What's going on guys? Happy Monday or Tuesday. Welcome back to Eat, Train, Prosper. This is episode 207 and Brian and myself are talking determining volume needs. One of the most common topics in the space, but something that is often bastardized or lacking the proper context from a place of Brian and I's standpoint. And very much so like we like to talk about this episode is full of context and nuance to help you in determining what big facets are going to be the most important decision makers for you and yourself in determining your volume needs currently and then potentially as your training age and training career goes on. Before we dive into the nuts and bolts of today's episode, always, Brian, can you kick us off with some updates, please? Yeah, so my first update is kind of a follow up to the last episode that we did two weeks ago, which was on the bro split. And I kind of fantasized about starting this up again and what that would mean and whether it's optimal and all of these different things. So if you're interested in that, go back and check out the episode from last week or two weeks ago. I think it was quite good. uh My story is that as soon as that episode ended, I started my bro split that day. So. It just tickled my fancy as we talked about it. And for all the reasons I listed, like being in the middle of winter, doing less cardio, it's cold out, blah, blah, blah, all these things. I decided to start it. So now as of today, I'm exactly two weeks into my bro split. I've trained 13 out of 14 days, which was kind of my intention with this is mostly having, you know, one muscle group a day, training mostly every day. splitting up hams and quads into separate days. The only day that has two muscle groups is arm day. um But of course, as I discussed, I did it in an intelligent way where there's crossover muscle group stimulus, know, arm day gets dips and pull ups on it or push ups and pull ups, whatever. um Shoulder day has some upper chest in there. It also has some rear delts. So you're getting back hit again a second time then you have back again on arm day So basically every upper body muscle group is getting hit it three times a week at a minimum Across the various upper body days and it's really just hams and quads that are only getting once a week stimulus Which is great for me anyway as I've found that those muscles tend to respond to these slightly lower frequencies But the the really interesting thing and the thing I've really enjoyed the most about the bro split is how short the sessions are. And that was kind of my big calling card as I was discussing it is I can keep these sessions under 40 minutes each. And so I've been timing every single one of them. And from the moment I start my first warm up set, I start the timer and every single workout, all 13 of them have managed to be under 40 minutes. They've been 35 to 39 minutes basically. uh so the crazy thing is that The amount of volume that I'm actually doing across the week is higher than when I was training three times a week on my lower upper lower and then upper lower upper type thing. Those sessions were taking 60 to 75 minutes. I was super crushed by the end. And uh these sessions being under 40 minutes with just one muscle group, I'm doing between six to eight working sets for a muscle group in a session. And uh When you look at the total volume across the week, my volume is essentially at least one and a half timed, if not two timed for some muscle groups. volume is essentially doubled uh and yet every session feels subjectively so much easier. uh Systemically, I just feel like there's almost no fatigue. Of course, you get a little of that on the hamstring and the quad day. I mean, those are hard days. you do six to eight hard working sets of those muscle groups. But for the most part, I'm barely breaking a sweat. ah It's just been such a revelation to go through workouts and feel motivated to start them, not intimidated by them, and then finish the workout and just feel so good coming out of it. uh Soreness has been insane. It's like I thought the soreness would get better the second week with repeated bout effect doing the same movements and all that stuff but still getting like sore for three plus days after sessions and um I've been able to increase loads despite basically taking everything to failure or zero to one RIR. I've been able to increase loads or reps every week um and I've been enjoying it. I can't say for sure that this is something I'm going to continue enjoying for 12 weeks or something, but that's not my plan. My plan is literally to do this until it gets warm enough that I can start biking again and then switching back to probably a three times a week up or lower type thing. So it's been really nice. It may be something I just continue to do this time of year throughout. And really the only drawback has been that because I have this mindset where I really like going. into my day feeling as if I just have one hard thing to do every day. I've been kind of not doing as much cardio as I had in the past, which, which again, I think is fine, the time of year that we're at. But ah I've been averaging only two cardio sessions a week, usually one kind of slower zone two and one harder kind of interval thing. And uh that's really the only downside, but it's it is it has been really nice. You know, I've been getting a bunch of steps in, I've been walking a lot. and then hitting these really intense short sessions. So a huge fan of it so far. And uh that's really all I got on Bro Split. have one more quick update, but let's see what's going on with you. I'll talk about my training update. as well since we were with yours training. I've slid from my upper lower and I think I said this last week. I started getting kind of afraid of the loads because I was doing a lot. I was saying, hey, I'm going to just go up or lower, you four times per week training. I'm to do one hard set to failure in like the seven to like 12 rep range depending on exercise. And it started getting really brutal. And especially in the lower days, I would be like, fuck, I don't like I have to jump in the leg extension and stuff now and it's just so gnarly and in like on my quad day I would literally my first lower session I have one like hard working set on the leg extension and one on the pendulum and they were burying me I actually got pinned on the pendulum last week for the first time um and I mean I would feel like literally defeated after it so was like I don't know if I want to do this anymore because like the load the loading was just getting real really heavy and and and to my legs were literally exploding so I was like I don't I just don't really need this right now so I moved back to a little bit of a push pull legs which always gravitate back to push pull legs because it's what I love I just really love training in that way and then what I'm gonna do is a push pull legs upper lower uh Yeah, push pull legs up or lower. um and then I'll just put some extra delt work on my lower and my second lower is going to be really low volume. I'll do like two sets of like one and one half reps on the leg extension just to try and get a much just more stimulus into the VMO. Like that's the only part of my legs. really hasn't like it's still pretty lagging relative to the rest of my legs. um And then some hamstring curls. I'm not going to do any like hip hinging or anything. I just don't need the muscle there in full transparency and then I'll delts. on that because you can never have too much lateral delt. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So you're back to kind of training five days a week from what was, guess, four if you were doing like upper lower, upper low. Exactly. Five days per week. And then I have two card to like zone two sessions in and then my second zone two session on Sunday. I put in some like not insane intervals like intervals at like 70 % so I could get my heart rate up. I'm breathing heavy. I'm sweating but I'm not like dying and getting that like CNS fried feeling like when I do the bike sprints because it just became seemingly counterproductive or I would feel so horrible afterwards. couldn't do anything. I couldn't work. So I was like, what is this doing for me? I feel absolutely it's the hardest session of the week. And I feel it's whatever it is eight minutes long. And I feel like I literally got kicked in the face. was like, I'm just gonna scale it back and I'll add four extra rounds. So I did. 12 rounds instead of eight. I do that first and then I go hop on the stair climber for like 30 minutes at a super low pace. And that's just like really chill. I do enjoy that. So it feels like productive, healthy cardio, not like hanging on for dear life cardio. Yeah. Yeah. When you do your squat pattern movements, are you going all the way to the bottom, know, spreading the knees, external rotation, getting asked to the, to the ankles, or are you being a little more discerning or cognizant of your range of motion to stop at, know, where the point is where the quads are maximized or like how, how are you approaching your squat style movements with execution? I'm not. like drastically trying to point my knees super far wide. um But my stance has gotten I would say a little bit more wider naturally as my body mass has grown because I just kind of have to to make space. um I try and keep a lot of I have a problem pronating. just naturally don't pronate well. So now I really try and pronate and keep like equal foot pressure especially on the big toes. So my knees do end up going out a little bit but I'm not trying to like shove them out. um my squat pattern is very adductor dominant, but even with trying to push the knees out and stuff, but no, I'm going as deep as I possibly can with keeping my knees forward still. Yeah. I made when starting this bro split after consuming some material on YouTube from a guy named Jonathan Warren, which I actually think might be an interesting cat to get on the podcast. He has some, really cool videos on biomechanics that kind of talk about how squat patterns need to focus more on kind of internal rotation as you descend, not that the knees are coming in. but that the pressure in the foot is shifting from the outside of the foot to kind of the big toe as you descend down, keeping the knees more in line in a way of like avoiding external rotation where the knees spread out, which then engages the adductors and engages the glutes more. And I was incredibly surprised to find out that the amount of weights that I'm using on my pendulum and my other squat style movements are about two thirds. of what I use when I'm able to go all the way to the bottom, externally rotate, use my adductors, use my glutes. And so simply by keeping the knees narrower and cutting depth at the bottom, actually doing less range of motion, the loads I'm using have dropped significantly and the movement is way more quad dominant. ah So I've found that like really enlightening and interesting to note how much of a challenge that is and how it kind of changes the stimulus to the, to the quads. quite a bit. And then similarly, he has another video where he talks about how in chest pressing, you don't want to go all the way down until you know, your elbows drop super low, because most of that is shifting tension into the front delts. So he's talking about stopping your chest pressing where your triceps are essentially parallel to the ground, which again, is a significantly shorter range of motion on the chest than I'd be getting by kind of dropping all the way down and getting a little bit of that stretch reflex out of the bottom. And once again, I feel like my loads have dropped a little bit in that regard too, despite shortening range of motion. ah So that's been really interesting. think maybe I'll reach out to him and see if we can get him on the pod at some point. That would be really cool. because I used to squat that way, because that's what felt normal to me. And then. Maybe about it was maybe about a year ago. Actually I started getting like knee pain where I've never had knee pain and I reached out to Baxter who's like, you know, we've had on the podcast He's he's one of I one of the best people that I found in terms of communicating these things and I just like hired him for like a Physio session and he had me do all these like drills and stuff and take all these videos and he was basically like yeah You can't pronate so your knees have to go out like that because you don't have this so He helped me work on a lot of things and now I'm like very conscious of trying to put my knees just kind of right over not really push them out and I mean it's changed the quad activation I get and stuff like like crazy um and like I mean my quads have absolutely exploded it is silly how big they've gotten um of course not not the VMO the point that the fucking one that I the most but you know I'll take what I can get but yeah it's been it's been in like in squatting and stuff I finally feel that like that massive quad stimulus and I get like a gnarly quad pump from squat pattern movements and stuff when I never did before because I was just kind of mechanically disadvantaging myself with the positions I would force my body into. Yeah, yeah, I feel similarly as well. uh All right, cool. So my uh my next update is just on TRT. So it's January 20th today, I think. And I'm just over. I officially my first proper injection was December 22nd. So I'm about four weeks in at this point. I'm in my fifth week. I just did my first injection of quote the fifth the fifth week or whatever. And it's I think I think I'm feeling some stuff. I wouldn't say that it's like overpowering noticing that, you know, oh my God, my energy, my motivation is so much better or any of these things. Um, but I do certainly, as I mentioned in the prior episode, notice like a little bit of an increase in libido and, the last two nights of sleep have been the best two nights I've had in a long time. I, I pretty much average like an 87, 88 on the sleep score. And the last two nights were a 99 and a 97. uh which for me is like insane. was like, you know, two hours of Ram, an hour of deep with only 18 minutes awake or something along those lines. And, and so I don't know if that's the result of the TRT finally coming in. What I had learned was that TRT actually kind of negatively affects your sleep in the early stages as your body kind of regulates new hormone patterns and stuff like that. And then it's supposed to potentially increase sleep quality once your body kind of regulates it. And another thing I've noticed, I don't know if I was complaining about this in our last episode or not, but for the first four weeks I was doing it really until the last few days, my heart rate, my resting heart rate was up like seven or eight beats and my heart rate variability was down like 10%. And I was starting to kind of freak out about it. was like, what's wrong? why, why am I, I've had, I have metrics for almost a decade of resting heart rate and HRV that have been pretty consistent across the board. So to see this like month long drop in these two metrics was pretty disconcerting to me. But again, now that I've gotten these two really great nights of sleep, my resting heart rate is back down to like the low forties. My HRV is back up to these insane numbers that I'm used to seeing. And ah I think everything's beginning to finally kind of turn in the right direction. So ah I'll continue to give updates on this, but what I've heard is that around the six week mark is when the magic starts to happen. So. In the next week or two, hopefully we'll start to notice some really tangible things with that. Yeah, and it's like a slow build to that I would say there's there's someone someone that maybe could be cool to have on the podcast if he still does podcast appearances in the future. There's a guy named Dave Lee who really speaks around TRT at a much different lens than many people do. He speaks about it much more from like a psychological kind of standpoint and how it. It's like a little, like if your life is moving in like this trajectory, right? And then like you put the TRT in and it just like slightly changes the angle a little bit. But then like months and months go by and that little angle change now like deviates pretty far away and it becomes like compounding decisions over time. Like he spoke about it though. It's really, really cool. It made me think really kind of retrospectively. around a lot of the things that had changed like with with my own, you know, approach mentally and things over the past really like 15 months, I would say about are sorry, 18 not 15. But um yeah, I will be really interesting to see like the the sad of six to 12 is where you might start noted because