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46: How Often Should You Strength Train Per Week?
1.2k Plays2 years ago
Welcome to Episode 46 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this episode, Laurel discusses frequency, or how often to strength train per week. Laurel unpacks the concept of frequency its relationship to volume, as well as what research suggests is the “minimal effective dose” to get certain benefits from resistance training, like increased longevity and strength. By the end of this episode you will understand why workout frequency matters enormously, but why it cannot matter separately from weekly volume or the individual who is training.
You will also learn:
- Why the common prescription for frequency—3x/week—is empty advice devoid of context to make it useful.
- Why any amount of resistance training is better than none (according to research).
- What the minimal effective dose of resistance training is for older adults (people over age 65), and what amount might be too much.
- Why it’s important to control for volume when researching workout frequency and its role in strength.
- Why there’s no right optimal dose of volume or frequency for everyone.
- Why fatigue and recovery play an important role in determining optimal training volume and frequency.
- That science still can’t point confidently to specific causes of delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS).
- What types of individuals, muscle groups, and workouts might require more recovery time than others.
- How to use frequency to increase volume in a safe way.
- How maintaining strength is different from increasing it, and what research shows is enough volume to maintain the strength you've built if you have to spend time away from training.
Get our FREE Bone Density Mini Course: Barbell 101
Essentials of Strength and Conditioning
Chris Beardsley Articles
What determines training frequency?
How does training volume affect muscle growth?
What causes delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS)?
Stronger By Science Articles
Training Frequency for Strength Development: What the Data Say
What is the optimal dose of resistance training for longevity?
A Guide to Detraining: What to Expect, How to Mitigate Losses, and How to Get Back to Full Strength
Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) - General Physical Activity Guidelines
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:02
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.
Solo Host Episode on Strength Training Frequency
00:00:41
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 46 of the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Laurel and I'm here solo today to talk to you about a topic I get asked about pretty frequently and this is the topic of frequency in strength training or how often we should work out specifically strength train in a week.
00:01:04
Speaker
This is an important topic, and when I polled Instagram in my stories to ask if this was something they'd like me to record an episode on, I got a resounding yes.
Introduction of Free Bone Density Mini-Course
00:01:15
Speaker
Before we get into this topic of frequency, though, I have a very exciting announcement, which is that as of today, June 21st, the day this episode goes live,
00:01:26
Speaker
Sarah Court, my co-host, and I have just launched our free bone density mini course. This is a four-part mini course that you will receive in four daily installments straight to your email inbox. It's over 90 minutes of content. Our motivation for creating this mini course for you is to give you background on barbells and how to use them to lift heavy.
00:01:53
Speaker
High intensity strength training is a safe and effective research supported way to build bone. Sarah and I help you get comfortable with barbells by providing you with information you can start applying immediately whether in your home or in your gym. And even if you don't have barbells, this is information you could start applying with any type of resistance training equipment you use really. However, the exercise technique videos that we give you in this course are around how to use barbell specifically because
00:02:23
Speaker
Those are the best tools we have to be able to lift heavy for life. In this mini course, we share with you how to perform three staple barbell lifts, the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift. You'll learn how to set up your barbell equipment for these lifts, and you'll learn exercise techniques for these three barbelling moves as well as progressions and regressions.
00:02:47
Speaker
Throughout this course, you'll learn how to build up these movements and use tools like a training load chart, an RPE chart, that's rating of perceived exertion chart, and then how to select a reasonable and appropriate amount of weight for your warmup sets, and then
00:03:03
Speaker
eventually your working sets. It's this part of the course that is potentially new information to almost everyone listening and valuable for any type of resistance training equipment that you are currently using. Because if you're stuck in the three sets of ten paradigm, listen, three sets of ten certainly has a ton of value.
00:03:23
Speaker
but that is not actually considered high intensity or heavy lifting and it is likely not the most effective way to build bone. And so if you do or don't have barbells this is a mini course you should get regardless because it teaches you some important tools to use in strength training in general like how to build up to a heavy weight within a set and rep scheme or
00:03:46
Speaker
how to incorporate warmup sets into your warmup. However, if you do want to use the most effective tool to build bones, barbells, and you are thinking about, or I've heard from many of you, which is really exciting, you've already gotten your hands on some barbells, then this course is definitely going to get you feeling really familiar and really comfortable with this equipment.
00:04:09
Speaker
and these three really important lifts, the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift. It's also gonna give you these essential tools for training heavy no matter what equipment you're using. And so bone density is a goal of this audience.
00:04:24
Speaker
but bone density aside for a second if you ever plan to use barbells in the future for any reason maybe it's barbells at your gym or maybe you want to try a modality where barbells are frequently used like CrossFit no matter what environment you're curious to try barbells within this guide is going to give you the ins and outs of this equipment so that when it comes time you know what you're doing and you won't have that awkward sort of self-conscious feeling that you get when you're using gym equipment and you've
00:04:51
Speaker
I've never used it before and this is the first time. Have you ever gone to the gym and seen the equipment and you want to try it but you feel super self-conscious? You don't know how to use it and you feel like everyone's looking at you and you feel like they are judging you like, oh shit, why don't you just totally not know what the hell she's doing with these barbells? Look, first of all, people are not looking at you and thinking this. They are completely self-absorbed and focused on themselves but I know the feeling.
00:05:19
Speaker
This mini course will make it so you step right up to the barbells at your gym and elbow the bros out of the way and start using them with complete confidence. This course will turn you into a barbell baddie!
00:05:31
Speaker
Now look, Sarah and I think this free course is essential for all women because we've noticed that training with barbells, particularly in the way we teach you to in this mini course is quite a bit different from how we notice most women training, which is one, not with barbells, and unfortunately often with weights that are so light that they barely or just don't even provide your body with a strength stimulus, and two,
00:06:00
Speaker
Typically, women are not lifting heavier than a moderate load. They are doing something more along the lines of three sets of 10, or maybe even lighter than that. There's nothing wrong with three sets of 10. I mean, go back and listen to Sarah's solo episode about this particularly popular set and rep scheme. But if you have any interest in learning the process of lifting heavier weights, weights you can't lift more than five or six times, then our barbell mini course will give you the tools to do that.
00:06:29
Speaker
and it will teach you to use this equipment to do those warm-up sets, to progressively add plates, to work into heavier loads within a workout, to use a training load chart to know how much weight you should even start with, to use an RPE chart to understand what exertion level you're targeting,
00:06:47
Speaker
And to basically just feel confident in your ability to navigate this equipment because you understand how to use the equipment, how to use it correctly, and how to properly prepare yourself for a lift that's heavier than you are probably used to lifting. Now, you've probably heard we also have this free barbell equipment guide that we've been passing around as well. Well, it's this mini course again, which is totally free.
