Train in Volume
Train in Volume
Other than maybe “sustainability is king” there’s a good chance that anyone that has ever spoken to me about fitness would say that “train in volume” is my mantra. This philosophy shaped my fitness journey, has impacted nearly every aspect of my life, and proves to me time and time again that it is the best method for building sustainable progress. It is steeped in my musical pedagogy-- concepts of the body reacting to stimuli, overcoming physical and mental limits, and practicing good habit formation. While everyone’s journey is different, the core concepts of training in volume apply to everyone whether you’re a beginner or an expert and apply to almost any discipline you can think of.
Training in Volume is the idea that you can create more effective progress by working yourself less and increasing the frequency of what you're working on. For example if I wanted to get better at sprinting and my physical limit was doing 10 sprints before needing the next day off, the train in volume principle dictates that it would be better to do 5-7 sprints every day instead. That way over a 6 day period--with the 7th day for rest--I could run 30 to 42 sprints instead of just 30. By increasing the frequency of the stimuli you can coach your body to respond to it, recover from it, and improve upon it faster. It is important to note, however, that a healthy threshold must be maintained. Exceeding ⅔ to ¾ of your maximum output can result in injuries when putting in that work every day and can lead to difficulty in doing other daily tasks. The goal is sustainability, so it is unreasonable to ask yourself to work excessively every day.
Because training in volume focuses around sustainability, it is important to be as consistent as possible. When you build consistently and make those changes a manageable part of your life, it becomes more difficult to not do them than it is to do them. So many folks I know ask me how I get so much done. The answer I give them is that I’ve made an hour or so available every day for those activities and make them daily practices. I trained and still do for all of these activities in volume. I run, lift, play, write, design, listen, stretch, and meditate daily. At ⅔ to ¾ maximum physical output it takes the difficulty off of my mind and allows me to pursue consistently so that on days when I need to spend more time it isn't so difficult. It is a part of my life.
Notice though that many of those activities aren’t career related. Taking care of yourself is an exercise in training in volume also. If you have some space in your day to unwind and relax (which are two different things, but that’s its own post), it is easier to maintain a relentless pursuit of your goals. Small amounts add up, or as my mentor Dave Wetmore says “inch by inch, life’s a cinch!”
I want to leave you with an anecdote--the process that proved to me that training in volume is the path to rapid growth and sustainability. For the bulk of my fitness journey pull-ups weren’t something I could do. I had loads of lower body mass from my career as a runner and soccer player and had not developed my upper body muscles much. When I started doing more lifting in college, it took me 2 years to get to the point where I could do just 1. Over that time I was listening to every podcast on athletic training that I could get my hands on, and at some point I stumbled onto an MMA podcast where the guest discussed his method for training between his pre-fight camps. He stressed the importance of consistency, doing all of the exercises daily to stress rapid improvement, and how you could do more in a week if you didn't work yourself to exhaustion every day. I decided to try it. The next day I tried to figure out how long I needed to rest before I could do another pull-up after my first one. 2 hours… much longer than I’d have liked. I decided that every day I went to the gym--regardless of my workout-- I would do one at the beginning and one at the end. In the morning I’d do 1 at the playground down the street from my apartment, and if I had a chance to do one at work--on the doorframe when no one was looking--I would. 1 a day became 4 a day with the smallest of time commitments. I kept this up for about 2 weeks. Then, somehow, 2 or 3 at a time not only didn’t seem impossible but were incredibly accessible. That put me at 6-9 pull-us per day. A week and a half after that 5 at a time didn’t seem so bad. At that point I shifted my schedule to just at the beginning and end of my workouts--remember the idea is not exhaustion but ⅔ to ¾. 10 a day not even a month after 1 at a time is a great improvement! This continued for the rest of the summer. I had started my project on June 12th and by mid August I had abandoned doing them at the beginning and end of my workouts because now they were the core of it. I could do two sets of 15 wide grip and two sets of 15 close grip daily with only a minute or so rest in between, and I still do them every single day. 60 a day (with a day of rest) comes to 360 pull-ups a week. This is the beauty of sustainable changes with a good foundation.
That is training in volume.