a lot a lot of the early things are just Estrogens high and libido comes strangely like ramping back at a different time or something like that Or you might get one training sessions or you get like this gnarly quad pump that turns out not to be fun and but then you get all these like little micro things that kind of Compound over time which is pretty cool that I have found cool. Well, I look forward to that. And then I have my first blood work post TRT scheduled for February 2nd. So hopefully by, you know, February 9th or the 16th or whenever blood work comes back, we can kind of go over that briefly on the pod as well. Yeah, what I would do is ask your doctor what's cadence or what day that they want you to take the blood work. Relative to your administration schedule. the six week mark is what he said, so he seemed fine with February 2nd. Okay, because what you don't want to do is like inject the day before your blood work because then you're going to catch a peak. Yeah, I mean, given that I'm doing it every three or four days, doesn't I mean, I would I would assume if it's done every three or four days that it's like kind of just a mostly a sustainable level across. don't know. I guess I'll learn. OK, OK. I've just had clients do it. They like that. Let's say they get labs done on Wednesday and their numbers come back like super high. Like like over 1500 and they're just running like you 130 or 120 and like well when did you when was your last administration the day before. So yeah just just ask what what they want because some doctors want to catch a trough. Others want it to be that kind of mid. So just just ask for clarification. right, well, February 2nd is a Monday and I usually inject on Sundays and Wednesdays. So I'll see, maybe I'll move it to a Tuesday. Yeah. And then the other, the only final update is undefeated. The, gym that I'm a partner in here in Bali is, is really picking up. It's been really, really cool lately to see tons of people coming in, training hard, getting after it. ah Most of the people putting their weights away that is like the one little kind of dagger to me where I'm like going to leave and I see a machine with all the weights left on it. So I'll like circle back and put them back and stuff. things are going pretty cool. Lots of people really really like it and it's been it's been cool to just kind of like sit back and see you know the other day I was in there uh Saturday I believe and there was like I counted 26 people up on the gym at this at the same time training and not too long ago, was like, it was me and Jackson up there, like the only two motherfuckers in the place. So it's been cool that like the word is getting out and it's the type of people that we want in there and it's been really cool. Yeah, so how many of the 26 when you look around would you say are like properly jacked? A quarter. Yeah, I mean, it really depends. there's because we get so many day passes because it's you get a lot of that. But there's also been really cool times where. I'm up there and I'm like counting and I'm like, we have, so there was a, a big men's physique Olympian was here for a couple of weeks from, from Italy, Alessandro. And like, I'm like, have two Olympians in here training right now and five IFBB pros. And there's only like 15 people in the gym. And I'm like, that's fucking cool. You know, so we get like lots of international pros and stuff that come in and it's, it's really cool to just, you know, be a part of creating that environment. ah and then having people who want to come to Bali, because obviously Bali's a hot spot for travel and stuff, to give people, especially high level physique athletes, a proper place to train, do their posing and recovery and stuff, it's cool to be able to provide. Yeah, very cool. Okay let's dive in so we're talking determining training volume needs but we're obviously looking through it at a much more contextually applicable lens so we have kind of four characteristics we're going to take into consideration with our training volume model. Okay and we kind of rank them of order of priority so. The first one we have is what can you execute to strict quality standards because the quality in the execution of course has to come first. What can you actually recover from and number one influences number two because of that execution. What can you sustain psychologically? Right? Because there's things that you can physiologically recover from, but you start getting really big training anxiety or, know, the example I've used on the podcast numerous times. have four heavy sets of RDLs, so I'm not going to push the first set really, really hard because I still have three more. Okay. So what can you actually sustain psychologically? What fits into your unmovable life constraints? Which is another big one that people like to or not like but often miss. And then the fifth and final one is over a long enough time horizon. Do you ultimately or do we ultimately end up at the same place anyway. So these are the big uh pillars or characteristics like I said and we're going to kick off with the first which is the quality of execution. So this is one when I when I set out to really put this together. When I look and talking about the gym, just that I just went over, I do a lot of just like observing in between sets, something I've gotten very, very good at over the past. It really started in prep as I turn my phone on focus mode when I train. So like no WhatsApp, no Instagram, just Spotify and my training application. So in between sets and stuff like I'm just sitting and observing, you know, and A lot of people, like the quality of execution is not overly high. I would say... 30 % of people I would say are actually producing like really, really quality sets. And that has a direct impact on your volume, not only needs, but what you can actually produce to a high degree, right? If you, if we're talking a larger compound, right? Let's talk leg press, right? Cause like press is one that's pretty universally like applicable. And what does it look like from an execution standpoint, right? Our intent, our technique, are you properly braced? I had a client send me a training video this week on the leg press. It's a pretty damn good set, except they're not holding on to anything. Their hands were just like not attached to anything. They weren't holding on. And I said, It's a good set, but we lock ourselves into place with the handles so that we are more stable because increased stability is better force production. Really, really straightforward. So stability, bracing, ROM, and are we getting a rep speed slowdown? That's another one. If your final rep moves just as fast as your first rep. Unless we're specifically training to like a three RIR or something like that, you're not nearing the proximity to failure that you probably think you are. And we really, really see this a lot. With that, the definition of a working set. What constitutes a warmup? What constitutes a working set? How much warmup do you need relative to sets? uh We had a number of weeks ago, Brian, you were talking about uh Ronnie Coleman's style of training with the, I don't remember if it was a pyramid or a reverse pyramid, but it. four sets of 10 where each set increased weight, but he was still doing 10 reps each set. So was like 225 for 10, 315 for 10, 405 for 10 and 495 for 10. It's a really good example and if you're able to do 495 for 10, I have a pretty strong feeling that 315 for 10 is not considered a working set. That is still a warm up, right? If we're adding another 200 pounds. And that's the biggest one, but I want to get your kind of thoughts on this part, Brian, before we ask the final question of the quality of execution characteristic. one of the things you noted with that leg press set not bracing the first thought I had is, man, if I wasn't bracing and holding myself in position on a leg press, I got to think that my working weights would be cut in half, maybe like a 600 pound leg press becomes a 300 pound leg press or something along those lines. So it can still look hard and feel hard. And on a camera, you could still see rep speed slowdown and all of these things. But so much of that is. your inability to internally stabilize, that you're not actually sending the stimulus to where it's supposed to go. And then the other thing that I think about when I think of something like