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32: Load & Volume: When is Enough Enough? When is it Too Much?
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Welcome to Season 2 and Episode 32 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this episode, Laurel discusses a topic that is important but poorly understood—training volume. Too much too soon leads to pain, injury, and burnout. Too little too late leads to frustrating plateaus and boredom. It’s important to understand volume, as well as its relationship to load, progressive loading, and changing up our strength training routine with well-timed variety. In this episode, Laurel also discusses:
- The concept of load is not new to folks interested in strength training, but the concept of volume may be.
- Why understanding volume is important for beginners who end up doing too much too soon and more advanced lifters who plateau and don’t know why.
- How understanding load and volume can ensure we’ve allowed adequate time to recover.
- What intensity is and the difference between intensity of load and intensity of effort.
- What fatigue is and what it isn’t.
- What volume is and how it’s defined.
- What work capacity is—how it’s like a sink—and how it’s a bigger topic than strength.
- The role variety plays in keeping our body responsive to a strength stimulus so we can continue driving adaptations toward increased strength and work capacity.
Episode 29: Pink Dumbbells and the Shrinking Female Body
A 1RM chart to determine intensity of load
The Science of Autoregulation, on strongerbyscience.com all about measuring intensity of effort using RPE and reps in reserve
How to Increase Work Capacity and Bust Through Plateaus, by Greg Nuckols on strongerbyscience.com
What is Training Volume? by Chris Beardsley
Strength Training Frequency, by Paul Ingraham
Episode 9: What Are the Best Exercises for Strength?
Listeners can use code PODCAST20 for half off your first month of membership to Laurel’s Virtual Studio. More details here.
Get the Movement Logic Hip & SI Joint Tutorial ON SALE NOW (save over 20%)
Sign up here for the Movement Logic Newsletter and receive a free Hips Mini Course!
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Transcript
The Importance of Proper Weight Loading
00:00:00
Speaker
We also know that beginners, especially women, tend to under load. Under loading is, yes, a way to do less work. But what's going to happen when you're lifting a lighter weight is you're going to do more repetition. So you're going to end up doing about as much work.
00:00:15
Speaker
with a stimulus that's insufficiently big enough to drive adaptations towards strength. So you're not actually making your drain bigger, you're just doing a lot of work. And it's no wonder that when you're underloading and exposing your body to too high of a volume of load, you're gonna end up potentially not feeling so great. You're gonna have to go back to the drawing board and go, what dials do I need to turn up? And what dials do I need to turn down? And I would say a lot of the time what I'm seeing is that women
00:00:45
Speaker
need to turn up the load dial and turn down the volume dial in the beginning.
00:00:52
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up to date and cutting edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
00:01:24
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast. I'm Laurel Beaversdorf. It's just me today. Sarah is at Superbike School. She's riding her motorcycle really fast, probably as I speak. Stay safe out there, Sarah.
00:01:43
Speaker
Today I'm talking to you about strength. Yep, here we go again. But specifically today, I'm going to be sharing about a topic that you might not hear many people talking about with regards to strength. You've probably heard the word, but you might not know what it means because frankly, this concept, this word,
00:02:02
Speaker
It's hard to talk about. And the topic that we're talking about today is volume. How much work we're doing in a given week with strength training, as well as everything else we're doing work-wise with regards to exercise and how this all factors into how our body responds.
Understanding Training Volume and Avoiding Injury
00:02:24
Speaker
The reason this topic is important
00:02:27
Speaker
is that understanding volume can help us avoid overdoing it and getting injured or putting ourselves out of commission for days on end, which is super common amongst newbies, especially, to strength training, people who are just starting out.
00:02:41
Speaker
We know it's possible to overdo it, but when considering how this happens, I think a lot of the time we're focused on the weight, how heavy the weight is. And there is, in my opinion, a lot of misplaced fear amongst women in my community who are overly hesitant to lift anything more than a three to five pound hand weight.
00:03:07
Speaker
Because they think that it is dangerous to do so that it will be overdoing it so that's a conversation Sarah and I have been having on this podcast starting with the first episode of the season pink dumbbells and the shrinking female body we talk about how this fear of overdoing it by lifting anything more than five pounds is
00:03:27
Speaker
really just a product of the patriarchy basically and how women have been conditioned to want to be as small as possible and are afraid of building any amount of muscle and many many insidious messages like that have contributed to this overblown fear of lifting anything more than five pounds and we need to understand load better in order to bust through those fears
00:03:51
Speaker
Namely we need to understand what a sufficient load needed to make changes to our strength is probably more than five pound pink dumbbells.
Benefits of Strength Training
00:04:01
Speaker
But understanding volume is as important if not more important especially for beginners who have this issue where they start strength training and within a couple of weeks they're injured or they have some pain cropping up from
00:04:19
Speaker
introducing this new activity, and they don't know why. Volume is also an important topic for advanced lifters or intermediate lifters, even because if you don't understand volume, you might also be prone to overdoing it, but maybe more common amongst advanced lifters, you might be more inclined to underdoing it. You might start to plateau
00:04:47
Speaker
And you're not making gains in your strength and you're not really sure why. Volume can explain both situations. A case of overdoing it and a case of underdoing it. But first...
00:05:00
Speaker
Let's keep our eyes on the prize here. Strength. We know we want to get stronger. Strength confers so many benefits to our bodies and our lives. Strength can mean less risk of injury, better bone density. It can mean less risk of fracture, less risk of falling, too, better balance. It can mean we are able to participate more fully in our lives.
00:05:25
Speaker
More adventures, less consequences for those adventures. We can do that sweaty vinyasa. We can dance all night at that wedding. We can hike up that big mountain. And at the end of it, we'll have the benefits without the drawbacks of those adventures. The aches and pains of engaging in an activity that our body's capacity was not able to handle becomes more and more of a thing of the past. Our margin for error has become much wider because we've been strength training. We've raised our body's capacity
How to Effectively Increase Strength
00:05:54
Speaker
We can tolerate more. We can enjoy more. If we want to talk pure aesthetics here, strength can also mean raising your percentage of lean muscle mass, which means you might look more toned. You can't look more toned without muscle. Anesthetically, this might be your goal. Strength can also mean less risk of all-cause mortality, which means we are simply less likely to die if we lift weights.
