Volume Manipulation For More Muscle

Volume Manipulation For More Muscle

It's undeniable that volume has a huge impact on eliciting muscle growth. Yes, training volume is more important for stimulating muscle growth than heavy weight or those crazy bosu ball exercises your buddy said would make you 'swole.'

While upward volume manipulation combined with a well periodized training program might help you keep growing, there is a limit. And for many of us, that limit is time. What if there was a better way? What if you could somehow manipulate training volume to help you grow and still fit in your life and your schedule.

When you first start training, upward volume manipulation is easy. Maybe you are only training for 45min, 3days a week. So, adding in some volume to train for an hour is no big deal. Or better yet, increasing frequency to train 5days per week could certainly increase your gainz. But what happens when you're already training 5days a week for 1.5hours or more per training session? If you are a career bodybuilder then maybe you can bump up the volume and train up to 2hours a day or more. But for many of us, doing that more than once or twice per week is just not feasible.

Cycling Volume Down

So, how do you manipulate volume to increase muscle growth when you are already spending hours a day in the gym? The answer: cycle volume down.

Wait? What?!?  I thought increasing volume builds more muscle, not decreasing volume.

Think about what happens with periodization. While volume and strength increases over time, it may not necessarily increase from one phase to another. For example, in a linearly periodized training program's recovery phase, volume actually decreases. In the case of DUP (Daily Undulating Periodization), volume increases and decreases throughout the week.

So, it kind of makes sense to cycle volume down at some point. And if you have a linearly periodized training program then cycling volume down is part of your training plan.

Change Makes The Difference

Because training volume has been found to be a huge contributor to muscle growth, many people are reluctant to drop volume.  But what happens when you drop volume? Do you lose everything you gained over the last year? No. Do you lose all that you've gained over the past few months? No. If you drop volume by a moderate amount, you really don't lose a lot, if anything.

Now, what happens when you increase volume over time? You get muscle growth. And if you decrease training volume for a period of time (volume, not intensity), but then gradually increase it up to (and beyond, factoring in strength increases), what happens? You get stronger and you build muscle.

What About DUP?

If you train using DUP then you are already manipulating volume up and down during any given week. But over time, volume as a whole increases: you get stronger, maybe add a few reps, etc. But you can't climb forever. And if you want to keep growing then something has to change. And that change is dropping training volume as a whole. It's kind of like integrating linear periodization with DUP; drop the volume as a whole for a period (e.g. 1-2 months) and then start walking it up again (e.g. for the remainder of the year).

Pulling it All Together

Last year when I went into contest prep and for most of the duration of my contest prep, I was training with higher volume than I had ever trained with before. This meant long grueling workouts. And then something happened… I herniated a disc in my lumbar. I had to drop the intensity and as a result, volume decreased. When I finished contest prep, I  gradually adjusted up the intensity and with it, I added in additional training volume with more sets and reps. Now my training volume is probably more than what it was last year prior to my disc injury. But a lot of that had to do with increased strength. And guess what? I gained some muscle too.

I’m not suggesting that you intentionally bring down intensity for any duration. But what I am saying is that periodic stretches of lower volume via reduced sets & reps might be a good thing to help create the adaptive response you want for building muscle without adding an unmanageable amount of time to your workouts. And I think even those who practice DUP in their training plans can benefit from periodically adjusting overall training volume down for a period before bringing it back up again. That’s exactly what I did and I had pretty good results.

To me, none of this really seems all that far out of left field. It’s really just allowing your body to adapt to lower volume in order to illicit a strength and hypertrophy response by increasing overall training volume back to previous levels or beyond. It’s kind of like taking one step backwards in order to take 3 more forwards. And I certainly don’t see anything wrong with that.

References

[1] Stone, Michael H., et al. "A theoretical model of strength training." Strength & Conditioning Journal 4.4 (1982): 36-39.

[2] Rhea, Matthew R., et al. "A comparison of linear and daily undulating periodized programs with equated volume and intensity for strength." The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 16.2 (2002): 250-255.

[3] Buford, Thomas W., et al. "A comparison of periodization models during nine weeks with equated volume and intensity for strength." The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 21.4 (2007): 1245-1250.

[4] Schoenfeld, Brad J., et al. "Effects of different volume-equated resistance training loading strategies on muscular adaptations in well-trained men." J Strength Cond Res (2014).

[5] Schoenfeld, Brad J. "The importance of periodization." Iron Life June 2014: 6. App.

Posted by Clayton Long