What is going on, guys? Welcome back to Eat, Train, Prosper. This is episode one hundred eighty eight. And today, Brian and I are talking quality volume. So this stems from a common conversation in the fitness space around junk volume. How much is too much? How much is too little? So we have a lot of bullet points listed out on this topic and we are going to cover it at depth before we dive into today's topic. As always, Brian, can you kick us off with some updates, please? Yeah, just one really quick update today. Um, I just got back from my bike trip with the boys out in Western Colorado. I mentioned this on the last episode in the updates, but, uh, it was a great trip. went out Thursday, got a really sick, like two hour ride in a Thursday afternoon over on the, was, it's a cool route, the rabbit Valley that basically the route crosses over into Utah for a little while and then circles back through back into Colorado. So you get to kind of cross the state border without even realizing it. beautiful, beautiful terrain, tons of canyons and stuff. ah And one of the interesting things that I think spans like all of the rides we did over this weekend, because we did three different locations around Western Colorado, is that the terrain when you get out into the middle of nowhere, it looks surreal. Like it looks like it was the bottom of the ocean. And I'm sure it was like millions of years ago, I'm sure that was the bottom of the ocean. And now it's this desolate dry land that barely gets any water. The precipitation is under 10 inches a year, and that includes rain and the little bit of snow that they get. But you look at some of these these like stalagmite is the wrong the wrong term, because it's not that it's not in a cave, but it's these insane rock structures that are sticking up hundreds and hundreds of feet in the middle of nowhere. And then it just like drops straight off. And you can see all of the erosion on all of the rock from the millions of years uh over time. It's just It's so surreal and so crazy to be out there biking and literally see nothing except rock walls and nature everywhere you look. It was very grounding and just one of the reasons I love this trip so much every year. then beyond that, like I got a bunch of exercise, so no resistance training, but three big days of biking. One of the days was a double day. So we did like a three hour ride in the morning and then like a one hour ride in the afternoon. Ate a bunch of good food, drank some beers, hung out, laughed a lot. Just really, you know, nice rejuvenating trip. And then came back Sunday, hadn't lifted in a few days, had the itch, hit my, uh my torso session. So chest and back on Sunday, just walked yesterday, did like 20,000 steps, didn't really feel like doing anything structured. And now today I feel like I'll be kind of right back into the mix, hit a leg session probably, and get back into biking the next day and whatever. So. Really cool trip, lots of travel coming up this month in general. Kim leaves for Miami in a couple days. So I'll be solo dadding for the weekend again as she goes to the Rufus concert with her girls. And then the next weekend, we all traveled to Moab, which is in like Eastern Utah, kind of right where I just was. And we do like a big camping trip out there in the Red Rocks, scrambling up rocks and stuff like that. The kids love it. So yeah, big month of travel and just try to stay on my game and. keep my routine going. What's up with you, dude? I am living Groundhog Day, which I don't mind for sure. That's one way to put it. um I'm in, I guess technically my fifth week of prep, I believe. I should probably get a better hold of these things because I should need to know where exactly I am. um And it's just prepping. I live the exact same day, day in and day out. Ladder parts of my week I have not as, I don't do check-ins, but I'm doing like other work stuff, like other little gym projects, things. following up on like shipping, you know, what's it do's it's of entrepreneurship type stuff, but my meals are exactly the same. I'm up at the same time. I have the same morning routine, which I've really come to like fall in love with. I've been very diligent on a prep log that I like kind of journal my thoughts down each morning. I haven't missed a day even with all my crazy travel. And I have to say I do enjoy the monotony of it because it's foolproof. Like I don't have to, there's no concerns around like, I doing enough? Am I doing too little? Should I be going harder? Like it's just, my days are on autopilot and this week was the first week where I'm like starting to see kind of like the shape take place a little bit and getting pretty lean in certain spots. One thing that was interesting or is interesting is I have, for the first time in my life, I kind of feel like a disproportionate amount of body fat in my lower back relative to like the front. I've never had that before. So if I'm ever posting any posing video or one of my posing photos or something like that, you can see some skin folds in my lower back as I'm doing my back pose. And I've never had something like that, especially relative to how lean I am in the front. So that one's been a little bit interesting. But other than that, nothing. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not doing anything until... the first week of June, which will be my regional in Thailand, which I'm looking forward to. um It's working out great. Things are going well. Posing is going decently. you, you answered, I think what my next question was going to be, which is, there certain areas or a specific area of your body that seems to be holding fat more than other areas? And so that seems to be the low back. One thing I'm curious about, I know you're doing men's physique, so your legs are less important. You've kind of put them on the back burner a little bit. how are they coming as you kind of get into this cut and, know, prepping the last month or so. I mean, they're very, very lean. I have like all the veins in my adductors and stuff already. um They're still a lagging body part and they're probably going to be way even worse in terms of a lagging body part now because I'm only training them like once per week. um But I don't think I think they will still fill out like my board shorts very appropriately and that sort of thing. Cool, cool. Well, yeah, you posted yesterday you're on prep day 29, so I guess today's day 30 or something like that. Yeah, so you know you're in the fifth week and that's awesome, man. I'm really excited to see how everything progresses as you get closer to that June date. So you have about six more weeks, yeah. yeah. Until the first show. And I know like we're, not going to be in like peak condition for the first show. It's just my regional that is like kind of a tick the box to qualify for a, a pro qualifier show. And then I think I have another six weeks until the pro qualifier. So, well. in theory, let's hypothetically say that you qualify and you get your pro card or whatever at that point. Does that change the calculation as far as your future in the sport? mean, potentially, but we'd really have to