I have a confession to make – as of yesterday I completed 3000 reps of volume training in just 3 workouts…and I loved it!

Now before you Mentzer / McRobert proponents of pseudo scientific high intensity quackery call out the men in white coats to cart me off to the funny farm for grotesque overtraining, let me explain some of the method behind my madness and, far more importantly and of relevance to most of the readers of this personal training blog, just why I enjoyed it so much (as enjoyment, or at least a sense of real satisfaction is absolutely vital to long term success in any endeavour, especially something that is weight training focused).

Why Volume Training?

I have begun training with someone in preparation for his assault on the British Bodybuilding Finals in October and we have decided to add a little bit of muscle before beginning the fine tuning of his pre-contest prep.  One phenomenal way to add muscle is to trick the body into supercompensation, whereby once it is “empty” it will soak up nutrients and be preferentially anabolic in status. This initial depletion is best achieved via volume training.

There are countless ways and reasons to run a volume training protocol but the essence of this particular one is simple.  Our goal was to totally strip the muscle of glycogen through minimal dietary carbohydrate ingestion and a massive volume of repetitions.  The beauty of what I do is that I am a true fan of training and the science and the art behind physique manipulation.  I am always learning and always experimenting with new twists and tricks, and will always try various protocols out on myself before recommending them to my clients or my team.  So although I have depleted and then “loaded up” countless times before and intimately familiar with the science, the art comes into the nuances, the small changes, and the mental challenge that you present yourself.  To that end, and knowing that I would be training with a true warrior who possesses all the gym focus that sometimes slips me by now that I have a busy business and a young family to take care of (and no, I am by no means feeling sorry for myself here!), I decided to come up with something a little bit special to really push us on to the next level.

Classic volume training might be a 10 sets of 10 reps Poliquin program for a given bodypart. It might be 25 sets in an entire workout hitting 12-15 reps each set.  That wasn’t for us – I have been there and done it, and in honour of stepping it up something a tad different was required.  Following a 3 way split (dividing the body into 3 separate workouts – back & shoulders, legs, chest & arms) I opted for something pretty simple – 1000 reps in a single workout, 10 movements per session, 5 sets per movement, 20 reps per set.  Of course this would take about 2-3 hours to complete (all 50 sets!) if one trained at a regular pace so the only option for rest intervals was either to superset (whilst my partner was on leg extensions I’d be on hack squats, and vice versa) or a very fast paced “I go, you go”. The longest workout took about 1hour 20minutes, the pace was brutal, and both of us are as sore as hell today.  And we have a whole bunch of workouts to do tomorrow, but these will be with massively reduced volume and the delight of added carbs!  More on this later if you are interested…

Why Did I Enjoy Volume Training So Much?

Contrary to what you may think, I am not some crazy ass masochist who lives for pain and destroying himself in the gym.  In fact, most of my weight training life was spent doing high intensity, very low volume work so this past few days of mega volume training has been way out of my comfort zone.  Yet I loved every minute of it.  The reasons are clear and simple and may be principles that you can apply to your own training, although I would caution you against following a 1000 rep volume training workout as I have over 25 years of training experience and as such can tolerate more physical workload than most.

First of all the importance of choosing the right training partner is paramount.  I’ve almost always trained by myself as I always prefer to work to my own schedule, do specifically what works for me, and am a picky s.o.b who can only train with someone who really knows what they are doing, doesn’t need their hand holding, makes me work each set with better form (that even for me can start to slip once fatigue sets in), doesn’t shout in my ear unless I really need it, and can spot flawlessly.  On top of all that it needs to be someone who I would actually be willing to listen to and respect enough to have a healthy, friendly sense of competition with.  Crikey, when I read this back it’s no easy feat!  But training with a good partner fulfills all those criteria and more.

This principle also holds very true for anyone seeking personal training – if you are not inspired by your personal trainer, if he / she can’t lift you up and get more out of you than you could ever do by yourself then my advice is to find a new one! This is just one of the reasons why finding a great personal trainer can be very challenging.

The second main reason why I have loved this period of volume training so much is the gym location.  Perhaps I shouldn’t write this, but I have stopped training at my own personal traiinining gym and popped down the road to my alma mater of Muscleworks.  Each gym has slightly different equipment – Muscleworks being twice the size of UP at Paul Street has more variety of leg machines, but we have much better strength specific training equipment such as a variety of fancy bars, weight training chains, bands etc and in fairness my personal training gym is perfect for intense private workouts where you can set things up however suits you with no need to wait in a queue and an infinite possibility of workout protocols to choose from.  However, where Muscleworks stands out, apart from the fact that I have many friends there and one can train as hard and as loud as possible without nary a glance from the other gym users (it is a fantastic commercial gym for serious trainees – especially if you can avoid the peak time rush in the evening), for me now is quite simply that it is NOT my own gym.

What I have recaptured this past week is my joy of training.  That ability to zone the world out for a given period of time and just focus on the training and the ensuing endorphin rush.  I can’t do that at my own place as once I cross the threshold there is inevitably some issue to deal with or someone who “absolutely must speak to me right away or the sky will fall in!”.  Away from that stress I can focus on one single task and effectively meditate throughout the entire workout.  I am not certain of the strict definition of “meditation”, and will eschew the chance to look it up in google as it fits what I have in my head perfectly and I’d rather not change that.  By meditation I mean the ability to shut out the stresses and worries of the world and to focus on one point with singular concentration.  You’ll never get someone like me chanting verse in a meditation pose, so maybe the right workout, in the right gym environment is simply meditation for alpha males…