00:07:13
Speaker
is something you should get your hands on, watch, get a feel for what's entailed with using barbells, and you'll also get the barbell guide included in it. So if you haven't gotten the barbell guide, it's coming in the mini course. Then if your interests are peaked, you got the guide, you can peruse the equipment and maybe consider getting it. To get the mini course immediately in your inbox, you'll also get the barbell guide. Go to the link in our show notes,
00:07:42
Speaker
and click on it. You'll be prompted to enter your first name, your email address, and you should see that mini course soon after that right in your inbox. So check your spam folder if you don't see it. Okay.
00:07:55
Speaker
Now onto our topic for this episode, which is frequency or how often we should strength train in a week. So
How Often Should You Strength Train?
00:08:05
Speaker
I get this question a lot, Laurel, how often should I be strength training? And I think I get this question a lot because people want to know how much time they need to invest in strength training to make their desired change, which is to get stronger.
00:08:23
Speaker
they want to know what the minimal effective dose is. What is the minimum I can do to make a change? And I think people understandably want to know the minimal effective dose because I think a lot of these people, one, really want to get stronger and don't want to do so little that they don't actually achieve that goal.
00:08:45
Speaker
By the way, I think this happens a lot. It's not because people aren't necessarily working out frequently enough. I think it's more related to how they aren't actually lifting heavy enough weights. The second reason that people understandably want to know the minimal effective dose is that they don't want to waste their precious time. So they want to do enough, but they don't necessarily want to do more than that, especially if it leads to diminishing returns. Like they're working out too much.
00:09:14
Speaker
And the amount extra they're working out is either not really contributing to their gains because maybe they aren't recovered enough from earlier workouts or earlier sets. All that extra work, their body isn't really effectively responding to that additional stimulus or worse, the excessive training on top of the minimal effective dose or just the effective dose could potentially cause them to have some pain or some injury. Now, another reason I think I get asked this question a lot
00:09:42
Speaker
is because I work with a lot of yoga and Pilates teachers. And what I've noticed about this population is that they can trend toward being a little bit perfectionistic, meaning they can get a little caught up in things like what, how, how much to make sure that they're doing things quote unquote, right, which I think is actually pretty admirable. Meanwhile, you'll often hear to make gains, you need to be lifting at least three times a week.
00:10:11
Speaker
That's the most common prescription for frequency I hear, and there's some research to support it, but this may not be true for some, and it's absolutely not true for all, or maybe even most. And even if we believe this is true, what do we do when we find that our lives are not really set up in a way where working out three times a week is feasible? Okay, so back to the perfectionists who are listening. Unfortunately,
00:10:37
Speaker
What I think happens is that we can fall prey to all or nothing type thinking. This is really common trait amongst perfectionists. It's really easy for perfectionist type thinkers who can kind of get into that all or nothing trap to go, well, then if I can't do it right, and in this case they think three times a week is right, then it's not even worth me trying to get in one or two times a week.
00:11:02
Speaker
And then what happens is that they don't train at all. And here's the deal. This is tragic because that belief that it's not worth training once or twice a week. Cause I can't train three times a week. That belief is so far from the truth that it, I find it very sad to think that this is what many people might've been led to believe by overconfident, overly simplified claims about how much people should be working out every week from experts and influencers. And I think it's extra important.
00:11:32
Speaker
that when we're talking about strength training and recommending frequency to anyone, but especially a group of people that might trend more perfectionist in nature, that we make this point really early on. Literally any amount of strength training is so incredibly much, much better than none, that any doubt in your mind about whether or not you're doing enough, and doubts about if it's even worth it to do the little that you are able to do in a week,
00:12:01
Speaker
should immediately be replaced by this mantra. Any amount is superior to none. Any amount, even just one set of an exercise, is superior to none. Any amount, no matter how small, is far superior to none. And this really reminds me actually of a beautiful quote from the Bhagavad Gita, which is, on this path, effort never goes to waste.
00:12:29
Speaker
And there is no failure. Even a little effort towards spiritual awareness will protect you from the greatest fear. I think the same can be said about strength training and exercise in general, of course, in a very different context, which is that on this path, even very small amounts of exercise are not a waste. You are not failing when you do even the smallest amount of exercise instead of doing none.
00:12:54
Speaker
A small amount of exercise will protect your health far better than doing none at all. And you know what? I think if these were the first words influencers and experts let slip out of their mouth,
00:13:08
Speaker
that even a very small amount of strength training is far better than doing none at all before rattling off a bunch of context free advice based mostly on anecdote and not so much on evidence about how much people quote should be doing we might have better adherence we might see more people training not giving up not feeling defeated and we might see people doing more
00:13:33
Speaker
even just a little bit more and more often, and I think that would just be a really good thing for public health. In fact, if your goal is longevity, it looks like as few as 30 to 60 minutes a week can give you most of the benefits to resistance training, even though higher doses might be better for something like diabetes prevention.
00:13:59
Speaker
I'll link this in the show notes, but a study performed on older adults, by the way, older in exercise science is typically defined as people above either the age of 60 or 65. I think it's usually 65. A study performed on older adults found no risk reductions. So like no improvement to longevity for people doing 130 to 140 minutes a week.
00:14:29
Speaker
Okay, so that's like two hours and 10 minutes to two hours and 20 minutes a week. And in fact, they found that there may be a higher increase in risk for this amount of resistance training for this population. So 130 to 140 minutes is like a lot more time than 30 to 60 minutes. And it might actually have diminishing returns. And so what this research suggests is that for this particular population of older folks,
00:14:56
Speaker
people over 65 probably. You might actually be better off just sticking to something less than 130 minutes, but like 30 to 60 might be more than enough. 30 to 60 minutes is not actually that much time. This could be the minimal effect of dose to prevent death, to stave off life-ending diseases, chronic diseases.
00:15:23
Speaker
And you can easily do 30 to 60 minutes of strength training in one or two workouts a week. You certainly wouldn't need to do three, although you could divide that time into three separate workouts for sure. And this is part of what we're gonna be talking about, the benefit of doing that.
00:15:43
Speaker
By the way, people who perform resistance training have significantly lower rates of all-cause mortality. They're likely to live longer. They're less likely to die of things like cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes. The average risk reductions here are actually pretty big. They're like 12-17%. Big gain, all-cause mortality improves.
00:16:08
Speaker
not a lot of input with just 30 to 60 minutes of resistance training. And again, for older folks, there might be benefit to staying under 130 to 140 minutes of resistance training. Okay, so hopefully it's becoming clear that I'm not about to give you a quickie answer to the question, how often should I resistance train? What I am going to do in this episode is help you think about this question better and understand what we're actually talking about when we talk about frequency.
00:16:39
Speaker
what is important to consider when we talk about frequency
Sources and References for Strength Training
00:16:42
Speaker
and what research has to say about the role frequency plays in making and maintaining gains. Okay, before we dive in, I want to share that I've gotten the majority of information I have to share with you in this episode from three main sources, all of which are evidence-based. They're all linked in the show notes. This is in no particular order.
00:17:02
Speaker
But the first is my NSCA textbook, Essentials of Strength and Conditioning. It's my personal trainer textbook I use to study for the test. The second is Stronger by Science, Predominantly Greg Knuckles Writing. They have a wonderful blog. I've linked the articles in the show notes. You should definitely check them out. And then Chris Beardsley, who is a prolific writer and exercise scientist who I've studied with personally via his mentorship. So I've linked his articles in the show notes as well.