wait and see. um I think it would be, let's say I do get it. I think it would be kind of maybe silly to not do one pro show, but we'll really see how I feel, you know, once January, February comes around and you know, my goals are still the same. Like September, we have the wedding. I restore my fertility. We start, you know, trying to start a family sort of thing at the end of the year. into the beginning of next year. um We've all already kind of pushed back some of our bigger long term plans for and full transparency like Aaron, I guess being selfish with wanting to build the gym and these sorts of things. So um it's it's definitely my priority. But who's to say in like a year and a half, right? Utah has these incredible gyms and I'm so excited to go train at and there's even like a local pro show in Salt Lake. So. Who's to say in the future what I'm not right now. I just I don't really think about it much Yeah, cool. Well, you still have plenty of years of good quality gaining left in front of you as well. Sweet man. Okay. Ready to dive in. Yeah. So the episode kind of stems from a bit of a ah conversation, or not a conversation, a comment that was left on one of Brian's posts where you were changing your training program, right? And you were, was it, and you were doing, think it was, do you remember, was it four sets? Was it five? so prior to changing the program, I was on the two sets to failure piece. Like I was basically probably six to eight work sets per workout. would cover the whole body across those say eight sets, two sets each of four different movements. And that was what I was doing before. So everything was about as abbreviated as it could be while still feeling like I was kind of at least maintaining, if not slightly gaining toward, you know, strength. Mm-hmm. maybe high perch fee, but definitely strength. think at this point in my training journey, I more utilize strength progressions as a proxy for whether things are working as I can't really accurately detect any high perch free that may or may not be occurring. so strength is my main gauge. And in that program doing two times a week, full body at eight sets per workout, it was about as low and trimmed as it could possibly be. And then I posted on my story that I'm making a relatively drastic change to the structure. And I think that's where this question came out of. um And then it kind of like I said it to to Summise the the topic of the episode How do we it with quality volume right in what might be junk volume? What might be quality volume in in the question? I like to ask first is like well How do we how might we even begin to define quality volume? um The note that I have here is potentially right my own kind of uh explanation of it uh Enough volume to elicit progress, but not enough to needlessly accumulate fatigue and or force frequent deloading or performance plateaus. Now, in that definition, I think it's important to break out a part that I have needless fatigue accumulation because there will always be some sort of fatigue accumulation, but there is a rate that is uh very likely faster than is needed. which would typically contribute to then an unnecessary frequency of deloading uh and performance plateaus because not enough recovery capacity between repeated bouts of a training session because of the high end volume. like with almost everything, you know, in hypertrophy and in the fitness sphere here, there's a lot of contextual uh Mm-hmm. application or contextual differences, individual variability that comes into this. And we want to break some of that down in the episode here today. Yeah, I think it would be helpful to just briefly go back and discuss kind of the change that I did make to the program from those kind of two sets to failure approach and why this question came into existence. So I made a post on my story discussing how I'm going to now be implementing a five by five and do a change into a split routine. So from two times a week, full body where everything was to failure, I'm now going to be going to a three times a week routine. with much more volume per session, but the difference being that the RIR or the proximity to failure is significantly lower or further from failure. an example would be that, you know, if I was doing eight sets across the entire body, I now have a day that's my torso day, it's called chest and back. where I'm doing a five by five of a back movement, a five by five of a chest movement, and then a three by five of a back movement and a three by five of a chest movement. So now I have 16 total sets, eight sets per muscle group, which is already just in that day, double the volume that I was doing across the entire week for a given body part. And so people look at that they're like, well, how is it that you're able to just increase your volume so much? Like isn't some of that junk volume and The answer is that it's all about that manipulation of intensity uh and volume, where they are naturally going to be an inverse of each other. That if you do a lot of volume, you inherently cannot be close to failure on all of that volume. And if you don't do a lot of volume, uh you do need to be closer to failure. And so with this change, doing this five by five, each movement was starting with approximately a 10 RM weight. So we're talking about a weight I could do 10 times, but I'm just going to do five sets of five with it. So that first set of five is likely five RIR, right? And then maybe the next one's like four and a half or four and then three and a half or three. And by the last set, maybe I'm at like two to three RIR or something along those lines. So none of those sets would be even close to failure, which means the fatigue cost associated is significantly lower. But also to your point, the stimulus that's being achieved is also a bit lower. And so the new routine had chest and back on one day, it had legs and abs and calves. another day, and then it had like shoulders and arms on a third day. And a lot of the shoulders and arms work would also incorporate movements that would train the chest and back auxiliary. So there might be like some dips or some pushups where which would include the triceps on there. And then there might be some pull ups, which would include the biceps in the back. So you're kind of getting the torso movements hitting twice in that week, which when you actually look at then the total amount of volume that I'd be doing, say for back. So I have the eight sets on the day that's specifically for chest and back. And then on the shoulder arm day, I might have three sets of pull ups. So now I'm done 11 sets for back, which is kind of in that sweet spot of what the evidence would say is that 10 to 20 sets, but I'm not doing all of those sets to failure. So maybe that lays out a little bit of context. I think it does. Yeah, for sure. Now, I guess with that now, let's talk specifically with yours. um Typically with a five by five, it's more akin to a strength program. Correct. um And then for the, you know, your training block, what is your plan or what have you been doing with um progressing those five by fives? Yeah, such a good question. That's