What is going on guys? Happy Monday for everyone listening on YouTube and Tuesday for everyone that catches us on Spotify and the other podcast platforms. Today is Brian and myself and we are chatting personalizing your training volume. So this came through as a question from our episode 164 August Instagram Q and A. The question was how to estimate optimal volume as in sets per week for an individual. And we thought it would make. a wonderful question to explode into an entire episode. And here we are for episode 167. So Brian and I have laid out some important considerations, both things that are very, very practical X's and O's inside of the gym, as well as other impacting lifestyle factors outside of the gym that goes into how you can find the best way to personalize your training volume. Before we dive into this, we have some updates. As always, Brian, can you kick us off, please? Yeah, so my update is actually an update to my training program, to Brian's program. And it's well timed because part of the reason why my program is changing is a potential new understanding of maybe what optimal training volume is for me. So I'm not going to give it all away here in my updates as to exactly why I can discuss that more in the body of the episode. But suffice to say that this bike season has been extremely eye opening for me. I've kind of talked week to week as we've gone through this about how surprised I am that I'm still able to progress so well in the gym. This has been since March when bike season started. And every week I feel like I'm coming on being like, progress this or I progress that or a couple of weeks ago, I noted how my body weight hasn't dropped at all throughout this bike season and how that may be playing a factor in my ability to progress. But one of the staples that has been present the entire bike season has been that I've used such a lower frequency and lower volume approach than what I've done in prior years. Combine the incredible success that I've had over the last six months lifting weights along with my reintroduction to abbreviated training, which as I've discussed in prior episodes is kind of how I got my start in training in the first two or three years of my training journey. I fell into what was called like a hit high intensity training, not high intensity interval training, but high intensity training, mentor. Mike Menser, Arthur Jones were really the big ones that popularized this approach, which was infrequent, high intensity, low volume training. Over the years, it's kind of been shifted a little bit through a brand called Hardgainer, which promotes drug -free trainees to train hard with full body or upper lower splits two to three days a week. So this is kind of how I got my start and I've been reintegrating back into this culture a little bit, found a Facebook group that had a lot of the old people that I was learning from when I was 16, 17, 18 years old. And now they have this Facebook group. so between falling back in with them a little bit, seeing these incredible results that I've been having with the lower volume, lower frequency approach during bike season, I made the decision to double down. on low volume, low frequency. And my thought process being that if it worked so well, while I'm also doing cardio five times a week, imagine how well it must work if I'm in an even more recovered state. And so it's another experiment. We had a question on a Q and A a couple weeks ago about when, what is my next experiment? And I didn't really have any ideas. And then this came to me and I was like, this is what I want my experiment to be. And so the new program that I'm gonna be starting literally this week is four full body sessions over a 10 to 12 day period. So think one full body session every two to three days. I'm planning it out to be kind of like a Monday, Thursday, Sunday, Wednesday, Saturday type thing. So that would be like 12 or 13 days to get through four full body sessions. And... relatively low volume, focusing on big compound movements, really trying to just push progression, which to week to week, whether it's adding a rep or micro loading in some ways, depending on the movement. And that will be available in the app under Brian's program to so we have Brian's program, which is just going to be my interpretation of the evidence and evidence based optimal training in my view. And then Brian's program two is what I'm actually doing. And in this case, it's not really evidence based per se based on what the literature would say about sets per body part and things like that. So it's an experiment and we'll see how it goes. And I'm just kind of excited for that journey to go forward from there. So yeah, Aaron jump on in, buddy. I have a great question. at least I think it's a great question. How are you for this experiment going to quantify efficacy? in. I guess let me extrapolate it a little bit more. Is the, is the, I guess what is the desired outcome is, are we just monitoring training performance? Is there a body composition or muscle retention build aspect of it? What are you planning to do there? Yeah, I don't really think that there's any way to accurately assess body composition given the perils that we had with my most recent DEXA scan coming back at 21 .4 % body fat. And I just don't believe it. And so I don't think that DEXA is a great use of trying to assess body comp in somebody that is advanced as me and the gains that would be made are gonna be so marginal anyways that it's likely beyond the error that the DEXA would be able to pick up on. so I think that, you know, we, we kind of touched on this discussion either last week or the week before where, you, you had kind of noted that training performance was going to be one of the key factors. And then I kind of poked at you, played a little devil's advocate and said, well, what if volumes are really low? What if rep ranges are lower than the hypertrophy rep range? Like there's a lot of extenuating circumstances that make performance a difficult metric to use to assess hypertrophy progress. But I think in this case, that is likely the best that I have. And so like, if I'm seeing my big compound movements going up with form staying the same over the course of the next six months, and the trend line increases, and I'm training in hypertrophy rep ranges, which will primarily be between five and 10 reps for most things, then I do think that that's the best correlation that I'm going to have. I also do understand the argument that my volumes are going to be lower than the standard evidence -based recommendation. For example, I'm only gonna be training biceps once every 10 to 12 days and triceps once every 10 to 12 days and with two to three sets for each. So we're literally talking about not even hitting the lower end of what the evidence-based recommendation would be for that. But then also understanding that when you do take evidence -based recommendations, they count. compound movements as arm work. So doing a bench press counts as a tricep exercise and doing a pull up counts as a bicep exercise as much as it counts as a back or a chest exercise. So in that way, my arms are going to be hitting close to the evidence based recommendations. But but still across the board, like, you know, the volume is going to be quite low, you won't see me hitting more than four sets, maybe five sets of chest in a week. no more than four or five sets of hamstrings in a week or quads or anything like that. So the volume will be low. Performance is likely the best proxy that