this is how you watch somebody train when they're in their first six months or maybe even a year of training. I think at about a year, you start to kind of be able to actually go there, but... You know, I think about some of these guys, we would get into the CrossFit gym and not not to say the CrossFit specific movements like cleans and snatches, but you look at their back squats or their dumbbell bench presses or something like that. And what they're limited by isn't their ability to actually engage the muscle and see rep speed slowdown from that point. Instead, what you're kind of seeing is they're going, going, going. And then technically something falters. It's like you're doing a dumbbell bench. But when things get hard, they can't actually keep the dumbbells in line. So the thing that makes them fail is that, you know, their shoulder kind of gives out a little bit or the dumbbell gets really wobbly and it doesn't stay in the line of press. uh So you're having all of these outside influences kind of come in and inhibit your ability to actually take the target muscle where you want it to go. So that person who's new might still be like, yeah, I went to failure because look, the dumbbell fell out of my hand and I couldn't actually complete the rep. But somebody who's advanced would be like, yeah, you just need to continue the line of press and become more technically savvy in that movement so that you can properly take the muscle to where it needs to go. And so if you're talking about the volume that somebody in their early stages can handle, it's probably significantly more because they're not actually holding the muscle to the fire. They're limited by joint structures and technique and things like that more. And it also makes me think about another episode we've done in the past. Maybe it was Oh, six months to a year at this point. But it was kind of discussing the the way in which volume needs change over a training career. And we talked a little bit about how in the beginning you don't need much because you're new and everything works. And then you get into kind of that like early intermediate stage where you're you're finally able to harness kind of that internal precision that you need. But you're still not lifting heavy enough loads necessarily. that it's limiting your volume. So maybe that like early intermediate to intermediate stage is where you're able to handle the most volume. And then as your technique becomes more precise and you're able to hold the muscle to the fire more and things like that, as you get into like later intermediate and early advanced stages, now you'll see a kind of downward trend in your volume needs at that point. And so so much of that relates back to exactly what you're saying, which is this quality of execution piece. Yeah, it does. It's it's I mean, like many things in let's call it a sport, right? Lifting is for a physical activity. You need enough reps to to hone your skills enough to be able to execute at a high level, right? It reminds me of I played American football, football. Sorry. um And it was until my third year maybe second year the first time that I like actually really hit someone like the way that you're supposed to hit in football and I was like kind of scared and I was like oh no. This is what I need to do like 30 times a game now. And it was one of those things like when you're younger, you don't really have that aggression, you know, and I started playing football, I think when I was like 13. And then it was maybe my it was either my freshman or sophomore year, probably my sophomore year. And we had a coach who was just like drilling us with form and would literally just put us five yards away from each other and just like whistle head to head, you know, and then it would like you need to be lower. You need to do this. You need to do that. And then once it finally like clicked and obviously with like your weights increasing we're getting faster We're now into a puberty and that's when it hit me and I was like, oh no This is what football is, you know and it like actually hurt to hit people like that and and it and I was like two years three years into playing the sport and that was like the first exposure to it and it's like that like you can be in a gym and you can use a leg press with your friends or whatever, but let's say I don't know you train with a friend from a different town or someone comes in and they're like, no, this is how you do a leg press. And it's that first time that you're actually taking a leg press to like a one RIR and you were like, oh no. what this is way different than what I have been doing. It's there's these levels that you didn't even know existed unless someone takes you there or unless you're just one of those like psychos who just kind of figure out on your own that that's how you're supposed to train. But it really does change what's required of you, what it costs you. And then subsequently, which leads me to my next point. how sets like that will limit, inherently limit your volume ceiling because of the cost of each set. Yeah, 100%. And I actually think that the, that aspect is almost more psychological than it is physiological in that when you have to focus and generate that amount of intensity internally for each set that you do, the psychological toll of that preparedness becomes significantly higher. So I'm, I'm kind of of the mindset that I think it's actually hard. to overtrain in the proper physiological sense of overtraining with just weights. the studies have shown that cardio tends to be something you can overtrain on much more consistently just because of how much of it you can do. Whereas there, does seem to be some kind of inherent limiters to how much volume you do. ah And I saw that psychologically preparing for each one of those sets takes a toll. And at some point you are just incapable of reproducing the same level of effort and intensity over the course of a training session. And I think one other point that maybe should be made here is, you you see the work from James Krieger on in session volume for a given muscle group. And he's shown that the most in session volume from muscle group that you can likely get away with is somewhere between eight to 10 sets, something like that. I find that to be slightly higher. than me, like I'm doing, you know, six to eight sets. And that seems to be about right for the most case. But I can very much explicitly remember a time where I was trying to follow the Mike is or tell RP approach in, I don't know, 2017, 2018, something like that. And I remember trying to do 16 sets, 12 to 16 sets of chest in a session. And I remember doing the last exercise and just feeling like I couldn't even the muscle that I wanted to engage. couldn't really feel my chest doing the work. It almost felt like it was just so swollen and pumped up and fatigued that I was just kind of going through the motions and like my shoulder was feeling weird because like my chest wasn't engaging properly. I think my front delt was taking much more of the burden. And so using that Krieger research and then the psychological limits of focus and intensity, I think it does make sense that there is kind of this inherent limiter in how much volume you actually can do for a muscle group in a session, which then downstream limits the amount of total volume that you can do across a week. Yep, I agree completely. Now, I think it would be helpful for the listener to add a little bit of additional nuance. I do think that certain muscle groups are more akin to higher volume than others because of the complexity. Maybe is maybe not the right term to use, but like back comes to mind. maybe or yeah like yeah. think about like quad, how are we training a quad knee extension and hip extension or a combination of knee extension hip extension and a squat like your options are like extension sissy squat reverse sled drag or like squat and lunge variations. But there's so much bleed over there. So there's but there you're hammering the same movement pattern again and again is basically what I'm getting at. But if we take something like the back we can do. Like a row, can do a rear delt specific kind of like fly. We can do a lap focused like pull down. We can do an upper back pull down. We can do like a Kelso shrug sort of thing. So you can throw a lot more volume at it because there's. just more muscles and