00:06:23
Speaker
It is true, it has been researched. There is a very strong relationship between lifting weights and living longer. Strength means we live longer, but maybe better than that, it means we live better, given any amount of life we have before us. So we wanna get stronger.
00:06:41
Speaker
But what does this actually mean? It means that we want to make a change to our body. But what change are we making? It's a more specific change than just any change. Any change could be a haircut. But even here, we understand that we can't do any old thing to get shorter hair. Lifting weights won't make our hair shorter. Cutting it with scissors will.
00:07:06
Speaker
You also can't do any old thing to get stronger. Spoiler, just doing yoga asana and mat pilates won't make you stronger after a point. Also, neither will cut your hair. When we want to make a change to our strength specifically, it means we must expose our body to an amount of stress that will cause it to positively adapt or adapt favorably toward this end.
00:07:30
Speaker
In this case, we're trying to get stronger. So adapting favorably means we change our body literally. We change our brains, our muscles, our tendons, our fascia. Yes, people who love fascia, we're changing our fascia too arguably to a much greater extent than massage will. And more, we're changing a lot of different systems. We're changing a lot of different tissues. We're changing a lot of different organs.
00:07:56
Speaker
And we're making those systems, tissues, and organs better capable of working together for us to be able to produce more muscular force. That's what strength is. It's the ability to produce force. And muscles produce force, so more muscular force.
00:08:16
Speaker
So even though that sweaty vinyasa, that hike up that big mountain, that all night of dancing at the wedding isn't strength training, that's not how you expose your body to stresses that will cause you to be able to produce more muscular force. Strength training will better prepare you to be able to do those things. So we want to make a change to our strength.
00:08:39
Speaker
We know that not only do we need to expose our bodies to an amount of stress that we can adapt favorably to, get stronger from, we also know that we want to expose our bodies to an amount of stress that we can recover from.
00:08:55
Speaker
In other words, we want to expose our bodies to an amount of stress that doesn't either leave us out of commission for days on end due to increased sensitivity, pain, injury, or just pure physical exhaustion. We want to expose our bodies to an amount of stress.
00:09:13
Speaker
where after a day of two arrests, we're not only fully recovered, we're potentially also objectively stronger. So we're talking about two main variables we can work with to make this change. The first one, we talk about a lot. We'll keep talking about it. From my perspective, many are starting to understand it better. We're getting the message across. There's still a lot of educating to do.
The Relationship Between Load, Stress, and Intensity
00:09:33
Speaker
This variable is load. You hear Sarah and I talking a lot about how if you want to build strength, you not only need to be lifting a heavy enough load,
00:09:40
Speaker
but you need to progress that load so that as your strength increases, the moderate to heavy load you're lifting does too so that it continues to drive those favorable adaptations towards strength. In other words, pink dumbbells aren't going to cut it. They might be too light right away if you're just starting out, and if they're not, they're going to be too light pretty quickly.
00:10:00
Speaker
Okay, we talk about load a lot, but this other variable, volume, it hardly gets talked about at all because frankly, it's harder to talk about it and it's not well understood, but it might actually be the more important variable to understand if we want to pursue strength in a sustainable long-term fashion, this variable volume. So at the top of this episode, I said that
00:10:25
Speaker
When we want to make a change to our strength specifically, it means we must expose our body to an amount of stress that will cause us to adapt favorably, and this stress is an amount we're also able to fully recover from after a day or two. Stress is synonymous with load, okay? So we don't mean bad stress here, like, oh my god, I got so many work deadlines, and my relationships at home are strained, I don't like my boss, or crap, the water's boiling over on the stove, my newborn is crying, and my phone is ringing.
00:10:54
Speaker
We don't mean psychological stress. We don't mean pull your hair out stress. We also don't mean stress is necessarily good. We don't mean stress as in like rainbows and unicorn stress. Stress and load are neutral terms used in science, physics specifically. And according to physics, stress and load
00:11:14
Speaker
are neither inherently good nor inherently bad. They're neutral. Whether the results of a load or stress are negative or positive depends on how the load was applied and to whom. And so in actuality when we talk about load and stress and strength training as the catalyst for making a positive change to the body, we are primarily thinking about who is experiencing this load.
00:11:33
Speaker
In strength and conditioning, when we use the word load, we're primarily thinking about how much weight is someone lifting? How heavy? This is because in order to make changes to our ability to exert force, to change our bodies from being able to produce less force to being able to produce more force, we need to expose our bodies to a minimal effective amount of load. If we fall under that amount, we won't change our strength. We might change other capacities, but not our strength. So for example, if I'm doing an overhead press,
00:12:02
Speaker
I'm raising my arms up overhead, holding onto weights. And if I'm using something that is too light, let's say it's pink dumbbells, this might be too little stress or too little load. Conversely, if I'm pressing a barbell over my head that is way too heavy, I have not systematically and progressively progressed my strength to be able to press that barbell over my head. And I'm like grinding through, that's too much stress potentially, that's too much load.
00:12:29
Speaker
And then of course, like Goldilocks and the three bears, eventually the porridge is just right. I'm pressing maybe it's a 20 pound kettlebell over my head. That load is just the right amount to drive adaptations toward my strength. Okay, so intensity is a really helpful way to describe load.
00:12:48
Speaker
Intensity can mean two things in strength training. It can describe the amount of load. High intensity is heavy, low intensity is light, as well as the intensity of effort or perceived effort. The first one, intensity of load is fairly objective. The second one, intensity of perceived effort is much more subjective. We're going to talk about both. So let's start with intensity of load. It's fairly objective.
00:13:12
Speaker
But it's not actually the number on the weight that you're lifting. It's not that objective. Okay, I can't look at a 25 pound dumbbell and a 50 pound dumbbell and go, the 50 pound dumbbell is a higher intensity weight. Now, we actually need more information. If I'm doing a squat and I can do 10 repetitions of a squat with 50 pounds before I can't do another rep, so I'm actually going to failure.
