Why ULTRA HIGH Frequency Training Might Be Best For Building Muscle

if you split up something into higher frequencies your total weekly volume can become so much higher and still recoverable high frequency is the only realistic way to train your muscles as much as they can recover from and really expand on your genetic potential hey folks Dr Mike here from Renaissance priorization I am here with my friend in real life do I have a friend but he only comes to visit me once every two years so that's my friendship Mr meno henman's a true Authority in the science-based fitness realm Mano it is absolutely great to have

you thank you well but that is exactly where our cordial attitude is going to end because meno and I are enemies in the science Community because we hold diametrically opposing totally irreconcilable views such as our views on training frequency MH meno what is your deal with high frequency training and how and why do you see it at least in some cases Superior to lower frequencies give us a lay of the land all right so it all started with the research that I I think I was the first to popularize the idea at least that's what

I'm known for and that's why I'm the high frequency guy that if you look at all the available research on training frequency they were not at all consistent with the idea of brol that training a muscle once per week is ideal historically also natural bodybuilders have pretty much always done full body workouts up until 1950s or so and only then did we start getting into training splits with the the weer Empire and uh the like so if you looked at the research is already s years ago or something the trend was decisively in favor of

higher frequencies and that's still largely the case although most studies Now find no effect so if you just look at the research right no mechanisms nothing and you look at all available studies you see that they are either in favor of the higher frequency group in comparison six versus three 5 versus two one versus three lots of different comparisons most of them find that if you equate for the volume there is no difference and there's only one with very low quality evidence in one out of four studied muscle groups which is mostly probably a fluke

in the other group but anyway that's there might be lower muscle growth in the lower frequency so just empirically I think a good argument can be made that if there is a training technique and I would tell you about this about anything else like protein intake or whatever like you can schedule your program like this or like this and there's no real other um like if you just go by the data this might be better or at least equal than this so my idea in that sense empirically is okay high frequency and theoretically I think

I popularized the idea that the muscle growth response after the workout muscle protein symphysis that anabolic window which is not one hour it's not two hours it's many hours in fact it can be multiple days but in most research it's about one day so it given that we know that the area under the curve like the total response of muscle protein symphysis especially myof fibr muscle protein symphysis over time very strongly correlates with longitudinal muscle growth so that the acute response of Muscle Pro emphasis is a significant predictor in the most well-controlled research of long-term

muscle growth I thought it may this makes sense like we have the theory and the empirical data now since then research has not been super fond of higher frequencies most Studies have come out with a null effect but that is with the control for training volume and recently a study came out where they tested with and without the control of higher volume so basically if you do one workout on Monday let's say chess day Monday is chess day everybody knows that and now you're doing 10 sets of bench presses now we're going to split that

up we're going to split up the incline the decline and the flat bench press or whatever type of work that you're doing not just all on Monday we're going to do it Monday Wednesday Friday let's say it's nine sets and now we're do three three exactly let's say nine sets on Monday versus free free free now what's going to happen to your total weekly volume the total amount of reps that you can do or total amount of weight that you can lift it's going to increase because you're not as tired simply the average fatigue in

your workout is lower because you're not doing it all at once when you're super fatigued and the fatigue just goes like you're doing some fatigue recover some fatigue recover some fatigue so you get more total volume and we see that especially in that in that recent study that when you don't control for the volume the trend quite decisively goes in favor of higher frequency being better because of the volume so basically I would say that there's kind of free argument there is a freal argument which is yeah it's not great but there is at least

some theoretical rationale for why higher frequencies might be better especially in well trained individuals empirically we do see this trend again especially in well- trained individuals doing high volume training which also aligns with the other research like James creger we also follow has done a good met analysis where he found that more than six sets per muscle group per session there are very strong diminishing returns after that point so it makes sense that after that point you would switch the volume you put it in another session rather than just keep layering on the volume to