I have. But it is possible that the strength is increasing because the fatigue is low due to the lower volume approach. And, you know, at this point of my journey, if my strength is increasing in hypertrophy rep ranges, I'm going to consider that a huge win. I'm not going to say that that means that I'm gaining muscle, but I am going to say that that's what the desired outcome is at this point. Perfect. Yeah. I wouldn't if I were in your, if I was doing that experiment and someone asked me the question I asked you, like I wouldn't really know how to answer it. I do think there is, there's a likely area where volume is low, but we have such good recoverability that like training, you know, can, progress each week, but it may not be like a sufficient enough stimulus for the growth. like we just, I truly think we're in an area. just don't know. You I mean, you look at like the power lifters and stuff, they train pretty low volume, you know, and I think generally they do, you know, hypertrophy over it, but it's it's just not the goal. You know, I think it's yeah, I don't know. I'm very excited to listen along and watch along and see how it goes for you, because, man. Yeah, I just, at this point, I don't even know if you could say that there's any way that we'd be able to accurately assess whether I've gained muscle in six months. Like I could be following a high volume program that ticks every box of the evidence-based sphere, and I'm doing 20 sets of this and 16 sets of that, and I'm at two RIR and blah, blah. And I'm doing all of these things. And it's like, hey, based on paper, this program should optimize your hypertrophy. But how do I know that it is? In some ways, you might actually say that that program would lead to less strength increase, less performance increase because volume is higher. Recoverability will be lower. You might not actually increase in strength as much. But evidence would say that that program may lead to better hypertrophy. So how then, in that case, do you even assess whether that's working if strength isn't even a metric that you are using per se? So I think the whole thing is very complicated and nebulous. especially as you know, you get higher in training age. I really think the only true way to do it is like, you run it, you get to a body fat or sorry, I guess technically a body fat percentage, but like a body weight that you've been before. Remember that's like your 185 or whatever. And it's like, how do I look? You know, like I really think that's the only true way that you can really do it, but it's very involved and has many moving pieces, of course. Yeah, absolutely. And so we'll just see how that goes. Like if it's going well after six months, then maybe at that point, I'm like, hey, maybe I'll try a deficit. See if I can get my body weight down. Like I'm not going to jump into a deficit right off the bat and be like, I'm lowering volume, lowering frequency, and I'm going to drop body weight. And let's just see what happens. know, so I'm going to try and try and keep body weight the same, but kind of let the training do the talking. Yeah. Cool. What's up with you? A couple updates. First, I have some coaching roster spots open. So I some clients wrapping up this month. And I always like to give those spots first to podcast listeners and then my progress squad on Instagram, which I'll be posting that in there as well. So if you're interested, reach out. I would love to chat about that. Second, this is a big one I made. I was purposefully pretty silent about this. because it was my first time and I did not know if it would be a disaster or not. I made, I took the choice of just working in silence and then seeing how things went. But I had my first bodybuilding client get on stage. This is also something where I've spoken many times about in my professional career, I guess. I don't like coaching things that I don't have direct experience in because it's horror. I don't like asking. something of someone that I haven't personally done myself. But this was a little bit of a different situation where female, we were going through a calorie deficit for like a photo shoot she wanted to do. And then after that, she was like, there's this bodybuilding show in six weeks. I think I want to do it. Will you coach me into it? And I was like, I will jump on this opportunity. we did. Things went very, very well. First show for her, first show for me. We took two class wins in a third place. in a novice class and she made it into an overall in her first show. So things went very, very well, especially for a very short prep and her learning to pose and all that stuff in six weeks. So I was quite pleased with our outcomes. was a lot of fun of just, you don't get to use some of the skills with so many of clients. So it's fun getting to play like a very, you know, soul, acute, intricate level game where you're like manipulating these very minor details and those sorts of things. So it was very, very good. I'm happy, very, happy with the outcomes. So is she. So that was a very, very cool first experience. I have a post up on my Instagram and stuff for if anyone wants to have a look at that. Yeah, dude, I'm super intrigued by all of this because I remember in the past you saying kind of exactly what you said, which is that, you you didn't want to coach somebody to do something that you haven't done yourself. And then also on top of that, that it was a female because I feel like you've been somewhat vocal in the past about how you primarily work with males. And I noticed that that had been changing as well over the. Last few months, I've seen you post a little bit more about some of your female clients. So it's cool that not only did you get to take someone to stage for the first time, but it also was a female and that it turned out so successful. And she had a cutout cardboard figure of you, which was also super cool. Yeah, around last, I'm trying to think. No, it's been over a year now. Probably about a year and a half ago, I started taking on some female clients. The first was actually Rachel Gregory, who we both know. And the way that she presented it to me, I just couldn't say no. I felt like it would have been almost like an insult to say no to her, but I laid it out and I was like, hey, these are the things that I need from you. I want this information. And it went really, really well. And I've decided to like for a certain select people who are a little bit more advanced, like the, at that time, all of my female clients were other coaches. So they were familiar with the game and those sorts of things. And since I've expanded and I really has come full circle, you know, if I'm really honest. probably if I were to pick my 10 favorite clients, probably like seven or eight of them are females. And I think it too is my positioning in the space now that I'm, I wouldn't say more mature, but I have matured in my existence in the space. People, before someone signs up with me, they kind of know what I'm about and those sorts of things by this point. So I think I can attract people who are more closely aligned with the way that I do things. And that's a lot different than the way that I did things in the past. but it has been really, really fun. You know, it just getting to do some different things, getting to help people, who are kind of different demographics that I'm, that I'm typically used to, in playing. And I just get to learn a lot too, you know, for a large portion of, my clientele, I'm not really learning new things at this point