No one ever thinks to ask themselves the simplest yet most effective questions you can ask. How much should I train?
The body can only take so much physical stress before it plateaus and refuses to develop additional adaptation, or worse yet, performance declines and suffers altogether.
It’s no different than when I was 17 years old, and my dad told me always to work smart and not hard.
I’ve followed multiple intense programs, training for two hours a day and seven days a week. Taking everything my dad has told me and throwing it out the window.
As a matter of fact, the highest adaptation is when we are recovering by eating calories, relaxing, and sleeping.
Everyone is different when figuring out how much we should be training. But we at RSF Performance have calculated a pretty good guide that can be customized for the average person or athlete.
It doesn’t matter if you have a lot of physical or phycology stress. Stress is stress. And too much training will lead to fewer improvements in your performance and a lack of results.
Maintenance Volume
The Maintenance Volume or “MV” is the number of weekly sets it takes for you to maintain your current fitness level without gaining or losing muscle.
Maintenance Volume (MV) is lower than most of us think! With as little as six working sets per week, you should be able to keep and maintain all of your hard work during the off-season.
You would think this number would fluctuate between an advanced lifter and an amateur. However, its doesnt!
Maintenance Volume is included in your training when your;
- In Season Training
- Lack of time to train for improvement
- Giving the adaptation process a break
- Resensitization period before entering Max Recoverable Volume Training
For advanced athletes wanting to prioritize certain muscle groups to help increase performance, you can set specific muscles to Maintenance training to free up recoverable resources.
So you can max out and develop the muscle groups you are looking to improve.
Minimum Effective Volume
Training below your Minimum Effective Volume is considered maintenance volume, and you will not see any adaptation.
When training consistently at your Minimum Effective Volume, gains will come. But at a much slower rate.
Our program Rookie Camp starts with a Deload Week, followed by a generalized Minimum Effective Volume while slowly progressing to Max workouts your body can handle without ever seeing a plateau.
A good indicator that you have found your MEV is when you have very little soreness in the targetted muscle that takes a day or two to go away before a full recovery prior to your next workout on that muscle group.
Transitioning from a beginner to a more advanced athlete, your Maintenance Volume won’t budge much. However, your Minimum Effect Volume will gradually increase, making it difficult to build new muscle tissue.
Maximum Recovery Volume
Our body will always prioritize recovery over anything else! Once our recovery system is busy recovering from training, illness, or injuries, causing more disruption like non-functional overreaching training will cause too much fatigue, not allowing for a full recovery that will limit improvements.
Training hard makes you feel on top of the world!
However, when training consistently at our Max Recovery Volume, we dont leave much time for our body to recover, limiting the potential for any new gains.
For newbie lifters, training can be a real shock to the body and is a perfect example of our body prioritizing recovery overgrowth.
New lifters don’t see much progress in the first several weeks because that initial shock when training cranks our recovery resources into full throttle. During this stage, our body begins to build tolerance for the volume needed to see the adaptation in future workouts!
This stage teaches our body how many resources it needs to recover from training to see the adaptation.
Functional overreaching training just above your Max Recoverable Volume for one to three weeks before a resensitization phase can help you grow new muscle tissues.
Training consistently at your Max Recoverable Volume may sound like the best way to train. But in reality, it causes too much damage and results in little or no muscle growth.
Maximum Adaptive Volume
To start seeing gains, you must be over your Minnum Effect Volume, while avoiding progression too fast and for too long in the non-functional overreaching state towards your Max Recovery Volume.
Maximum Adaptive Volume is right smack in the middle of your MEV and MRV. And to apply the principle of Progress Overload properly, you must slowly progress from the lower to higher volume landmarks.
As long as you do that, you are guaranteed to see growth.
Suppose someone were to start training at their Maximum Adaptive Volume and progress to their Max Recovery Volume. They would cause too much fatigue too fast, causing junk volume, taking away from weeks of training now that must priotize recovering instead of additional training to surplus gains.
This is important to know and is why we start training at our Minimum Effect Volume, so we can avoid plateauing early and have more productive weeks of training.
How Much Should I Train?
Our body adapts to our exercises, and what was working the last week will probably not work this week.
Every time we train hard, the volume needed to get those same games increases, making it harder to gain muscle week to week.
Thats why our Rookie Camp optimizes overloading training triggering both faster and slower twitch muscle fibers by using a combination of heavier weights and higher volumes.
In fact, by doing a variety of rep ranges, your growth response per set will be higher than someone who doesn’t.
The formula we came up on how much you should train? Can be found in the Navigation section of our Rookie Camp!
Conclusion
The Maintenance Volume or “MV” is the number of weekly sets it takes for you to maintain your current fitness level without gaining or losing muscle.
Maintenance Volume is included in your training when your;
- In Season Training
- Lack of time to train for improvement
- Giving the adaptation process a break
- Resensitization period before entering Max Recoverable Volume Training
When training consistently at your Minimum Effective Volume, gains will come. But at a much slower rate.
A good indicator that you have found your MEV is when you have very little soreness in the target muscle that takes a day or two to go away before a full recovery prior to your next workout on that muscle group.
Functional overreaching training just above your Max Recoverable Volume for one to three weeks before a re-sensitization phase can help you grow new muscle tissues.
Maximum Adaptive Volume is right smack in the middle of your MEV and MRV. And to apply the principle of Progress Overload properly, you must slowly progress from the lower to higher volume landmarks.
Resources
https://rpstrength.com/training-volume-landmarks-muscle-growth/