that session so I would say you have that theoretical argument there's some of that Empirical research the interaction with volume and yeah some Theory overall not a lot of Reason to Believe purely based on the science at least that higher frequencies would be detrimental in any way and there is reason to believe that they might be superior so basically I do full body every single day works out very well it's also super time efficient because you can pair up all these different exercises and I can be out of the gym in like half an hour

many days half an hour 45 minutes if it's a longer workout with squats or deadlift and it's also practical in that way so that's basically in a nutshell my views on why High high frequency chaining should for most individuals in my view be the default and you need a a good reason to make it lower volume again if you're equating for volume and you have a preference for doing say two you're hitting a muscle two times per week you can definitely get equal results that way I just think it makes sense based on the data

we have to go with earing on the side of higher frequencies versus what most Bros do is earing on the side of lower frequencies damn that's a lot of science all at once yeah I think I'm Dumber now but it's like the dun and Krueger thing where all get smarter and look back on it fondly so I have one thing to add to that and then some questions on realistic implementation the one thing I'd like to add to that is that even most of the studies that favor higher frequency even if so if you control

for volume and by volume we mean number of sets yeah most of the studies do that so just sets for now if we only control for number of sets we're not controlling for the number of reps and we're not controlling for load so like you said if we do nine sets all at once versus 333 the 333 ends up being more reps and usually more load so the overall stimulus whether or not we call it volume it's mathematical volume or if we just so set set volume is the same but the total stimulus is higher

but that even that is underplaying the hand at least in some cases of how big of a deal higher frequency can be because you know James creger has demonstrated that you know more than six to8 sets per session per muscle may have some diminishing returns fine but I think in many cases people can comfortably do 10 working sets per muscle and still have very robust growth not have to worry about a whole lot but here's the situation let's say that you have uh an ability to do 18 sets in one session I don't think a

lot of people are going to be able to make up the claim that the last eight of those sets maybe the last four for sure are ultra high quality very stimulative sets that's just not really reasonable to say yeah but if we split that workout into three workouts so we have a workout at 18 sets per muscle Group which is already almost untenable three sessions of six sets each is actually quite easy and what you find in practice if you try to train a muscle just once a week versus if you try to train it

three times a week once a week you may be able to do 20 sets for that muscle and then you're just done but three times a week you may be able to comfortably do 10 sets each time you go from 20 total sets to 30 total sets and every single workout is actually more doable not just more efficient not just more effective but realistically tenable possible who the does 30 sets of chest or back in one session tell you there's plenty of people that quote unquote do it and all them train with an R8 and

they say they train to fail they're all Liars or they just don't know their own bodies very well so it turns out that if you split up something into higher frequencies your total weekly volume can become so much higher and still recoverable that that set equated studies on frequency are really doing a not a disservice they're theoretically very important studies internally valid studies then in applicability they're really underplaying the hand of higher frequency training so I'd say when you can do as many sets as you can recover from before the next session you can repeat

that session two three four times a week even if it has five to 10 or even more sets because recovery can be that good so good in fact that I myself have run into systemic recovery problems of running highfrequency programs because I can now realistically in a workout do so much volume and that means locally my volume is really big here's another thing to add to that to to your point about higher frequency we have seen in the research that when systemic constraints are not realistic uh somebody trains only their quads for example three times

a week we have seen in multiple studies now at least recreationally trained undergraduates can go upwards of 50 work sets per week for weeks on end and get better growth than at any number of sets smaller than that better than 40 better than 30 and yes there are caveats to that but at least we know it's a potentially High number who the is going to do 50 sets of quads in one session that's the I don't care what you think about it don't bother commenting it's irrelevant because nobody can do it to any reasonable extent

where anything is stimulative and I would say you run a very decent risk of developing rabdom myis right there on the spot if you try 50 actual work sets but it looks like if you do maybe 10 work sets per day five days a week and you're used to it you're trained that might be realistic and all of a sudden that 5050 is possible so if your local musculature is recovering well if your joints aren't hurting if your systemic resources are still good high frequency is the only realistic way to train your muscles as much