anymore. There are a lot of the same avatars, but with this bikini prep, it was a lot of, of learning new things. So it was, it was a great experience for the both of us and I'm happy about it. Yeah, super cool to push yourself outside of that comfort zone and get the new experience. Yeah. And then the last thing is my training is fully back minus legs. I haven't put in RDLs or bilateral squat pattern. I'll probably put in the bilateral squat pattern this week. But like setting PRs, chest, back, delts, it's cool that I'm doing that again. It's been happening faster than I had thought, which has been a lot of fun. Are you going to veer away from it was the leg press that caused the hernia, right? Yes, at least I think so. It could have been a Bulgarian split squat, which I also did that day. Could have been a seated leg curl. I don't know precisely, but I would imagine of the exercises that day, it was the leg press, yeah. my guess too. So are you gonna stick with like a pendulum or a hack instead for the time being? Yeah, yeah, I don't. mean, we have the arsenal like press here, but it's just I get a much better stimulus on the pendulum anyway, so that'll go in. I feel like a leg press has you in a much more compromised position to get a hernia than either of those movements as well. Like the way that I brace through that movement and how hard you have to push from the bottom in that like super crunched up position. It just seems like the perfect movement to cause a hernia in my mind. Agreed. It does feel that way too. Like even with like a hack squat, I don't feel that same kind of like pressure in that area. Yeah. And that's it for me. All right. Well, we are talking about personalizing your training volume today. And so we have a few categories of different topics that we want to go through that will impact how to best find your training volume. And so I think the very first one that came to mind as soon as we saw this question and began discussing this topic is, is progression happening? And so this kind of goes back to the discussion we had during the updates when we were talking about my new training program, just five or 10 minutes ago, is progression happening and is progression a reliable metric that you can use to assess hypertrophy? And I think it's a little bit ambiguous. Like it's not fully straightforward, but I do think that some sort of progression should be happening. Like your volume shouldn't be so high that it's muting your, or diminishing your recovery so much that you're unable to progress. Like nobody would say, yeah, dude, you're like, you're right there in the hypertrophy zone because you're not making any progress. You're doing enough volume. Good work. I think that that's probably too much volume. And so there should be an amount of volume where you can progress. And then as long as you're progressing, I think there's some variation in there as far as which volumes may or may not produce the best hypertrophy for you. As a hypothetical, you could be doing 10 sets for a body part and making progress, or you could be doing 16 sets for a body part and also making progress. But one of those volumes could potentially be better for you. But the basis of that being that you have to choose a volume where at least you're making progress. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think the, you were explaining the progress, think proxy is a really, really good term to use because proxies are typically correlative, but not inherently causative. and it's the most straightforward way to kind of gauge progress. Like, I progressing? Am I adding reps? And then over a couple of weeks, you know, is weight coming up? I think that's really, really good. And if it's not, it could lead you to think it's a very plausible to be like, well, do I need more or do I need less? And then that can unfold into some other aspects that we have outlined here as to which may be the best help in helping you decide whether you need more or less. Yeah, and I think it's important to understand that like there are multiple progression models out there and ways that you can go about seeing or eliciting progress in your training. And so like the most straightforward obvious way would just be am I week to week able to add a rep at a pound or two? Am I seeing this trend line kind of go up over time? But I think a very popular way to go about training and one that I tend to use is the more a wave approach, which would be that, you you spend four to six weeks progressing up, slightly increasing RIRs, working a little bit harder week to week, adding, you know, two to five pounds a week. And then taking a reset of some sort, it doesn't have to be a deload, but kind of almost as if you're stair stepping, going like four steps forward, two steps back, four steps forward, two steps back. And so like, love that, that type of progression. And I use that almost exclusively with clients. So in that case, it's like, we're not necessarily comparing week to week. Like, yes, we do want to see some progress week to week as we're working harder, getting closer to failure, whatever the, the stipulation is. But what we really want is we want like week five of meso cycle one to be better or to be, we want week five of meso cycle two to be better than week five of meso cycle one. So it's not that we're comparing directly week three to week four to week five, but we're comparing the same week across different messo cycles. And for someone who's advanced, who isn't going to see progress week to week, like an intermediate would, or a beginner, you know, as an advanced person, progress is slower. And so you need to look at it over a longer timeframe. And so this kind of like wave -like or stair -stepping approach of going forward and coming back and going forward and coming back, but always ending up at a higher place at the end. I think is also a very reasonable way of kind of going about this. Yeah. And that's it. And that kind of leads us into the, the second thing we had here was just training age, right? Because I think as your training age increases and as you develop some, let's call them for what they are imbalances between different muscles for a variety of reasons, injury, some muscles, you're just going to have an inherent better, like mind muscle connection with from maybe playing sport or just genetic proclivities, those sorts of things, you may need to individualize your volume across different body parts because of some of those. as your training age increases, the likelihood of needing some increased personalization also does increase. Yeah, that's such a good point. And I'm really glad that you brought that up because I think it bridges us into the topic of specialization, which is something that isn't necessary at earlier training ages, but is at later training ages. And that has a direct impact on the amount of volume that you use. And this has been a topic we've discussed before. We've kind of noted how the data -driven strength guys discussed this topic quite a bit as well, and that they're huge fans of this process of oscillating or alternating between different focus muscle groups. And so it complicates this question of what is the optimal training volume for me or personalizing your training volume, because that number actually couldn't change depending on what muscle group is being prioritized, which may actually turn out to be the most optimal way to go about achieving the various volumes that will elicit the most optimal growth across various body parts. And so I think