there's like different nuanced ways that you could kind of stack those together. But something like a like a bicep, right? It's only so many ways you can bend your elbow, you know, where it's just simpler. So the kind of overloading of a signal happens more easily because of the more simplistic nature of the muscle. Yeah, that's interesting because biceps are actually one of those muscles that you do see people be able to handle like pretty high volumes on. Like you'll see people do, I don't know, eight sets three times a week or something along those lines. And you're like, wow, you're doing like 24 sets of biceps a week. And similarly, I think you see the same with lateral delts where you can like, I mean, it's both complex and simple at the same time in that there are multiple regions and heads of the dealt like there's like seven different dealt heads that you can train between anterior, lateral and rear delt. So there's a lot of different angles that you can train the lateral delts on or the delts in general. And so in that way, you can kind of Institute a ton of volume for those as well. But the other thing about the lateral delts is that they tend to be like a little bit more slow twitch muscle fibers. So they're a little bit more resistant to that fatigue, you can probably handle a little bit more volume there, whereas something like you referenced with the quads or especially the hamstrings, which are a very fast twitch muscle group, you just cannot do as much hamstring work before you just simply are no longer able to engage the muscle in the same capacity that you were before. Yeah, agreed. Okay, so moving into the second characteristic is which we've kind of already bled out into a little bit is you're just training capacity and recover ability. So one of the things effectively is like how many total working sets can you adapt to right now? Right. And that's that right now is important because there's different Indirect impacting factors in your environment that either increase or decrease your adaptability to a given level of training volume, which I'll get into a little bit right now. Sleep, a combination of sleep quality and quantity. Allostatic stress load, right? If you're that. three years at a university, you have a nice high paying job, no student loan debt, you're in a low cost living uh area of the country, and you have a lot of like free time and stress is low, bills are paid for, you can handle a lot more, but if you're that same age, but you also have like two children, you're in a high cost of area living, you're in a shaky... business sector and you might lose your job and stuff and stress is higher you're not going to be able to handle as much caloric environment right. This is the one that always whenever uh admittedly. All the listeners know like I'm a nutrition guy. That's my background when I'm when I would read a lot of these nutrition sorry training studies over the years I get really frustrating because it would never talk about nutrition or anything like that. And to me it seemed before I knew about how controlling for studies and costs and all of these things it would really frustrate me because I mean this is a massive lever that's uncontrolled and different people have variously different you know understandings and defaults of nutrition and that has a impact on things like hypertrophy outcomes or lack thereof. So your environment of those indirect impacting factors significantly changes your volume uh capacity because of your recoverability with those. Yeah, I think the calories are a big one too. It used to be discussed or the RP model was that, well, if you're in a caloric deficit and you're dieting, you need more volume because you have to be able to hold on to this muscle in this caloric deficit that you're in. And I think so much of that, thankfully, has washed away and changed in the model now. And that when you're in a caloric deficit, it's now seen as, well, you can maintain muscle. on significantly lower volume. And it's not like you're going to really be building muscle anyway, since you're in a caloric deficit. So you can pull that lever of lowering volumes a little bit and maintain the muscle that you have. And so I think that that's helped a lot just as far as like a general paradigm that people may follow in the industry. But all of those other things you mentioned, like sleep quality and allostatic stress and things like that, all fall kind of downstream of that of calories or rather are aligned with the calorie deficit as things that kind of mitigate your ability to handle maximal volumes. Yeah, agreed. They're not all that equal. uh I would say like impact factors. Right. So let's say let's say you're a little bit stressed out. Your sleep's not great. But I mean you're eating all the food in the world that can compensate to a decent degree for a you know a significant amount of time not forever. um And it will not be a one to one. But some of them. Yeah. Like I said have different impacting factors or impact factors. Yeah, yeah. training age and your current trainability. This one's really big, right? You think about the really textbook example of this is CrossFit, right? The people who train multiple times per day, multiple days per week, they don't just start doing that on day one. It's a tolerance over time for the body to adapt to a given level of training volume to be able to perform skills at the necessary execution level for those skills. And then the volume gets titrated up over time. Once the body adapts right like like the most basic kind of physiology in biology and nature. We are effectively just an organism that adapts to the environment around it, but it's not immediate, right? Certain things take different amounts of time. And if you're brand new to training, you can't handle that amount of volume, right? Because your system hasn't been exposed to it over a long enough time to be able to succumb or surmount the demands of the volume increases. Yeah. I do think there's potentially a distinguishing factor there in that the example of the CrossFit athlete that can continuously increase volume. So much of that is adaptation to systemic stressors. And I think that when you're talking about bodybuilding or hypertrophy training, you're looking a little bit more at like the local musculature and what that specific muscle belly can recover from and adapt to. And so I think you're kind of left with a few different elements to consider there than maybe you are with CrossFit. But I do I think there are the references is solid. And so kind of like if we can jump into your next bullet point, which is exercise selection, this is a super relevant one because ah like the example you put in here was barbell RDL RDL vs leg curl. And so both of those when we're talking about exercise selection are hamstring movements. but the amount of volume that one could handle of that movement is super different. Like if somebody is constructing their hamstring routine strictly of seated leg curls and lying leg curls, they might be able to handle 15 or 20 sets a week. But if someone's routine is primarily like RDLs Nordics or something along those lines, now you might only be able to handle six or eight sets a week or something along those lines. So exercise selection plays a huge role. when we're talking about this volume conversation. Yeah, it really, really does. that's where part of the reason why I wanted to do this episode is because people will just say volume, right? Volume for hamstrings. But it is not that simple, unfortunately, right? Like Brian said, an RDL or a... Nordic ham curl or a GHR glute ham raise is I would say equally double if not more of a recovery of recoverability in acute stress demand than a seated or prone ham curl. And it's in there and there's specific exercises like that that extrapolate to all of the muscle groups, maybe not like lateral delts or rear delts, but most of the larger muscle groups. And it dramatically impacts what amount of volume numbers look like. And then the last point here is joint wear and tear as much as. you know, someone might want to admit it like that does play a role. And it's usually it's not so much the I had a really good conversation with someone about this a few weeks ago. It's not so much the age like people speak about with joint wear and tear. It's the compounding effects of choices you made when you were