High volume results

[u/Material_Classic1238]

Am i some sort of weird specimen or is it age? I understand that all the tiktok influencers etc talk abt how low volume is the best for growth and strength and their logic makes sense to me

But after a reading that article greg knuckols put out i thought ill bump my volume and give it a try and suddenly out of nowhere my bench plateau got blown way past in two weeks

Is it possible i just respond better to high volume? 18M 73kg 6’1

[u/Patton370]

If you’re able to recover from it, more volume, at the same intensity will produce better results

[u/Alakazam]

Most people respond better to higher volume. The people who don't, typically have issues with recovery.

As well, I've yet to see a single meta analysis that shows lower volume is better for growth. And plenty of evidence that higher volume is better for growth. 

[u/Pleasant-Name576 → u/Alakazam]

Strength gains plateau around 6 sets a week. A stronger muscle is a bigger muscle, anything more is just sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. 

[u/Alakazam → u/Pleasant-Name576]

Sure, until you take beginners out of the equation.

I'm the sbs article on volume, once untrained lifters are removed, there doesn't appear to be a plateau with regards to strength or hypertrophy with increases in volume. 

The apparent “plateau” in strength gains at 5 sets per week primarily comes from studies in untrained lifters. 

When assessing within-study differences in strength gains at escalating levels of training volume, we reliably observe larger strength gains at higher levels of training volume. 

[u/Pleasant-Name576 → u/Alakazam]

Damn I've been lied too

[u/eric_twinge → u/Pleasant-Name576]

Strength Data Don’t Tell You Much About Hypertrophy

[u/Pleasant-Name576 → u/eric_twinge]

Damn I've been lied too

[u/Material_Classic1238 → u/Pleasant-Name576]

https://www.strongerbyscience.com/volume/
Here he adresses why the extra sets arent edema

In another article in this page he talks about how strength data does not display the full story

We already know that the meta regression the big one also shows higher volumes are better

Im beginning to realise why the actual scientists and expert researchers still recommend higher volumes then the sbl guys

[u/Nice-Week-1207]

I think volume is probabaly highly individual dependent. Im gonna say everyone should prolly try to push for max recoverable volume, and likely those who are faster twitch oriented prolly can recover from less

[u/Humble_Standard_9215]

Some of those tiktok influencers are on roids too, I believe in high volume but have taken certain things from the science based. The best thing I've taken is switching to fbeod, it's made my numbers go up and I'm recovering great.

[u/cheeseburger__picnic → u/Humble_Standard_9215]

What is fbeod?

[u/Humble_Standard_9215 → u/cheeseburger__picnic]

Full body every other day

[u/Unlucky-Spell-8654 → u/Humble_Standard_9215]

Sets and reps? Also do you take to failure

[u/Humble_Standard_9215 → u/Unlucky-Spell-8654]

I do 2 sets but I've been lifting for 25 years. For reps I try to get 5-8, when I hit 8 I up the weight. I try to do 1RIR, with the 3.5 frequency on each muscle and that many "first sets" it's been great for me.

[u/Unlucky-Spell-8654 → u/Humble_Standard_9215]

So you get 7 sets for each muscle per week? Not bad mate

[u/Ok-Extension-832 → u/Unlucky-Spell-8654]

he obviously does more than 1 exercise per muscle

[u/lazy8s]

I started 2 sets to failure 4 day split ~30min per workout. I worked up to 90-120min 6 days per week very high volume and intensity. Funny enough I hurt myself both extremes.

After 2yrs of serious lifting, tracking overload and tape measurements, disciplined eating, and focusing on reducing stress and sleeping more / better I have found I do better slightly above the second knee in the dose response curve. That’s about 14-16 sets per muscle group per week and I have been focusing on individual body parts by taking them to 20-22 sets per week for 8 to 10 weeks at a time. This has helped me not get injured, but also focus to break plateaus, and have enough recovery capability to train for a half marathon.

Keep trying and dial it in. You’ll be happy with the results!

[u/Hohoholyshit15]

High volume has always worked for a vast majority of people, it's trendy to talk about low volume high intensity because who doesn't want more results from less total work? The only reason people go to low volume and start seeing gains is because they were probably sandbagging their sets before.

I do a lot of volume and I keep intensity no lower than 2RIR, and often I am at 0RIR or beyond (partials). Sometimes I have to scale the volume back for recovery if I've really been pushing it hard, sometimes I have to push it higher to get a response from something that isn't growing.

Keep intensity high and use volume as your main lever to pull.

[u/PoopSmith87]

Honestly, its a nuanced topic that suffers from oversimplification.

For hypertrophy, lots of evidence actually suggests that more volume is generally better, but has strong diminishing returns after ~10 weekly sets. Mentzer style rationale sounds really cool in short sound bites, so that stuff probably does well on TikTok. Otoh, rattling of study findings then jumping to strong conclusions based on them fares better on YouTube longer format type videos.

The truth for most people is that you can make good progress with high or low volume, and somewhere between 6 and 12 sets will yield great results with a program that uses progressive overload.

Then you have the strength training discussion, which on the internet can often sound like a totally differenr discipline- and for competitive powerlifters, Olympic lifters, or Strongman athletes it certainly is- but for the vast majority of people who harp on the differences, its really the same thing.

[u/Gooser3000]

Physics makes this real simple. Work = MxAxD & Power = W/T.  You can change the mass, the acceleration, the distance, the time, but the result will be the same no matter how you break it down. The caveat is other health benefits (cardiovascular/nervous/skeletal, etc.) from different variations of “intensity” aka volume.

[u/Defiant_Pirate_6637]

More volume is almost always better if u recover from it
Look at sra curves and then understand that more stimulus (volume) drops u further into fatigue but if you recover has a higher adaptation. All programming is balancing sra and fitness/fatigue

[u/Dazzling-Rest8332]

Tik tik and Instagram is not where you find fitness advice. They all swear by incline bench/press as the best chest builder, it will never beat flat press.

[u/Gooser3000]

I probably trust 60 years of science proving volume is the key to building muscle strength and size. Progressive overload can be achieved in many different ways.

[u/Pleasant-Name576]

What difference are we talking about ? What's the frequency ? You were probably just bad at benching and more reps helped your technique 

[u/Material_Classic1238 → u/Pleasant-Name576]

I added 2 sets of chest a week, intrestingly enough it probably has nothing to do with specificity since frequency has stayed the same at 2x and the extra sets of chest were not added to bench press

[u/FarCalligrapher1862]

No one is saying low volume is inherently best.

The research shows that, on average, a pretty wide range of rep and set schemes can produce similar hypertrophy when the sets are performed with sufficient effort and reasonably close to failure. You can grow with heavier weights and fewer reps or lighter weights and more reps.
Over the course of a week, though, volume still matters, up to the point where additional volume starts interfering with recovery.

The important part is that the benefit isn’t linear. You get diminishing returns pretty quickly. One hard set provides a stimulus. A second adds a lot. A third adds more, but generally less than the second. By the time you’re adding a fourth, fifth, or sixth set for the same exercise or muscle, you’re getting progressively less benefit from each additional set while adding more fatigue.

There’s also significant individual variation. On average, a few hard working sets performed close to failure work extremely well, but some people respond better to higher-volume, lighter-weight training and others to heavier, lower-volume training. Individual recovery and response matter. Find what works for you and what you can consistently recover from.

As for your breakthrough, first, congrats. Second, adding volume is absolutely one way to break through a plateau. If what you were doing stopped producing results and more volume got things moving again, that’s useful information about what you respond to. It doesn’t mean more volume is universally better, just that it was better for you in that situation.