the idea of saying, you know, here's two or three body parts, and we're going to ramp the volume up almost above evidence based recommendations for a brief period of time can be very productive, especially when that's combined with a lowering of volume of the muscle groups that are not your primary target for that period of time, which Like, I love this idea. Have you implemented something like this in your training or are you still pretty evenly distributed across the board? no, my current back volume is astronomically higher than everything else. Yeah. long has that been for? February, maybe when I started this program. Yeah, maybe March, maybe, no, maybe, no, probably, probably mid March, but it's important to realize I took it. There was a solid two month chunk in the middle, right in train. And then, you know, what I decided was I would know that I was back from my injury when my training was prior was, was equal or better to my prior performances. Are you spending that extra effort and volume on back because of the nature of it being short overloaded, which is another thing we'll get into here as assessing volume, but is it because it's less stimulative per set than some other body parts and movements? Because in my mind, you've always stated that your legs are your weak point. Like my legs are my quads and my hamstrings. These are the things that I really need to work on. So why is it that you decided to spend the last six to eight months specializing on back? because I decided that I would compete in men's physique. And as much as I don't like this answer, my immediate primary goal is to build a physique so that I can compete for this small amount of time. And my personal preferences of how I would actually like to train, it would just be silly to do so. I'd be doing myself a disservice in pursuit of having a good placement in men's physique. I just don't need any more legs to be completely honest. And my back was kind of the area that needed the most work for the division of men's physique. And that's why. Yeah, that makes total sense. And so then that gets into another question or not question, but another kind of issue as we talk about personalizing your training volume, which is not just what muscle is your weakest muscle, but for what purpose are you trying to grow that muscle? And so, yeah, it's a very complicated question. And I guess to kind of bring it back to the second topic that we're in right now, which is training age, is that these, these focuses these individual focuses on specific muscle groups for growth are something that really you don't have to worry about until it becomes relevant. And if you want to really delve into volume over training age, then our last episode is the one you want to listen to. So I think instead of us belaboring the discussion of training age too much right now, I'll just refer you back to episode 166, which was last week's episode. and we talk about training volume over training age for literally 45 minutes. anything else to add to kind of that discussion before we move on here? Now let's move into the next point. Yeah, so next we have effort or RIR like reps and reserve, how close to failure you're training, stuff like that. And that is perpetually linked to volume. Another thing that we discussed a bit last week and we've discussed many times over in prior episodes has been this inverse relationship between volume and effort where, you you could probably do 30 sets per muscle group per week if you're training at five RIR. for each exercise. But as soon as that effort begins to ramp up and now you're somebody that maybe is training to complete failure with, with partials and with four straps and drop sets and I don't even know, like just adding in all the different intensity techniques that you can throw at something, then that mitigates the amount of volume that you can do. And so there's that, that relationship between those two that cannot be separated and there isn't necessarily, at least according to evidence, a best way of going about this. Like, I literally think that you can look at the evidence and say that you could, in theory, do 20 or 30 sets of three to five RIR across every set, or you could do something like 10 sets where every set is taken, you know, to one or zero RIR, and both of those, at a grand population level, will likely get you to the same place. However, individually, there's likely one that is better for you than the other. And so how do you go about parsing out for yourself and with clients, whether this client is somebody that may respond to higher volumes with lower efforts, or whether this is somebody that responds to lower volumes with higher efforts. Yeah. And I, and what, and I love that this is the place in the conversation where we're going to start to intersect some of the non gym mediated factors. the, the, the, the real answer to that, or that I start with is like, what does our schedule demands look like? What is our time commitment? Right. Maybe we only have 40 minutes in the gym four days per week. Right. We're going to do those intensity techniques and those sorts of things, because where you don't have the luxury of time. to run four sets or five sets or something like that. We're going to do rest pause sets, you know, so that I think this is another important consideration that often gets missed, you know, in these kinds of conversations is what other unfortunately, right? A lot of people, many people don't just have the luxury of training whenever they want as many days as they want for as many hours as they want. They have other important commitments in their life that are a higher priority. That's where the beauty of understanding some of these things and we can ramp intensity down if we have more time, right? Or if we have a recovery capacity, maybe we have like a kind of sensitive CNS. And if we take sets to failure, we start getting like really dizzy and then energy problems. Maybe there's I've met people who are just these kind of genetic anomalies with blood glucose. And if they train too hard, they go hypo and they have to just keep shuttling like, like carbs in, like there are people like this. It depends. So I love bringing, I love at this point, we start bringing in like, well, realistically, how many days per week can we train and what kind of time commitment? And then we, we, we back in from there. So let's, I think what helps maybe is we use a kind of an avatar and frame out. Maybe we have four days realistically per week. 60 minutes, which I feel like is a pretty good kind of baseline for a lot of people. I personally like to keep almost anyone at about a two RIR at the furthest away from failure. If it's someone very, very new, very green, I just, I will give them rep numbers and be like, Hey, I want you to hit eight reps and then we're going to increase weight. Cause you know, with, that new novice trainee, they're going to pick, okay, eight reps, I'm going to do, you know, 20 pounds where realistically they could probably do like 45, but it's a learning curve for them. So we're going to give them like that runway of finding their strength and just keeping it easy and saying eight reps sort of thing. So it really depends on, I know we moved away from training age, but the, the other indirect impacting factors that they go into how much time we realistically can contribute to it. Yeah, that's a good point. I think four times a week at 60 minutes per session is kind of that point where it does need to veer closer to intensity because you just