Recoverable Volume

There is an amount of training you and I could complete today that would surpass your ability to recover fully from it before your next planned training session.

That should be a universal truth we all subscribe to; but to some people that statement alone will cause disagreement, believing instead that we can do as much training as we like and if we don’t recover fully it’s because we are mentally weak or we didn’t get our nutrition right.

More is more?

I am strongly opposed to the “more is more” mentality. Sure there are the few “survivors” that can cope with crazy high training volumes but mostly it spits people out in a pretty large number.

If you take on board the fact that us humans do have a finite capacity for the amount of training we can complete (and fully recover from) the job of the strength coach becomes establishing what that barrier is and making sure we don’t cross it.

Our job is to decide what adaptation we want to create in our clients (for example we may want to stimulate the build of new muscle tissue) and decide upon a training volume that will deliver that adaptation.

Once that volume has been achieved, training for longer for endless reps simply steals POTENCY from your next training session, and why? For what? Who are we trying to impress?

I am all for challenging yourself to a super hard session once in a while, but if you want to consistently make progress without injury, acknowledging your recoverable volume and sticking to it is the only way to go.

Spence