00:17:31
Speaker
What's so great about Greg Knuckles and Chris Beardsley is that they're able to make the science understandable without oversimplifying it and then making it wrong. So it's all evidence based and it's all really smart writing. And really a lot of it, it can be a little bit heavy on the technical language.
00:17:51
Speaker
But at any level of your experience in understanding this content, you can read these articles and come away with something new, some new, more informed way of thinking about strength. So I highly recommend that you check them out. They're like my primary go-to people. Okay, so basically when we talk about frequency,
00:18:08
Speaker
we're talking about dosage. We definitely don't want too little a dose so that the little dose we do invest in giving our body a strengthening stimulus ends up kind of being a waste of time because it was too little to make a change in the first place. But we also don't want too high a dose that, you know, one might eat into our weekly time where we might prefer to be doing other things like spending time with our kids, doing our jobs, spending time with our spouse or friends, cleaning our house or engaging in some hobby or
00:18:39
Speaker
worse that too high a dose could maybe be so high that it lands us in a world of hurt or burnout. No, we want that Goldilocks dose, which is just enough to make gains, but not so much that our effort becomes redundant or counterproductive.
00:18:55
Speaker
And here's what I think is the most generic advice we hear about frequency from the influencers and coaches, which I've already said, which is that we should be working out three times a week. By the end of this episode, you'll learn that this is pretty empty advice. Rather, it's advice that is seriously lacking in context to even be helpful. Here's another misconception I think we have related to frequency, which is that I think when we think about a workout,
00:19:23
Speaker
So if we're doing one, two, three, four workouts in a week, I think when we think about a workout, we assume that that workout should last for one hour. I don't know why, but maybe it's because one hour is often the length of group fitness, that it's this really easy unit of time. But if we were to take this advice to work out three times a week for one hour,
00:19:47
Speaker
as a hypothetical, just to use as an example to kind of root someone I'm going to share with you in a specific example.
Training Volume vs Frequency Explained
00:19:55
Speaker
That would be three times a week. That's the frequency for one hour each workout. That's 180 minutes a week. Now, even though it's not usually expressed in units of time, that amount of time spent working out is not
00:20:10
Speaker
actually indicative of frequency, it's rather more related to volume. Okay, so I'm going to be talking about volume quite a bit in this episode. But if you want even more background on what that means, go back and listen to Episode 32 load and volume, when is enough enough? When is it too much?
00:20:27
Speaker
and you'll get more background on what this word means. But I'm gonna tell you right now that we can't talk about frequency and have it really mean anything unless we're also talking about volume. So if volume is the total amount of strengthening input we expose our body to via exercises, the number of sets we do of those exercises, the number of reps we do within those sets of those exercises in a week,
00:20:55
Speaker
That's volume. Volume is typically measured in weekly intervals of time in research. That's volume. Then frequency is actually how we divide up that volume into workouts and put them on separate days. Let's analogize this to food. Think of all the food you eat in a week. That's your total weekly volume of food.
00:21:24
Speaker
Now, if you ate all the food you eat in a week in one day, you'd be stuffed, that'd be really bad, it'd be impossible actually. So instead, you spread it out at a frequency of about 21 meals per week or three meals a day for seven days. So volume, or total amount of food you're eating, frequency, how you divide up that food into separate meals.
00:21:52
Speaker
Here's another one. Think of all the sleep you get in a week. If you got all your sleep for the week, in two days, you'd be sleeping for likely a full 24 hour period, and then you'd wake up about halfway into the second 24 hour period, and then you'd be awake for five and a half days straight, which would be really bad. So instead, you spread out your sleep in bouts of like six to nine hours, seven days a week with a few naps thrown in there for good measure.
00:22:22
Speaker
So volume, when it comes to strength training, volume, think dosage or optimal volume, optimal training dosage, that Goldilocks amount, there is no fixed right amount. There is no fixed Goldilocks amount. Man, would that be easy. Doesn't exist.
00:22:45
Speaker
because optimal training volume varies by individual. It also varies by muscle groups and it also varies by what types of exercises you're doing in a workout. There is no one right dosage for everyone and there isn't even one right dosage for one person forever. So let me give you a few quick examples. Optimal training volume varies by individual.
00:23:07
Speaker
Now this actually speaks directly to one of the four principles of strength training. We've heard probably a lot about progressive overload. That's one. We've probably heard of specificity or specific adaptations to impose demands. That's two. So strength requires progressive overload. All strength is specific.
00:23:27
Speaker
The third lesser known one is variety, right? We have to vary how we're exposing our body to loads so that we prevent overuse injury predominantly and we stay sensitive to the stimulus. But there's this fourth very little discussed principle called individuality. Okay, so this principle tells us
00:23:50
Speaker
that different people will respond differently to a strength training program, even if that program is delivered in exactly the same way and the exactly the same amount between individuals. So whereas one person might be able to tolerate a particular training volume, another might find that that same training volume is more than their body can adequately recover from and positively adapt to.
00:24:16
Speaker
And yet another person might find that that training volume is not stimulating enough to drive changes toward increased strength in their body. It's not enough to make the desired change. So here we have a fixed amount of volume. One person gets this Goldilocks dosage. The next one gets an overdose. And the next one gets an underdose. It's the same volume. When we talk about frequency, there is no one size fits all.