don't have enough time to do tons of volume, especially if you're taking sufficient rest between sets, which is actually like another mitigating factor of volume that we've covered before, but probably worth mentioning again, in that if you're resting longer between sets, you're able to work harder on each set and get more out of each set. Whereas if you're trying to do higher volumes, you to rest less sort of almost as a result of trying to fit the higher volumes in. Do you have a sense of what would be more fatiguing for somebody assuming time wasn't an issue? Like somebody is doing 20 sets at three RIR or doing 10 sets, you know, pretty close to failure. Like which, which one do you feel like would be causing more fatigue for like a general client? The first one was 20 sets at three. Okay. And then what was the second one? 10 sets basically at failure, close to failure. Honestly, I think that the 20 and the reason I think is it's not so much like the direct systemic kind of fatigue, but more of like the mental fatigue, the boredom that kind of sets in like staying, keeping your head in the game. Like most of the people that I have coached towards like working, training closer to failure, it's daunting over like the first nine or 10 days. And then it just kind of becomes your norm. And then you adapt to that pretty quickly. But I do find even myself, like I love training, but the days were especially like small muscle groups that don't really love. I'm kind of like once I get like 60 % of the way through the training session, I'm kind of like losing my focus between my, my sets and stuff. And I kind of really just want to get out of there. So I think like the mental fatigue would, would, would start to creep in as the volumes get really, really high. that's the, so that's how I would answer that. What about the mental fatigue or the psychological fatigue of anxiety associated with having to go to failure on, you know, these big compound movements, like, you know, that feeling of, man, I'm in week five of my hack squat progression and I barely eked out my goal last week and now the coach wants me to add 2 .5 pounds and hit that same number again and it's fucking driving me insane and I like couldn't sleep last night because I'm so nervous about the set that I have to do. Well, if it's like that, would implore you to have a conversation with your coach around maybe some lessening some expectations that he or she has of you if you can't sleep at night because of the act squat. OK. but you like you wake up in the morning and you're already thinking about that session and it's kind of like, it's infiltrating your mind and distracting you from other things. Yeah, it is real. know, I get that like tomorrow is my leg session and it's, you know, by far the hardest one. I don't think it's. Objectively, a bad thing, you know, there there is. mean, those are just the pressures of life, you know, but but I don't they seem daunting while you maybe haven't done it yet, but it but it's also like a it's like a leveling up. of your of your life. And there's so many things that we approach in that manner. Like, I'm sure there was at some point, right, when like you and Kim were both self-employed and you're like starting the family and there's that like inherent pressure of like, we have to generate, you know, this income for ourselves to provide for our family. That's different than if you just have like a nine to five. But now you've done that for whatever seven plus years now. Now it's just another fucking Monday. You know what I mean? But I think it's I think there is that to it. It's. is there, it's a little bit of pressure to perform and it feels you get some anxiety about it, but I don't think that that's objectively a bad thing. Yeah, no, that's a good point. Yeah, I think it builds mental resilience and it kind of makes you stronger to have to push through that. Yeah, cool. All right, well, I want to sort of rearrange our syllabus here and I'm going to save one of these things that I just moved to the end and I think that we should jump to equipment access limitations or just equipment selection might even be like a better way of saying that exercise selection in that it takes into account this idea of there being a huge difference between single joint movements that may or may not be short overloaded compared to big compound movements that are likely lengthened overloaded and how that kind of impacts our volume. so like we touched on this last week as well in the training volume over age, training age volume, volume over training age episode. But But it is really relevant. You can't say that doing 20 sets for quads is the best and you're doing all 20 sets of leg extensions because that's a very different outcome than saying 20 sets of quads is the best and I'm doing all leg presses, hack squats, and split squats. And so, yeah, I mean, think that's relatively obvious. I don't know if we need to go super deep into it, but I'll let you of expand any thoughts you have there. I yeah, I think even within the length and like, let's say, let's let's take a practical example, right? We're taking six sets of quads, right? Which is very digestible for almost anyone. We could split that up as like four sets on the leg extension and two sets on the leg press, right? We do like a top back off on the on the on the on the what the fuck is it called like press? And we can do like a descending pyramid on the leg extension, right? Six sets or you could do six sets of eight. with a barbell back squat. Like both are six sets of quads, but like the latter seems indiscernible, undiscerningly daunting. You know what I mean? Relative to the first example, which is like pretty straightforward. It doesn't really seem daunting at all. So it really does take into account lengthen versus short, but really actually loaded movements and in what you have access to. Because if someone's training in the garage, We have barbells and an adjustable dumbbell set. I don't think you can do a one -to -one on volume because it's just not the same. It's not the same stimulus. It's not the same. This is where that mental kind of anxiety comes in. Like if we had that six sets of eight on Wednesday as your leg day, holy shit, that sounds awful. Yeah. So as a good coach or as a good trainee, somebody that's programming, whether it's for yourself or somebody else, you cannot separate out what you have access to and what your exercise selection is from what your volume needs are. And it seems like in the evidence -based space that oftentimes that seems to be like just the nominal recommendation is like, 10 to 20 sets at like zero to two RIR and like, you're good. And so Yeah, I mean, if, when I look at the majority of studies that assess this, and there are so many studies done on quads because they're a relatively easy muscle to, you know, take muscle biopsies or to ultrasound or whatever, to kind of measure muscle thickness. You do look at the evidence -based programs that people are going through, and they usually do have a mix of some leg extension with some bilateral pressing. And so I would say that's like the most common combination. Like I think there was a study where they had them doing like four sets of leg extensions, four sets of lunges or split squats, four sets of Smith squats or back squats, and then four sets of leg press. So you're looking at like a 16 set per week quad workout where four of them are leg extensions and the other 12 are lengthened overloaded. And so that's, that's, you know, on