What's Your Volume?
What's Your Volume?
I was told by a friend of mine recently that a certain strength coach laid out his training plan of his football players at a coach's clinic a while back. This coach claimed that his players had more volume and intensity than any other program. This coach claims that his teams (are you ready for this?) do 50 sets of doubles at 70% of their max! Imagine that. That is unreal. In fact, it's so unreal, I call bullshit on that program. Even if it were true, assuming the athlete had no warm-up time and just started at 70%, it would take approximately 55 minutes to complete a workout with one minute rest between sets and 5 seconds to complete the double. If it went to one and a half minutes rest, the workout would drag to 80 minutes. Can you imagine doing 50 sets of 2 at 70% of your max in less than 90 minutes? That doesn't even count warm-ups or someone else training with you.
The point is, athletes and powerlifters will all train at different intensities and training volumes. However, do you know what your body needs in order to get stronger? Do you know the intensity and volume you need just to maintain? If you want to get stronger and be a better lifter, then you need to know.
Intensity is one key to greater strength. That doesn't mean the kind of head banging on a power rack that I see. It means getting your workout done timely and with great concentration. I don't think anyone would argue that a lifter who completes a workout in 90 minutes is stronger than if he completes the same exact workout in 120 minutes (that point could be argued with very light workouts, but for argument sake I'm talking about maximal poundage). Why? Because it's more physically demanding to lift those heavy weights in a shorter amount of time with shorter rest periods. I am not advocating speed in your workouts and getting no rest. Actually, I think lifters train better with as much rest as they need but make sure they eliminate excessive talking and wasting time. Actually, between the time factor of intensity and the concentration factor, I think concentration is more important than time. Eliminate thoughts of work, stress and the daily grind. Focus your mind into achieving the lifts and completing the workout. The better you can focus in the gym when it means little, the better you will do it in a meet when it counts. And as you progress up the ladder of strength, strength becomes more technical than it does from a raw power standpoint.
To get an idea of concentration, ask yourself how many bench presses you have missed on a mis-groove. How many have you missed because you didn't touch in the right place? Lowered the bar too slow? Wrists broke? Kept your elbows out? Wrong body-positioning? The list goes on, but the list is all technical which is imperative from your standpoint because it often determines if you make the lift, not if you're strong enough or not. To make sure you're strong enough, let's then look at your volume.
First, make sure you keep a training log to record your workouts. Rickey Dale Crain has been an advocate of this for years, and so have I. I still have logs of when I trained in high school. If for no other reason, it's incredible to go back and see what you did years ago and look at the strength level you were at then and sometimes the whole picture of your strength becomes very clear. Log books should keep track of the exercises you perform, number of sets, number of reps, weight used and the order the exercises were done in. Many athletes are now keeping their logs online or on excel documents so they can easily be accessed and totaled. Also, try to keep dates of when the workout was done and once in a while, jot down your bodyweight. You know what you weigh now, but when you go back 6 months from now to check on it, you won't remember.
Second, at the end of every training cycle have your maxes listed in your log along with your volume summaries. What is a volume summary? Go through the first week of your training cycle to the end and count the number of reps, sets and poundage performed for every exercise completed in that cycle.
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In the example above, you can see all the sets, reps and total weight used in a training cycle. To make it simple, those totals should go up at the next cycle to see a noticeable strength gain at the end of your next training period. Of course, it's not that easy because there are so many variables involved that affect strength besides your volume. For example, your volume could be higher next training period, but maybe you were sick the last 10 days of your cycle. Maybe your volume was higher, but you started overstraining and experienced a loss of strength. So the trick is, find the point your body needs to maintain strength and then slowly increase it, note anything out of the ordinary, and track your progress with your next meet results or next max session.
Increase your volume by adding sets, adding reps or simply keeping the set and rep scheme the same and just add weight. Here is where powerlifters get in trouble-they don't understand the math!! To demonstrate, take the sets, reps and weight used for each exercise and give them a value of 1. If you multiply all three together you get a value of 1 (1*1*1=1). Now leave the sets at 1, double the reps to 2 and keep the weight value as 1. Now you get 1*2*1=2. Your volume has doubled by simply doubling the reps and keeping the sets and weight the same. Imagine if you doubled the sets, reps and weight....2*2*2=8. You have increased your volume 8 times, not three times like most lifters think. This is way, way too high and too fast of an increase. Do you really think it's possible to not overstrain and expect to increase your volume 700%? With the 2*2*2 example, you did just that.
Most lifters would be happy with a modest 5-10% gain at the end of one year of training. For example, a 500 pound squatter with a 10% gain at the end of one year would now be doing 550. A 400 pound bencher with 10% gain would now be doing 440. So maybe we first try getting a 10% gain in our volume and see if that pushes our best lifts up.
The volume summary chart above lists 100 sets of squats. If you were to add 10% to the sets, you would want to increase your number of sets to 110. Over a 10 week cycle, that would be one extra set per week and that would do it. You could apply the same idea to the reps (pick one or the other, not both). 220 reps in the squat, mean you would have to increase reps to 242 for a 10% increase. (22 extra reps over 10 weeks is 2+ extra reps per week. The key for this to work, though, is the total weight moved has to be a 10% increase. Adding an extra set per week is a 10% gain, but is no guarantee that the total weight moved is a 10% gain because the set you add could be at a very low weight, or the set you add, could be for one rep-the result-maybe the total weight moved now only increases 3% instead of 10%. Whatever you decide to do, make sure the result is a 10% increase in weight moved.
Most lifters find it easier to simply add weight without increasing sets and reps because it's easier to make sure you are increasing the weight moved, however, at some point, as you begin to fail in a progressive overload type training, your reps will decrease and your volume drops.
If you are training using progressive overload principles, you will be most successful laying out your complete training cycle in advance before starting it and including sets, reps, exercises and target weights. Then, as you progress through the program you must often adjust things for days you might miss attempts or miss reps.
For Westside system training, it is probably better to add volume to your workouts by simply trying to add weight on your max effort days and trying to push your weight up slightly in your assistance exercises and small increases on speed days (without losing bar speed). Some lifters have even increased their volume in the Westside program by simply adding extra workouts.
The ability to push up your volume gives you the ability to increase your maxes. Keep detailed logs, concentrate and do the math and you'll get stronger.