where I wanted to go next as well. So, uh, the idea here is that it kind of goes through three iterations across the cycle. So starting with the five by five with the 10 rep max weight, my plan is adding weight every week. So eventually that 10 RM weight is no longer a 10 RM weight. might be like an eight RM or a seven RM weight. And so when I get to a point where that final set of five is now basically at failure, or zero to one RIR, then I'm gonna drop volume. I'm gonna go from five by five to three by five. And I'm going to continue adding weight and or reps say it's like six reps, seven reps. I might call it like a five to seven rep range or something like that. But I'll progress in some manner for a few weeks now with the three sets. And then once I get to a point where that third set is again at failure, then I'll usually drop to two sets. and kind of go back to a more similar protocol that I was using prior to this cycle. So I'm using volume as a tool to kind of accumulate what we'll put in quotes, quality volume in the beginning of the cycle. And as the cycle goes on, where the volume decreases, the quality goes higher. The stimulus goes higher because I'm working closer to failure, but I'm doing fewer total sets. uh So that's kind of one way that you can periodize. And I think that's an important word here is that, you you don't always have to train in the exact same manner all the time to elicit the best results. And maybe in some cases you'd be better off not always training the exact same way and just kind of pushing up against a wall and just trying to add a rep every week, beating your head against the wall and eventually realizing fatigue is too high and having to deload and recover again. So this way is kind of a unique and interesting way to, like you're not deloading when you're doing the five by five at the 10 RM weight, but it feels significantly less taxing both psychologically and physiologically than it does when I'm doing two sets where both sets are to failure. So I'm doing more sets still within what could be considered quality volume, because I'm still within that five RIR range for hypertrophy. And then progressing that into more of like the way I was doing things where everything is extremely effective toward the end of the cycle and then kind of rinse wash and repeat from there. uh So that that's, think, effective for me, effective potentially for other people. But I also think it's really important to kind of double click on something else you said, which is the difference between strength and hypertrophy. And that is that when we're training for strength, 5RIR is not the floor of where you need to be. In many cases, when you look at that meta regression from Robinson and colleagues two years ago, what they found is that strength is actually benefited by not getting close to failure. So they were better off being four to six RIR than they were being one to three RIR and accumulating more volume further from failure as know, strength is a neurological skill and the more that you can do it. the better you're going to get at it. Where failure can create these like compensations, maybe other muscles are doing the work, you're causing too much fatigue, the neurological stress isn't actually implemented in the way that you intend it to, and then strength doesn't increase because you're too close to failure all the time. So it's been interesting to kind of split the training cycle into these two buckets where we're starting with a bit more of a strength approach and then progressing that into a bit more of a hypertrophy approach over time. Definitely is. And one thing that I wanted to ask that I think can be um helpful for the listeners is, did you notice, because you kind of went from like a super low volume program to, I mean, we wouldn't really call it super high, but a considerable jump, even though we have a significant higher RIR you're training with. Did you notice anything in terms of like the novelty of doms increasing or anything out of the ordinary there? Yeah, good question. uh Surprisingly, and I didn't expect this, but I did get quite sore in the beginning. And uh that made me also kind of, I know we're not supposed to use soreness as a proxy for gaining muscle here, but it is always nice and encouraging to realize that you're getting sore in the muscles that you're training. And so I was no longer getting sore. from the two sets to failure approach, because I think there had been the repeated bout effect. had adapted to the movements and to the volume, et cetera. And then dropping, you know, the intensity working further from failure, but doing double or triple the amount of volume did in fact create more doms in the target areas, which yeah, it was very reassuring. Like that I was kind of doing the right thing, training the right muscles, using the right technique to, to elicit that adaptation that I wanted to occur. then On top of that, I mean, it's hard to detect at this stage of my training differences. Like I always reflect on when I was a teenager and it would almost feel like weekly I could wake up in the morning and be like, my God, like that wasn't there last week or, or something along those lines. And now, you know, you don't see that, but I do wake up and I've been looking at my body enough over the last 27 years that, uh, I know how I look in the morning and sometimes, you know, throughout the early stages of the cycle, I would look at myself and be semi impressed with something that I saw that, you know, wasn't there a week or two prior. And so whether that's just, you know, fluids kind of accumulating in the muscle from the higher volumes that that may be the case, I'm totally open to that. But uh I am, think along this journey, becoming a little bit more convinced in the benefit or utility of these kind of oscillating periods where it's not just two sets to failure all the time. Yeah, think my, I don't want to kind of derail us here, but I think this conversation obviously comes up a lot, right? And it's almost to me when people are asking the question seems like everything else is static and equal, but I just want to know like high volume versus low volume. And it's really hard to answer that because in my perspective, which again, it's just my perspective, I personally find most often, especially dealing with clients and stuff, life dictates time available to train into a very large degree our training volume, right? That and then ambition, right? Like let's say, Brian, if you decided, I'm sorry, how old are you? 42, 43? 42. If you're like, let's say it's in three years and you're... about to be and you have like six months till your 45th birthday and you're like, I want one last hurrah. I want one last go at my lifetime best physique. I'm going to give it everything. I have this time to dedicate to it. The kids are a little bit older now and you know, a lot more. What would you call that? Like autonomous. I bet if that were the case, you're probably not going to do to two training sessions per week, full body to failure. You'd probably like inch things up as the ambition of the goal. is larger. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I think that's a hundred percent right. And I also think that it would. changed the way my priorities lied with how I split my cardio and my strength training as well. So if I were to want to optimize my physique in a six month period, I would likely cut way back on the amount of cardio I was doing so that I would have more recovery resources and attention and focus to put onto the strength training because like, people mostly realize this now, but I think there was this belief back 20, 30 years ago that cardio gets you shredded. And what we realize now is that cardio has zero impact on your aesthetics, like literally nothing. The things that you could optimize your aesthetics without doing cardio a single time, if you can just dial in your nutrition and your strength training. And in many cases that might actually produce your best physique. because you just have the most attention and focus and energy to put into the thing that's actually going to move your physique forward. uh So yeah, I think I think that would be that would change that calculation for sure. Yeah, I don't know if I have anything else to add on that. Okay, yeah, so I just wanted to point that out because there's one thing I know I have a note here somewhere and where where was it it was on the individual variability. Here we go. Right. um Fitness, fitness levels, another one there, too, that we didn't talk about. If you the typically the further along you are into your training age, the higher amount of volume that you can handle. um Although I do believe it's a bell curve shape because let's say once you get into this fear of the like really large enhanced bodybuilders, I think your absolute loads just wreak too much havoc on your body. So I would say it's like a bell curve thing and then it starts to. I think a clarification here might be that instead of talking about the amount of volume that you can handle as your training age increases, the better phrasing might be the amount of stimulus that you can handle because uh I don't believe like we've talked about this on an episode where we talked about volume over a training age and we both kind of agreed that as you get to that advanced, like super advanced stage, you're able to get so much more out of each set that naturally the amount of volume you're doing actually increases because the stimulus you're creating per set increases. So while I would agree, I think the way to phrase that is that at over your training age, the amount of stimulus you can handle increases that might actually coordinate with decrease in volume. That's a really, really good caveat there. um I, yeah, that's a really, really good way to put it. Maybe the term that I'm looking for is kind of like train ability per se, right? The better trained you are, the more that you can typically do. um I mean, you think about it like anything, right? When you're a senior in college, you can go out typically on a night and drink 10 beers and be like chilling. When you're in your first week of college, you go out and drink 10 beers, like you're gonna be in the fucking. you're gonna have a problem, you know what I mean? So it's one of those things where, like, there's been times where someone wanted to come train with me here, right? And I'm like, okay, we're training back. And we get like a good 60 % of the way through it. And they're like, I don't want to call it dying, but like, really fatigued and like kind of struggling. And it was very interesting. like, we're training back. Like I get it if we were like training legs or something like that. like, back is usually just like, There's typically not like a negative correlation with training back in terms of how hard it is or anything, but it's if if if you're not as trained The volume impacts you more. It is it that make sense? Yeah, yeah, I think we can even like, bring this back to the junk volume discussion and say that in that exact example that you're talking about, you are continuing to accrue call it quality volume, whereas that person that's tapped out at 60 % has already achieved the maximum quality volume that they can and anything more that they do beyond that point is junkful. very, well put. mean, I think that's like the best of it. The Trying to find like the best way to phrase that. The more like adapted to training that you are, the higher stimulus that you can probably achieve. Whereas if your training adaptation is lower, you will tap out that kind of max stimulus earlier and then everything else becomes effectively junk where you can't squeeze or feel any real great tension anymore. Everything's just a blown up kind of mess in that area. Yeah, think that, uh, junk volume changes over the training age for sure. And people oftentimes, like, I think this question initially came, it said, what did it say that folks say that anything over five RIR is junk volume. So there's junk volume in two ways. There's potentially the idea of junk volume being anything that's too easy that you're not close enough to failure is junk volume. But then to this example, There's the, uh, you know, everything's been to failure. We're still going to failure, but we've already maximized the stimulus that we can achieve. And therefore there's junk volume there too. And so there seems to be a number of buckets that could qualify as doing junk volume, which maybe makes the calculation a little bit tricky, or maybe it's just a, a more of a sense of, I don't want to like, like RPE is the wrong term, but a sense of self-awareness that's built where you can detect at what point, you know, I've stimulated the muscle effectively and at what point doing more would be significantly less effective to the point that it begins to kind of detract or have negative ramifications on our recoverability. Yeah, it's a really good way to put it. can't kind of, I'm trying to conceptualize a way to explain it. It's almost like if it's too easy, it's like a wasted opportunity, right? And that's if you're, like let's say it's a 20 RM and you do like eight reps, right? Kind of like a wasted opportunity probably should have been a warmup. That's like the kind of low end of the spectrum. That really high end of the spectrum is like. your intensity has been super high or the volume has been super, super high. Your stimulus is long maxed out and we are now into like what's typically very well defined as junk. Yeah, I feel like this is another argument potentially for using higher frequencies per muscle group in that if we know that junk volume can begin to occur after a given per session volume for a muscle group that, you know, okay, so I just, there have been a number of studies over the years that showed that anything, I think it was from James Krieger, that anything over eight to 10 sets per muscle group per session seemed to. kind of just maximize the volume. then at that point, you're either doing unnecessary work or just, you know, causing havoc on your recovery. Um, I saw another one that Mano Henselman's posted recently. Uh, it wasn't his study. I can't remember who the author was, but they, I believe found that three to eight sets per muscle