the higher end of what I think would be considered reasonable for a quad focused week of training. You'd likely split that into two sessions of eight sets each where you do, you know, leg extensions and leg press on one day and then maybe it's split squats and back squats on another day or something along those lines. And that's pretty reasonable, but you are talking about having 12 sets of lengthened movements in there for quads. And so I do think at that point, you now have to mitigate effort in some way. Like you're not doing all of those 12 lengthened sets over the course of the week to failure. That would leave you in a heap of mess where you're not really able to recover and make significant progress week to week. And so, you know, if that was different and it was eight sets of leg extensions and eight sets of lengthened quad pressing, I think that changes the game a little bit. Now you can think about maybe taking even the length and movements closer to failure because you have eight sets of short overload movement as well, which is going to be significantly less damaging. So looking at the whole picture of your exercise selection in your program can help give you insight into how close to failure you need to train, given your volume, or do I need to reduce volume, change out some exercises so that I can work closer to failure if that's kind of the way that you want to go about organizing your training. Yeah, I think that's incredibly valid. Do we... Where did you plan to go next, point? gonna let you kind of talk about nutrition a little bit. Okay. That's what I was hoping we were going to do. And this is one that I, of course I get frustrated about it. Like I'm, you know, nutrition is my bread and butter. It changes so much. You know, if, if we have someone who's inherently under eating or they restrict during the week because of stress levels with work, whatever, and then they like obviously over-consume from a day -to -day standpoint over the weekends versus someone who's like structured, covering their bases really well. eating, you know, separating into four evenly distributed protein intakes throughout the day. Like it really does change. And they understand, hey, I'm running a moderate to higher training volume. I'm going to put myself in like a gain, tain or a little maintenance plus sort of thing to make sure there's adequate calories to recover. Like it really does impact the quality of your recovery and therefore how you may respond to a given volume. Whereas at a certain volume, let's call it that same. 16 sets per week, you may not be recovered enough if you're trained or sorry, if your nutrition is all over the place or the quality is poor, micronutrients are not paid close attention to. But if we do things that then upregulate the quality of the recovery that you can achieve because of the quality of the food, the volume of the food that you're putting into your body, like we may be having a different discussion. And this that very thing that I just stated. Nine times out of 10 this conversation has had is not even brought up, which blows my mind. It always blows my mind. And I think it's really, really important to have that conversation. Yeah, I kind of almost like from my perspective at least feel that the total calorie amount is likely even more important than like the quality of the food that you're putting in your body because it's going to dictate whether you're in a caloric surplus and are building muscle and creating an anabolism versus not being a deficit and you know, being in catabolism, breaking down muscle tissue. And there used to be this kind of sentiment in the space. I think it was pushed by kind of RP and Isra tell. And I feel like they've sort of changed their, their statement here, but it kind of used to be a few years ago, this idea that when you're in deficit, you need more volume because you have to give your body a stimulus to hold onto muscle or else you're going to lose muscle as you diet. And I think now that sort of shifting, and I know like you and I are both on the side of like, look, if you're in a deficit and your energy availability is lower, You're not going to add volume and do more work. You're going to double down on working harder and being more focused and getting more out of the work that you have because your recovery resources are lower. So yeah, kind of like you want to discuss on that at all where you stand on that equation. Yeah, 100%. What I do personally, what I do with clients is try to maintain training performance. That is a very good marker. And I tell them like we're in like week four of your diet. You should still be able to progress, right? Because we're not, we're, I'm not starting people off at a 35 % deficit or something like that. Like we're starting just enough to get the needle moving at the target rate of loss we want. You should be able to still progress your training. Once we get into the deficit, you may not progress at the rate you were at. peak build, but we should not be regressing four weeks in. Once we get into like weeks 12, 16, 20, especially with lengthened overload movements, especially chest pressing, I'm like, Hey, we're trying to hold on to our performance with everything that we got in week one of the diet. If we were using, let's say the 80 pound dumbbells for eight, we're probably going to be around the six reps now, maybe a five rep on like a bad day. but we want to try and hold onto that training performance. And I really like to say, if it's five reps and above, I'm okay keeping the load. If anything drops under five reps, dump the load to like the next dumbbell size down, but try to maintain that training performance. So I think that's where I stand pretty firmly. And one thing I wanted to circle back on in the nutrition, calories are important, assuming that you're not. kind of grossly misdistributing things. If someone's following like a keto diet and we're running like 16 sets of legs, something, anything that's like higher than like 10, 12 reps, I wouldn't recommend that because obviously the carbohydrate is fueling glycolytic movement, glycolytic, Jesus, glycolytic modalities. assuming you're not doing any kind of like really weighted distributions and were, you know, a decent across the protein, fat and carb. Yes, the overall caloric load would have the highest importance. Yeah, making sure you're getting enough protein at a minimum. Yeah, that's kind of way I look at it too is like, look, if you're in a deficit, just hit whatever the protein minimum is. And then like, obviously higher quality food is going to keep you more full. But at the end of the day, like if you're hitting protein and calories, that's going to be the thing that moves the needle the most, at least, you know, until you get to the point of the diet where you're so depleted that you really do need those higher volume foods. And we have plenty of episodes on dieting. So people can go back and check those out. Anything else to add on the nutrition front? Not but not nutrition, it's not nutrition at all, but I think it's really related sleep, sleep quality, sleep duration. You know, it is when we recover, duration being the most, they're both important, but duration is something I would try to work towards most and then, you know, trying to button up quality. Nah, maybe I should change my mind. think quality is, quality is easiest to change quickest because oftentimes duration is relegated to schedule. Like if you can only sleep six and a half hours with your demands, that's