Latest volume study

[TAWS6]

Has anyone seen this from James Kreiger. Pretty much just goes to show what we've known all along. I absolutely love how these guys defended all the insanely high volume studies (45+ sets a week) and now we are back to common sense advise.

[George2100]

So basically...do what you enjoy lol

[TAWS6]

So basically...do what you enjoy lol

A basic split, moderate frequency with sufficient volume, adding weight over time. Who would have known? I would put money on it that in a few months these same people start pushing very high frequency training again. Since the volume agenda went up in smoke. Then eventually come back to proven training methods.

[George2100]

Training styles come and go as phases. Growing up, my father and his gym pals always did bro splits. When I was old enough to hit the gym with them, I started on a bro split as well. Been doing one ever since and have made slow and steady gains, despite the fact that everyone ****s on bro splits lol. I also have friends that love full body high frequency splits, and they’ve made great gains as well. It really just comes down to progressive overload, sufficient weekly volume, and consistency. Obviously nutrition, sleep etc are huge factors as well.

[TAWS6]

It really just comes down to progressive overload, sufficient weekly volume, and consistency. Obviously nutrition, sleep etc are huge factors as well.

Yup, but people in the fitness industry can't make money off this forever lol.

[Heisman2]

Anybody have a link to the actual study?

[supramax]

It's already been proven that the length of rest intervals has little effect on strength gains and virtually no effect on hypertrophy. The only point of short rest intervals is if you're training for endurance.

[WeightedDip]

It's already been proven that the length of rest intervals has little effect on strength gains and virtually no effect on hypertrophy. The only point of short rest intervals is if you're training for endurance.

Honestly, I get a kick out of guys in the gym holding up the machine for 30 minutes with their super long rest periods. My method is to get on the pull up bar, knock out my weighted pull up sets, and on to the next exercise. Same with dips and every other move. I've been training 15 months - 6 days a week and went from 137 to 175 and my strength has more than doubled on every single compound move.

Don't take me for grant, but just my opinion. The more time your watching that watch, the more time your wasting in the gym. With that said, it drives me nuts in the gym when someone takes 30 minutes to do 6 sets of pull ups. Back when I lived in Texas they at least knew how to rotate with others between sets. Now where I'm at you nearly have to d-bo the machine and explain to them they can rotate between sets and they look at you funny for the whole rest of the hour in the gym.

[George2100]

Honestly, I get a kick out of guys in the gym holding up the machine for 30 minutes with their super long rest periods. My method is to get on the pull up bar, knock out my weighted pull up sets, and on to the next exercise. Same with dips and every other move. I've been training 15 months - 6 days a week and went from 137 to 175 and my strength has more than doubled on every single compound move.

Don't take me for grant, but just my opinion. The more time your watching that watch, the more time your wasting in the gym. With that said, it drives me nuts in the gym when someone takes 30 minutes to do 6 sets of pull ups. Back when I lived in Texas they at least knew how to rotate with others between sets. Now where I'm at you nearly have to d-bo the machine and explain to them they can rotate between sets and they look at you funny for the whole rest of the hour in the gym.

I lift alone at home and still take very short rest periods lol

[FurtadoZ9]

Agreed on the rest period portion for the most part. I think high intermediates and above (for strength specifics) need some kind of cycle in their programming that has heavy low rep work with 2-3+ min rest periods.

But I also think a lot of people take that overboard. Don't need to rest that long when doing 4 sets of 8 just so you can move an extra 5-10 lbs.

Have a link to the study?

Now where I'm at you nearly have to d-bo the machine and explain to them they can rotate between sets and they look at you funny for the whole rest of the hour in the gym.

Haha same. I frequently ask if I can work in and unless if it's a regular they have this look on their face like they don't know what to do lol

Or if someone walks in the weight room and you can tell they wanna jump on the machine you're using. I'll invite them to work in, they'll decline (thinking they're drop setting or doing something different), wait until I'm done then go do the same exercise I was doing no differently lol

I guess sharing is foreign nowadays

[SuffolkPunch]

There are problems with presenting the results of studies to the general public...

I think what people don't appreciate is that what makes good training has many variables... but a study can only adjust 1 thing at a time and look at the outcome to isolate the effects of it.

So that has been done with volume in the past and the recent study does this with rest pauses by the looks of it.

The problem comes in that these variables interact with each other and are often not linear. This is a common issue in my day job which involves training machine learning algorithms... you can look at a "slice" of the problem by (say) examining how results change with volume - or how they change with intensity etc. But once you get 3 or more variables involves, the whole thing is too difficult to draw on a graph or visualise in your head.

But as experienced lifters know, it's not hard to find a place in that mess that works for you. It's what happens when you want to change things radically that you can't always predict... this is why lifters find something that works and stick with it... and why people who jump from one thing to another often don't get results.

BUT just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not worth trying to study the problem... IMHO

The researchers know that the results of a single study don't explain everything because many of them train themselves and their clients - but they probably only talk about what they have empirical proof for - and they don't necessarily talk about what they strongly suspect to be true (because there is an outside chance it might not work how they thought).