group per session seemed to maximize the stimulus for that session. So what we're looking at here is, you know, if somebody needs to do 15 sets a week for chest, it would be junk volume for them to try to do those 15 sets all in one session. Whereas if they split it into five, five, five across three different training days, they would be able to get more quality volume or stimulus from, uh, from each of those sets than they would in the other approach. Yeah, the frequency I think cannot be. And I don't want to say downplayed. ah What's the word I'm looking for here? It's understated. Yeah, because I mean, if you think about it, if I'm. Let's let's let's let's take the top end of the rep or the top end of the kind of volume range, 20 sets per week. Right. If you try and do 20 sets on like chest on Monday. It's it's a big day. Those final few exercises are probably going to suffer from a. psychological commitment standpoint, right? Let's say it's, mean, fuck, let's say it's six exercises of three sets each and then like two of them actually go to four, right? So that gives us our 20. If you take that and you split it into like a Monday, Thursday or something like that, that's a completely different stimulus that that chest is getting on those like ladder exercises. So I think, like you said, that the frequency plays a really significant role and it's like another There's like a top layer is the total sets, but then we break that down into frequency really does change the output, the outcome, right? The recoverability, probably the performance to a rather significant degree, I would argue there. Yeah, I have a memory of when I was just coming out of CrossFit. So I was still doing this workout at the CrossFit gym. was doing bodybuilding at CFPB and I was in the back room and I was beginning to follow RP because I didn't exactly. That was the first kind of hypertrophy program that came across my desk after I moved out of CrossFit and uh the day had, I don't know, 18 sets of chest or something on it. It was, you know, one of the third or fourth weeks where they progress volume week to week. And, uh, I had done my first nine or 10 sets of chest. think it was three different exercises. And in the past, that would have been the point where I called it. I always followed. not always for a number of years in college. I followed a bro split called max OT, where you would do six to nine sets per muscle group per session. And so by the time I would get to the nine sets, I'd have three exercises of three sets each. And that usually felt like a good number. So I was still training in the same manner. I was then where everything was to failure. It was to the house. I was working hard and I got to the three exercises done. And I was looking at my program and I was like, okay, I still have nine more sets of chest to go. Uh, and, and I knew that it like, that I didn't need it. Like I could tell my chest was completely blown up. My strength was diminishing quickly, but I had these on the program, so I had to go do them. And it was crazy because it was like, you know, I started with flat press and then incline press and then flat fly. And then it was going to go to like barbell incline press and then barbell flat press and then flat fly. And it was just like, like every movement with every type of equipment from every different angle. And on my 10th set, after I had just told myself like, okay, that's a good stimulus that I have right now. I was trying to do my incline dumbbell presses and I was so fatigued and my chest was so blown up. that I wobbled with my left arm. It kind of like fell off to the left. I had no capacity to be able to grab the dumbbell and correct whatever error was occurring. And I ended up injuring my shoulder. And that was kind of my moment of realizing that I was very well into junk volume at that point. So now junk volume can just potentially not be effective. It can have negative impacts on your recoverability, but it can also... cause injury because you're so blown up and fatigued that you're not able to actually move the load in the desired kind of plane of movement throughout and stabilize it. Yeah, that's a really good point. That's one thing I didn't have here is the injury risk goes up as I mean, just fatigue, fatigue accumulates, stabilize, especially like stabilizers and stuff. And I think, you know, one could argue this could likely be mitigated through some program design of putting more less like what would you call it? I don't want to call it like a dumbbell press. I wouldn't necessarily call unstable, like a fixed. Yeah, yeah. Something where, where injury risk is lower there. But the thing that you brought up that I had down here that was later in the list that I think is really good performance metrics, right? If you're into that like ninth, eighth and ninth exercise and those are just not progressing, right? And you're getting a stark performance detriment drop off. It's a pretty good indicator that it's just not needed. And if you wanted to keep that exercise like in for whatever reason, split it off into another day, right? when you have some level of recovery. I wouldn't put it the very next day, ah but at least like, you know, probably two days in between if you wanted to keep a total weekly chest, you know, volume in this particular example at a given. Yeah, I agree with that. uh, where is it gonna go with this? uh I can't remember what I was going say with this. I'll let you continue for second if you have anything to say. So the one thing that I wanted to touch on next that we briefly kind of touched on was managing recovery, right? So that's another one here. And I think it goes into kind of what I said around how much time can you really dedicate? How many training days are realistically going to be able to be fit in a week? And how many days between repeated performance schedules allows for us to be able to dictate how little, how much or little volume we can, right? Like let's say realistically, we can only do four days per week, right? That's the max that schedule family life dictates and allows. And we can do maybe an hour and 15 minutes or something like that. We can just fit in less volume in a week than if we're training five days per week, like from a pure time allocation standpoint. So again, to kind of circle back on a point that I made earlier in the episode. I think when this conversation comes up, the bounds of the answer are often dictated by external factors, not how much volume can I handle or can I progress on. It's what type of time do I have to dedicate to training and how much do I really care to dedicate to training? Everyone likes to think that. it's the top priority and they want to get as like humanly jacked as possible until the friends like hit you up on the weekends or that training. When you say you're going to go to the gym at 6 a.m. know or 7 a.m. Saturday morning and you're out till whatever midnight doing a normal weekend activity with friends or family or whatever like these things are very real factors that come into play that are often swept under the rug. Yeah, so it's a little bit more like the psychology of junk