Stronger Than Your Boyfriend
Stronger Than Your Boyfriend
Junk Volume: What It Is & If It Actually Matters
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Today, we talk about junk volume: what it is and why it actually matters. Junk volume is essentially training volume with little to no benefit. Typically this is after a muscle has had sufficient load and volume to reach a threshold where adaptation can occur but after this point, recovery is limited –or– junk volume can be associated with lower weights and higher reps. We talk about what junk volume looks like, the nuances to it, and what you can do to train smarter, not harder for optimal strength gains.
In this episode, we discuss:
- What is Junk Volume?
- How Junk Volume Can Affect Muscle Growth
- Signs You're Training Too Much
- How to Optimize Your Training Volume
- Alternatives to Junk Volume
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Welcome to the Stronger Than Your Boyfriend Podcast. Podcast for anyone into fitness.
SPEAKER_01Especially for those of you still doing 20,000 extra sets of tricep pushdowns and curls and lateral raises.
SPEAKER_00We are Heather and Katie, owners of Barpath Fitness, here to help you sift through the bullshit and toxic disinformation that permeates the fitness industry. Today we want to talk about this term called junk volume. Junk volume and what it is and if it actually matters. Does it matter? I mean, it does, obviously, since we're talking about it. Yes. So junk volume, if you've ever heard this term, it is coined as training volume with little to no benefit. So it's kind of considered a potential waste of time and effort, uh, which maybe, maybe not. We'll talk about that today. But this is typically after a muscle has had sufficient load and volume to reach the threshold where adaptation occurs. But after this point, you know, recovery is pretty limited. And this is where we kind of get the term junk volume. It's also another example would be someone's going to an into the gym and using really lightweights with a lot of reps, uh, just to try to get more and more. Um I've heard that being used as an example of junk volume, but basically it's it's this idea that at a certain point doing a bunch more during your session is actually not doing anything for you. So we're gonna go into that a little bit today.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think people really just love to feel the burn. Yeah. You know, sure. And even what I find if there's a a mezzo cycle that they're doing or a phase of training that they're doing that's more weight but less reps, you don't feel the burn as much. It's a different kind of feel. So people just throw in that, it's that junk volume that comes in just because they want to feel the burn. But right, it's not doing anything for you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think there's a lot of nuance in this conversation. So I'll talk a little bit about the research, but I also want to talk a little bit about this kind of concept at different phases beginner versus because at some point, if you're a beginner, a lot of repetitions is not a terrible thing. So it's not like it's not doing anything, but it depends on the exercise, it depends on where you are in your training, etc. So let's talk a little bit about about junk volume and kind of what what we're seeing in the research. So we know that volume, which is okay, volume if you're not sure. So there's there's frequency, intensity, and volume. So frequency is how often you work out, intensity is how hard you work out, right? The weight that you use or the load. Uh that's one version of intensity. And then volume is reps times sets times load, right? Yeah. Or reps, some people just do reps times sets, but I can do times load as well. And so there's a total number of tonnage or pounds that you that you lift at the end of your session with your reps times your sets times your load, right? That's volume. We know that volume is pretty much one of the highest primary drivers of hypertrophy or muscle growth. Volume is what matters, right? More sets, more reps generally produces more muscle growth. But but is there a limit? Research has talked about the dose response relationship between training volume and results for a really long time, honestly, but there are still studies trying to figure out exactly what's going on here. And the issue that I the nuance that I was talking about earlier is controlling for different variables like recovery or individual tolerances for volume, right? Some people can handle a lot, some people can't. But overall, what the research currently suggests is that there is a positive return for increasing your volume or your upsets, reps, and weights for a muscle group to a point. Meaning there is a point where you see diminishing returns. In other words, your gains start to slow down as your volume gets too high. Now, interestingly, the dose response relationship between volume and hypertrophy is different than the dose uh response between uh volume and strength. So the latter strength exhibits more pronounced diminishing returns. Okay, and there's some research on this that we'll link in the show notes. So basically, if you're trying to get stronger versus just focusing on growing muscle, this is where excess volume can really be the most limiting and really be pointless versus if you're trying to grow muscle. There is uh a point where too much is too much, but it's much higher than with strength, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that does make sense. Yeah. Because it's more about if you're just kind of pumping blood into a muscle, it might help you grow a little bit more muscle in that area. But if you're just fatiguing your CNS, you're not gonna get stronger. Right. Right. So I don't know. I would argue it's I don't, it's not necessarily worth personally. I feel like it's not necessarily worth the the added volume if you're trying to gain muscle, but you're not getting any strength. Right. I feel like I would want that strength. You know, if they go hand in hand, but I just would want both, you know, it's not worth it to me just to have like a slightly bigger bicep.