00:13:37
Speaker
but I can only do five repetitions of an overhead press with 25 pounds. The 25 pound dumbbell in the context of me doing an overhead press is a higher intensity load for me than a 50 pound dumbbell for me in the context of doing a squat.
00:13:59
Speaker
This is because a five rep maximum with 25 pounds means that when I'm lifting that 25 pounds, I'm working with a load that is 90% of my estimated one RM.
00:14:13
Speaker
Whereas when I'm working with a 10 rep maximum, that 50 pound dumbbell, this means that I'm working with a load that is 75% of my estimated 1RM in that squat, right? So for me, within the context of the shoulder press, 25 pounds is a high intensity load. And in the context of the squat, 50 pounds is a moderate intensity load for me.
00:14:37
Speaker
basically select a weight, do reps until you can't do another rep, and however many reps you did of that weight, this corresponds to an intensity of load given as a percentage of a 1RM. High intensity
00:14:52
Speaker
is anything above 85%. Moderate intensity is between 70 and 85%. Low intensity is lower than 70%. This is just for me. Those weights are high and moderate intensity, respectively, within those given exercises for me. But for my husband, I work out with my husband a lot,
00:15:16
Speaker
For him, lifting 25 pounds five times in an overhead press and 50 pounds 10 times in a squat would be much smaller percentages of his 1RM because he's stronger than I am. For him, these loads would probably be pretty low intensity. They would not drive adaptations.
00:15:34
Speaker
towards strength. So intensity of load is something we're interested in because if we want to get stronger, we want to be lifting a load that is higher than 70% of a 1RM. And so this is a load we probably couldn't lift much more than 12 times. For bone density, we'd need to be lifting something probably closer to 85 to 95% of a 1RM. That's a load that you couldn't lift much more than six times. Okay, and to complicate it further, while not making it incomprehensible, we know that just as there is variation, a whole bunch of it between individuals, like my husband and I,
00:16:03
Speaker
There is also variation intra-personally. We are not the same people over time. As individuals, we change.
00:16:12
Speaker
Therefore, what was a moderate or high intensity load for me at the outset of my strength training journey will certainly not remain so. As my body favorably adapts to the training loads I expose it to, I will need to increase those loads over time to continue to drive those adaptations. So set another way, I'd need to pick up heavier weights as I got stronger. Okay, that's intensity of load. What about now intensity of effort?
00:16:38
Speaker
By the way, we're still talking about load here. We're not talking about volume yet. We're going to talk about volume, but I want to set this up so that we really understand load and then we can even better understand volume. So what is intensity of effort? This is where it gets more subjective in a very useful and necessary way.
00:16:55
Speaker
Intensity of effort relates to how hard we feel we're working, how hard we feel we're working, and how heavy a weight we're lifting is relative to our estimated 1RM are not the same things. Heavy is more objective than hard. Hard is totally subjective. How hard we feel we are working certainly relates to the heaviness of what we're lifting, no doubt. But it can also relate to how much sleep we got the night before lifting weights.
00:17:25
Speaker
the work deadlines were up against, the strained relationships at home or at work, whether we just got over a bad cold, the temperature in the gym, or maybe just some muscle soreness we're still feeling from yesterday's vinyasa flow practice.
Debunking Myths About Fatigue and Strength Gains
00:17:42
Speaker
Literally anything can contribute to fatigue.
00:17:47
Speaker
Fatigue is something many people also confuse. Fatigue is sometimes conflated with strength, believe it or not. We equate a feeling of fatigue with evidence that we've gotten stronger, but this is actually not the case. Because you can feel fatigue from sickness, from sitting too much, from going on a long walk,
00:18:10
Speaker
From doing a yoga practice, and none of these inputs lead to strength. In science and research, fatigue is defined as a temporary and reversible decrease in exercise performance. In the context of strength, fatigue is measured in a reduction in the amount of weight you can lift. So in other words, when you're fatigued, you're weaker.
00:18:35
Speaker
You can't lift as much weight, and there's a number of different variables that can increase your fatigue. Anything that interferes with our muscles' ability to contract and produce force, anything that causes us to not be as strong as we could be in its absence, is potentially fatiguing. Therefore, intensity of effort
00:18:56
Speaker
Right? Not percentage of a 1RM, that's intensity of load. Intensity of effort, how hard we feel we are working, can sometimes be very different than the weight we're lifting. If I'm feeling very fatigued on a particular day, I may lift a weight that on a day when I wasn't feeling so fatigued, I could lift 10 times no problem. But on this particular day, I might reach the same intensity of effort
00:19:24
Speaker
I'd reach on my good day after only five reps. This is where using a tool called a rating of perceived exertion scale can be very helpful. It's a one to 10 rating system. One being low perceived effort, 10 being the maximum perceived effort we could ever experience. This scale on a one to 10 helps us to account for how hard we feel we're working, much more so than a one RM chart does.
00:19:52
Speaker
A 1RM chart accounts for intensity of load. Rating of perceived exertion accounts for intensity of effort. And I'd argue it's more important to account for intensity of effort because if we are fatigued on any given day for any given reason, but we override that and insist on sticking with some prescribed intensity of load that we have predicted we should be able to handle, maybe it's written into our program,
00:20:19
Speaker
This is a good way to overdo it. Even though on paper you should be able to lift that weight, the reality is you're fatigued and you really can't and shouldn't. By the way,
00:20:32
Speaker
This word intensity, just to kind of zoom out a little bit and put it into a broader context, this word is used to describe exercise outside of strength training too. It's often used in running. When we're running at a higher intensity, typically we're running faster. When it's lower intensity, we're running slower. Now, we didn't put more weight on our bodies when running and call that higher intensity because running is not typically something we externally load because the goal when running is not strength.
00:20:58
Speaker
It's also not to get a haircut. The goal is probably either to increase our speed, how fast we can run at a given distance, or increase our endurance to increase the distance we can run at a given speed. Okay, so load. We need to meet a certain threshold of intensity to make a change to our strength.
00:21:21
Speaker
it needs actually to be above 70% of an estimated 1RM. And we can monitor this threshold by noting the intensity of load using something like a 1RM chart, as well as we can monitor our intensity of effort by using a rating of perceived exertion scale. And ideally, I think we do both. We use both tools to be as successful as possible in selecting the appropriate load on any given day.
