Volume and Intensity – a recipe for success!

In today’s article, I want to discuss the two most important factors to focus on when it comes to building muscle: volume and intensity.

Prefer to watch than read? Then please check out the video below:

What is training volume?

Volume is work done. This can be calculated as weight x reps x sets. Or, a more straightforward way to measure volume is to just track total sets. If your sessions consist of many sets, then there’s a lot of volume. Simples!

What is training intensity?

Intensity is how heavy the weight is relative to what you can lift. So, when talking about intensity, we’re not talking about how out of breath you are. 

Volume with intensity

It’s good to discuss these together, as discussing one without the other can lead to some very suboptimal training decisions.  You could have loads of volume, i.e., loads of sets in a session, and they’ll do very little without the appropriate intensity. Just doing air bicep curls is not inducing a hypertrophic response; even if I did 40 reps and 100 sets, we need to have that intensity. An appropriately intense resistance needs to take you close to muscular failure. Proximity to failure, whether that’s tracked via RPE (rate of perceived exertion) or RIR (reps in reserve), is something that you’ll see a lot in the research. To get this intensity right, you want to pick a weight that challenges you. So, when doing your hard-working sets – which are your tracked sets that come after any warm-up sets you might opt to do, they need to take you close to failure. If you’re doing four sets of ten reps, the first set wants to be hard, the second set even harder due to the build-up of fatigue. The third set wants to be very difficult to complete, and the final set wants to be so close to impossible that you may even fall short of the desired reps. So, you aimed for ten but only got eight as you hit complete muscular failure. You don’t always need to hit failure on the final set, but you want to be super close to it and leave no more than a few reps in reserve (few reps in the tank). The reps closest to the muscular failure are the most effective reps of the set. If we match this kind of training intensity with a decent amount of volume and, of course, good nutrition, we can expect to see significant progress. With volume, we’re ideally looking for ten or more hard-working sets on each muscle each week. For more advanced lifters, I tend to push this up to 20 sets per muscle group per week. Even more for the genetic monsters who can handle and recover from higher volumes. When reviewing the research, we can see a dose-response effect with volume, meaning more volume generally equals more gains. 

Common mistakes

I find that many who struggle to get results prior to working with me tend to be nailing one of these but not the other. They might have a lot of volume and do loads of training, but the intensity is not there to elicit a hypertrophic response. Or, they train hard and go heavy, but they don’t train enough – the volume just isn’t there. In fact, for people who train really hard and feel they’d struggle to recover from more training, then I’d actually suggest reducing the intensity for a short period to facilitate more volume and add more sets into your week. We have what’s known as the repeated bout effect (RBE), which is our body getting used to a repeated stimulus. When it does, you’ll be able to handle more training even when that training is back up at a higher intensity. 

Summary

Regardless of what some people might say on the internet, training hard and getting in a good amount of volume is a recipe for success, and we have plenty of research supporting this. We also have plenty of anecdotal evidence, as most people you see in really good shape will have trained hard and done that a lot.

In short, train hard, train enough and enjoy making solid progress!