly not a detrimental effect at least, or you could say it really wasn’t a meaningful or statistically reliable difference, which is what the researcher said. And this is basically also the conclusion of the overall literature. If you look at the latest meta-analyses, which I’ve cited many times on this channel already, there are gains to continue up to about 45 sets per week per muscle group. But if you look at individual studies, the gains are highly inconsistent. So some studies find benefits, some studies find no difference, and the occasional research even finds some trends for detrimental effects of higher training volumes.

Although this is almost exclusively when you look at high training volumes per workout, not high training volumes across the week as a whole. The major variance in results between studies is likely because the optimal training volume differs a lot between different individuals. The method that I teach in my PT course and that I employ in my MH Physique App is that the training volume is optimized based on all the factors that you can see in this image here. Long term subscribers will know that we have multiple studies showing that factors like stress and sleep have a massive effect on recovery capacity and your results. So while I would love to give you just the optimal volume number, it doesn’t exist. It differs per individual.

Broadly speaking though, we can say that you can make excellent gains with low training volumes and that the results that you get from training with higher training volumes get increasingly diminishing returns. So if you’re already at, as based on this study, in the upper range of the 12 to 20 sets per week per muscle group range, which is very serious volume for most people, then going up higher is unlikely to produce a big difference in your gains. You might get a marginal further increase in your gains if you can recover from it. But most people can recover from a lot more that they think. Everybody wanna be a serious lifter, but ain’t nobody wanna do no 45 sets per week per muscle group.

The second new study I have for you today looks at the opposite end of the volume spectrum. What if you look at untrained lifters already doing a kind of a low volume training of what, about six sets per week for muscle group, and you then have them do a deload week every four weeks, or you don’t have them deload. So this study was basically a comparison between around seven sets per week every week versus 7 sets per week most weeks, but then every four weeks doing only 2 sets per week during a deoad.

This study was again a within subject design, which is what most studies are gravitating to now because it’s simply much stronger. So they trained their biceps and their quads on one side with deloads and on the other side without deloads. After eight weeks, and I think you can predict the result of this one, there were no significant differences between the groups in measures of muscle growth or strength development. This shouldn’t be too surprising because if your volume is below ten sets per week per muscle group, you really shouldn’t need a deload week, especially not every four weeks.

However, again, we can see that most people can recover from a lot more that they think, because a previous study found that in strength trained individuals doing 20 sets per week per muscle group to failure a deload week in the middle of the nine week program actually results in a trend for worse gains, which was statistically significant for strength development but not for muscle growth.

So on the one hand, it’s clear that most people don’t need deload weeks. On the other hand, it’s also clear that occasionally taking a week off or substantially reducing your training volume is not going to materially alter your gains in the long run. And if we look at the bigger picture, these studies are not so much about whether you should do deload weeks or not. They’re essentially volume comparisons. One group has a volume of X, and the other group has a volume of Y. A deload week every eight weeks, or four weeks, or whatever, has a very small effect on the average training volume performed over the whole period as a whole.

Training volume is a lot like energy balance. It’s the total accumulation over time that really matters for your body fat percentage in the case of energy balance, or your muscle growth in the case or training volume. So these studies basically just look at very, very small differences in average training volume over a certain period. The distribution of the training volume is not as important as the total, which is why these studies often have very great difficulty finding statistically significant differences between the groups. The difference in training volume is just very, very small. It’s like comparing a group doing 20 sets per week versus a group doing 21 sets per week. And this is generally a big misinterpretation of fitness research that I see.

Many people are obsessed with what is statistically univariate optimization. So they want to know what is the optimal proximity to failure, they want to know what is the optimal training frequency, they want to know what is the optimal rest interval, what is the optimal number of sets per week per muscle group to do for every muscle group, but they don’t consider the overall picture together. And that’s what really matters. In endurance training research we have what’s called impulse. Impulse is essentially the total accumulated training stress.

And in my Henselmans Hypertrophy model I often talk about kind of the tension integral. Tension multiplied by the time under tension. That is the total signal for muscle growth. That is what really drives the muscle growth. The total amount of mechanical tension accumulated on the muscle fibers is determined by all of these factors together. And that’s why in optimal program design you have to think of all of these things together. You cannot independently just look at deloads or not deloads. It depends on your total training volume, whether you are training to failure or not, how advanced you are, and similarly, your total training volume also depends on the other factors.

So if you train with a very high training volume, you probably shouldn’t be training to failure. If you train with a very low training volume, training to failure is much more likely to be beneficial because increasing your training volume, not doing deload weeks, these things are essentially the same in terms of training stress as increasing the number of sets.

Similarly, if your program is highly optimized with very good exercise selection, long rest intervals, your volume spread out across the weak, high frequency training, longer the rest intervals with combo sets, for example, then you don’t need as many sets per week as you would if your program was not as optimized. The total amount of training stress, or stimulus can be the same, even when the set volume is materially different between two groups.

Taking into consideration all of these different factors together is what I teach my students in my PT course, and it’s the method that my MH Physique App uses. Now, for deloads specifically, if you want to get more information on that and the method that I personally recommend, which is not traditional deload weeks, because there is no research at all to say that these are beneficial, I recommend instead, therefore, that you do reactive deloads. And I discuss reactive deloads in this video, which you can see somewhere on the screen here. So you can check that out if you haven’t already. And if you just want more free content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe. See you in the next one.