volume in that like, in theory, that volume might physiologically still be stimulating, but because of your life circumstances, where maybe you have these other priorities, then you're unable to do that volume or at least unable to focus on it. But maybe in a different life situation or as stress diminishes in life and you have more time available, then that volume could manifest in positive physiological adaptations. Exactly. Right. And it's being realistic about Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with that too. It it's tough to square that circle because like when you're talking about junk volume specifically, I my inclination is to look at it strictly from the physiology and say like, hey, if you can still adapt to this, then it's not junk volume, like if you're still progressing with it. But yeah, I mean, you can't ignore the kind of intangibles of sleep and stress and food and things like that. One of the, sorry, go ahead. No, no, no, no. I was just gonna say like that is, I can't tell you how often I speak about that with like clients and stuff. And for anyone out there, know, who's getting into coaching or as like an interest in it, I wish coaching was really so much of just like, here's your X's, here's your O's, here's how we put them together. Like here's our wonderful protocol go, but so much of it is like psychological, right? habit formation and rewiring like old habits and patterns that like don't serve people. Right. Like I can't I'm now that like I was saying with Brian, like I'm in my seventh full full time year of coaching. So much of the work I do is literally positive mental manipulation. So much of it very is not. I think we'll get performance improvements if we move these 10 grams of carbs like intra workout. Like that's very little of it. And I think it's again, like what even in conversations like this, we want to think it's the X's and O's, which sure it can be if we have someone who's like sleeps eight and a half hours per night. They only work, I don't know, part time because they're retired from their, you know, investments that they made in their early twenties or something like that. Then it's purely X's and O's. But for probably 85 % of people like all these. Indirect impacting factors play a non insignificant role in how much volume they can really do that's stimulative versus not and in that's just the way that it is unfortunate Yeah, I think, you know, this maybe deviates a little from the junk volume conversation, but I think it's important to note that any studies that are done, and I think this is intuitive as well, is that the first set that you do of any muscle group is going to be the most effective set for that muscle group. And you're gonna get the majority of the benefits. I think the Schoenfeld study meta from 2017 or whatever it was showed that 64 % of the gains occurred from the first set, I believe. And then you were getting close to like 85 or 90 % of the gains from doing the second set. And then every set beyond the second set would give you another like two or 3 % as you work close to like 100%, something along those lines. So from a time efficiency standpoint, likely two sets, two hard quality sets are going to get you the I mean, more than the 8020, it's going to get you the 9010. and so when you're in a stage of life where things are busy and, know, maybe junk volume occurs earlier than it would in another stage of life, you can be pretty confident that assuming, know, your execution and your exercise selection and all of these things are on, on point, that you're getting good quality work in that's going to move you forward from two sets. Yeah. Yeah, I think in those higher stress sort of or higher stress or just other priorities like higher priorities, right? Like, like I will be entering one of those relatively soon, like we were talking about earlier in the podcast, and I'm going to go from these like, insane volumes where I train for two hours a day, because I can and I just have this playground I want to play with to where I'll go, you know, significantly lower and it really is just like a prior prioritization. side of things and what you really have. So the kind of final thing, and this is kind of a pure Aaron question for Brian, I know in the past it used to be like super popular. I don't think it is as much anymore as kind of like the notion of like a burnout exercise where, okay, it's the end of the day and now we're gonna do 100 pushups in as many as few sets as possible or something like that that's not the typical two RIR, three RIR, and it's much more open-ended to accumulate 100 body weight dips or something like that. How do you think that can kind of play into it? I mean, I think ultimately there's a number of factors that go into your assessment of whether that's beneficial or not. one would be what type of work did you do prior to doing that? Cause like, I could see a situation where somebody's looking to tackle metabolic stress in their training cycle. And so maybe they come in and they do two sets of heavy chest pressing of some sort. And that's kind of their, their metric movement. And that's what they're going to look to progress week to week. And then they're like, okay, now I'm like time constrained. Um, I'm going to drop down and do an AMRAP five minutes of as many push-ups as I can do or 10 minutes or whatever it is. And I think in that case, yeah, there's probably like some value in that, in that two sets probably didn't maximize the stimulus bucket that you could have achieved. got you close, but it probably didn't maximize it. And so maybe in that case, those hundred push-ups is providing some sort of benefit without pushing you too far back into a fatigue deficit. that you can't recover from. Alternatively, if you had done a workout that was eight or 10 sets where it had, you know, some dumbbell presses, some barbell presses, maybe a machine press instead of one of those two and like a fly type movement. And so you're completely trashed, your chest is blown up. And then you go to do your five or 10 minute AMRAP of pushups. That's probably overkill and unnecessary at that point. So I think a lot of that comes down to The workout itself, your individual response to that workout, your life recovery bucket and all of those things. But to answer your question, I think where you wanted me to go with this was that comparing more or less straight sets with the purpose being mechanical tension to something where the goal is metabolic stress and just kind of cranking out reps with body weight. I think in a one-to-one basis, you'd be better off spending that time putting it into more. mechanical stress loaded movements like another press or fly in the six to 12 rep range or something like that. Yeah, I agree. The only thing I would say is maybe if you're on like an extremely limited set of equipment, that kind of thing could give you a little bit more, I don't know, variation in what otherwise might be like an incredibly limited kind of training. Well, one application of it is, and so like when I travel, I usually travel with rings and I hang them over the tree branch or whatever, a cross beam