00:21:53
Speaker
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00:22:23
Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Defining and Monitoring Training Volume
00:23:43
Speaker
All right, let's get into volume. In a nutshell, if load in strength is how much weight we're lifting, volume is how many repetitions we are lifting that weight for, and actually to get more specific, it's how many sets. And it's not how many sets in a workout, actually, it's how many sets in a week. This is how volume is traditionally measured in research.
00:24:10
Speaker
It's defined as the number of sets in a week. All right, let's define some of these terms. So reps or repetitions. A repetition is a single iteration of a movement that you do with a weight. Typically, there's a movement of the weight upward and then a lowering of the weight downward, and that is one repetition. A set is repeating a number of repetitions
00:24:39
Speaker
all in a row and then resting after the set for a given amount of time before completing another set. So a set is a collection of repetitions.
00:24:50
Speaker
And it can be any number of repetitions. So one repetition could be a set. That would probably be a very heavy load, right? But we can also be working with five repetitions, which would still be considered a heavy load. Six to 13 repetitions, or 14 repetitions. This is more of maybe a moderate load. And then 14 repetitions to 100 repetitions, right? These are light to very light loads.
00:25:15
Speaker
And now let's talk about volume more specifically. In research, volume is traditionally measured as the number of sets performed of an exercise in a week. But a parameter we can track in our workouts is referred to as volume load. So volume load is when we take the number of sets we did,
00:25:45
Speaker
multiplied by the number of repetitions in those sets, multiplied by the amount of weight we lifted for those repetitions. So let me give you an example. If I'm doing the overhead press, I'm gonna keep these numbers really simple, and I'm pressing 10 pounds. If I'm doing 10 repetitions, three sets, 10 pounds, we take three times 10, that's three sets times 10 repetitions and get 30, times 10 pounds and get 300.
00:26:12
Speaker
So volume load is 300. Now remember, we're trying to make a change. So we need the load to be sufficient. We don't want it to be too heavy. We don't want it to be too light. We want a Goldilocks amount of load. Well, guess what? We also need the volume.
00:26:28
Speaker
to be sufficient. We need the volume to be sufficient to drive a favorable adaptation. We need the volume to be a stimulus that we can recover from. The amount of volume or the volume we can favorably adapt to and recover from relates to our work capacity. The amount of load we can lift relates to our strength.
00:26:53
Speaker
The amount of volume we can favorably adapt to and recover from relates to our work capacity. And work capacity is actually a bigger topic than strength.
00:27:03
Speaker
Strength is what we're after when we wanna be able to produce more force. We wanna be able to tolerate higher loads. We wanna be able to recover favorably from those higher loads. Work capacity, on the other hand, is the ability to adapt and recover favorably from work. And here's the thing, you can be really strong and still overshoot your work capacity in a given week and end up with pain. You can also be just starting out
00:27:30
Speaker
with strain training and overshoot your work capacity in a given week while undershooting your load.
00:27:38
Speaker
and end up in pain. And I have to say that this is what happens to the majority of beginners I see starting out. By the way, we can never really know why someone ends up with the aches and pains that they express having. And believe me, I am definitely not saying that I know why. I am pointing toward possibilities here. It's not that they pick up a weight that's too heavy. That's not why they end up having the aches and pains that they end up with. In fact, it's quite the opposite. In my community, I notice
00:28:08
Speaker
that many women are still afraid to pick up a weight that is heavier than five pounds. But despite this, they're doing however many workouts a week, however many exercises, their rep range is potentially probably a little bit higher because the weight they're lifting is lighter, right? They don't even reach a state of fatigue until they've completed like 10 or 12 reps, right? And then they start maybe starting to feel some stimulation there and they get to like rep 15, 16, 17, and they're like, okay, now I might feel a little bit fatigued.
00:28:38
Speaker
So despite not picking up a weight that's heavier than five pounds, they still might land themselves in the land of injury and pain. Even though with regard to the intensity of load, they weren't overloading. In fact, they were underloading. They're underloading strength, right? They weren't actually exposing their body to a significant enough stimulus to result in adaptations of increased force production. But what were they doing? They were overloading their work capacity. So let's talk about how this happens.
00:29:08
Speaker
To do so, we need to define work. In this context, work is not what we do for money. It's also not cleaning the bathroom and it's not tax prep. Work is a physics term as well. In physics, work is the energy transferred to or from an object via the application of force along a distance.
00:29:30
Speaker
Set a simpler way. In strength training, work is when we exert muscular force, that's the energy, to the object, that's the weight, to move it through an arc of movement, that's the distance, aka the repetition. Work is what we're doing when we lift weights. Work equals force times distance. What this means is if you know anything about multiplication,
00:29:53
Speaker
You know that we can manipulate how much work we are doing by increasing or decreasing the force, the size of the weight, as well as increasing or decreasing the distance, or both. Say we're lifting a weight for 10 repetitions. We can increase work by selecting a heavier weight.
00:30:10
Speaker
we can decrease work by selecting a lighter weight. Likewise, say we're performing a squat. Distance relates to the place where we started from and the place that we moved to and ended up, sometimes called displacement, right? Distance relates to that distance that we moved through the arc of movement of a squat.
00:30:35
Speaker
If we were to increase the distance that we're moving, we get more work. If we decrease the distance we're moving, we get less work. There are two ways we could do this. We could squat to a higher or lower end point. So if we squat our hips to knee height, we're moving less distance than if we squat our hips to below knee height. This means we're moving more distance. Another example in the context of kettlebelling
00:31:04
Speaker
is if we snatch a kettlebell, we take a kettlebell from below waist height to the overhead position. This is a greater distance than cleaning a kettlebell, which is to take a kettlebell from below waist height to shoulder level. A snatch is more work than a clean, just like a deep squat is more work than a partial range of motion squat.
00:31:25
Speaker
This is one way to increase distance. Another way to increase distance is to add more repetitions. So say we're lifting a 20 pound weight. We can increase work by lifting that 20 pound weight within any given exercise for more repetitions. We can decrease work by lifting that 20 pound weight in any given exercise for fewer repetitions. When we increase repetitions, we increase work. But let's go back. Why are we talking about this?