Practical advice (for hypertrophy goals) from this:
1. Keep the most complicated things fixed - i.e. exertion levels per set
2. The tradeoff between weight used and reps you can do to reach that exertion level is a practical decision - see what suits each exercise.
3. Total workload (number of sets done over time) is something you have to find by experimentation - and slowly increase over time
4. Keep anything else that might affect results fixed - rest times, tempo etc.

All of the above rely to some degree on how it "feels" - you can't rule out feedback, you can't fully "automate" the thing.

[sooby]

I think a lot of people criticized the Brad Schoenfeld study and there was another study I think showing that there is some sort of volume threshold.

Alot of Chris Beardsley's work has shown that short rest periods pretty much blunts the activation of high-threshold muscle fibers. However another interesting aspect to this is myo reps or some sort of rest-pause training in which there is at least evidence for being just as effective.

Myo-reps/rest-pause training is interesting because technically it employs a short-rest period (usually 10-20 seconds). But one can consider it more of a "set-extender" rather than a separate set in and of itself. So for example if you do 15 reps the first set, and 5x5 for subsequent sets, it's basically a set of 40, rather than 1 set of 15 and a 5x5. It's also based on the idea that only the last 5-6 reps of a set activate all of your muscle fibers, this protocol sort of bypasses that in theory. I think short rest periods can be good for the conditioning aspect of your muscles and overall conditioning for volume tolerance.

i tend to rest 3-5 between heavy compounds and around 1:30-2:00 for most accessory and isolation movements as a rule of thumb for myself, unless doing rest pause or timed stuff

[WakingOp]

I usually go with 60-90 seconds. Rarely more than 2 minutes unless it's squats. Or a heavy single for deadlifts. It makes no difference in performance for me, taking longer rests doesn't help so long as I've managed to catch my breath

[TAWS6]

I think a lot of people criticized the Brad Schoenfeld study

Yup. That's what happens when you push non sense. His seminars will still sell out though since the people attending probably don't want to train hard and just do a bunch of pump work (45+ sets per week).

[jademonkey]

I usually go with 60-90 seconds. Rarely more than 2 minutes unless it's squats. Or a heavy single for deadlifts. It makes no difference in performance for me, taking longer rests doesn't help so long as I've managed to catch my breath

I disagree. I think longer rests would absolutely help you lift more per set if you stuck with it for long enough.

I've never rested less than 2 minutes. This block I'm doing 10 sets with 2 minutes rest and when I started I was pretty much useless by the 4th set at 50%. I'm used to resting 4+ minutes. Lo and behold, after a month or two I was able to complete 10x10 at 60%. I think you'd learn to push harder and need the rest just like I learned to recover faster and keep going. But this short rest (2 minutes) definitely feels like endurance - somewhere halfway between bike racing and heavy lifting.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to do 10x10 squats at 68% with slow eccentrics and only 2 minutes rest. It's gonna be hell.

[nomoreluke]

There are problems with presenting the results of studies to the general public...

I think what people don't appreciate is that what makes good training has many variables... but a study can only adjust 1 thing at a time and look at the outcome to isolate the effects of it.

So that has been done with volume in the past and the recent study does this with rest pauses by the looks of it.

The problem comes in that these variables interact with each other and are often not linear. This is a common issue in my day job which involves training machine learning algorithms... you can look at a "slice" of the problem by (say) examining how results change with volume - or how they change with intensity etc. But once you get 3 or more variables involves, the whole thing is too difficult to draw on a graph or visualise in your head.

But as experienced lifters know, it's not hard to find a place in that mess that works for you. It's what happens when you want to change things radically that you can't always predict... this is why lifters find something that works and stick with it... and why people who jump from one thing to another often don't get results.

BUT just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not worth trying to study the problem... IMHO

The researchers know that the results of a single study don't explain everything because many of them train themselves and their clients - but they probably only talk about what they have empirical proof for - and they don't necessarily talk about what they strongly suspect to be true (because there is an outside chance it might not work how they thought).

Practical advice (for hypertrophy goals) from this:
1. Keep the most complicated things fixed - i.e. exertion levels per set
2. The tradeoff between weight used and reps you can do to reach that exertion level is a practical decision - see what suits each exercise.
3. Total workload (number of sets done over time) is something you have to find by experimentation - and slowly increase over time
4. Keep anything else that might affect results fixed - rest times, tempo etc.

All of the above rely to some degree on how it "feels" - you can't rule out feedback, you can't fully "automate" the thing.

But this is PRECISELY why they perform these studies with control groups - so they CAN eliminate all variables aside from the particular variable they are studying. They very rarely change multiple variables at the same time - unless it's a specific style of training which is being tested - for example the Norweigan Frequency Project, which you could argue featured a range of variables but, even with that example (which was about as convoluted as sports science studies get when it comes to weight training), the focus of the study was pretty specific.

The fact is that it fundamentally is possible to gain valuable information on best practices for weight training. Let's say for example:

Study 1 results: Short rest periods are not beneficial to hypertrophy or strength training.

