Training More Often With less Volume Vs. Training less Often With More Volume : Which Is Ideal For Seeing Gains Faster ?
Are you looking to get the best fitness routine for your workouts, that will ensure maximum or more rapid gains? Or do want to know why regular workouts with less volume give faster gains than less often workouts with more volume? On this post, I’m going to clarify a lot concerning this topic, and hopefully, you can get some vital information that will up your muscles and strength game.
What is more important? Frequency or Volume
I am going to present an argument for you, that will apply to both natural lifters and mild to moderately enhanced lifters, you could throw this out the window for guys with amazing Genetics and guys that use enhancing drugs. Because these guys will always get results no matter what they do; the science of how the train, the method they use are completely irrelevant these guys will look ten times better than you and I if they nothing but push ups and squatting or only work on a punching bags.
So we are going to be talking about everybody else, Now the reality is that for the majority of people once your body adapts to the frequency and that’s the key word there “Adapts.”
You will make much more progress both regarding your hypotrophy (which refers to muscle gains) and your strength if you train more frequently with a lower volume per session than you would if you lumped every thing in one session with long breaks in between.
There are a few reasons for that, and I’ll talk about them below keep reading and enjoy.
Firstly
The most obvious reason for that is protein synthesis, for individuals who are not on drugs or are using very moderate amounts of drugs, your muscles have finished growing, and they will not gain any more adaptation at all period. This is proven by muscle biopsy studies and researches in both trained, untrained individuals and athletes.
Your growth window is 28-48 hours, beyond that window you stop growing and in fact, you start growing within a few hours of finishing a training session.
So that whole crap people talk about that you recover then you grow simply is magazine junk, that’s not science that’s from people who don’t know anything about exercise science who just made that up.
And the fact is muscle growth can ultimately proceed with full recovery; you could be finished growing well before your muscles are fully recovered before you have gotten your DOMS any every thing else, you could completely finish growing before any of that.
So the obvious point becomes if you are going more than 28 to 48 hours at the most between training and gaining muscle growth,
Whether directly or indirectly because to be honest here if you just trained your chest and did a bunch of pressing and end up doing triceps and shoulders, a couple of days later, you are still hitting the shoulders and triceps again? They got hit during the chest training.
Obviously there could be some kind of overlap for individuals who are on training splits, but that is the reality of it guys, you have more muscle growth time the more frequently you train.
Secondly
Another factor you want to consider when people say, well what if you split the same amount of training volume over different days versus all of them in one. This is where it gets tricky….
Folks would say someone who did ten or twelve sets in one day is stimulating more growth on that day than someone who did three sets. Well you are correct but three efficient and appropriately done sets, done with relatively heavy weights, with a work load and intensity that recruits all available muscle fiber on every single set of the 3, can stimulate a lot of muscle growth; you do three sets of squats, and you do all three sets with a weight that is anywhere between or from 70-85 percent in your max, and you get within two reps of failure without even hitting muscle failure, every single one of those sets you will do stimulates pretty much every single muscle fiber and most of the muscles being worked on in every set that is proven we know that you hit every single fiber.
So three sets of that stimulate a lot of growth. When you start going beyond that, you need to remember that on any set that stimulates all available fiber or begins or requires failure. Each additional set you do beyond that has diminished returns, it still gives you benefits of quite invisible gains, but it gets smaller and smaller.
Take Home Point
You are sure to make a lot of progress relating to both your strength and hypertrophy, if you train regularly with small volumes per session, compared to when you lump everything in just one session with plenty of break in between.
Thank you. I appreciate it!
Stefan
