The Truth About Getting Stronger: It’s Not Volume or Frequency
Joe Mackey Grew Like a Weed After I Adjusted His Training.
Garry Frank built monster totals on heavy singles and raw progressive overload. Every week? Simple mission: more weight than last time. Then hash browns at Waffle House. Done.
Bill Kazmaier took a totally different approach. Worked harder than an ugly stripper on a slow Tuesday night. Piled on enough volume to make a rented mule quit. Different playbook. Still savage results.
Walk into any real gym and you’ll hear the same argument. Volume preacher on one side. Frequency guy on the other. Most of them are arguing over the wrong thing.
Because recovery runs the show.
Frequency is how often you train a lift or muscle group. Volume is how much work you pile on once you get there.
You can’t separate the two!!
Bury yourself under enough work on Monday and don’t expect to come back Wednesday feeling like Superman. Leave a little gas in the tank, recover, and you can train again sooner.
So how much volume is enough?
Think about hot sauce. A few drops wake everything up. Dump the whole bottle on your food, and all you remember is the pain. Training works the same way.
One hard set gets you most of the adaptation. Additional quality sets can absolutely make you stronger. Keep piling them on, though, and eventually your body sends you the bill: stalled lifts, lousy recovery, and motivation that disappears faster than complimentary beer at the American Legion fish fry.
Some people recover well from high volume. Some don’t.
I love high volume training. Hell, some of the biggest breakthroughs of my career and many of my athletes came from high volume. But only when we could recover from it.
Volume isn’t the enemy. Unrecoverable volume is.
Mike Mentzer believed work capacity didn’t change much over a career. Louie believed you could spend years building it. There’s truth in both.
Years ago I knew a bodybuilder we’ll call Jimbo. Jimbo lived out of a van and trained with all the restraint of a meth head who’d just spotted copper wire behind an abandoned Kmart.
Seventy sets for chest. Seventy sets for back. If there was a bad idea, Jimbo probably supersetted it with another one.
Then somebody handed him Arthur Jones and HIT.
He slashed his training down to a handful of brutally hard sets. Eight weeks later he looked like he was carved from granite. Jimbo thought he’d found the Holy Grail.
He hadn’t. He’d finally recovered.
Months of accumulated fatigue disappeared. His body supercompensated, became resensitized to training, and he started growing again. It wasn’t magic. It was recovery.
Once the reload effect wore off, progress slowed, but Jimbo spent the next several years preaching HIT like he’d discovered the lost tablets on Mount Sinai.
The lesson wasn’t that low volume was magic. The lesson was recovery.
I saw the same thing when I trained Johnnie Jackson after he stepped away from bodybuilding to chase powerlifting.
Johnnie Jackson Training Under My Tutelage at Metroflex
Johnnie wasn’t trying to gain weight. He was supposed to weigh in at 242. He walked into the meet at 264. Twenty-two pounds heavier without trying. His body had spent years answering one question. We simply asked a different one.
That’s why I rotate phases of bodybuilding, powerlifting, and strongman training. Even if you compete in one, there’s value in borrowing from the others. Different stimulus. Different adaptations. A chance to resensitize the body and keep progress moving. The same principle applies to athletes in any sport.
Paraphrasing Dorian Yates: give the body a reason to grow!
I’ve watched world champions train in completely different ways. Different personalities. Different programs. Different recovery abilities.
The one thing they all had in common?
They knew when to push, when to back off, and when to change gears before the wheels came off.
Most people don’t have world-class genetics. Most people don’t have six hours a day to train, eat, nap, and repeat. So quit copying somebody else’s program ingredient for ingredient.
Find the combination of volume, frequency, and intensity that lets you recover, keeps you excited to train, and lets you add weight to the bar.
Milk it until progress slows. Then change gears. Deload, swap exercises, adjust your frequency, or change the stimulus. Whatever you do, give your body a reason to adapt again. The strongest people I’ve ever been around weren’t married to volume, frequency, or intensity. They were married to progress. If the plan quit working, they changed the plan instead of arguing with reality.
Now quit overthinking, load the bar, make it heavier than last week, and hit Waffle House on the way home. Everything else is just noise.
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