what we can do, but we can try and improve the quality of that six and a half hours and then trying to push into the duration. But this is another one I think people just grossly overlook. I am so, guilty of this. My sleep was horrendous through my twenties. Like literally through my entire twenties, even early parts of my thirties, I'm really only now just figuring out really quality sleep, you know, well after 35 years old. So, and it has, it impacts so much. Like when you wake up in the morning and you don't feel good already and it's, know, fucking 7 a It's gonna be a rough day. you know, and that does really carry over into your training performance and recovery capacity, especially when you're a natural athlete. And that's because when you're producing that, those hormones, when you're sleeping, that growth hormone secretion, like when you're sleeping, like it's really, really important. And I think similar to the nutrition, it's one that just gets completely glossed over, never spoken about, but has a profound impact, both, you know, positively or negatively. Yeah, I find one night of relatively poor sleep mostly just impacts my motivation to train, but doesn't really have an impact on how my session goes once I'm in there. But like, yeah, if it's chronic and there's multiple nights of poor sleep in a row, that's not just gonna affect your motivation, but it's gonna have direct impact on all the aspects that go into quality training, recovery, and all that sort of stuff. But I do think that that sleep conversation actually, you know, is very related to, we'll call it other lifestyle factors. And so I think that's kind of the right place to take this conversation now is, is the general bucket of stress and, and how that impacts your volume needs or what you can actually recover from optimally with a dose of volume. And so stress is a huge one. Like how much time are you spending in front of a computer sitting there each day and not giving your body a chance to like move and kind of be resilient. Cause I think the more you move, the more resilient you are. If you're stuck at a desk all day, that doesn't really set you up optimally necessarily. Obviously I don't mean to say that you need to be moving all day like a hunter gatherer, because that's also not going to put you in an optimal state to recover from your training. So I do think there's, there's definitely a fine line there, but I think you need to move more than 3000 steps a day of sitting at a computer and then walking to the bathroom. walking to bed and doing it all over again. And Aaron's like, yeah, that's what I do. but, I do think, you know, having some, some movement is important. It almost like in my feeling, it almost kind of greases the joints and like sets the body optimally in a state to, to feel like movement isn't a foreign bacteria that's being introduced to your body. Like, Hey, you know, we're born to move. Like let's move so that moving isn't that this foreign thing. But like stress can come across in so many ways as a parent, having kids. I remember I was much more stressed out like two years ago, because one of my kids just really wasn't behaving well. And I couldn't we couldn't wrap our heads around. How are we going to get him to act like a normal human? Like, I mean, he's just acting like this terrorist controlling our house. And so every night it would be like we would enter our evening in a state of stress, just wondering when he was gonna blow up. And so that's a stress. And then there's like work stress and there's having to drive the kids to school and back and get them ready for school and making sure they're not leaving their jacket and their snow pants at school. And I mean, like, there's so many things that are coming into your brain and consuming you from so many different levels that it all goes into the same bucket. of like, much do I really have now to give to my training with all of these other inputs that I'm trying to deal with? And so being very self -aware, tallying up the things in your life that are causing you stress and aren't contributing to recovery, they're really like these opposite buckets. How have you kind of seen that? it's massive. And I think the irony in it is the people who have the most stress want to then go train a lot to reduce the stress because that's how they've compartmentalized it or people talk about it. like the gym is my stress reliever. Like it's one of those things that's like generally accepted at like a consensus, but it's, it's completely a falsity. Like training is a stressor on the body. It is a physical stressor. You just enjoy it. You know, so it may not inherently feel like a stressor because the other stressors in your life, like your job or God forbid your family, like you may hate and you don't hate the gym, but like, let's be clear. The gym is a stressor. It is a object physical stressor. and, yeah, I mean, that's a big thing of, of what I do with clientele is like, okay, well what stresses are just going to be there and there's nothing we can do about them or which ones can we like start to work on? And I think that plays a very big role into your like training volumes, right? And in into the reality of where this particular mess or training season of your life fits in, like you may be realistically, as much as I hate to say this in a season of life where you're just going to train to hold on to what you have. And that is a victory in and of itself, right? Because of these other things, maybe you're starting a new business that you're bootstrapping and like monies and incredibly tight and those sorts of things like that could be a that's a very, realistic reality. And I think it's something that people underestimate. And then their progression is dog shit. And then they get frustrated and don't realize that they're just literally stretched too thin. And they're just asking their expectations are too much of their given circumstances. Yeah, and then maybe if they would have been training with lower volumes or lower frequencies or both, maybe they would be able to progress because they're not exceeding what their capacity is. I also want to just bridge this quickly to two things that I've found reduce stress. And so that would be a breathing practice of some sort. I've talked about this on the podcast before, but in the morning and then usually once in the afternoon, I just kind of sit on the couch where I work. and I take five to 10 minutes and I just close my eyes and I focus on my breathing. And I feel like that really levels out what could be like an erratic heartbeat. Like sometimes in the middle of the day when you're just like this machine, like working at the computer, feel like I, even though I'm not on Adderall, I feel like how I would feel like if I'm on Adderall, I'm just like typing away on the computer, like grit face, know, just like punching keys. And then suddenly I'm like, my God, like I feel so... I feel such a disarray right now. Like I need to center myself. And so, you know, sitting down and taking five minutes and just focusing on my breathing, like really kind of helps regulate me a little bit. And the other thing is, is zone two cardio. And so this is a tough one because if you're already limited on time, then being like, Hey, you need to do this cardio so that you can reduce your stress. It kind of seems like a bit of a slap in the face. So, so I just talk about it from my perspective in that. When I do feel any sort of stress in my life, like taking an hour and going out and going and