00:24:43
Speaker
because when we're talking about frequency we're talking about how we're dividing up total weekly volume and total weekly volume is going to be different individual to individual. Now optimal training volume also varies by the muscle groups you're training. Some muscle groups
00:24:59
Speaker
may take longer to recover than others, meaning that if you stimulate two different muscle groups enough to make a change to their strength, you might experience more muscle damage or muscle soreness in one group of muscles due to that stimulus, that strengthening stimulus, versus the other
00:25:22
Speaker
in subsequent days after the workout. Now, scientists don't fully understand. I love this. Scientists still don't really fully understand delayed onset muscle soreness. The soreness you get 12 to 24 to even 48 hours after a workout, they don't understand its relationship to muscle damage, which is something that happens as a result of strength training. It's not a
00:25:47
Speaker
It's not an injury. It's not a bad thing necessarily, but your muscle becomes to a certain extent damaged and then needs to repair. And in that span of time that that's happening, we tend to also experience this protein synthesis taking place, which causes us to maybe grow our muscles bigger, or just we might experience other adaptations that lead us to be stronger. But people tend to think that muscle damage is what causes the soreness. But something I learned from Chris Beardsley in my mentorship that I did with him is that actually
00:26:17
Speaker
that doesn't quite make sense because the timelines don't really match up. Because if muscle damage did cause muscle soreness, we'd experience muscle soreness immediately after completing muscle damaging sets of an exercise. Say you're doing pull-ups, but we don't. We don't immediately feel muscle soreness right after doing a set. It's usually 12 to 24 to 48 hours
00:26:42
Speaker
After we did those exercises that we suddenly start to feel that soreness and this is long after The damage from the exercise from the forces that we expose our muscles to take place So it's a it's a bit of a scientific mystery which I love because you'll hear a lot of people speak very confidently about muscle soreness and attributing it to muscle damage and then
00:27:02
Speaker
They go even further to connect muscle damage with strength, which that's also kind of a shaky connection to make because the two processes of getting stronger, which is more anabolic in nature, are actually completely separate from muscle damage, which is catabolic in nature. They just happen kind of at the same time. Anyway, I learned all this from Chris and the mentorship was fascinating, but it's still kind of a scientific mystery like why we have muscle soreness, what mechanisms are causing it,
00:27:30
Speaker
science is still a little bit flummoxed about this. And yeah, I think it's great. I think it's great that they don't know because if science doesn't have all the answers, we don't have to have all the answers either. Whoo, what a relief. Anyway, some muscles are just more prone to soreness after a workout than others. And some research shows that this might maybe have more to do with fiber type
00:27:54
Speaker
distribution in some muscles over others. There's different fiber types. Your muscles are made up of fibers and there's something called type 1 fibers and something called type 2 fibers. You probably have heard like slow twitch or fast twitch. Type 1 is slow twitch. Type 1 fibers are highly fatigue resistant, whereas type 2 fibers, fast twitch, are highly fatigueable. If you have a muscle with proportionally more type 2 fibers in it,
00:28:23
Speaker
then a muscle with less type two fibers in it, proportionally speaking, you might experience more symptoms of fatigue from tiring that muscle out, like muscle soreness, right? Then you would a muscle with a lower percentage of those fiber types. That's a theory. I don't know that it's like really strong one that a lot of, like everyone's behind, okay? I think more studies are needed.
00:28:49
Speaker
But this theory might also explain differences between individuals. Some people have overall a higher proportion of type 2 fibers than others. And science suggests that those individuals with a higher proportion of fast twitch or type 2 fibers may experience more muscle soreness from resistance training than their type 1 dominant counterparts. So sensitivity to resistance training like the next day you're more sore
00:29:18
Speaker
than like other people you talk to, it could, it could, it could be related to genetics largely and like what your fiber type distribution is. Okay. But again, more studies are needed, but just to shed a little light on like this idea of fatigue is really important to consider when we're talking about frequency, because frequency, like optimal frequency takes into account how much time we actually need to recover.
00:29:43
Speaker
from the previous workout. And not just frequency, but also volume. So how we're dividing up that volume into separate meals or sleeps or workouts. Optimal training volume also varies by workouts. We have it varying by individual, we have it varying by muscle group, and now we have it varying by workouts. Or really, what are the exercise, the nature of the exercises you're doing in a workout?
00:30:13
Speaker
If I do concentric only strength training, this happens a lot in CrossFit. Okay, so in CrossFit, you'll lift a barbell up off of the ground, it'll be a heavy one, and then you'll drop it. You won't lower it, you'll just drop it, you'll let gravity bring it down to the ground. This is called concentric only strength training. You're only doing the lifting phase, the concentric phase. There's also eccentric only training, or eccentric overload, right, where you're only doing the lowering phase, usually
00:30:40
Speaker
with a super maximal load, a load that you couldn't lift up, but you can lower with control. Between these two ways of training, you could train the same exercise using these two different ways, and it would be a completely different way of training. It is the case that eccentric training produces more muscle soreness than concentric training tends to.
00:31:01
Speaker
You could also do partial range of motion strength training or full range of motion strength training. Partial range of motion is like you don't move through the full arc of movement. Your joint is capable of moving through under load. You move through only part of that arc of movement. And it looks like full range of motion strength training is going to produce potentially more fatigue the next day or more muscle soreness than partial range of motion strength training.
00:31:30
Speaker
bodybuilders are known to do a lot of partial range of motion training because it works. Different muscle fibers that they're trying to bulk up. Then training further from failure versus to failure, you take a set and you go all the way to failure, meaning you go all the way until you can't do another rep and you attempt
00:31:52
Speaker
That next rep and you fail it, you don't complete it. That's called training to failure versus training further from failure, staying, you know, one or two reps shy. Failure we sometimes call this like reps in reserve. Go back and listen to Sarah's episode about three sets of 10. She talks about reps in reserve. I also talk about it in my episode on load and volume. But basically if you train to failure, you're probably going to be
00:32:18
Speaker
more sore the next day, right? So optimal training volume for someone who trains to failure is gonna be different for somebody who doesn't train to failure. Optimal training volume is gonna be different for people doing eccentric only exercise than it is for people doing concentric only exercise than it is for people doing traditional strength training. And same thing with partial and full range of motion. For people doing partial range of motion exercise, their training, optimal training volume is gonna be different
00:32:45
Speaker
than people doing full range of motion training. So I'm telling you all this just so that you understand that saying that people should work out three times a week is like, hooey. It doesn't mean anything because there's just so much to consider and honestly,
00:33:04
Speaker
you don't even have to consider all of this. Just know that there is this much to consider. It's not this complicated to start strength training. It's just that when you study strength training, you study strength science, you start to understand like how rich of a topic it is and how much nuance there is. And then so then all the bro-y influencers online, you start to be like, okay, not only are you sort of annoying to listen to, but you're also like not making any sense, dude, the takeaway
Effectiveness of Twice vs Thrice Weekly Training
00:33:34
Speaker
here.
00:33:34
Speaker
should be that in order to decide how frequently we should be working out in a week, we're looking at minimal effective dose of volume. And this is the minimal effective dose of volume we need to expose our bodies to, to continue to make changes to our strength. And that volume will vary person to person. It will also vary muscle group to muscle group, and it will also vary workout to workout.
00:34:01
Speaker
based on what you do. So back to the, you should be training three times a week advice. Now, if it's true that we should be training three times a week, then of course we need to understand like what volume we're divvying up into three workouts a week. What amount of volume? Okay. Because if it's too much volume at the end of the day, three times a week is going to be too much frequency. If it's too little volume,
00:34:29
Speaker
three times a week is gonna be, it's not gonna matter, right? So it's really about the volume. And we should ask like, if I keep the volume the same during the week, could I not just do two workouts a week? Could I split it up into two? Or could I do four or five shorter workouts a week? Would I see the same results? And here's what research suggests about this question. This research that I'm gonna share with you
00:34:54
Speaker
I got this from Greg Knuckles in his great article in Stronger by Science, which I'm linking in the show notes, called Training Frequency for Strength Development, What the Data Say. This research looked at volume matched comparisons, volume matched comparisons in weekly frequency.
00:35:12
Speaker
volume match. This is a really important part of this comparison because what this meta-analysis managed to do is isolate frequency. In other words, often actually when research looks at frequency, it researches it in a way where volume is not matched. In other words, it's researched in a way where the findings from the studies cannot be attributed solely to changes in frequency because there were also changes in volume. Higher frequency typically means higher volume.
