This is a Transcript of a video where a guy talks about of a Muscle and Strength Training Pyramid Level 2 Volume, Intensity, Frequency. Summarize it so that I can better understand what he said and then apply his advice in my training planning.


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All right folks, we are back for the 2nd installment of the Muscle and Strength training pyramid where we are organizing training into a logical priority system to help you reach your goals.
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Much like the nutritional pyramid that I made a couple years back, we have a system where we have a pyramid based on priorities, where just like an architecture, the bottom is the foundation, the most important, and as we move to the top, it becomes the least important.
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We're on Episode 2 today.
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After we covered the adherence, the most important part last week volume, intensity and frequency.
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This is going to be probably the longest episode because these are three very important topics that are inextricably linked.
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I didn't feel comfortable making them different levels because in the different context, any one of those can be more important than the other, and they affect one another.
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So we're doing them together and it's going to be a long video and you're just going to have to like it, all right.
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So as a reminder, the whole pyramid, it is encompassed by periodization because we use periodization to manage all of these things, all right?
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So volume, intensity and frequency or VIF.
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VIF gets a double underline for being interdependent.
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That is because if I was to increase my load or my intensity, that would actually increase my volume if I didn't change the other characteristics, right?
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If I did 3 by 3 and 100, that is 900 volume.
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If I increase it to 110, it would be that much more because I can't do math in my head.
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So that would be 990.
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Say I could do it awesome 9 reps times 109 reps times 110.
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All I do is increase the load but the volume went up, right?
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Likewise, if I add a day of training, I think I've just increased my frequency.
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Well guess what?
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If I don't change the current days of training, I have.
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I've also just increased my volume a whole lot also, if I increase the intensity of my program, that's going to affect my ability to recover and produce force again in subsequent days.
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So my volume might come down or I might have to do additional frequency to accommodate a higher volume program or this or that etcetera.
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So you can have a high volume, high intensity or high frequency program that could be quote UN quote optimal, but it would need to be balanced with the other factors.
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So therefore, it is not appropriate in my opinion to put any single one of these on the pedestal because in a different context, each one of them could be more important or less important than another.
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So we're going to start with intensity.
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So let's get into it.
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This is the muscle and strength pyramid.
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So we're going to talk about both strength and hypertrophy.
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First thing we need to think about is specificity.
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So specificity means that to get a certain outcome in training you need to train for it.
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A power lifter does low reps and heavy loads because in competition he has to do a one Rep Max.
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All right, strength is not just the quality of the body, but it is a skill, meaning that you need to get better at the movement which you want to be stronger at.
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Additionally, strength is not only affected by muscle size, which does have a large impact on strength, larger cross-sectional area, more mass, more muscle to contract, you can move heavier loads.
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However, it is the neurological system that's going to dictate a large amount of your strength gains, and that means you need specificity for the velocity and the load and the recruitment patterns that you need to use to move those heavy loads.
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So meaning strength is optimized by specificity, less specificity is needed for hypertrophy.
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This was shown quite well in a study by Schoenfeld back in the day where he took two groups equated volume.
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All right, so we're pretty much just able to look at intensity here.
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One group did all their training with three Rep maxes.
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The other group did all their training with 10 Rep maxes.
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Equal amount of muscle growth.
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OK, showing that specificity for hypertrophy has a pretty broad range.
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However, the three Rep Max group got stronger than the 10 Rep Max group, showing that if you want to get really good at lifting heavy things, you have to lift heavy things.
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However, muscle growth is not a specific adaptation outcome.
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Rather, that is just equality of the body.
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So that needs loading on the muscle.
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So, specificity for strength, developing a skill, developing the neuromuscular system.
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For hypertrophy, we simply need to load the muscle in a progressive way.
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Does that mean intensity is not important for hypertrophy?
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No, it is important.
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However, we have a broader range we can work with.
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It still needs to be heavy enough to optimize hypertrophy.
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OK, if you think about it, we're all under load all the time because we're on Earth.
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That means that our muscles have to resist gravity in order to ambulate and move around.
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So clearly, if intensity was not important at all for hypertrophy, we would all be the same or the same level of development relative to our genetics just from being on planet Earth.
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Likewise, no matter how many reps I do with a pencil, I'm not going to be able to get the same growth as if I could with a 20 or a 40 LB weight.
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So there is some threshold somewhere and where that threshold is, it's going to be dictated by a lot of other things, whether you're training to failure, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.