MEV, MRV, and RIR

[Spence]

I was wondering what your opinion is on minimum effective volume, maximum recoverable volume, and reps in reserve. Seems there a lot of people in the industry who promote progressing the volume of working sets to your maximum recoverability over the course of a few weeks and leaving reps in the tank, vs HIT style training and training to failure also arguing that failure you will pretty much never recover from. I know where you guys stand with HIT style training, but what is your opinion on pushing volume as a form of progression? When, If ever, do you feel this type of training for hypertrophy May be appropriate?

[Joe]

Spence wrote:

I was wondering what your opinion is on minimum effective volume, maximum recoverable volume, and reps in reserve. Seems there a lot of people in the industry who promote progressing the volume of working sets to your maximum recoverability over the course of a few weeks and leaving reps in the tank, vs HIT style training and training to failure also arguing that failure you will pretty much never recover from. I know where you guys stand with HIT style training, but what is your opinion on pushing volume as a form of progression? When, If ever, do you feel this type of training for hypertrophy May be appropriate?

Great question Sean. I’m going to answer this one in a video as well. But the short answer is, for newbies (maybe under 5 years of training if I had to pick an arbitrary number), progressing sub maximal volume can be a pretty good option for progress. But at some point, volume alone hits a point of extreme diminishing returns. And you need to focus on progressing force production. And at some point, the only way to produce maximal force production is to train to/past failure (with good exercise selection). As to the recovery point, I’ve never seen an hard evidence to back this. And I would argue more volume is harder to recover from than training to failure

[Michael DeBlois]

As a 45 year old natural lifter, lifting for decades, I think both higher volume vs HIT style programs have their time and place. Overall, my experience is that a lot of volume places more stress on your joints long term. But, I tend to crash faster under HIT style training, given the load profile, so I have to take more frequent deload weeks. What’s worked the best for me is general HIT style programming in a 6 week cycle, and then taking a 1-2 week deload, using lower weight and higher volume. I then go back to HIT for another 6 weeks, exchanging a few exercises, as I like some variety, and then follow the same general approach. Each person is different so I think you have to experiment and find the optimal volume/load for you.

[Author]

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