00:35:41
Speaker
and this change in volume, this increase in volume, then confounds any findings related to frequency, making it hard to say whether it was the change in frequency that led to the difference, the change in volume that led to the difference or both. Or if I use a previous analogy, if I eat 18 meals in a week and gain weight, but then the next week I eat 24 meals in a week and lose weight, should I think eating more frequently causes people to lose weight?
00:36:11
Speaker
Hopefully not. Hopefully I should go, wait a second, back up. How many calories were consumed in these weeks? Now, if those calories were matched and I'm still seeing a difference in weight gain versus weight loss, that's when I could potentially start to wonder further if maybe eating more frequently results in weight loss somehow. Now, I totally made this example up. I'm not basing it on any research. It's just an analogy for my brain.
00:36:38
Speaker
But there you go. The thing is like typically frequency and strength training is used as a vehicle for increasing volume. So I work out two times a week for an hour. Then I start working out three times a week for an hour. That's a 50% increase in weekly volume.
00:36:53
Speaker
Because now I'm working out three hours when I was working out two hours, by the way, which is a massive increase in volume and not one I would recommend you make so abruptly. But just know that in this meta-analysis that we're looking at, it wasn't the case that more frequency meant more volume. Volume was matched. Because of this, we can more confidently ascribe the differences we see as being due to frequency rather than volume. If you want to go to the article,
00:37:21
Speaker
Check it out in the show notes. You can check out details of how this was measured. Greg goes into painstaking detail. I'm not going to talk about that. I'm going to jump directly to the results. Okay. He writes, when looking at mean weekly gains, it appears that three times a week is best. One time, two times, three times, and four times a week are compared. And it seems like the gains are somewhat linear.
00:37:49
Speaker
So the more frequently you work out, this is volume matched by the way. So one time a week we're doing all of it. Two times a week we've split it in half maybe. Three times a week we split it into thirds. Four times a week we split it into quarters. And it appears like three times a week is best. But the only significant difference was between one time a week and three times a week. Significant, what does that mean? If you don't know, because I definitely didn't,
00:38:18
Speaker
A significant or non-significant difference in research measures the probability that the results we get from a measurement made in research are due to chance. In other words, significant results mean there's a low probability that results were due to chance. And non-significant results mean that there's a high probability
00:38:39
Speaker
that results were due to chance. We can't really take that difference and ascribe too much meaning to it. We might take that non-significant difference with a grain of salt because it could just be chance. The significant difference, the one that was probably not due to chance was between one times and three times a week.
00:39:00
Speaker
So in other words, when it was between two and three times a week, this difference, like the improvements people were able to make in their strength by working out three times a week instead of two times a week was not significant. And it was also not significant when looking at the difference between three and four times a week, really just one time a week and then three times a week. It kind of like.
00:39:23
Speaker
Honestly, it really makes sense because if you're taking all your weekly volume and trying to do it all in one workout instead of across three workouts, you can maybe imagine if you've done any strength training or really just any exercise at all. Let's take a hike. Most of us, we probably are familiar with walking long distances. Let's say in a week, you try to walk
00:39:48
Speaker
Let's say in a week you try to walk 15 miles, okay? If you did a 15 mile hike in one day, damn, that would be hard, right? And you might actually see like some diminishing returns because of it. This is not a great comparison, but anyway, stay with me. But if you split that 15 miles up into three separate days, you're just walking five miles each time,
00:40:11
Speaker
Like suddenly that just, that seems a lot more doable, right? Well, with strength, what happens is we do too much in a workout. We do too many exercises, too many sets. Basically, by the time we get to the later exercises in the workout or the later sets in the, in the set rep scheme, we stop making a change to our strength because we're basically just working from a very fatigued place in our body.
00:40:32
Speaker
where we're not able to recruit well, we're not able to experience muscle tension well so that we don't actually end up making changes to our strength, we're just kind of like, it's redundant, it's pointless, it's better to do less actually. Because like when we're fatigued, we're less strong, right? So we're not actually inputting that like strength into our body, we're instead just working under fatigue. But okay, so back to this paper, Greg goes on and he says,
00:41:00
Speaker
It looks like if you do a direct comparison, it says it looks like one to three times a week, there's a significant benefit to increasing frequency, and all the rest are non-significant. But he goes on to say, when you compare these frequencies more directly, and this has to do with how you're looking at the numbers and it's way over my head, but the data tells a different story. It shows that four to five times a week is best. Because now you're taking that 15-mile walk,
00:41:26
Speaker
And you're doing four to five shorter walks that add up to 15, right? You're taking that really long strength training workout and you're dividing it up into four to five smaller workouts in the week. He says that four to five appears to be best. So depending on how you compare these frequencies, how you compare the data, you could come to the conclusion that three times a week is best, or you could come to the conclusion that four to five times a week is best.
00:41:51
Speaker
he implies that the more direct comparison is the better way to compare these frequencies. Therefore, my takeaway was Greg is basically advocating for four to five times a week as long as volume is matched. We're not adding volume by adding one or two workouts to get four to five workouts a week. We're keeping the volume the same. We're splitting this workout into smaller chunks.
00:42:13
Speaker
And again, that makes sense. Like I run, I'm not very good at it, but like if I were to go and try to run five miles, right now my goal is to run six miles a week. Okay. But not in one shot. God, no. My goal is to run six miles total in a week. So I'm going out and I'm running a mile.
00:42:29
Speaker
And then maybe two days later I'll go out and run two miles. Then three days later I'll go out and run 2.5 miles, whatever. You see, so like for me, my quality of running is so much better when I run for less distance. Like I enjoy it so much more. Okay. Anyway, for the sake of simplicity, when we're talking about strength training, let's use this simple hypothetical. Your weekly dose of strength input. Okay. Your weekly volume.
00:42:54
Speaker
is that you're doing 12 exercises in a week. And so you're doing three upper body pushes, you're doing three upper body pulls, that's six. And then you're doing six lower body exercises total, so that's 12. And for each of these exercises, this is just to keep this really, really simple in our brains. Let's say you're doing three sets of 10. Okay, three sets of 10. So all told, we're doing 12 exercises multiplied by three sets, that's 36. And then we'll multiply that
00:43:23
Speaker
by the reps, which is 10 for each set. And we get 360. This number means nothing. It's really just meant to show you an amount. It means nothing mostly because we don't know how much weight we're lifting. We also don't know the exercises. It really means nothing. But hopefully this roots this in kind of an amount, an idea of amount. So the single big dose of strength training is 360.
00:43:51
Speaker
All right, now what happens if we do it all in one workout? Who knows? I don't know. You could probably do 12 exercises in a workout, three sets of 10. It wouldn't be like trying to eat all your food in one day. It wouldn't be that ridiculous. You could do it. Some people could do it.
00:44:08
Speaker
But it might suck. It might take you too long. The quality of your workout might rapidly devolve toward the end because you're tired from the first half of the workout. Do you see what I'm saying? It might, you know, just be unpleasant as well.