00:31:53
Speaker
The name of the game here is to enhance our strength, which means the name of the game is to stress our bodies with a Goldilocks amount of stress, enough stress to make a change, but not so much that we are either unable to favorably adapt, an unfavorable adaptation by the way would be an injury, or that we are unable to recover.
Managing Work Capacity and Recovery
00:32:15
Speaker
Three to four days of sore muscles or just feeling totally exhausted from a workout is a poor recovery. Or really just muscles so sore that the next day you can barely move, that's also a pretty poor recovery and a sign that you may have stressed your body too much. If intensity is the heaviness of the load and or how hard you feel you're working, volume is basically how much work you do. If the appropriate heaviness of the load
00:32:39
Speaker
is what drives adaptations toward improved strength. The appropriate volume is what drives adaptations toward improved work capacity. We don't want to do too much work. We don't want to do too little work. We want to do just the right amount of work to make a change. That amount that we need to do to make a change will change. Appropriate volume is like appropriate load. It depends on the individual and it's a moving target within the progress of that individual. Beginners need a lot less volume than intermediate and advanced.
00:33:07
Speaker
lifters, just like beginners, can get stronger from a much lighter weight than that same beginner down the road as an intermediate or advanced lifter. They're going to be lifting heavier weights, right, to continue to drive adaptation. So I think a very good analogy for work capacity is a sink. And I got this analogy from Greg Knuckles from an article he wrote called
00:33:29
Speaker
how to increase work capacity and bust through plateaus on his website stronger by science.com, which I will link in the show notes and that I highly recommend that you read. And I also highly recommend that you follow
00:33:44
Speaker
Greg Knuckles, Stronger by Science, in all the ways that you can because the quality of information coming from that gentleman is extremely high. He couldn't be nicer frankly from my perspective. I like him a lot. Check him out. A very good analogy for work capacity is a sink. In this analogy, the water pouring into your sink is the work.
00:34:10
Speaker
It's the strength training. It's the training stress, right? The work capacity, your work capacity, is the size of your drain. Draining water from your sink is recovery. Filling your sink with water is training. When you start off as a beginner,
00:34:27
Speaker
your drain is really small. It doesn't take long for the water you're pouring into your sink, the amount of training you're doing, to fill your sink up. And if you fill it up with too much training stress, you overflow your sink because you're not able to recover. Your drain is too small. To drain the sink, you need to do less work. You need to allow yourself more time to recover. If you are applying load and volume appropriately though over time and increasing
00:34:57
Speaker
training stress systematically, you will inevitably grow a bigger drain. So as you become more intermediate or advanced, your drain gets bigger. Your ability to recover improves. More water can go in, and in fact more water has to go in if you want to continue to drive adaptations.
00:35:18
Speaker
You can do more work because you can recover from more work. If you don't do enough work, you'll never fill your sink enough to continue to get stronger, to improve. So the amount of work you did as a beginner is no longer going to make a change anymore.
00:35:35
Speaker
You're not going to fill your sink. Now remember, you can do more work by lifting heavier loads, but you can also do more work by doing more reps, doing more sets, even doing more workouts in a week. Doing more exercises in a workout, all of it contributes to increasing volume.
00:35:50
Speaker
The whole point of increasing volume is to increase work capacity so that stress slightly outpaces recovery so that we send a message to our body that it actually needs to get better at recovering. It has to become stronger, more resilient in order to be able to handle the amount of stress we're giving it. If you think about it, this explains why strength training prepares us to be able to handle a whole bunch of different types of stress out in our world.
00:36:20
Speaker
we've basically created a bigger drain. We can recover from everything a little bit better. If we are applying the principles of progressive overload, both load and volume should progress effectively so that we see our strength trend upward over time without overdoing it, without the aches and pains
00:36:41
Speaker
of too much too soon, and without the plateaus of too little too late. For beginners, relatively speaking, if load is sufficient, work cannons should be pretty low because, again, your drain is small. You've got to give it time to get bigger. Therefore, taking a conservative approach to how much work you're doing is extremely important.
00:37:05
Speaker
It's very easy to do too much work. We also know that beginners, especially women, tend to under load. Under loading is, yes, a way to do less work. But what's going to happen when you're lifting a lighter weight is you're going to do more repetition. So you're going to end up doing about as much work.
00:37:24
Speaker
with a stimulus that's insufficiently big enough to drive adaptations towards strength. So you're not actually making your drain bigger, you're just doing a lot of work. And it's no wonder that when you're underloading and exposing your body to too high of a volume of load,
00:37:39
Speaker
you're gonna end up potentially not feeling so great. You're gonna have to go back to the drawing board and go, what dials do I need to turn up? And what dials do I need to turn down? And I would say a lot of the time, what I'm seeing is that women need to turn up the load dial and turn down the volume dial in the beginning. Believe it or not, for untrained, completely untrained lifters, research has shown
00:38:05
Speaker
that a single hard set in a week so you do one set maybe it's a set of eight of an exercise with a sufficiently
00:38:17
Speaker
challenging load, an appropriate intensity of load. So that's going to be a load that's probably within the realms of 75 to 80% of a 1RM. That one single set in a week can be enough to drive adaptations towards strength. But a lot of the times what happens is a beginner goes to strength train and they pick up a weight that's like 50% of their estimated 1RM.
00:38:40
Speaker
They do 15 or 18 repetitions of it. They don't actually end up getting stronger because the load is too light. They can lift it too many times. Clearly it's too low of an intensity of a load. They do three sets. They do two or three workouts in a week and they end up in pain.
00:38:56
Speaker
I think the reason might be better understood if we can understand volume and work capacity better and if we can stop underloading.
Adapting Training for Beginners vs. Advanced Lifters
00:39:04
Speaker
Okay now for more advanced lifters relatively speaking, if the load is sufficient, work will over time need to increase.
