Train more often & heavier to recover faster. Yes, really.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:14 1) Higher training frequencies improve recovery

09:27 2) Higher training intensities cause less fatigue

12:19 Outro

Transcript:

Recovery is a hot buzzword in the fitness community, so it’s too bad most people don’t know what it means. If you cannot define what “fatigue” or “recovery” are in concrete terms, you cannot program effective fatigue management. So in this video I’m going to explain what fatigue is based on exercise science and give you two highly paradoxical but highly effective strategies you can use to make your workouts less fatiguing.

Many people think of fatigue as some vague construct that groups together like loss of performance, injuries, and some mental sensational fatigue. In exercise science, neuromuscular fatigue has a very specific definition, and is actually much more simple. It is the loss of force production, and something like a fatigue index basically just measures how your reps decrease across sets. So if your reps go from 8 to 4, that is 50% fatigue. In fact, that’s literally called 50% on the fatigue index. And importantly, neuromuscular fatigue is not the same as mental fatigue.

This is a recurring theme you’ll see in many of my videos. There are objective, evidence based markers of concepts, and there is how you feel. Your feelings and the facts are not always the same. And this also explains why the following two strategies are so paradoxical.

The first strategy is to increase your training frequency per body part. This sounds extremely counterintuitive, and in fact, one of the questions that I get asked by my students the most is: “But how can I recover? If I’m going to train a muscle even more frequently isn’t recovery a problem?” Research finds it’s completely the other way around. Higher training frequencies, given the same weekly total set volume per muscle group, so you’re just training the muscle more frequently and taking some of your sets from, say, your bro split workout on Monday and you’re spreading them over Monday, Wednesday and Friday, improves recovery and reduces fatigue.

For example, one study looked at recovery in trained lifters doing bench presses. One group did 8 sets of bench presses in one workout, and the other group split it up into two daily sessions of 4 sets. The group doing 2 sessions recovered faster in the days afterwards. Moreover, the group doing 2 sessions instead of 1, because they were less fatigued during the second workout actually did 10% more work. That means that even though they were doing a higher total training volume, they still recovered faster. While counterintuitive, it is actually completely logical. Many people think: “Oh, if I’m going to do another workout for my pecs on the same day, how can I possibly be recovered after the first workout?” But ask yourself, when are you less fatigued? Are you less fatigued after 4 hours or after 2 minutes? Because that is basically what you’re doing.

If you’re doing all 8 sets together, you are doing the 8 sets in the most possibly fatigued state you could be in. Set number 8 just had 7 sets prior to it. If you take some of those sets and you move them to another workout later in the day, or just later in the workout or later in the week, obviously you’re less fatigued in that workout. Another study found that switching from a four times a week upper lower split to daily full body training improves recovery capacity while increasing total volume, similar to the other study.

In the researchers words: “In conclusion, 2 weeks of heavy training reduced acute neuromuscular fatigue after a test workout. As a result, recovery was complete 22 hours after the workout performed after the heavy training period but not after the workout performed before the heavy training period. This faster recovery may explain why daily bouts of leg extensor strength exercise were well tolerated by most subjects.”

Several lines of mechanistic research also support that higher training frequencies improve fatigue management. One of them is that when you increase your training frequency, it typically reduces in less muscle soreness.

Now, I will caveat that muscle soreness is not a reliable marker of muscle damage at all. However, at a minimum it helps with the subjective sensation of feeling recovered. I think the highest soreness after a bro split for many people actually leads into a self-fulfilling prophecy of feeling like they cannot handle more volume or frequency. If you do all of your weekly work for a muscle group in one session with a high volume, most people get very sore. If you spread that volume out across the week with full body workouts, most people do not get sore. In fact, many people do not get sore any more at all.

So when you think that soreness means that you’re not recovered and every time you work out you get very sore, then it kind of leads to this self-fulfilling prophecy where you feel like, oh, I can’t possibly handle more volume because I’m already very sore. But the reason you get sore is because you do all of that volume in one session, rather than spreading it out across the week. So ironically, that perception is actually what limits you in increasing your training frequency and volume and probably also tolerating more total volume, even if it’s psychological.

Multiple studies have also found that higher training frequencies improve the testosterone to cortisol ratio, which is used as a measure of overtraining. This is again a very rough marker, but at least it supports that actually that something good is probably happening when you spread your volume out more equally across the week, and you train more frequently as opposed to doing all of your volume in one session.

And finally, some research has found that powerlifters with higher training frequencies have lower injury rates, which is again, counterintuitive, but makes sense if the higher training frequencies improve recovery capacity. Now we have very few data on injuries and most of it is just associative. So again, not strong research in itself.

I would say that in general research supports that training frequency and injury risk are not related, but because higher training frequencies usually result in higher volume, even if it’s just extra repetitions because you’re less fatigued during your workout, I think that’s already a good sign.

So multiple lines of research support that recovery is not only not an issue for higher frequencies, but rather that higher training frequencies actually improve recovery capacity because there is less fatigue during each workout. For many people, this is extremely counter-intuitive. How can it be that if you train a muscle group more frequently, you recover better? And I think this is largely a matter of mental framing.

What you should think about rather, is frequency is an extension of your rest interval. If I ask you: “Who do you think will recover better? People that rest only one minute in between their sets, or people that recover three minutes in between their sets?” Obviously, three minutes of rest means you’re less fatigued than if you only rest one minute in between sets. Training frequency is basically an extension of the rest interval. We talk about rest interval when it’s a couple of minutes, but when you move the exercise or the set to a couple hours later, then we talk about bi-daily training. But in reality it’s the same concept.