as they can recover from and really expand on your genetic potential because people will say things like man man I'm struggling with calf growth and you're like oh cool like what do you trained how do you do for calvs they say exercises they say loads progression schemes and then you get to the real thing where they train calvs one a week or twice a week and you're like have you tried to train Cals three four five six times a week it often times has never entered their mind that if they do that they can easily

get up to 25 30 35 sets productive sets sets before which you recovered to do them of that many caves and all of a sudden what you thought was bad calf genetics was just you just didn't train nearly close to your minimum effective volume for Cavs not remotely close to your maximum adaptive volume because it turns out you needed more and the idea as you mentioned in another one of our videos that we did for your channel the idea that the Gregorian calendar that the 7-Day week has anything to do with physiology is pure impossibility

of nonsense because we just made that up we made it up before we had MRI studies before we had Tracer studies before we knew it before physiology was a term and so your muscles there's no reason to believe that a week is some kind of magic amount of time to rest why not not hours why not days technique Sports and weightlifters train two time two times a day six days a week why can't you and the why can't you answer is a very good answer you cannot recover from that much but how do you know

until you try so my humble recommendation and I train with more moderate frequencies my normal recommendation is two to four times per week per muscle but if you have a muscle that is easily able to recover there's not a lot of joint and connective tissue problem because if you try ultra high frequency on joint joints that aren't so great you will cook yourself and your joints will break into pieces but if you have muscles like your biceps for me rear ads for me for example side dos that recover quickly that can tolerate a lot of

volume that don't impose a lot of systemic fatigue and uh that can handle a lot of stress try to train them a little bit more often if you're doing once a week try two if you're doing two try three if you're doing three try four the worst thing that happens is you overreach and you're like that's too much I can't grow anymore but you may find that with higher frequency you actually experience a really good deal of growth because we already know muscles can potentially benefit from 20 30 40 plus sets per week in some

context and you can't tell unless you try the stimulus to fatigue ratio is a interesting one because almost everyone I've talked to intuitively believes that higher training frequencies are inherently more fatiguing and in that case I think they're conflating volume and frequency of course if you're doing a heavy duty chess work on Monday you're going to do that exact same workout now on Wednesday and on Friday as well rather than Distributing the same sets over more days of course that's going to be harder to recover from because your total volume is simply a lot higher

now interestingly if you look at the same number of sets even when you're doing more reps because you're less fatigued there is a trend in the research that higher frequencies are easier to recover from we have two studies showing lower delayed onset muscle soreness which I'm not a big fan of as that meaning much but might mean something and anecdotally certainly I think people get a lot less sore when they spread out their volume over more sessions as opposed to doing like like you said 50 sessions one workout you can get RAB though so in

in that line of research there is a trend in the line of research of testosterone to cortisol ratios again in natural lifters we see that the testosterone to cortisol ratio even resting levels tends to be higher in I think free studies than with higher frequencies versus with lower frequencies with injury injury rates we don't have a lot of research but it suggests no effect of training frequency per se like independent of volume or intensity on injury rates so overall the trends actually lean slightly in favor of the stimulus fatig ratio being better especially if we

add if we look at the stimulus components we just looked at fatigue you look at the stimulus components we can see what Mike says the decreased quality of workout we can see that objectively in muscle activity levels now EMG has its limitations but in this case I think makes perfect sense that the quality of your work how much you can activate a muscle how much force you are producing we know that's all you can also feel it like when your PCS are fully pumped they just don't do much anymore and people will report like I've

had in team foron Forum people say like after XYZ number of sets of quads I can't even Flex my quad should I still be doing sets and we're generally like no you should be going home to recover so that you can come back and train again when you're recovered and ready to go yep I also I use those cues to a lesser degree but I also Auto regulate a lot based on especially work capacity which often results in the same actual application so I will say if your sets go from like 12 to six to