00:39:12
Speaker
your drain is large you want to continue to drive adaptations in your body you're going to need to pour more water into the sink so hopefully what's happened is that in the process of being a beginner you've been exposed to strength training that feels fun and enjoyable that has all the pluses and none of the drawbacks because you've been working with an appropriate load
00:39:33
Speaker
You've been progressing that load systematically over time using the principle of progressive overload, and you have not been exposing your body to too much volume. You've allowed your work capacity to also improve. And what you end up with is you end up with the habit of strength training. You end up with a desire to keep going. You end up maybe even identifying as somebody who lifts weights. And by that time, you've got buy-in. By that time, you've shifted your maybe whole lifestyle, maybe your whole basement.
00:40:03
Speaker
got a gym membership. Maybe you now have a bunch of new friends. Maybe this is what you do on Tuesday, Thursday mornings. And that's like church now. You're going to lift weights. And by that time, you've got this bigger buy-in to where now the idea that you need to do more work to continue to drive adaptations and that you need to lift heavier weights to continue to drive adaptations isn't a bad thing. It's a good thing. It's a welcome challenge. So in the beginning, it's important that we get that buy-in.
00:40:31
Speaker
that you undergo a period of learning and growth that feels positive so that by the time you do need more training stress to drive adaptations, you're on board. The buy-in is there, you're ready to commit at that higher level. So all of this to say is that if we are beginners and we don't want to do too much work and get injured, and we don't want to do too little work and fail to make a change,
00:40:55
Speaker
We need to pay attention, yes, to how much weight we're lifting and make sure that not only are we starting with inappropriate sized weight to drive adaptations towards strength, but we're increasing that weight as our strength increases. We want to make sure the load is sufficient, but we also probably want to make sure that we're not doing too much volume in a week. You may want to stick to just four exercises in a workout instead of eight exercises in a workout.
00:41:22
Speaker
So three sets of 10 of every single exercise in the workout might be too much volume for a beginner.
00:41:29
Speaker
two sets of 10 might be a lot more appropriate. Three workouts in a week is potentially too much volume for a beginner, although I see a lot of people on social media recommending three sets of 10 and three workouts a week to beginners, and I think that is, for a lot of beginners, an inappropriate amount of volume. Maybe just do two workouts in a week, and even one workout could be enough in the beginning to drive adaptations towards strength for a while, for at least a couple of months. Also, what's the rush?
00:42:00
Speaker
Overdoing it, especially for beginners, and underdoing it, especially for more advanced lifters, has arguably much more to do with volume and overwhelming our work capacity, overflowing our sink. For more advanced lifters, underdoing it maybe has more to do with not increasing volume enough to continue to drive adaptations. And here's another thing.
00:42:25
Speaker
Your weekly volume includes what you're doing in your strength workouts, but it also includes everything else you're doing. It also includes that vinyasa flow. It also includes that hike. It also includes that HIIT class.
00:42:38
Speaker
You gotta pay attention to all the work you're doing in a week and understand that in increasing and turning the dial up on any of those activities too much too soon, you are potentially going to see negative ramifications as a result of your strength training practice even though it wasn't the strength training that you turned up. So let's just talk a little bit more about why for beginners
00:43:03
Speaker
we might be prone to overdoing it. The reason is because embarking on something very different from what we typically do and strength training is very different for some people relative to the other things they've been doing like maybe mostly walking or gardening or
00:43:22
Speaker
maybe they're runners or maybe they do yoga asana. This is very, very different. These are very different activities in strength training. The reason it's so easy to overdo it is because introducing something like strength training can be actually a pretty significant disruption to our homeostasis, to our set point, to our normal. So it's important to recognize that lifting weights is going to be a huge disruption to our homeostatic set point, to our baseline.
00:43:51
Speaker
and proceed accordingly. We should proceed accordingly with the intensity of load we select. But again, I think the tendency is actually to select an intensity of load that's actually too low, especially for beginners who are women. But we also need to make sure that we are exposing our body to an appropriate amount of volume. In my virtual studio, I teach a couple of small group strength training classes.
00:44:17
Speaker
And here's how I mitigate for this disruption to homeostasis for beginners. We work within my virtual studio, typically with a target rep range of between either eight and 10 reps or six and eight reps. These are both moderate intensity loads that we would be lifting. Eight to 10 is slightly less intense than six to eight.
00:44:40
Speaker
I provide a lot of background information about RPE using that intensity of exertion or that intensity of effort as a guide, as really a form of mindfulness for each individual in the class to know how hard it feels.
00:44:57
Speaker
but also I use a concept called reps in reserve where we want to make sure we're not underloading and to do that we want to ask ourselves how many more reps could we have done after completing the set and we want to stay somewhere within the two to three more reps left in the tank range because if we're not getting
00:45:16
Speaker
that close to failure, right? So we finish the set, we complete that last repetition in a set of 10, and we go, I think I could have done 10 more. That is an indication that whatever weight you selected was not heavy enough. But if you go, I could have done three more, as a beginner, I think that is an appropriate distance to stay away from failure. I think ending a set with three reps left in the tank
00:45:44
Speaker
This would correspond with an RPE of seven. We can subtract reps and reserve from 10 and get our RPE. Seven is this was moderately vigorous or moderately challenging, right? Challenging enough for a beginner. If you're more advanced, you've been lifting for more than six months consistently, I would say you want to get closer to that failure point and maybe step into an RPE of like eight.
00:46:07
Speaker
Leave two reps in reserve. In my small group strength training, which is done live on Zoom where I can see the students and they can see me and they can unmute and ask questions.