00:44:25
Speaker
Instead, what if we split these exercises and this volume up into two workouts? That's much better. Really, in real-world scenarios, taking 12 exercises and doing six and six and two separate workouts, that sounds like, yeah, it's a totally doable amount of volume. We're doing three sets of 10 of each exercise. We stay focused. If we stay focused, we're not on our phone or Instagram or getting caught up with some distraction. We could probably complete that in less than 45 minutes pretty easily.
00:44:53
Speaker
Okay, so that's not an unreasonable amount of time to work out. But it's also the case we could split that amount up into three workouts. Okay, so now we're doing four exercises per workout. Maybe these workouts are like 20, 30 minutes at most. And the best news is that when we do this, when we split these exercises up into four workouts, we're probably going to experience even less interference in our ability to be as strong as possible for every single rep.
00:45:19
Speaker
because we won't be too fatigued from the last exercise of the workout because there weren't that many there there's only four total exercises so we might see improvements to our strength certainly we would see improvements to our strength i would say when compared to like one time a week but wait there's more you could go further and split this amount of work up into four weekly workouts now we're only doing three exercises a week this is what i did when i was working with my personal trainer
00:45:48
Speaker
who was programming a lot of pull-up work for me, the idea was that I was gonna split it up over the week. And I could kind of choose how I was gonna do that. I took all the upper body pulling exercises and I put them on separate days, because I knew I would be fresher for every single one if I just split them all up. And I made big gains in my strength. Maybe because this schedule, yeah, it allowed me to recover and be strong for every next exercise in the week, but it also promoted my ability
00:46:17
Speaker
to do all of the work in smaller chunks, which logistically works better for me. Because for me, it's easier for me to work out in short spurts more often than it is for me to find big chunks of time to train, especially at home or like distractions are just relentless. And it ensured that all of that work was going to be fairly high quality because I would be more recovered between exercises done days apart
00:46:45
Speaker
then I would exercise this done minutes apart were they done in the same workout. So this example that I just gave you is an example of per muscle group frequency.
00:46:55
Speaker
So you're taking different exercises, they're all different exercises, but they all kind of targeted the same muscle groups. This is an example of taking per muscle group frequency and either condensing it or diluting the amount of fatigue you subject your body to by either putting these exercises all in one day or splitting them up over different days.
00:47:17
Speaker
So we can condense fatigue, which means that fatigue might become much more of an interference to our ability to build strength. Or we can dilute fatigue. We can spread our workouts out more. Workouts are rather exercises that target the same muscle group more.
00:47:36
Speaker
so that when we do this, fatigue does not interfere as much in our ability to build strength. So again, we're thinking about fatigue when we're thinking about frequency. So when we're trying to figure out the right frequency, we're thinking primarily about how we might strategize recovery days so that when we come back to do more exercises, we're fresh.
00:48:03
Speaker
And it looks like when volume is matched, like we're not using frequency to drive increases in volume, but when volume is matched, no matter how we dice it,
00:48:12
Speaker
At the end of the week, we could have done the same volume in one, two, three, four, even five workouts, but when we divide it up into four and five workouts, it might be the case that we're going to see greater increases to our strength. Nothing changed about the workout. We just divided it up into smaller chunks. We might see greater increases to our strength than we would if we condensed all that volume into fewer workouts, which I think is, it's good to know, right? Good to know.
00:48:40
Speaker
This meta-analysis actually saw significant findings. So again, findings that were probably not due to chance and large effect sizes, which I will define effect size in a second, especially for upper body pushing exercises.
00:49:01
Speaker
Increasing frequency doesn't work just as good for every single type of exercise. It works particularly well for upper body pushing exercises, especially when training the upper body push three times a week instead of one times a week. Now, what is an effect size? An effect size is either big or small. I think there's probably moderate effect sizes too, but
00:49:26
Speaker
If we just look at dichotomous terms between big effect size, small effect size, an effect size is a difference that is either too small, that's a small effect size, or great enough, that's a large effect size, to be applicable in the real world, to be applicable outside of the lab, to be applicable in an environment that is not super controlled, where there's so many other confounding variables at play. You can find that there's a difference between two interventions,
00:49:55
Speaker
in the lab, but that doesn't actually tell you if that's actually even going to be useful in the real world, if it's going to make a difference in real life. Because if the effect is so small, so many other confounding factors in the real world might just wash out that difference. It's like not even, you won't notice it, right? It won't really make a difference. But if the effect size is large enough, then consistently, even in uncontrolled environments like real life, we could probably expect to see that in this case, in going from one time to three times a week of training the upper body pushes,
00:50:23
Speaker
we could potentially expect to see real world changes to our upper body pushing strength. So I know a lot of you are really into pushups or chaturangas or down dogs. If you really wanted to get good at those exercises, say you've got like a
00:50:37
Speaker
a prescribed weekly volume that you're training your upper body pushes in, right? What if you took that weekly volume, you actually divided it up into instead of one or two workouts a week, what if you went for three? What if you went for four? What if you went for five? Would you notice a difference in your strength? Would your strength improve?
00:50:57
Speaker
Um, it's hard to say because like probably week to week you're also increasing volume because that's how progressive overload works. But anyway, it's something to consider, right? It's something to consider. So why the upper body push? Why does that, those muscle groups, why did they respond so positively? It's probably because the upper body recovers faster. The upper body recovers faster. These muscles recover faster.
00:51:21
Speaker
from a strength input than lower body muscles do, or maybe that upper body pulling muscles do. And so it might be that the muscles are just smaller. There's less muscle mass, right? If you fatigue less muscle mass, you're going to experience less fatigue, right? If you fatigue more muscle mass, like your lower body muscles are just much bigger. If you fatigue more muscle mass, you're going to experience more total fatigue, right?
00:51:42
Speaker
But there could be other things that play here, fiber type. Who knows? But it's just the case that research in the lab experimentally, what seems to be the case is that your upper body pushing muscles might benefit from divvying up how you're stimulating them in smaller chunks throughout the week.
Frequency Strategy and Recovery for Muscle Groups
00:52:00
Speaker
Then of course, if we're matching volume, we're not messing with our volume, we're just training more frequently. By necessity, hopefully this is obvious, it means that per workout volume is less.
00:52:13
Speaker
And so then, okay, of course it might follow that if per workout volume is less, right, we're going to recover the next day from that lower volume than we would if that were a longer workout that we had just done. The next day we're going to be probably more fatigued. Had we done a longer workout the day before, then had we done a shorter workout the day before. So again, divvying up.
00:52:34
Speaker
your weekly volume into smaller chunks is, is just kind of common sense. Like you're going to recover better. You may be able to complete higher quality work each time. Now I frequently notice this anecdotally to be true for me. Like I'll train two days in a row, sometimes working different muscle groups. Sometimes I'll train the same muscle group two days in a row and I'll see positive. I'll continue to drive changes. I'll see positive changes from that.
00:53:02
Speaker
In fact, this is something I've been working out with in my pull-up training, which is that instead of doing two or three long workouts to improve my pull-up strength, I've been experimenting with trying to hit a certain number of sets in a week. So instead of workouts in a week, I'm thinking sets in a week, right? And I'm thinking, you know, right now I'm trying to hit 10 sets of five pull-ups in a week. So I'm doing sets of five.