younger, which have uh negatively impacted a certain joint and the time compounded on top of that right so you know if you have someone who's never had a knee injury in their entire life and they never had any like really kind of dumb training phases or anything like that, overuse injuries, their knees squatting and stuff in their late 40s are probably in great fucking shape, right? But if you had someone who had like an ACL repair or patellar tendon repair, there's just scar tissue buildup and degradation over time, but usually due to choices or acute misfortune that compound. Yeah, I think that's accurate, but I also think that there is an effect of the amount of volume that you decide to do for a given muscle group or joint structure that compounds over time, regardless of your prior injury state in that, man, I've had clients, I'm sure you have too. where somebody's like, I really want to grow my arms, for example. And so we start kind of ramping up some volume on the arms and they're doing three or four different exercises for biceps, three or four different exercises for triceps. And inevitably at some point, a number of months down the line, they're like, Oh, you know, I have golfer's elbow or tennis elbow or a combo of both. And my elbows are really starting to hurt now. And so my mind, where my mind goes in this situation is, man, you just made a decision to try and get a significant increase in your short term production at the expense of your long term sustainability. And so much of your ability to achieve your desired physique over time is a result of your ability to stay consistent and just keep doing the damn thing. And like, we'll get to this at the end with like, you know, do we get to the same place anyways at 15 years, but If we're gonna be able to say that maybe you get to the same place at 15 years, then like, is it worth doing 20 to 30 sets of biceps and triceps in the earlier years so that maybe you can get slightly faster results in that target area versus thinking about the long game and where you might end up, regardless of whether you did seven to eight sets or 20 to 30 sets. playing devil's advocate. mean ultimately I agree with what you're saying. Do you think if let's say for let's use that same example because I've had two clients who were like the last three weeks where our biceps and triceps are the priority. So we're you increasing volume there. Do you think it is maybe in a too much of an acute increase in volume, which then, cause I mean, we know the overuse typically is as the word states like overuse, but do you think it's from an acute increase in volume or as if we maybe used a ramping or titrating approach so that those connective tissues could be exposed to those increasing volumes over time? may, I mean, we may not be able to circumvent it. Like there might just be a, hey, at. whatever 15 sets per week on biceps you're going to develop like a tendonitis somewhere but maybe if we do more of a volume ramping approach we can at least kick that can a few months down the road before that problem starts to manifest or do you think it's just a just a ramping that could just a certain volume threshold Yeah, I think that that's probably right, that you probably could ramp it up slower and alleviate some of that burden, but my sense is that... Total volume certainly plays a role, but I also think that unique individual genetic predisposition plays a role in that some people's joint tolerances are just lower or worse than others. And you can see that with the type of client that you're training, like somebody with those big robust joint structures, know, maybe their wrist is over seven inches, something like that. You see them being able to handle a little bit more of this volume tolerance with less detriment. than you would with somebody that's maybe of more of that like ectomorphic 6.5 or smaller wrist structure. And they just tend to be a little bit more fragile when you try to ramp up those volumes in that manner. Yeah it obviously goes without saying to that your movement mechanics obviously play a role right. Like we have these simple joints like think like a knee or an elbow. It bends in one way right. That's the way it's designed to bend. You can like kind of twist your knee. It will still work that way but you're you're cranking on it in a way that it shouldn't be cranked on and over enough time you're probably going to develop some issues there. But the term comes from or not the term the person comes to mind Tom Platts right. The quad father, he has just textbook squat form. It's just beautiful. It looks like he was literally born to squat. I think he's in his, I'm almost very positive he's in his 60s now. And I saw a video maybe two years ago of him like still repping out like. an unnatural amount of weight at his age. His legs are still huge and he still moves like he's in his 30s or something like that. um So Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. So that's even crazier that I think the video is maybe like two years old that he was just still moving so well. um I mean there's just an additional one there which takes us to the next point which is enjoyment and sustainability. So we kind of talked about the sustainability from a physiologic standpoint of what your joint structures and stuff can handle. But. psychologically, right? You know, one thing that we've talked about a number of times on the pod is just, you have to find some way to enjoy it so that you keep showing up. Because if you're absolutely miserable, even if you have the perfect plan, if you hate it, it's always a means to an end there. So Enjoyment is not ignorable is ultimately what I want to say there and then the CNS resiliency to failure sets on large compounds, right? and this is where one of those things where the The way that you have your volume distributed from you know, isolations to compounds short overload to lengthened overload does play a role because you know, the the resiliency to that and the psychological impact and anxiety is very, very real. So let's say we want to do, for example, whatever eight sets for the quads, if we just do, you know, four sets on the leg extension, four sets on a hack squat. That those hack squat sets are going to be a pretty decent uh mental battle. to surmount. But if we divided that maybe a little bit more intelligently, maybe we only do maybe we do a top back off on a hack squat, we do three sets on the leg extension with maybe the third set having a little bit of uh a technique change or something like that one and one half something like that. Maybe we do a lunge pattern and then one set of cable supported sissy squats at the end. That's a different psychological beast to approach that day and potentially increasing the long term sustain of that equal set of volume of that eight, think is the number that I used there. Yeah, the the enjoyment and sustainability, I feel like, oscillates also throughout a training career. Like I think in the earlier stages, when you're younger and full of testosterone production and all of this stuff, I think it's really easy to. You know, have that gumption to do whatever is necessary to get results right now. And at some point across the way. your results slow down a little bit. You're not getting these results that you notice in the mirror every month or two months or even six months, whatever it is. And at that point, maybe the opportunity cost of your time changes. And I noticed that for sure with me. Like I started with an abbreviated routine. So I started super brief. was like two times a week, full body for 45 to 60 minutes. So I was on the briefer side. Then a few years later, I got into the, muscle mag stuff and I was like, well, what I really need to be doing is 20 to 30 sets of, know, different muscle groups, bro split and all this stuff. And that started to kind of, I mean, it was motivating at first. And I did, I would say in many ways did see results from that. Who knows how much of that was like the pump and muscle swelling and things like that. But I felt like there was certainly some results there and that was motivating. But then eventually those results slow down. And where I ended up finding myself at year. five or six was back to a more abbreviated style, which was I've talked about on here, the max OT program. So it was like, you know, six to nine sets per muscle group per