23 Feb Training volume & muscle soreness
Training ‘volume’ refers to the total work completed in a workout or accumulated in a week’s worth of training (Not your intensity)
Now, we all like the idea of feeling incapable of moving the day after a workout and use it as a measure of how effective our workouts are.
Feeling partially inflamed after a workout (when including novel movements or the addition of extra volume or mechanical load) is normal.
But feeling partially paralysed and thinking you did a good job, is not good idea for various reasons.
If Hypertophy is your main goal, planning your sessions with allocated volume throughout the WEEK and allowing your body enough time to recover from your workouts, is ESSENTIAL.
Here’s a simple way of looking at this equation.
If your goal is to train (for example) your push exercise 3 times/week,
you should aim to spread your volume out according to those workouts in such a way that you are not completely BROKEN by your second workout that you are now incapable
of performing your workout EFFECTIVELY and hence, fall short of your volume quota and have increased your risk of injury.
Consequently, your sleep is probably suffering as well as a result , which cascades into a host of hormonal and appetite changes.
Aim for effective and structured training.
Training to failure and high volume training HAS ITS PLACE,
But the reality is, if you are too sore to train in your following sessions, your intended weekly volume will suffer and yield less than satisfactory results .
Train- Recover-Train-Recover … REPEAT
Personally, that’s just my approach as trainer.
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