Study 2 results: Splitting 3 full body workouts into 6 full body workouts (with the same overall volume) is beneficial to strength training

Study 3 results: Sets containing rep ranges of 2-6 are more beneficial to strength training that higher rep ranges

I'm not saying that those results are fact - I'm just using those as examples.

What most people will be able to draw from that is that, in order to optimise strength training, their routines should look something like:

Lower-volume (but high intensity), full body workouts 6 times per week, with 3-4 minute rest periods between sets of 2-6 reps

To say that there are "problems" presenting studies to the general public is inaccurate in my opinion. I think that people who train regularly can gain a great deal of useful information from valid, peer-reviewed studies into the effects of weight training. To dismiss them is foolish in the extreme.

[nomoreluke]

I usually go with 60-90 seconds. Rarely more than 2 minutes unless it's squats. Or a heavy single for deadlifts. It makes no difference in performance for me, taking longer rests doesn't help so long as I've managed to catch my breath

While I would agree that it's important to go with what works for you, I'd suggest that there are very valid reasons for trialling longer rest periods (3-4 minutes between low rep, heavy sets on any compound lift). Unless you are a genetic freak (which, admittedly, you may be) there are valid physiological reasons that slightly longer rest periods are beneficial. It may take your body some time to reap the benefits of those increased rep periods but my bet is that, if you try it for an extended period of time, you'll see a marked difference in your performance, especially in the intensity of your lifts, which can only benefit you. There are literally zero drawbacks (if you're strength training at least) to extended rest periods.

[WeightedDip]

Agreed on the rest period portion for the most part. I think high intermediates and above (for strength specifics) need some kind of cycle in their programming that has heavy low rep work with 2-3+ min rest periods.

But I also think a lot of people take that overboard. Don't need to rest that long when doing 4 sets of 8 just so you can move an extra 5-10 lbs.

Have a link to the study?



Haha same. I frequently ask if I can work in and unless if it's a regular they have this look on their face like they don't know what to do lol

Or if someone walks in the weight room and you can tell they wanna jump on the machine you're using. I'll invite them to work in, they'll decline (thinking they're drop setting or doing something different), wait until I'm done then go do the same exercise I was doing no differently lol

I guess sharing is foreign nowadays

Bingo. I don't have a problem with most people that have been around the gym life for a while in their life-time and know how to rotate sets. The problem I have is mostly with the guys that are busy watching a stop watch and counting every minute that goes by and don't look like they've grown an inch since I first seen them in the gym. Back when I was in Houston, most people knew how to rotate sets and it was never really a problem. But man where I'm at now out of state, it's like it's un-heard of and drives me crazy. I once asked someone on the pull up bars if I could rotate in with them and the got up and walked off? Now that drives me nuts.

And for part about the 4 reps of 8. That's spot on. When you got a few hundred pounds loaded on the bar, no doubt, you, I, and the next man needs a rest period between sets to recoup. But when your doing some light weight for sets of 8 and feel like you need a 5 minute rest between sets, that's when I see it as a problem. Somebody doing some strength sets or loading some weight on the bar, I have no problem waiting for a rest period because I know how strained up you are after dropping that weight. I think some people just make things too complicated. It kind of reminds me of the people doing 100 different exercises and still can't figure out why they aren't growing. They make things complicated and forget the basics like calories and progressive overload.

[SuffolkPunch]

But this is PRECISELY why they perform these studies with control groups - so they CAN eliminate all variables aside from the particular variable they are studying. They very rarely change multiple variables at the same time - unless it's a specific style of training which is being tested - for example the Norweigan Frequency Project, which you could argue featured a range of variables but, even with that example (which was about as convoluted as sports science studies get when it comes to weight training), the focus of the study was pretty specific.

The fact is that it fundamentally is possible to gain valuable information on best practices for weight training. Let's say for example:

Study 1 results: Short rest periods are not beneficial to hypertrophy or strength training.

Study 2 results: Splitting 3 full body workouts into 6 full body workouts (with the same overall volume) is beneficial to strength training

Study 3 results: Sets containing rep ranges of 2-6 are more beneficial to strength training that higher rep ranges

I'm not saying that those results are fact - I'm just using those as examples.

What most people will be able to draw from that is that, in order to optimise strength training, their routines should look something like:

Lower-volume (but high intensity), full body workouts 6 times per week, with 3-4 minute rest periods between sets of 2-6 reps

To say that there are "problems" presenting studies to the general public is inaccurate in my opinion. I think that people who train regularly can gain a great deal of useful information from valid, peer-reviewed studies into the effects of weight training. To dismiss them is foolish in the extreme.

You seem to have taken my statement that there are problems with presenting the findings of studies - and rephrased as me dismissing them entirely. That is not what I'm saying at all. I'm a big advocate of the research process.

I'm simply saying that the public don't understand the iterative nature of research and tend to treat each new result as the final word in what they should be doing. Then when some new study comes along which looks different - they lose confidence in the whole process.

Whereas actually, the programs set up in each study are often simpler than what people would use in the real word to try to control variables. They have to be because of the problems of interactions between variable that I mentioned. This makes it a slow and expensive process of converging on more accurate solutions to our problems - but as I said still worthwhile. We just have to acknowledge its shortcomings.