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's interesting because most people want to train smarter because they want to be more efficient with their time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But then you do have folks. I feel like I feel like this is either when you're first starting out or you're into it a few months and you don't really have a program or know what you're doing. You just go in and you're like, I'm gonna destroy my shoulders today. Yeah. And it's just so many reps, and it's like, but what are you doing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but like at some point, you're just getting like, are you addicted to that burn? I don't know. It's just like also just I can't imagine doing like a shoulder workout to me would be like 20 minutes. You know what I mean? Like it's like it's so, you know, those muscles fatigue really quickly. Yeah. And it's like, okay, you do your your overhead presses for you know, your compound movement, and then you just do a bunch of lateral raises and front raises and cable shit. It's just like it just would take not that long. But right, anyways, that's just a silly example. But, you know, as far as affecting muscle growth, right? And I do think that most people want muscle growth no matter what, even if you are training for strength. So I do get that. Yeah. But I think most people find it very hard to know what's the limit because your body, you can always do more. You can always push your body. Bodies are amazing. You can push them, they can stay strong, they can adapt to whatever you're giving them. So it is hard to tell what, you know, what is the line. So I would I would kind of bring it back to recognizing a recovery trap. So what that means is you're, you know, if you're in this recovery trap, you're overdoing it with the volume, right? And your body is just recovering versus recovering, adapting, and growing. And again, that can be hard to decipher, but it you will, this is why I don't like trading strength, right? Because the strength is a really good objective indicator that you are growing and adapting. Because if you're just getting muscle, but you're getting, you know, you're not your strength is staying stagnant, you're probably flirting the line of the diminishing return. So that's why I'm like, I don't know if I would trade one for the other because it's really hard to decipher for most people. Like, is this actual, am I actually making progress versus am I actually doing too much? You know, and just because you're getting a massive pump by doing a bunch of high rep isolation movements doesn't mean necessarily you're going to grow muscle. It means that also because there's a lot of other factors that come into play when you are trying to go grow muscle, like are you eating enough? Are you getting a protein, etc.? So just because it burns and you have a pump for a few minutes doesn't mean that you put muscle in your body. The right amount is the right amount, right? So, you know, again, it's hard to tell. I think having a coach would be the best for you so that they can manage your volume and intensity and they can objectively see, oh, you're getting stronger and you're, you know, your tent, you're talking to me about better body composition changes, et cetera. But overdoing it will backfire. So this is why I always tell clients err on the side of doing less, because you can always increase the volume if needed to spark more growth, whether that's strength or muscle, et cetera. But I was just thinking about this, you know, how your example was shoulders, like everyone just does like shoulder. No one does junk volume with legs. It's so funny. No one's just adding in a bunch of extra, you know, leg extensions and leg curls and lunges because legs are fucking hard to train. It's always upper body where the junk volume comes in.
SPEAKER_00Isn't that funny? Unless you have a masochist who is like, let's do a thousand rep leg day, though those guys.
SPEAKER_01But you you lowered your voice and you know for sure it's not gonna be a man, it's gonna be a female who wants to do extra with their legs. Probably. You know that's the truth. Most likely. I mean, I would say like 98% of the time. Chicken legs chat is not gonna be doing junk volume with legs.
SPEAKER_00Probably, probably. Well, how so how do you know that you're entering junk volume territory beyond, you know, hiring a coach and and and figuring it out that way? I think there are a lot of signs. Like the biggest thing with this junk volume concept, right, is the whole thing with training is what we're trying to do is we're trying to push our bodies to the point where we're forcing our bodies to adapt, but we have to recover in order to redapt. So we're balancing our recovery and our effort, right? And so once you pass that threshold that where you can't recover, now you're doing too much. Now maybe your joints are hurting, or maybe you're feeling really fatigued after your workouts. In general, every once in a while it's fine. But if this is a continued feeling, maybe that's a problem, right? Maybe something's training, uh changing in your energy levels, your brain fog is another example I've I've seen people have when they're like overtraining. So I think we have a very old episode or blog on overtraining that you can look at. Um we also talk about undertraining in that, which is interesting. Uh, but in this, in this kind of uh example, you're obviously like you're feeling it, you're overtraining, it's too much. That is a sign that maybe you need to back up on the volume, and some of that volume might just be junk volume at this point because it's not you're not able to recover, it's not doing anything for you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I think that's the biggest telltale sign is that, or the two biggest signs is if your sleep is affected, and or your joints start hurting. Yep. And that again, okay, junk volume and overtraining are two very different things. I would more so put the like joint fatigue, maybe, or aches and pains, you know, more along the lines with knowing if you're doing too much volume, because you can cut the volume out. And I've I've seen this with client clients, you know, we cut the volume down in a certain area and that joint pain goes away. So that kind of tells me maybe we were just doing too much volume for those muscle groups. But, you know, if your sleep is affected, then you're probably flirting with overtraining, and then you really need to to dial it back. But all in all, it's the same thing that you're dialing back. You're dialing back the volume, whether or not whether it's you're doing too much volume and you're you're gonna push yourself to overtraining if you're doing too much volume.
SPEAKER_00I think the differences with junk volume, the volume we're cutting back on is like it's like little accessory volume movements, right? Whereas if the other volume we're talking about is like compound movements, important movements, you may need to back off that too. Like that is the difference between like the junk volume and the just like, hey, we need to cut your volume down because your program needs adjusted.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, we're mostly talking in this episode about like like lateral raises and like preacher curls and just like yeah, it's mostly you know, those little muscle groups, isolations.