00:53:30
Speaker
five reps and I'm trying to do 10 in a week. So on days when I'm strong, I might do two or three sets, right? With a lot of rest in between, believe me, like rest like four or five minutes between these sets. But on days when I am maybe not feeling as strong, like maybe I, maybe it's the day after I worked pull ups, right? I might just do one set. So I'm playing around with this idea of, um,
00:53:56
Speaker
working with a higher frequency, same volume, higher frequency. And I tried this and I ended up training six days out of the week. I did two sets on Monday, two sets on Wednesday. Then I did a set on Thursday, another on Friday. That's six. Then I finished with two sets on Saturday and two sets on Sunday. Um, that's quite a bit of volume, but I've been working on pull-ups for many years and I'm ready for this amount of volume. And I have to say letting go of the container of now I am working out for this big amount of time.
00:54:24
Speaker
and letting it be more like, oh, there's the pull-up bar. And I have five to 10 minutes, so let's knock out some stats. Usually I'll do pull-ups before, I'll go to my CrossFit to do CrossFit. And before we start, I'll just go over to the pull-up bar and do like one or two sets of pull-ups. It's been really great. It's been really great. Now, this is an example. So the example I gave with how I worked with my trainer's programming was an example of breaking up exercises that target a specific muscle group.
00:54:55
Speaker
into more workouts. This example that I just gave you is an example of breaking up a single exercise, breaking the sets up into multiple bouts of exercise or multiple workouts in a week. Can you imagine if I tried to do 10 sets of five in one workout? It wouldn't happen. I can't do more than three sets of five in a workout because I can't complete a fourth set of five. I can't. What this allows me to do is
00:55:24
Speaker
have higher quality performance of these sets across the span of a week and do more volume because of it. So this is what's called per exercise volume. So we've got per muscle group volume, per exercise volume, and then the question is how should we split these up in terms of frequency. So we can increase frequency with which we are targeting a muscle group or an exercise while keeping that volume match.
00:55:53
Speaker
And so what this meta-analysis suggests is that higher frequency training can independently promote larger gains in strength. Here are the explanations Greg gave for why this might be the case. One, higher workout quality each time you work out. This is speaking mostly to the fact that you just have more recovery time between exercises or between sets of an exercise.
00:56:18
Speaker
you also become more skilled at the movements, right? So you can be more skillful when you're not under a great deal of fatigue. We tend to not have great capacity to motor learn when we're fatigued. Motor learning suffers. But if we can be fresh when we're learning a movement pattern, and strength training requires a decent amount of skill, right? Especially compound exercises like the squat. The fresher we can be each time we go to do that exercise, the more skilled we'll become over time.
00:56:47
Speaker
If we're looking at hypertrophy or increasing muscle mass, muscle growth, it looks like you can't really add to a muscle if the muscle is fatigued. You're not going to get high enough recruitment and you're also not going to get high enough tension that the muscle's able to experience, the muscle fibers are able to experience to cause that anabolic process to take place, to cause protein synthesis to take place.
00:57:14
Speaker
You actually need to wait for the duration of time that your muscles experiencing muscle damage for that to reduce before you then seek to cause protein synthesis again through strength training. So in other words, with hypertrophy,
00:57:33
Speaker
There's really literally, that's your goal. There's no point in trying to work out with too high of volume. However, you might benefit from splitting up whatever volume you are using to build muscle into more frequent bouts of exposure. Again, because you're going to input a little bit less and recover more so that the fatigue is spread out over the week.
00:58:03
Speaker
So one reason we might see improvements to our strength, in other words, from higher frequency workouts, is that we actually experience more hypertrophy from higher frequency workouts. And muscle growth and strength are different, but muscle growth is a really important adaptation that takes place to increase our strength.
00:58:21
Speaker
And then finally, when you're lifting heavy, you're doing warmup sets a lot of the time. And so if you're working out more frequently and you're warming up for the lifts you're doing, you're doing more warmup sets in a week, which contributes to actually a higher volume. So in this case, we're almost like kind of cheating and going like,
00:58:40
Speaker
Yeah, but more warm-up sets actually increases volume. So here's a case where it's like we actually got extra volume accidentally by doing more warm-up sets. And even though warm-up sets are submaximal, lows are not necessarily, they're not as stimulating to you being able to get stronger as like your working sets are. They're not nothing. They're not nothing. So they do contribute to some extent to your gains. All right. So it seems like frequency can improve your gains up to five times frequency per week. And I don't
00:59:10
Speaker
I think this amount of analysis looked at higher frequencies than this, but the biggest difference, the big takeaway here is that when you go from one time a week to three times a week, you're potentially going to see the most benefit. For hypertrophy, for muscle building, it looks like going from one to two times a week is actually the bigger significant difference or larger effect size.
Role of Frequency in Progressive Overload
00:59:33
Speaker
And look, everything that I've just shared with you so far, let's back up. It's all been about volume-matched frequency or taking a particular volume of exercises in a week and then playing with how we are dividing that volume up. But in the real world, and I kind of keep hinting at this, typically frequency is used to increase weekly volume. It's used as a vehicle for increasing volume.
01:00:01
Speaker
Like typically when someone starts working out more frequently, they start completing more weekly volume. Frequency is actually one of the main levers we pull to increase volume. It's also one of the main levers we can pull to progressively overload our strength. And other levers we can pull are also sets of an exercise, which is going to increase weekly volume.
01:00:24
Speaker
and also reps that we're performing of an exercise, which is an increase to volume. So go back to listen to episode 34 if you're still not quite sure what I mean by volume, right? As a reminder. Okay. So we're talking about volume match frequency, meaning we're taking the same amount of volume and splitting it up into fewer or more workouts. Like we're taking a pie and cutting it into fewer or more pieces, right?
01:00:51
Speaker
And it looks like more workouts tend to be better here. However, if we're using frequency to increase volume, so maybe we're going from two workouts a week to three workouts a week. Here's my recommendation for you. Okay. Assuming that the two workouts a week are going really well for you. It's not too much, whatever, however many exercises you're doing, however many sets, however many reps, whatever load is, right? Kind of steadily increasing the load, you know, maybe thinking about like adding a third day. Okay.
01:01:18
Speaker
This would increase your volume. You would be adding volume by increasing your frequency. This is my recommendation. Don't increase your volume, volume, by more than 10%. Week to week.
01:01:31
Speaker
What does this look like? Okay, let's go back to those 12 exercises, those three sets of 10. So let's go back to that, that random number 360. Remember, if I'm going to increase 10% the next week, what does that mean? Okay. First of all, am I increasing sets? Exercises both. It really, that would depend on your goal. But if I just take 10% of 360, that's 36.