00:46:18
Speaker
They can also type questions into the chat. I'm of course giving them a lot of feedback on technique. I'm also offering a lot of modifications, ways that individuals in the group do the exercise that will reduce maybe sensitivity in a certain area of their body or will be more accessible to them given what they're working with physically or the equipment they have available to them. But I'm also threading through our sessions a ton of information about intensity of load,
00:46:47
Speaker
and intensity of exertion or intensity of effort so that they make sure that they're not underloading or overloading. Then in addition, I build in a lot of room for selecting appropriate volume. Because I have a mixture of levels, I have people who are just starting out, and I have people who've been training with me for three years,
00:47:09
Speaker
This is where I offer choice in terms of how many sets you're going to perform. I suggest for beginners that they stick with just two sets, for intermediates three, and for more advanced lifters maybe doing four sets. Over the course of the four to 12 weeks that members of my virtual studio are undergoing a program,
00:47:33
Speaker
with me for we're obviously going to see changes taking place members are tracking their parameters they're tracking how much weight they lifted they're tracking how many reps they did they're tracking how many sets they did and over time these individuals are going to need
00:47:49
Speaker
to continue to progress and that's what i'm there to help them do my interactions with trainees are filmed recorded and then uploaded to the library where people who are taking on demand who can't make the live class can hear the questions can hear the conversations i'm having with members they can also email me they can also
00:48:11
Speaker
DM me on Instagram to ask me specifically how much weight should they consider lifting now that they feel they're able to do this many reps for this many sets at this level of perceived exertion. And so I help them make those decisions. And they also sometimes even send me videos doing an exercise so that I can give them form check feedback.
00:48:30
Speaker
we focus on learning how on an individual level to appropriately progress load and volume together. It's not random. It's systematic. It's not, oh, I guess I'll just try to throw in a third and fourth set today because I'm feeling good. I mean, you wouldn't like not run for 10 years and then go out and run three miles, would you? I mean, maybe you wouldn't, but I mean, I have definitely done that before too.
00:48:59
Speaker
not very positive effect, but you get the picture, right? We're learning how to do this together and we're learning how to be responsive. So yes, the programs in my virtual studio set people on a progressive path that systematically increases load and volume, that's for sure. But that is actually not enough. Because our bodies are systems made up of systems,
00:49:26
Speaker
And there are untold number of variables that can affect how fatigued we feel or how ready we feel to train on any given day. It's really important to understand what's written down in the program is always open to change and will need to change and will need to adjust.
Developing Personal Strength Programs
00:49:46
Speaker
Additionally, it's really comforting to know that you're figuring this out in a community and not having to figure it out alone.
00:49:54
Speaker
One more thing, I got a great question from a student in my program design basics workshop that I taught for my virtual studio that I'm making available this month in the courses section. It's seven sessions and it's program design basics, how to design your own strength program. It gives you a lot of background into a lot of what I've talked about today and more. A student in one of these online sessions, she asked, what if you just want to remain strong, but you don't have these big dreams of being able to do say like,
00:50:24
Speaker
pull-ups or muscle-ups or handstands or pistol squats. You don't want to win a bodybuilding competition. I think it's a really interesting question because I think it's a question that's in the back of a lot of our minds. Those of us who have no intention of being competitive weightlifters, that's probably 99.9% of you listening. And it's like, when is enough enough? When are we strong enough? Are we just going to be progressing intensity of load and intensity of effort and volume forever until eternity? Is that what we're doing here?
00:50:52
Speaker
I think this is a healthy question because as a society, we can be really prone to excess. It's like it's never enough. We need more money. We need more attention. We need more things. But if we just want to continue to keep our body healthy and resilient, when is enough enough? I'm in this wonderful place, she said. I feel good. Can we just keep it this way? Can we just keep it this way without this delusion of endless progression?
00:51:18
Speaker
When is enough enough? Well, here's the thing. If we want to continue to keep our body healthy and resilient,
00:51:25
Speaker
We need to give it a good reason to do that. We need to drive change. This is where variety can become really useful and important. And I know I've spoken a lot about variety as almost an obstacle to strength, because if we're doing something different every day, like we tend to do when we practice yoga and Pilates, we tend to do a completely different class every single time we go to the mat, right? We're not getting enough repetition. We're also not.
00:51:55
Speaker
progressing load, right? It's probably body weight.
00:51:58
Speaker
We're not getting enough repetition. We have too much variety. It's akin to digging lots of shallow holes, but not getting anywhere with regards to strength because you're not digging any one hole deeper. You're not increasing your strength in any one way. That's not to say that variety still doesn't play a really important role in strength training. In fact, variety, while kind of being the opposite side of the progressive overload coin, it's true that
00:52:26
Speaker
If we have too much variety, if we're always doing different exercises every single workout, we're probably not going to progress our strength as quickly as we would if we stuck to the same exercises for between 4 and 12 weeks and continue to progress them that way. But we still need to actually change it up when strength training. We can't also do the same exercises.
00:52:50
Speaker
and expect to see favorable adaptations because our body will potentially stop responding. We know this is true with bone building,
Maintaining Adaptation Through Variety
00:53:00
Speaker
that there's such a thing called cellular accommodation where after a certain number of repetitions of say impact, let's say it's running, when we go running we do
00:53:11
Speaker
many, many repetitions of our foot hitting the ground, that after 100 repetitions of impact, our bone cells stop responding. They stop sending the message to lay down more bone cells. So when we build bones, we want to make sure that the activity we're engaged in is high enough intensity probably to not be able to do 100 repetitions in a row. It needs to be high intensity, right? So that's number one. But number two, that we change it up so that we're not doing the same exercises
00:53:39
Speaker
for a lifetime, but that maybe we're changing up the exercises we're doing every four to six to eight to 12 weeks. This keeps our bones responsive, but it also keeps our nervous systems responsive. It also keeps our muscles responsive. It also keeps our imaginations responsive, because I don't know if you're like me, you might get bored doing the same stuff over and over and over again. So it's a balance between repetition and variety. We want to have enough repetition to drive change.
00:54:07
Speaker
But then when we stop responding, that's a good time to change it up and do a different exercise. Now a different exercise doesn't mean a completely different exercise. We can go from doing one version of a squat
00:54:23
Speaker
to a version of a lunge. These are both going to target similar muscle groups, but in a very different limb movements. There'll be very different physical demands placed on our body. So we change it up to continue to drive adaptation. So this student's question got me thinking that when is enough enough with regards to load and volume? Enough is enough when we stop making a change. So despite progressing load, despite progressing volume,
00:54:52
Speaker
We're hitting a wall. We're not making changes to our strength. We're just feeling a little bored. This might be a good time to change it up. I talked about the best exercises for strength training in season one in one of the earlier episodes. It may have been episode seven, I believe.
00:55:09
Speaker
Go back and listen to that. What are the best exercises for strength? I outline four main types of strength training exercises. There's the upper body push, the upper body pull, the squat slash lunge, and the hinge. Within these four categories of like staple strength moves, there's a ton of variety.