three do you benefit from adding another set to that maybe but if you just look at it from a tension biomechanical point of view the stimulus that you're going to get is probably two repetitions maybe one which is just not a whole lot of tension and we know that fatigue can increase disproportionately to the increased muscle growth because there are very strong diminishing returns to the muscle growth stimulus but there are no diminishing returns to the fatigue fatigue just keeps Rising so in that sense I think you also see that you get a very poor

stimulus to fatig ratio at some point let's talk about some problems that I see that can arise in the implementation of high frequency in certain scenarios and this may not even be the correct implementation one is people that like you said earlier will continue to do ultra heavy training every time they step foot into the gym my recommendation for that has been if you train some big strong muscle like quads for example three times a week at least consider for hypertrophy by the way at least consider something like in the first session training it with

mostly sets of five to 10 when you're fresh in the second session on Wednesday maybe more like sets of 10 to 15 10 to 20 repetitions your joints will still not be super recovered because uh it's my suspicion that joints take longer Ive tissues and basically poor more poorly vascularized parts of your body which includes all connective tissues versus muscles take longer to recover from than your uh so than your muscles do so I say you could have muscular recovery by Wednesday if you train legs hard on Monday but your knees just experientially might not

feel a th% your back might not feel a thousand going again in sets of 5 to 10 might be like okay you're asking for it but if you go sets of 10 to 20 and you do some different movements it could be another awesome workout and then Friday maybe some sets of 15 to 20 maybe some sets of 20 to 30 guys remember that we know that sets of 20 to 30 on average produce just as much hypertrophy that's a five to 10 so if you go heavy moderate light and you do three workouts a

week you end up obviating the problem of joint stuff because you're aren't going heavy heavy heavy so that's a thing I've seen people do when they try high frequency and they're like it doesn't work if up my joints a lot of times they're just going heavy heavy heavy all the time and of course as you said it's basically a volume artifact because they're doing that much volume but there is only so much heavy volume you can tolerate and if you can't tolerate any more heavy volume but your muscles can still recover if you go lighter

we know it doesn't uh tax your joints as much we know it's not acutely as much injury risk but we also know from the literature that light training does promote roughly as much hypertrophy as heavy so why wouldn't we take advantage of that what do you think about that man was that decent advice I would say so I think it's very important to different iate the training stimulus if you're doing very high frequency training it doesn't work as well to do the exact same lift same reps Etc and try to do it just every day

there was this book by Matthew Perryman I think squat every day yeah I had an interaction with that guy that was unpleasant on the social media right I think that was a good example of where he has he is also kind of in the pain science movement where he's like the pain that you don't you don't give into that and it doesn't mean as much but the take on message was essentially that almost everybody that tries that develops serious joint injuries at least a lot of aches and pains I know a lot of people that

Crush themselves with squat every day yeah so it doesn't work well for a lot of reasons so Berger fagly and I Norwegian strength coach good friend of mine as well we experimented a lot when this early research came out and we kind of connected the MPS literature and the training frequency literature and we found like very strongly in our clients it doesn't work as well if you try to do the same stuff every time you really need to differentiate the training stimulus every time you do it plus there is actually one big downside not theoretically

but in practice the way most people Implement high frequency training I think that on average anecdotally people do report even given the same number of sets more injuries with higher frequency training my experience is that the reason for that is that when people get an ache or a pain that might turn into an injury if they do for example lag day once per week your knees start hurting you're good you quit what happens you did only five of your expected 15 sets or quad work for that week and you rested for a whole week afterwards

what happens in hardcore traines that get some aches and pains they squat after third set of squatting on Monday they're like didn't feel great Tuesday they go back they go heavy again it's like first set was not great third set really hurt Wednesday they go in again they're like oh you know different day didn't hurt while walking into the gym so again they do lack press or whatever first set not great but then they try like second and said okay now now I'm done what happened is that they aggravated it four days in a row

and what you feel in the gym when you're in a state where you're already quite desensitized to pain and if you're a very serious lifter a little bit of pain continually building upon something that's probably already injured tissue that's already degraded which is already has a weaker collagen structure can very quickly turn into a much more serious injury and that's what I see happening when people do high frequency training is that they never give the injured or uh at least damaged body part a break and that's what you have to be really careful for you