week, because that felt like the perfect coalescence of my ability now to manufacture better technique, my ability to have better exercise selection. And without the excessive commitment to the time of doing 20 to 30 sets of muscle group that maybe would have given me like very slightly more results, who's to even say if that's true or not, but eventually finding my way back to an amount of volume that felt sustainable and enjoyable per the section of topics. Agreed. Which takes us to the final point. It's not fun point before. I apologize. Availability. Right. And this is the one I feel like this is because we're older now. You know and we have to look at it through this. But this I very rarely see people talk about this. But at the end of the day for most people I would say this the time availability. You know days per week availability and What was there was one other one whereas it was not joint wear and tear it was the other environments right sleep quality Environment surplus those sorts of things I do truly think before we get into Specific like programming tweaks and stuff. I do think these are the biggest levers And what we have here is time availability time availability per session days per week that you can train what your work hours are like, what your commute is like, and what your home demands are. If you can realistically only train, let's call it Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday for 45 minutes, and that's what your actual availability is, there is your constraint on volume right there. Like that, what can you actually fit into that window? And then if you need to, since you need to train Saturday and Sunday and you don't have any time between that, that's going to limit what you can do on those days as well. So your life is the large or your life factors, the non, you know, negotiable, unmovable life factors is the largest constraint on your volume. Let's call it for what it is. Yeah, I as a personal example, I would absolutely not be doing this six day a week bro split that I'm doing right now. If I had to commute to a gym and do that just to get a 35 minute session in and then turn around and come home. Like if I didn't have a gym in my basement that I could just walk down to start my timer 35 minutes later, I'm done. Boom sessions complete. There's no way I'm wasting that time going to the gym six days a week. I for sure would be on a three or four day a week program with 60 to 75 minute sessions, because that's just what makes the most sense with the other factors that go into the time availability there. So a really good point. Yeah, and this is one where I don't want to sound insensitive because by no means is that my intent, but I would also often make the argument that if this is something that becomes so important to your life, where you're like, hey, I really wanna train five days per week or six days per week and I really want this to be more important, then maybe you move other variables of your life. Maybe you need to get a new job or different things like that. Or this is a really good example, right? This is so important to me, right? And I'm just very fortunate that I found something that I love to do. I've been able to build a career out of it and stuff. We've talked about on the podcast numerous times, The neighborhood that Jenny and I are going to move to or not maybe neighborhood the the the region of town We picked it because of its proximity to the gym because that is where we will go the absolute most So we choose a neighborhood Or region of town so that I have we have less than like a 12 minute drive to the gym. That was like a very hard constraint um because it's important to me, right? If we found this beautiful home and it checked all the boxes, but it was like a 25 minute drive to the gym, I'd say no fucking way am I doing that every single day. So again, it's being able to pick and choose and knowing what your priorities are and stuff. And it ultimately does define how much volume you can handle because you can only fit so much in a session like we spoke about. Okay, I had one other small one here that I think I'll touch on quickly. Equipment availability, right? Sometimes I'm not a big fan of if using as much equipment as we can just because it's there, right? So let's say a gym has a really, really good incline pressing machine, but the flat press machine's like pretty garbage. I'm not going to use that. We might just do a little bit more inclined and then maybe more flat dumbbell pressing or something like that. So it's less of an importance, but exercise selection and equipment quality, I think are worth at least briefly mentioning, but not nearly to the to the magnitude of most of the other things that we we spoke about. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. You also have the potential programming decision of whether you want to do, you know, one or two sets of a bunch of different exercises or more sets of one exercise. And the fact that you have to consider that if you're going to do a bunch of different exercises and you're in a commercial gym, you have to maneuver yourself between these exercises, hope that no one's on the machine that you want. probably do a warmup set or two for each new machine. There's a number of different factors that can add time to your day by making that decision uh versus doing more sets of the same exercise. And then the opportunity cost of that would be less stimulus to various regions of the muscle group. Like if your chest day is a flat bench and an inclined bench, then you're not able to also fit in like some sort of fly movement. or a decline or a dip or whatever else you would want to do. So there is a little bit of opportunity costs there, but there's no reason that you can't use that to your advantage and do four to six months of two exercises. And then the next four to six months, you know, maybe you keep one and you put a new one in, or you switch both out and do two new ones. So a few different ways that you can kind of use exercise selection to manipulate volume. And then, uh, the last thing I had on here, and I don't even know if this fully fits into this section, but The idea of specialty cycles and pulling the levers of volume for one to two muscle groups at a time. This is the idea that the data-driven guys have really been promoting super hard for the last couple of years. And I think it makes the most sense when you talk about doing a higher volume routine. I honestly don't think it makes sense to just do high volume across the entire body. I think it makes a lot more sense to choose one or two muscle groups that are a priority and you can ramp up the volume. to your point about joint structures, you can ramp up the volume slowly over the course of multiple weeks or months for those specific muscle groups. And then after you've achieved as many gains as you can, that's reasonable timeframe for those muscle groups, you can simply rotate which muscle groups become a priority so that you're not having to put the entire body on blast. And that protects your joint structures. It protects your recoverability. It protects your precious time commitments. uh It kind of solves a lot of the negative drawback issues that we're gonna discuss, that we've discussed about high volume routines. It solves that and it allows you to directly utilize volume specifically for a purpose and then use the maintenance volume research to kind of dial that back, put those muscles on maintenance or maintenance plus, and then ramp up the volume for other muscle groups. Yeah. And as the final point, which we're going to kind of allude to, this is a great segue. As your training age increases, so does the likelihood that different muscles develop at different rates and you have strong muscle groups, strong body parts, lagging body parts. So the likelihood that that specialty cycle makes a lot more sense so that you can bring up lagging body parts while, you know, just supporting the uh amount of uh hypertrophy you already have and some of the stronger ones, right? Yep. Yeah. So which kind of leads us to this final point is in 10 to 15 years 10 to 15 years plus do we eventually end up at the same place anyways. And I think so in practical terms right because. If you're doing this for 10 to 15 years plus, it means your interest in it is quite high and you are going to step through the various paces and ultimately find what works best for you. The one thing I will say though is you may find pretty late what might work best for you because I feel rather confident saying, I mean, I started training in 2005 and in 2021, 2022, was, that's. let's say that's 17 years later, I would still consider myself high volume and only in the last like year and a half have I really leaned into doing lower volume at like year 23, right? And now I mean, obviously there's a lot of different changes in my life with the exogenous hormones and stuff, but I mean, I'm making great progress. I'm learning new things about my body and stuff like that. So ultimately, if you spend enough time chasing, this game, you will walk through the different steps and low volume, high volume specialty cycles because you eat. It's just an it's it's like an never ending quest to try and get the best out of yourself and find out what works for yourself. And it has enough time goes by. You're going to try it all effectively. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it's interesting that it took you kind of that long to get to the low volume point because I mean, I remember looking at your routines when we were first starting this podcast and you would write down your leg routine and it was like four sets of six different exercises or something like that for your leg workout. And I know that you like thought you were training hard and you were putting in the proper intensity and all that sort of stuff. But I think looking back and reflecting on it, you can now say that A lot of those sets were probably, you know, two to four RIR or something along those lines, or at least you weren't able to institute the amount of intensity and focus that you're able to now. And so in some ways you kind of follow that curve that we mentioned earlier. It's just that your curve happened later where, know, you were intermediate, late intermediate, your volumes are really high, you're experimenting with high volumes. And then you kind of transition over into this like advanced stage. And you realize that You don't need as much volume because you can focus better. Your execution is better. All of the things that we've basically talked about already today. And so I think that that is insightful, not to say that you're the same as everybody else and that everyone else is going to have the same experience as you, but my sense from 20 years, 27 years training and basically 20 years coaching is that most people get there. like most people that think that they really need to do high volumes, they ultimately end up at lower volumes once they reach the point that they're able to institute that execution and intensity that we've been talking about. And there of course are exceptions. Like you look at Eric Helms and his upper body and you see that he's doing 20 to 30 sets and basically everything's to failure and his execution is really good and all of these things. And he's found that that's what's necessary for him. But by the same token, he's found that his legs actually respond to higher intensity, lower volume. And so these are sort of the things that you learn over time in how it's specific to your body. So just because you might respond to high volumes in one part may not mean that you respond best to high volumes in another part. And so it's all part of this journey of building insight into yourself. And to kind of wrap it back to the 10 to 15 years plus thing, my sense is, and you and I have discussed this too, that the thing that limits you from reaching quote, genetic potential is often not your training. It's not whether you're training high volume or low volume. It's much more the lifestyle factors of are you getting sleep? Do you have stress? Are you eating enough calories? Are you able to do this consistently over time? Like all of these various factors keep you from reaching your genetic potential, not the style of training that you choose. ah And so my thought process is that regardless of which style you train, you're likely gonna get to 95 to 98 % of your genetic potential if you just do it long enough. And then maybe there's a few little levers you can pull later on that are like, oh, I actually can use more intensity and maybe pull back volume here, or maybe I need more volume here and maybe slightly less intensity. But these are the things that are getting you that extra one or 2%. They're not the things that are taking you from, you know, a novice untrained physique to being super jacked. It's like, Regardless of how you train, you just do it long enough and hard enough with enough volume, which is kind of a nebulous amount of volume, but enough, uh then you're going to get a pretty jacked physique. And so that's kind of where I stand. Yeah, yeah, I mean, ultimately, I agree. And if you eat enough, so. Yeah, for sure. And then we have like personal anecdote here. I need to jump off here in a second, but I do want to say, you know, I did try the high volume stuff as I referenced after my abbreviated training, I did a couple of years of high volume and then eventually dialed that back to the max OT. And I can't say I've really done significantly high volumes other than my CrossFit years. That was kind of like this, this Oasis in the middle of my training career, but uh in my bodybuilding style training, I haven't really gone back to high volumes much after a year. fourth, four and five. um But I did hire Brian Miner as a coach at one point, the 3dmj coach, and he was awesome. I love him. Nothing against the way he programmed me or anything. But um he basically increased my volume by at least 50 % from where I was going into him because he was like, look, this is a lever we can pull. Like if you want maximum results, we can pull this lever of more volume. And so he not only took me from a push pull legs where I was doing six sessions over 10 days. He pulled that back. So I was doing six sessions over eight days, and he basically one and a half times my volume while increasing my frequency. And I made it about five weeks of that program before I was like, my enjoyment is down. I, my joint structures are starting to hurt. I don't really want to show up to the gym and do this anymore. And, and that just wasn't something that worked for me. So you know, one of your points here is try it, like play devil's advocate, try the other side, see if that works for you, see what happens. And I can say that through that experience that I tried, you know, increasing frequency, increasing volume, and the end result was not beneficial for me. Yeah, mean, I, well, I'm not gonna say I love that, right? Cause that would be kind of a dickheaded thing, but um yeah, like these are just experiences you have, do you have to gain? And the one kind of final thing that I will leave with is you can use volume as a lever or sorry, you can use titrating and increasing volumes as a lever. but then it eventually needs to reset to be able to use that again, right? And maybe it resets with a season of your life where. For example, like I used it as a reset postseason where my focus is now getting married and you know, being back in the USA and seeing family and stuff like that. I'm going to drop my volume back down. I'm just going to try and maintain, you know, the amount of muscle and stuff that I have. And now that was in September. We're now in January and I'm titrating volumes back up and I'm like using that lever again and then I'll drop it back down and use it in a wave like fashion. So it is a lever that you can use, in short, most people probably don't need as much as they think as the training age is, ages progress. And I just want to say like, love Brian Miner. He and I have conversations off offline and stuff too. So this really isn't anything against him. Like I actually think given where the science was in 2020 and stuff, like he made the absolute right move. I would have done the same move if I was coaching somebody under those conditions as well. It just happened to not be the right move for me in that situation. So ah yeah, totally agree with everything you said. Cool, so that is uh Brian and Aaron's meanderings on determining your volume needs. So as always guys, thank you for listening. You can follow up with us on Instagram or in the comments on YouTube. We would appreciate that. Have a great week. We will talk to you two weeks. Next week I will not be able to record. Cool.