pedaling the bike and doing some kind of low intensity cardiovascular exercise, I come back feeling like a new person and just a completely renewed sense of self, of motivation, of vigor, vitality, all of these things. so... It's tough, like it really just depends on what your schedule allows, but I do find the breathing practice and the zone two cardio to be for me, something that's sort of irreplaceable in balancing everything in life that comes at me. Yeah, in full transparency, don't have any of those things in place. I'm There's a quote and I'm gonna botch it so I kinda don't even wanna say it. But they say like... It's something along the lines of like a lot of. An over like an overpowering amount of work, like without purposes is called stress and then that same exact thing, but with like a purpose is called like passion or something, something along those fucking lines or whatever. And that's kind of where I find myself. Like I've had I've said this to Jenny numerous times where I kind of committed to like now through the end of the year, I want to see how much I can stack on my plate and get done. I've and I kind of there's a there's a word. What is it? Positioning, maybe it's like a kind of a concept. And I think and like a story that I'll tell myself was like what you have on your plate now is nothing. It pales in comparison to what it's going to be like when we have a family, too. So like you got to figure it the fuck out. And that helps me to be like, this is nothing. And like a year and a half, there's going to be a little one that I need to like dedicate family time to and stuff like what I have my plate is nothing. So I kind of like anchor against that a little bit. But I also think too, it's like a kind of like I said that like leveling up, you know, I've really begin to begun to look at my life is just like a series of like upskilling and up leveling to see how good I can get at things. And that's really changed the the perception of how they are. And that's been fun, you know. I feel it sometimes, but I feel like it's building towards a purpose that I think is worthwhile building towards as opposed to just like slaving away to make it to the next Monday sort of thing. Yeah, no, I love that quote. I'm gonna have to look up what that exact quote is, because that definitely resonates with me. And no, it's cool. Like I got the idea. And like, I totally get it. Like, when you're so passionate about something that you're just thinking about it, and it's on your mind all the time, it is its own sense of reward to pour yourself into it. And if you're not passionate about something, and you're just like doing admin work that you hate doing, then that's going to have a completely different effect on you. All right, well, I to bounce here in a minute. So I think we need to wrap up with subjective senses of pump, soreness and fatigue. These are kind of the old RP Isretel markers that he would use. Like when you would ask him, what's your training volume need to be? Like literally those would be the three that he'd go to. be like, are you getting a pump? Are you getting a little bit sore? And do you feel some fatigue after you train? And so those are pretty good ones. I think the things we went over prior are probably more important. than those three, but I do think that those three are relevant. And so, you know, if you're training and you're doing so little volume that you don't even get a pump in the muscle group that you're training, then you're either not doing a great job of connecting with your muscle or you're not doing enough volume. And it could be both. I can honestly say that I can do one set of bicep curls and be like, my God, my biceps. Whereas 20 years ago, I don't think I could do that. the way that I can now. So there's an element of training age in there. But whatever you're doing to stimulate your muscle, like there should be a pump if you're training in hypertrophy rep ranges and that muscle is susceptible to pump. Hamstrings are kind of a weird one. Like you don't really get a pump in your hamstrings. They just kind of feel like they're like ripping apart and it's uncomfortable. But that's kind of like the same idea like of I'm creating a stimulus, so to speak. Soreness is a good one too. I actually really like soreness. because too much soreness tells you that you likely did too much and no soreness likely tells you that you didn't do enough depending on the muscle group. And so there's a certain caveat there. And then a little bit of soreness, like you kind of wake up the next day or two days later and you're like, yeah, I feel like, you know, a little bit of tightness in that muscle that I trained, I can tell that I worked it. That's likely a pretty good sweet spot of where you would want to be for volume and stimulus for a muscle group. And then, yeah, like after you do a leg session, you should feel fatigue in the sense that you struggle to walk up the stairs or down the stairs. You're like, shit, gotta like kind of balance myself here and like surfing on the stairs. So I do think you need to feel that. Like if you did a really hard shoulder and back workout and then you go to shower immediately afterward, it shouldn't feel just completely normal to like raise your arm up and wash your hair. You should be like, yeah, that feels like I just trained my shoulders and back. So. there are those kind of subjective senses of, you get a sufficient stimulus in your workout? And so pump soreness and immediate post -session fatigue, I think are in the target muscle group are good proxies to kind of assess whether your volume is sufficient. Yeah, the post the post training fatigue is arguably my favorite. I also like the the second either either next day or second day. Everyone's a little bit different. A little bit of soreness like, I can feel like I train that. I really, really like that one. The pump is I would say nutrition plays a role in that. If you're deep in a calorie deficit, your pumps are probably going to be trash unless you're using all sorts of pump. tools and those sorts of things and that one may not be a great gauge at that point. I've had I've just had numerous clients be like my pumps are shit. Does that mean I'm losing muscle? I'm like no you're only eating 150 fucking grams of carbs a day. That's the that's the that's a problem. Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point to bring up the nutritional periodization along with the pump because that the pump I think for that reason is probably less reliable than the soreness and the fatigue, but also important to remember that if you're in a caloric deficit, you're likely going to get more sore. So, so you do kind of have to keep in mind the mitigating factor of nutrition on those variables as well. Yep, yep, very, very well put. Cool, that's all I got. Yeah, so I mean, I like this. was an episode on the deciding factors, right? As opposed to like, you should do six if you should do eight if, because it's, I don't like when people present information like that because there's no context in nuance to it. And unfortunately the answer to this top level question is chock full of context and nuance. And it's going to vary from person to person. even within yourself based on the different seasons of life and other things that we covered in the episode. So as always guys, thank you for listening. Next week, Brian and I will be back with a topic that we do not yet know about. No, know what it is. We'll know about it. We just don't know what it is yet. Almost left.