00:55:29
Speaker
So it's good to mix it up every four to six to eight weeks and give yourself a different upper body push to do, a different upper body pull, a different lunge, a different squat. And guess what? This is where programs become extremely helpful. Not only do programs help you progress load in volume slowly and systematically over time,
00:55:52
Speaker
And especially when those programs are delivered in a live class format where teachers and students can see each other and dialogue about what is actually happening and individuals can get the individual attention that they need and everybody can benefit from that individualized attention. But also programs begin and programs end and that is a good thing. So after you do, for example, in my virtual studio,
00:56:17
Speaker
the Sweet and Simple Strength program, you might move on to do the Strength for Handstand program. You might spend four to six to eight weeks on the Sweet and Simple Strength, and then spend four to six to eight weeks on the Handstand program, and then move on to do the Kettlebell Progressive program, which is Kettlebell movement specific strength training.
00:56:39
Speaker
And then maybe you want to do the Prepare to Pull Up program. And so in this way, you continue to drive adaptations through those four basic categories of lifts. You continue to progress intensity of load and volume to increase your work capacity. But you're also changing it up. You're working toward
00:56:59
Speaker
particular performance goal that you may or may not actually care about but in all these cases these programs are going to be very different programs with very different exercises because they have very different goals and that in and of itself can be a way to ensure that you're getting the variety that you need
00:57:16
Speaker
in the long term. And this can also be incredibly important for making strength not only sustainable in terms of musculoskeletal health and well-being in the long run, where we get to reap the benefits without suffering the drawbacks, but it can also just make it more fun.
00:57:33
Speaker
you're going to be working to improve yourself in various different ways. So with that being said, if you are interested in trying out membership to my virtual studio, popping into some live small group strength training, we've got a wonderful community of people who
00:57:51
Speaker
Join me every morning 9 a.m. Central Tuesdays and Thursdays or taking those classes on demand if you want a lot of background on strength in addition to that with a 3 plus hour course in the courses menu called strength science 101 you want to understand strength even better if you want to
00:58:08
Speaker
partaken program design basics for resistance training and over 12 hour course designed to help you understand how to write your own programs. If you want to have a lot of options for recovery days, like yoga classes and self massage classes and restorative classes, my virtual studio pretty much has it all. And what I'm offering to listeners of this podcast, where we're typically talking about movement logic related projects, because this is the movement logic
00:58:34
Speaker
podcast today i'm also going to offer you the opportunity to try out membership to my virtual studio for half off of your first month using podcast 20 coupon code podcast 20 all caps pod c-a-s-t two
00:58:50
Speaker
zero podcast 20 at checkout. I'll link my virtual studio in the show notes so you can read all about what's on offer there. You can download the calendar of classes to see what's coming this year. I made that calendar available to download at the very beginning of this year, even late 2022.
Upcoming Strength Programs and Offers
00:59:09
Speaker
I kind of put all of my cards out on the table to share
00:59:11
Speaker
what programs I'd be offering this year. We just finished up strength for handstand and starting in April we're going to be starting strength for the pistol squat. That's starting on April 4th. So on April 4th we're going to be working toward the pistol squat. Now as I mentioned all of my programs involve the upper body push and pull, the squat and the hinge. They're all full body programs.
00:59:34
Speaker
so in handstand we did lower body work and in pistol squat we're going to be doing upper body work. If you're interested go ahead and head on over to my website to my virtual studio page to read about what's on offer and use the code PODCAST20.
00:59:51
Speaker
to save $20 on your first month of membership. You can cancel any time to avoid being charged again. And also those of you who have been members and are no longer members who are listening, you too can use this code and get this discount. It's not a new member only deal. You can go ahead and jump back on into membership and enjoy a month half off.
01:00:13
Speaker
I hope this has been a useful episode for you to be able to understand the relationship between load and volume, specifically from the standpoint of being a beginner to strength training, why understanding load yes is important, probably mostly to avoid underloading for this particular community that I'm speaking to,
01:00:36
Speaker
but also how understanding volume and the way that volume drives work capacity and the way that our work capacity determines how much training stress we can benefit from and recover from, how this can be such an important thing to understand as a beginner to avoid overdoing it, to avoid not lifting too heavy because that doesn't tend to be what people are doing, but to avoid,
01:01:02
Speaker
Exposing your body to too much volume, maybe because you're not lifting heavy enough. And hint, there's the relationship, right? Perhaps. I hope this has been helpful for you to understand that.
01:01:16
Speaker
All right, a note to you listeners that you can check out our show notes. I'm gonna link a couple of articles that you can read online, including Greg Knuckles' article, how to increase work capacity and bust through plateaus, which is also about how not to override your current work capacity and do too much too soon. Definitely check that article out.
01:01:36
Speaker
I'll link a few more as well for your background reading, and I will link to my virtual studio where you can check out what's on offer, which includes small group strength training, live classes, Tuesdays and Thursdays, a library of only over 200 classes, including four strength programs with the new one coming April 4th, strength for the pistol squat, dozens of yoga classes, yoga with resistance bands classes, creative prop classes, massage classes,
01:02:05
Speaker
restorative classes, as well as a large collection of kettlebell classes, which drive adaptations towards strength, but also strength endurance and cardio respiratory endurance, some of them as well. You can also make sure you get the discount on the movement logic hips tutorial, which will be ending soon. So head on over to the movement logic website to take advantage of that over 20% discount on our extremely popular
01:02:35
Speaker
hips tutorial that Sarah Court, Jason Parikh and I created for you. And finally, it really helps us out if you like this episode. If you like the content that Sarah and I are putting out for you each week, please subscribe. It bumps us up in the algorithm to be able to reach more people.
01:02:53
Speaker
like you who are interested in picking up what we're putting down here. It gets the word out. You can also rate and review our podcast on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen. Finally, if you have a question that you'd like us to discuss, Sarah or I, pop it into your review. You could just ask your question in the review. We definitely read them. You could also DM us on Instagram or send us an email. Thanks for nerding out with me as always. We'll see you next week. Bye.