There’s a certain total amount of volume across the week and how we spread that out across the week, that is what we call the consideration of your rest interval or your training frequency, simply depending on how much time is in between them. But it’s the same thing. It’s the distribution of volume over time. Distributing your volume more equally over time improves recovery because there’s less fatigue at any moment during the exercise. The most fatigue you could possibly be is when you just did a lot of sets for that very body part. So a bro-split is the worst possible form of fatigue management. Spreading the volume out equally across the week is the best way to manage fatigue.

And just like with rest intervals, the literature on training frequency basically shows us that more rest, in the sense of higher training frequencies or longer rest intervals, is neutral to positive for muscle growth and strength development, especially positive for strength development. We see this both with rest intervals and training frequency, and also training to positive for muscle growth if we get higher training repetition volumes. So when you spread your volume out across the week and you get more repetitions because you’re now less fatigued, then we might see higher gains with higher training frequencies.

Training frequency itself doesn’t improve muscle growth in the majority of research when volume is equated between conditions. However, if we look at the studies, you can find a link in the description, of a PT course, overview that we made in trained lifters, studies that found significant differences between groups with different training frequencies, you see that in virtually all of the cases, the higher training frequency groups made better gains. So if there is a difference, it always favors the higher training frequency group.

One of the best illustrations of this is a study by Nevis et al., where a group of individuals trained one of their legs with nine sets once a week, and the other leg did 3 sets 3 times a week, with either the same total repetition volume as the group doing 9 sets on one day, or with their own volume when they just trained to a given proximity to failure, and therefore had higher reps because they’re less fatigued. Now, if you do the 3 sets on Friday, as opposed to as your set number 7, 8 and set number 9 on Monday, then of course you’re less fatigued. And in the Friday workout you’re going to be able to do more reps. And indeed, they saw that the gains were very similar when total volume was equated. Basically the same growth, no difference in gains, but when volume was higher in the 3×3 group, their gains were substantially higher. It wasn’t statistically significant, but effect size analysis supported that there was likely a real difference. The percentage gain was in fact about double 4 vs 2%.

Since higher training frequencies tend to be good for both fatigue management and for your gains, I generally favor high frequency training programs. It’s also worth noting that almost all of the best bodybuilders of all time in the natural era up until the 1950s trained with full body workouts. That is also how I program many of my workouts. If you’re interested in an evidence based example of that, you can get a free trial to the MH physique app with the link in the description. The second paradoxical fatigue management strategy is train heavier. Heavier weights with higher training intensities cause less neuromuscular fatigue. Research is very clear on this. And this fatigue is not just transient metabolic stress, it actually increases recovery time.

We also see this in research on central nervous system fatigue. CNS fatigue is consistently higher after low intensity exercise, not after high intensity exercise. So the idea that one rep maxes fry or CNS is complete nonsense. How can it be that higher intensities cause less neuromuscular fatigue? Well, in this case you can actually just test it for yourself also and feel it. In this particular case, neuromuscular fatigue and mental fatigue agree that a one rep max of squats might be quite fatiguing, but it’s not nearly as bad as a 20 rep max on the squats. They are called widowmakers for a reason.

Logically as well, if you think about it, after, say, a two rep max on a squat, how fatigued are you? Well, logically, you’re so fatigue that you cannot lift your 2 rep max anymore. Now, how fatigued are you after the Widowmaker set of 20 rep max on squats? Well, your’e so fatigued that you cannot even lift your 20 rep max anymore, let alone your two rep max because that’s a much heavier weight.

Also, if you look at total tonnage lifted like weights x reps, you’ll see it is consistently much higher with higher rep sets. Even though you’re lifting a lighter weight with the 20 rep max, you’re doing it 20 times. So the total tonnage lifted, which is the total physical work output of the musculature, is much, much higher than the two rep max. Because even though that’s a heavier weight, you’re only doing two reps with it. So the total tonnage ends up much lower. And you can just do the math and you’ll see the lower the training intensity, the higher total tonnage lifted, which means higher total work output from the muscle and therefore higher neuromuscular fatigue. It’s actually very logical.

This knowledge has training implications that are again counterintuitive. In the coaches I mentor I often see that when they have a client that is not so motivated and they’re struggling to do their workouts or they’re older, they’re a beginner, they have them do very high reps. And that can be sensible from a physiological point of view, but it’s not sensible from fatigue management point of view in the neuromuscular sense or the subjective sense, because it’s much less fatiguing for them to do sets of five and do something more like starting strength, four sets of five, eight, doesn’t have to be a strength based program, but not like a high rep program. Then doing sets of 15 or 20. Most people have a much easier time pushing closer to failure when the weights are relatively heavy, say 6 to 12. That’s probably also part of the idea of the 6-12 hypertrophy zone that actually survives empirical exercise science.

However, my long time viewers will know that most lifters are probably not actually limited by neuromuscular recovery to begin with. And for many lifters injuries are a much bigger obstacle in that sense. If you always go heavy, then you might run into problems with your connective tissues. so you have to strike a balance there between what is actually limiting you and what type of fatigue you most need to manage.

I hope this knowledge helps you with your training program design, and if you’re interested in an evidence based training program, you can check out a free trial for my MH Physique App with the link in the description. See you next time!