and just kind of get to work. And so the workout that I'll usually do when I'm traveling is I'll do like an alternating EMOM or maybe not even timed, just kind of alternate sets of doing pull-ups and push-ups. And, uh, And in that case, like the way I'm approaching it is like, might just say, okay, I'm to do five pull-ups and I'm going to do 10 push-ups and I'm going to alternate those for 20 sets each. Like that's pretty stiff standard workout for me. By the end of it, I had a hundred pull-ups and 200 push-ups in, but none of them are like really to failure or like even within a couple reps of failure. I'm just kind of like casually moving back and forth and those workouts for that purpose are super effective. Like I get insanely sore from it in like my entire upper body, my arms, my shoulders, my lats, my chest. mean, my entire body is blown up probably from the novelty. Like I could adapt to that and not get sore, but something like that. Yeah. The application is, I'm traveling. want to get a stimulus in and I don't have a lot of equipment. That's a fantastic application for it. But as far as optimizing our training over time, uh those types of things are likely not going to be the best catalyst for that. Yeah, I do have. Is there anything else you wanted to cover from the from the episode? I have one. want to add one other thing. So the thing that I said I forgot earlier, maybe 10 minutes ago when we were talking is that I wanted to note that a drop in training load is a really good sign that you're kind of approaching that junk volume arena. And I don't mean just like a small drop, but for example, I can do an incline dumbbell press with the hundreds for 10 reps, say that's like my lifetime PR. If that's what I know I can do in the beginning and then I've done, you know, three sets of incline press, three sets of flat press and three sets of flies. And then I were to go back nine sets later and try the incline dumbbell press again. I would not be able to use the hundreds for 10. I would not be able to use the nineties. I probably wouldn't be able to use the eighties because I'd already done nine sets close to failure. I would probably have to drop to like the seventies or something like that to continue to get quality reps in with that movement. And so I don't know exactly what that point is where the weight drops so low that it's no longer effective. uh The studies, you know, will say anything below 30 % of your one rep max, which is just crazy. Like nobody's going to go to a point where, you know, 30 % of their one rep max and they're like, yeah, these are still quality reps. Like you could probably do that a hundred sets into your workout. So that's not a great, a great number, but I think for you as an individual, you can know. or begin to understand where like a weight drop, it's too large. And now you're kind of just going through the motions. You're not really actually causing any kind of productive stimulus. Got it, got it. I have one kind of final question for you. And this one I'm kind of purely curious about. I um don't think I have an answer for this. So if there's a reason why I'm asking you. Let's say someone is going through maybe like an RP volume ramping style program. Because they, for whatever reason, we get to an end of a program and we're doing a lot higher of a volume. Let's say they want to reduce to a lower, know, volume uh next block purely from a time commitment. They don't want to train two hours per week. How would you, what do you think is the best kind of approach to do that? And do you think there is any kind of inherent risk of a very large reduction in volume over a short period of time to like adaptations or anything like that? No, I mean, it's a good question, but no, I think that that's just natural periodization. Like over the course of, of a year of training, you'll naturally have these cycles that kind of are higher volume or hypertrophy focused. then potentially maybe it's lower volume, strength focused, or it's just lower volume, hypertrophy focused or, you know, changing exercise selection or these things like these are kind of just the natural changes that occur. when you're coming off an extremely high volume, like a volume escalation program, like the RP model. it's likely that some of that. there's a term for it, but basically the delayed growth that occurs. they've, they've shown that, you know, when you over, over overreach. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you, if you overreach, but don't over train, you just overreach a little bit. And then you like deload or dial back significantly that there's some delayed muscle growth that will occur a hyper overcomp overcompensation, hypercompensation, one of the two. Um, so, so that you can essentially have this two or three weeks of growth that are occurring after you've even kind of peaked your volumes. But I think a lot of that depends on being able to facilitate in a environment, an environment of, of recovery of optimal recovery. And so if you're in that high volume escalation program, and then you don't actually let your body recover, you never get that overcompensation to occur. And you don't actually see the growth that's potentially there. So by dialing back to these lower volumes or amplifying recovery after the high volume cycle, you can see kind of some some subsequent gains there. And I'll just use an example from myself too, when I was following the RP model, the first cycle I did through it. So this was before I really reached the kind of being so fatigued where I injured my shoulder on the dumbbell press. Uh, one of the movements I had in my program was a dumbbell floor press. And so at the end of the cycle, after volume had escalated and fatigue had accumulated, and I was basically in week five or six, I The volume was so high and I was so fatigued that when I went to do my dumbbell floor press, I got a hundred for six and it was legit failure. Like I could not have done another rep. Then I took my deload week where I didn't do much because it was like the RP style deload week where you basically just essentially fuck all and came back the next week, started with my dumbbell press and it was supposed to be three RIR for the first week. and I ended up doing a hundred for nine. So I got three more reps than I did and I had three RIR left. So in theory I could have done 12 and that just shows that the fatigue was so high at the end of that cycle that it was masking my fitness. And through this deload week, this amplification of recovery, I'm able to manifest the strength, not have it masked by the fatigue and demonstrate my fitness. And so in your question, I think the same thing is occurring where, you know, people worry, my God, I was doing all these volumes and then I'm gonna drop my volume and suddenly I'm gonna lose all this muscle that I've been working so hard for. It's really actually the opposite that's occurring here. Yeah, yeah, the performance there's no denying the once you've experienced that performance like I don't even know like super compensation after a period of like reduced fatigue and like an increased recovery. You're almost like