I slowly built up my
level of training volume focusing on anaerobic activities because the whole magic of metabolism in my view is when glycogen stores are not completely full.
This
type of training volume and duration increases the neural activation and slightly increases the body temperature, warming up the body just enough for the upcoming workout.
In
terms of training volume and frequency, you want to train long enough and often enough to stimulate muscle gains without compromising your ability to recover.
When you're training each muscle more than once per week, you should also take into consideration the
level of training volume and intensity.
With increasing
periods of training volume so, too, does the recovery / adaptation period increase often growing to 2 - 3 weeks of recovery after the high point volume of training period is reached for ultra-endurance sports.
Weight, however, is only one
dimension of your training volume, i.e. the work you're doing defined as weight x sets x reps. Besides simply adding more weight, another way to increase volume is by adding a few extra sets with your current weight or increasing the number of reps for your standard number sets.
Employing the «low - rep, moderate number of sets» strategy, which provides an optimal
mix of training volume and intensity, has always been related to increasing muscle size and strength.
This effectively increases the volume of your training
An
analysis of training volumes revealed that those in the T + group completed more repetitions to volitional fatigue than the placebo group.
So the take - away message so far is this: across a wide variety of endurance sports, studies have shown that the best endurance athlete athletes are actually performing about 80 %
of their training volume at a low intensity and only about 20 % of their time training at a high intensity (15).
Now that we have a better sense of the
importance of training volume, let's explore 3 training strategies that will help maximize the amount of volume you can chalk up during your training sessions.
As the periods grow so does the cumulative stress load which is where the athlete does not fully recover from the training during the peak period
of training volume for each period and why a recovery period.
To illustrate, let's assume that you'll need to accumulate 1,000,000
pounds of training volume (performed with at least 75 % of maximum) on exercises directed toward your hamstrings in a certain timeframe — let's say it's one year — to increase the size of your hamstrings by 5 %.
But, before we dig into those, let's assume we have three levels of 1RM, as well as three
levels of training volume or stress.
Then, incorporate anaerobic training in NO MORE than 20 %
of your training volume, meaning 15 %.
It will be no more than 20 %
of my training volume so MAF will still dominate.
If you want to spend some time doing exclusive MAF training (for healthy people, we usually suggest that ~ 80 %
of their training volume be under MAF), you can do high - rep bodyweight and skillwork under the MAF HR.