01:01:56
Speaker
And if I add that to 360, I get about 400, right? I'm gonna round up. Okay, so now let's put this into more useful terms. We went from 360 to 400. Basically, I've probably added about four sets of 10 to my workout, which means maybe I go from doing three sets of four exercises
01:02:20
Speaker
to doing four sets of those four exercises, or maybe I've added a whole exercise, and now I'm doing four sets of 10 of that additional exercise, or maybe it's some combination. This means I'm increasing volume intelligently by 10%. No more than that. I'm not just randomly slapping on 50% more work and expecting that to go well. Don't do that. Don't do that.
01:02:47
Speaker
But I'm going to work out 3 times a week instead of 2. So what this means is that whereas I would be dividing 360 by 2, now I'm dividing 400 by 3 to get about 130. So there's a difference now per workout volume of 180 to 130.
01:03:08
Speaker
I've reduced my per workout volume considerably to be able now to increase my workout frequency, and yet I have still increased my workout volume by 10%. 10% is a conservative and appropriate and wise amount to increase your volume.
01:03:26
Speaker
Now, I took a really analytical approach to explaining this to you, just to root it in something that we can understand. You don't have to be super analytical about this, but you can be reasonable and go like, okay, I want to work out more in the week. I want to do another extra workout. I want to go from two to three times a week. How many exercises are you doing total across two workouts?
01:03:52
Speaker
and you get like 12, okay? And you go, I'm gonna add a third workout. Well, then don't do six exercises for three workouts. 12 divided by two would be six in each workout. Don't add a third workout of six exercises. Instead, maybe a good idea would be to do five exercises in two workouts and four in one. Do you see what I'm saying? So you did make an increase. You're doing more, but you're not doing that much more.
01:04:21
Speaker
You can kind of fudge it. You know how like when you cook but you don't follow a recipe, you just kind of add a little dash of that and a little dash. But you can do that with strength training too. You don't have to be like hitting the calculator and like writing everything in a spreadsheet. Not at all. Just don't like decide to do 50% more of what you've been doing. It's just usually not a good idea with exercise. And this is how we end up like being injured and being like, I don't understand what happened.
Critique on Standard Training Advice and Maintenance
01:04:50
Speaker
Okay, all right. So to review, the next time you hear the advice to train three times a week, hopefully you can recognize that while this advice could potentially hold water if we filled it in with a little bit of context, liquid context maybe, it is pretty empty otherwise, right? So we have to really ask like, who are we talking about? What is the goal? What do these workouts look like?
01:05:19
Speaker
What is the weekly volume, right? So basically, in summary, frequency matters enormously, but it cannot matter separate from volume nor separate from the context of the individual who's training. And if weekly volume is either too high or too low, it doesn't matter what frequency you're working at.
01:05:39
Speaker
Also, if too much volume is packed into too few workouts, you will not see beneficial outcomes. By the way, your workouts should not be over an hour long. That's a good rule of thumb. Just keep your workouts under an hour if you can. But these are your resistance training workouts, by the way. Next, if you have a Goldilocks amount of volume,
01:05:56
Speaker
going like you're seeing gains and you're feeling good, you have a great strategy for gradually increasing that volume over time, then you can play with frequency quite a bit and it may be that especially for upper body pushing, more frequency is more better. But it looks like it might be slightly better actually for all exercises because again, you're spreading out fatigue. Finally, and I know I said that this at the beginning of the episode that like any amount of resistance training is better than none.
01:06:24
Speaker
I'm probably going to do a whole episode either with Sarah or just solo on this topic.
01:06:30
Speaker
next season, because we're toward the end of this season. But this entire episode, we've really been talking about making gains. Like how can we make gains to our strength? But sometimes the more relevant question during a period of our life where maybe we just aren't training as much, we can't train, maybe we have an injury, maybe we go on vacation, maybe our jobs get really busy, something happens. Like our training kind of falls by the wayside. A really important, maybe far more important thing to consider
01:06:59
Speaker
than gains, like building more strength, is actually how to maintain the strength that we built. How do we keep it from leaving? So maintenance, maintenance. And it turns out, and I'm going to do a whole episode on this at some point, we are, it requires very, very little input to maintain strength than it does to build it, to get it in the first place.
01:07:25
Speaker
So I don't have the numbers fresh in my head because I plan to talk more about this in a future episode, but basically you could do about one ninth, one ninth, it seems like you could do one ninth of what you were doing to build your own strength, to maintain the strength you built. So this is where I, I'm gonna go back and say like that mantra, which is that any amount of resistance training is a lot better than none.
01:07:51
Speaker
If you can only fit, seriously people, this is research supported and it's extraordinary. If you can do one set of an exercise in a week, that's all you have time for. One, do it. Do the set. Because what happens is just by doing that one set, you prevent losing strength. Dude!
01:08:20
Speaker
That's like opening up your bank account, seeing a number, going, that's a good number. Then coming back a week later, opening up your bank account, and it's the same fucking number. Like you didn't lose any money. Because you know what? This is kind of the game we're playing as we get older, folks. Right? Yes, we can make gains. We can build bone. We can build strength. We can build muscle as we get older. I mean, hell yeah, we can.
01:08:50
Speaker
At the same time, sometimes, the more important question is how do we maintain? How do we stop the loss? Okay. One set is better than no sets. One time a week, one set. One set per body per muscle group. Go back and listen. Season one, I did an episode one of the best exercises for strength. If you want kind of an overview of the different types of movements we train with strength,
01:09:18
Speaker
There are four main types. Squat, hinge, upper body push, upper body pull. Okay. So if you could do one set of each type of exercise in a week, that wouldn't take you hardly any time. And you would maintain the money in your bank, right? You would preserve your investment. Fuck the advice that you have to be working out three times a week to
01:09:48
Speaker
I don't know, be worthy or some bullshit. No, you look, you have to do more than you were doing to continue to make gains. That's just a fact. That's how progressive overload works. But it takes actually a long time to lose what you built much longer than you think when it comes to strength. And you can keep it for a very long time by doing surprisingly little.
01:10:13
Speaker
And so for those times in your life where you're just like, oh, this is so hard to find time to do this, it doesn't have to take that much time. It could take a little bit of time and you could preserve your investment. Okay. So that's what I want to leave with you. That is what I want to leave you with. I hope this has been an interesting episode.
01:10:37
Speaker
I hope that you subscribe to our bone density mini-course. Click the link in the show notes. If you want to support my work and Sarah's work and give us a boost, please subscribe to this podcast. Go the extra mile to Raid in the U.S. We freaking love it when you do. It means a lot. And be in touch with us, please.
01:11:07
Speaker
via our website, movementlogictutorials.com. You can also get in touch with us on Instagram, at movementlogictutorials. You're right. We will be back for one more episode next week. And there we will thus conclude season two of the Movement Logic podcast. We're coming back for more. Sarah and I are getting together in Los Angeles in a couple weeks to record in her luxurious closet.
01:11:37
Speaker
You can go to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, too, which I'm very excited about. And so you'll be hearing from us again. But anyway, we'll be back next week in next week's episode. I think it's going to be a crowd pleaser. You're not going to want to miss it. The title of it is our oopsie stories from the teaching trenches. You're not going to want to miss this one. All right. That's all I got for you. Goodbye.