when it when it happens to me, I almost I'm like, did I botched last week's logs? Like, could I really put four reps up in a week sort of thing? But no, it will happen sometimes. So I mean, it's always very cool when it does. That's for sure. Yeah, exactly. So I just think people don't need to be scared of that. like, man, how can we kind of wrap this thing in, kind of take it home? And I think that the general idea that junk volume is anything over five RIR is wrong because junk volume or volume in general is a product of the relationship between intensity and volume. And uh If you did 25 sets at five RIR, my guess would be that that's probably for the most part, pretty effective junk volume would mean 25 sets. Maybe I'm just throwing an arbitrary number out there, but, like the, the, the closer you work to failure and the harder you work and the more focused you are and more attention you can give to your training, the more stimulus you can create, the less volume you're going to need before things then begin to turn into junk. And the further you are from failure doesn't mean that it's immediately junk just because it's further from failure doesn't make it junk. I think if I had to really define junk volume, it's doing work at the end of a training session after you've already maximized the stimulus. So it's work that is no longer contributing to you increasing the stimulus. It's more just causing havoc on your recovery. And so I don't think you can say it's over five RIR, it's 10 RIR, it's using this exercise or that exercise or doing 100 pushups at the end or anything like that. It can't be just fit into a bucket. It's just work that's done after you've already successfully done all the work you needed to do. I mean, very, very well put. Like almost everything in fitness and nutrition, it's contextual, right? And the more advanced you are, the longer that you've done it, done this, I should say, you have a better understanding of what is continuing to be contributory to your stimulus and what is now just stimulus has been maxed out and everything is now just kind of mushy and going through the motions per se. Yeah, exactly. Where increased injury risk occurs and you know, you're making inroads into your recovery. So maybe you're not sleeping as well, or like you're less motivated in subsequent sessions. I mean, there's a lot of detriment that can occur. And so, man, you and I both are a relative large proponents of somewhat low volume training. I'd say I'm a little bit more low volume than you for the most part, but, you've come a long way. Maybe like before we wrap up, this is actually really interesting to demonstrate that, you know, you're old training programs when we first started this podcast, like a leg day would be, you know, five or six different exercises of four sets each. So you're doing, you were doing like 20 sets of legs in a session. And now you're doing, I don't know, six to 10 sets of legs in a session, something along those lines. And, and so like, what is your interpretation of the way that junk volume manifested in your prior training versus the way that, that it's kind of implemented now or not implemented. Yeah, I mean my personal experience There was a large, there's a big, there's a pretty big delta in RIR of my upper body training versus my lower body training in previous years. Like let's call it my late 20s, even into my very early 30s. uh And the reason is like lower body training in close proximities to failure is really fucking hard. It's very unpleasant. And I think there's a reason why people end up doing like higher volume. because even a two RAR hack squat or a leg press is soul sucking. You know what I mean? And most people aren't going to do that. You watch most people leg press, they're doing quarter reps or half reps. So if you say, hey, one set is all you need and you're half repping to a five RAR, it's not going to be very stimulative. you can't equate one to one when range of motion is complete opposite ends of the spectrum. and so is, you know, relative intensity. So I think that that was my own, you know, kind of personal, uh what would you call it? that journey with that. And it's something that I think is like very, very common when, when, when legs are trained in close proximity to failure. I really don't think most people can handle like the stimulus gets really maxed out. would say more quickly than any, most other body parts, the lower body does. So you were going to failure more or less on the upper body stuff. yeah, right. So my question is like during that time, were you also doing those higher volume type workouts sessions for the upper body as well? I really don't remember in full transparency. um Probably not because if we really split, there's just a lot more body to train above the waist relative to below the waist. So it's easier to, can, let's say it's 20 sets. You can really easily distribute 20 sets across the upper body and not put eight sets on a single body part. But if you put 20 sets on the lower body, like you have, I guess four body parts and that's if you're gonna do a lot of calves, you know what I mean? Yeah. So then would you say that during that period of time, say five, six years ago, when you were training your legs with 20 sets, that some of that was junk volume, or would you say that it was far enough from a failure that those sets were likely not causing a performance decrement or inroads into your recovery? They were just kind of, I needed that volume because I was working, you know, less hard. I think from the parts that I can remember, would say I would argue more of that wasted opportunity kind of thing, you know, um where sets one and two were probably just not stimulative enough and they were kind of unnecessary warmups. We could probably even call them um or just. yeah, really, really just not appropriate relative intensity to be completely honest, because it was hard and I didn't want to keep going. Yeah, so maybe it was like you were losing out on time efficiency, but you weren't necessarily doing junk volume to the point that it was detrimental to your recovery or anything like that. I would agree with that. Yeah, I wouldn't say it was detrimental or an impeding recovery because stimulus was I would say net stimulus was lower because per set stimulus was significantly lower than it could be. Right, right. Yeah. So you're wasting some time, but like at the end of the day, it wouldn't be junk volume because it hadn't, wasn't like you would maxed out your stimulus and then you continue to do stuff. It would be like the equivalent, like example you use would be you finish your leg day and then you're like, yeah, a hundred air squats for time. That's what I should do right now. You know, like, like that would be a good example of, junk volume, right? All right, cool. That's all I got. I think that was pretty productive. Yeah, I think so. Of course, guys, as always, any questions about the episode, you can either leave a comment under YouTube or ping Brian or myself on Instagram. And next week, if Brian is not traveling, we will be back with another Eat, Train, Prosper. Yep, I'll be around.