Garbage Volume

What is Garbage Volume? 

Understanding garbage volume 

There has been much debate about what garbage volume is. Often beginner lifters easily obtain “newbie” gains, without much volume or effort. This is often followed by a “more is better” thought process. People who have only been training for a year or less will hit a wall in progress, whether in body composition change or strength, and will increase volume and see success. Then some preliminary research will show them to increase muscle the classic 20-25 sets per muscle group, or to increase strength by more sets required. Then more progress is seen. Which reinforces the “more is better” principle. Eventually, all persistent lifters will experience the dreaded plateau. This is often where “garbage volume” lives.  My definition is the abuse of volume and/or frequency in the pursuit of increased muscle or improved body composition. Abuse is dependent on the individual, and as one's training age changes, level of strength, recovery practices, and outside stressors, their tolerance to volume and frequency changes. 

In strength training there is a known bell curve for training volume and frequency. In the younger years of training, very little input is needed to create change. As your training age increases to 1-3 years, you can start to implement more sets, reps, exercises, frequency. Due to the improved efficiency of your muscles and nervous system, your body's tolerance to inputs increases, therefore more is needed. Then an interesting physiological change happens. Your body becomes too efficient, and you can start to do too much damage. Which becomes too difficult to recover from. Recovery is where we see the desired outcome, increased strength, endurance, or muscle mass. 

Depending on the phase of training, garbage volume can look like too many sets, too many reps, too little rest, or too long in the gym. A role model of mine, Charles Poliquin, has been quoted saying “if you are in the gym longer than an hour, you are making friends, not training”. I have been in this spot early in my strength training life, where you are trying to fit in 5 exercises per body part, 5 sets each, and needing some rest between sets. This would lead to whole afternoons at the gym. Shockingly, this was at a time when I was seeing little to no gains in strength, or muscle size. 

Also, a redundant concept we are all hearing about on social media is “progressive overload”. Which essentially means more.  The theory/principle is that as your body adapts to training you need more intensity (load), volume (sets/reps), or time under tension. However, what you can see here is that this requires only increasing. What do you do when adding more isn’t working? The frequent recommendation is a deload. Deloads are periods where frequency, load, and/or volume. These phases are often only for 1 week, at max 2 weeks. Then the hamster wheel starts again, more, more, and more. Again, this can work for the first 1-2 years, but what do you do when it stops working? 

What to do? 

1: Deloads: 

To rehash deload and what they can and should be, these are planned periods of decreased volume and/or intensity, with extended rest periods and lowered frequency. Often you’ll see people decrease both volume and intensity, which isn’t wrong. However, depending on several variables, you can decrease volume while maintaining intensity and use this as a deload. An example would be instead of training a muscle group 2x per week, only train that muscle group once in this deload week. Lastly, a deload can be and should be (at some point), NO TRAINING AT ALL! Wow, how can you make progress without any training for a whole week? Trust the process. 

I have heard some coaches talk about not needing to plan a deload. Saying “your body will tell you”, meaning you’ll tweak something or start to excessively ache. Or, “your schedule will force a deload” meaning holidays or life will get in the way of training which will force a deload. I am not a fan of this mindset. I would rather not plan to train an individual into an injury or a tweak. Also, most life events can be planned, holidays, vacations, school events, etc. When unexpected life events happen, a quality strength coach/trainer should have the agility to manipulate programming. 

2: Undulating Training (phasic training): 

There are essentially four phases of training: metabolic, hypertrophy, functional strength, and relative/absolute strength. Often when people have a goal they stick to the phase that has the intended outcome. For example, I have a client with a bodybuilding goal. He had been taking training seriously for approximately 18 months. In these 18 months, he stuck with stable exercises (mostly), meaning machines. Sets were roughly 3-4, and reps were geared towards 8-15, with failure on each set as the standard goal. “Surprisingly” he wasn’t making the progress like he used to. Once we started training together and I introduced eccentrics, a metabolic/rehab phase, and relative strength, then his progress continued. 

Undulating or phasic training is necessary. The human body is a very smart organism. There is an expected window where the body will adapt to a stimulus. Once this threshold is met, results essentially halt. Ideally, a coach/trainer will anticipate this and plan for a change in training. 

3: Exercise Selection/Order: 

The traditional organization of a workout is 1. warm up 2. explosive 3. compound exercise 4. single joint 5. accessory and/or cardiovascular. This organization is just fine. However, it does not have to be the ‘set in stone’ way to do things. If you have a weakness, you can/should place this first. “What is done first, is prioritized.” Rather than coming to a single joint towards the end of a workout, when you’re fatigued. Placing it first will allow you to ‘attack’ this muscle or muscle group and truly tax it. Creating the stimulus for change. 

Pre-fatiguing a muscle group or muscle, can have beneficial effects for later in the workout. Pre-fatiguing a muscle can trigger the synergist muscles to work harder in the following exercises. Or, the fatigue muscle can be taxed further in the following exercises, depending on the exercise selection. 

Lastly, would be exercise selection. Like most anything in life, training styles are cyclical. From functional training, to strength based, to plyometric, to HIIT, from free weights to machines, etc. All of these methods or styles have their pors and cons. As a strength coach/trainer, it is our job to determine which is best for each client, and when to ebb and flow between styles. The bodybuilder above was almost only machine based. Once switching to more free weights in his training, increased muscle and strength was noticed right away. This does not mean free weights are always the right answer. When working with athletes, the current emphasis is on explosive training. Leaving out machines and strength based training, leaves gaps in training, limits potential, and potentially increases risk. 

• Coach Justin