Volume Method: More or Less
Goal 5: Increase Strength with Minimal Hypertrophy
If you're an athlete who needs a high level of relative strength—that is, maximal strength in relation to body weight—additional muscle mass can be a hindrance.
So for this goal you want to reduce the set-rep volume significantly, especially if you're also cutting or barely maintaining your calorie intake to stay within your weight class.
Here are the parameters you should follow:
Table 4
The Volume Method as it Applies to Maximal Strength Without Hypertrophy Training
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In order to minimize hypertrophy, you keep the volume low and take longer rest periods between sets, while using enough weight to improve maximal strength.
You'll recruit the maximum number of muscle fibers per lift, and rest long enough between sets to allow your central nervous system to recover. (Your CNS gets fatigued, just like muscles do, and needs time to recover.)
S o . . . What Do I Do?
You'll notice I've given you a bunch of parameters without any specifics about how to use them. So let's pick a practical example. Your goal is #4, strength with hypertrophy. (My favorite, as you may have guessed by now.)
But before I talk about how to employ specific exercises, let me say a word about terminology:
If you consider yourself a bodybuilder, you probably think about the exercises you do in terms of which body parts they work. So you do bench presses for your chest, overhead presses for your shoulders, rows and pulldowns for your back, squats for your legs, etc.
Others like to talk about exercises in terms of movement patterns—a
shoulder press is a "vertical push," and a row is a "horizontal pull." This is a more useful way to look at exercises, since it's easy to figure out that the opposite of a horizontal push (bench press) is a horizontal pull (row), and that these
combinations should be done in equal volume. This is called antagonist pairing, a
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concept I'll discuss in detail in Chapter 4.
But whatever terminology you use, the Volume Method works the exact same way.
Exercise selection
As you've probably guessed, there's a wide range of exercises that you can plug into my formulae. Let's say your goal is maximal strength and muscle size.
Looking at Table 3, you see that you should do 24 to 36 reps per muscle group/
movement pattern per workout, at 80 to 90 percent of your 1 RM. Just to make it simple, let's start with the entry-level parameters—24 reps at 80 percent of your 1 RM. Here's how your first workout of the week might look for a typical pair of exercises:
Monday:
Barbell decline bench press: 8x3 with 80% of 1RM Barbell bent-over row: 8x3 with 80% of 1RM
But maybe you don't want to use just one exercise for each movement pattern, so you decide to do it like this:
Monday:
Barbell decline bench press: 4x3 with 80-82% of 1 RM Dumbbell flat bench press: 4x3 with 80-82% of 1 RM Barbell bent-over row: 4x3 with 80-82% of 1RM Chest-supported row: 4x3 with 80-82% of 1 RM
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That might be a more interesting workout, and you'd probably find that using two exercises per movement pattern allows you to train with slightly heavier loads, since you're doing four sets of each exercise instead of eight.
With either choice, you're using the same parameters.
Volume progression
Finally, here's how to use the Volume Method to get the results you want.
Let's assume the same goal—maximal strength with hypertrophy. Once again, you'll start at the lowest end of the spectrum numbers: 24 reps per body part/
movement pattern, 80 percent of 1 RM, two workouts a week. If you add two reps per body part per week, your progression would look like this:
Week Reps per body part/ Workouts Movement pattern % of 1RM per Week
1 24 80 2
2 26 80 2
3 28 80 2
4 30 80 2
5 32 80 2
6 34 80 2
7 36 80 2
From there, you could drop the set-rep volume back down to 24, and add another session per week, so you're doing three instead of two. Follow the same set-rep progression until you hit 36 reps per movement pattern per workout.
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Now drop the set-rep volume back down to 24, and add one more workout, so you're doing four a week. Continue with the progression until you're doing 36 reps per body part per workout. At this point, 21 weeks into your program, you've more than doubled your total weekly exercise volume.
Stay with four workouts a week for that movement pattern, but drop back down to 24 reps per workout, and increase the load to 82 percent of your 1RM.
Work back up to 36 reps in the next seven weeks.
When you hit that mark, drop back down to 24 reps and bump the weight to 84 percent of your 1 RM. Now build your reps over the next seven weeks.
You can see how this can go on for ages. In just a few paragraphs, I've shown you 35 weeks' worth of progression.
I wouldn't recommend staying on one program for that long, even if you are able to handle each progression. The more experienced you are, the faster you'll get stale and need some kind of change. But I think it's useful to show how you can use the Volume Method to make progress on any program, whether it's one you design or something you found in a magazine or online.
Once you've mastered it, every program and training technique in the universe is yours to exploit.
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