SPEAKER_01Not to say that those aren't important. I mean, they do have a time and a place, but yeah, you'll if you need to scale back your compound movements because your CNS is fatigued, then you're over, you're you're about to overtrain yourself. And that's that that's a little bit more serious. You might not even have signs that you're doing too much junk volume. You just might be doing a lot of extra shit that you don't need to be doing when your muscles could be recovering as you're doing those isolation movements, they're you're you know, the muscles could be recovering instead. So you could just let them recover and not do those movements. You did enough, you're good. So, so okay, people are probably asking, well, how do I how do I know? How do I optimize my training volume? So let's talk. You should one track it. You know, it's I get it, it's another piece that you have to track, but just know that the optimal volume per muscle group per week is 10 to 30 sets. Okay. That's a big range, and there's a lot of muscle groups, so that probably seems like a lot. But if you're doing a lot of compound movements, you're hitting multiple muscle groups, so that counts towards your volume. So I would always start lower than you think. Okay. Track your strength. Is it increasing each week? And if you're just following a program and you don't really want to track, you know, your sets times your reps, times your weight to get the exact amount of volume. This is why you should always be paying attention to if you're getting stronger or not. Because if you're not getting stronger, you're probably doing a little bit too much. And if you are getting stronger, your volume is good. Don't fix something that isn't broken. So if you're getting, don't change anything until you need to. So once your strength has plateaued, then try increasing your volume a small amount and see if it sparks some more strength improvement. You can get, you can gain muscle as you're gaining strength. They do go hand in hand, but that's just such an objective way for most people who don't want to track or who aren't going to go super in depth with tracking their volume every single week. That's the pretty much the only way you can tell, right? So, or if you have a coach, like I said earlier. And how can you add volume? So you can either increase the weight each week, you can increase the amount of sets that you're doing, or you can increase the amount of reps. Don't do all three at once. If you add five pounds to your lift one week or one week to the next, keep the sets and reps the same. And then congratulations, you increase your volume. That's just one example. However, we always talk about phasing your programming. So you don't want to stay with the certain the same sets, sets and rep range forever, but within a specific mesocycle or four or four week or so phase, if you are adding weight to a lift, as an example, then you are increasing your volume in that phase. So you don't need to change a thing, right? And even if you don't add weight one week, that's okay. You still might be getting enough. It's not strength increase, hypertrophy increases. It's not always going to be linear. Yeah. It's not going to increase week to week. If you have one week where you're not increasing anything, that doesn't mean you're not getting stronger. That doesn't mean you're not growing muscle. But we're talking about general trends over time. Okay. And we had a whole how to build series. So you should go listen to that if you have a specific muscle group that you want to grow. But if you want to grow a specific area, you can take volume away from one area and add it to the muscle group you're trying to focus on. And this is where I think people start doing all that junk volume, is because they have their program or their body parts split or whatever, but they're like, you know, I'm going to do my workouts as written, but I also want to grow my ass, you know, so I'm just going to add more asta, but that's not how you do it. Then you're just going to, then you're just going to be recovering, especially for bigger muscle groups. Like if you want to grow your legs or your butt or pecks or shoulders or lats or something, you have to take volume away from other muscle groups in order to add it, add more to a specific muscle group. You will grow muscle to that area if you do that, but you can't, again, your central nervous system is a big important factor in all of your training. So even if you are just doing a bunch of junk, smaller volume, you know, isolation movements, it's going to add up. So if you want a specific muscle group to grow, take away from other muscle groups, put it towards the butt, and your butt will grow.
SPEAKER_00So yes. So in summary, muscle growth does increase with more volume. That is the main driver of hypertrophy. But there is a limit. Your modular moderate weekly volume is probably 10 to 20 sets, but you can do up to 30 for you know more intense volume if you if you can handle it. So 10 to 30 sets per muscle appears to be ideal for most people. Very high training volumes do not consistently produce more hypertrophy once you hit that point. And strength and hypertrophy both respond to volume, but strength gains tend to plateau earlier when you're doing more and more volume. More sets are generally better than very low volume. Keep this in mind. We're not advocating for you to, you know, not do enough. But expressive sets, excessive sets may simply just add fatigue without additional growth if you've already hit that limit. Yeah. So that's the summary.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I think the best bet as far as asking yourself whether or not you need to add that isolation movement is will it help your compound movement? So are your triceps weaker during bench press? Okay. Maybe adding in some tricep pushdowns is actually beneficial to you. But just doing it for the sake of doing it and you have those movements like bench press, overhead press, heavier compound pushing, pressing movements, maybe, maybe not. But if you have a weak, limiting factor, then yes, that is a really good case to add in isolation.
SPEAKER_00With every single exercise, always ask what is the purpose of this exercise in my program.
SPEAKER_01And if it is, if your answer is to get a massive pump, then don't add it. That's not the right reason. That's junk on you. Chad. Yes. Alright, okay. Peace out.