have to manage volume you have to think of your total volume and don't go in there every time aggravating it really think about what level of injury do I have how do I interpret my pain signals and differentiate the stimulus and don't go in there every time and aggravate it give yourself an actual break if you're really like okay every type of quad movement hurts my knees take some days off great idea my summary is as follows there is compelling evidence that higher frequency training can be better than lower frequency training I would say one

quick aside is theoretically and I think empirically to some extent it's not as much of a big deal as you would think because the refractory period of the MPS response is pretty robust if you stimulate muscle growth every day you don't get much growth every day but you get some if you stimulate it twice a week you're so Det trained in a sense by the second session that you get a lot out of both sessions you still get more six times a week versus two but it's like 1.25 or 1.1 times as much stimulus it's

not two times or three times as much stimulus so that allows us to get into a good Gray Zone where say anything between two and four times a week frequency is totally good professional attempt at getting jacked but experiment in your own time with Whatever frequency you're doing now adding one unit of frequency to that if you're doing two two times a week try three try it for a while see how it goes watch your fatigue watch your joints and connective tissues watch your overall volume to because that's going to be the thing that makes

you grow and can up your recovery see how it goes at least theoretically in a lot of practice we know that there is some light at the end of the highfrequency tunnel and if you're training muscles one or two times a week definitely give a thought to at least one muscle at a time training it two or three times a week and then seeing if you get good results if you don't whatever Mike mener was right go back to one time a week no big deal but if you do get some better growth think interesting

I can keep going like this or I can go back to two times a week frequency and then when I'm in a specialization phase for this muscle later I can try three or four times a week frequency just to experiment anything to add to that menu I think two interesting points that you can also learn from experimenting with high frequency training and again high frequency means that you're hitting a mus muscle more times per week not necessarily that you're going to the gym every day because you can go to the gym four times a week

if you do full body every time that I would say that's high frequency training I would probably say that high frequency training is hitting a muscle three plus times a week agreed yeah I think that's including three yeah including three so like the old school three times full body that's pretty high frequency training and anything yeah any other structure that hits a muscle at least three times a week would be kind of high frequency training so one thing that you can learn from high frequency training especially if you've been doing bro workouts all your life

is that only a few sets are actually super hypertrophic already and you get strong diminishing returns after the very first set if you train very hard a lot of people have asked me isn't there like a minimum threshold that you need to cross and it's like yes there is but it's one set if you're hitting that muscle every single day of the week was probably measured in reps and not even sets yeah I mean we have research showing that if you do even some body weight squats a few times across the day you can get

some MPS response there so it's very much a Continuum of course you need to reach a certain level of NPS to cross the threshold needed to build net muscle across the weak as a hole and the more advanced you are the higher that threshold is exactly but even one hard good set high quality work work set after a warmup every single day that's seven sets per week that's serious that's above the minimum effective volume for the vast majority of individuals so you can get away with really short workouts hitting a muscle with one two freets

is pretty hardcore like if you do every if you train a muscle every single day like I do freets is ious bulk that's 21 CS per week of high quality so 3 to four is very serious volume one to two is perfectly reasonable if you want to do a minimum effective volume type approach where you're cutting so I think that's something you can learn from it and the the setup is a really important part like the time you can save because if you do high frequency training and you do Squat and you add L curl

and you do chin up you do bench press you can do all of that in a circuit you can still rest in between set in sets in which case I would call it a combo set rather than a circuit because a circuit is usually associated with no rest and that's incredibly time efficient so as I said I can do a full body workout in 30 to 45 minutes and for for a lot of people that are short on time especially if you want to fit in a workout for example in your lunch break you can

get a lot of high quality work in in one hour also for pts that have clients and they often they are restrained to one hour it's a really effective time effective way to structure your workouts yes brilliant brilliant Mano where can people you I'm on YouTube and Instagram mostly and if you're new to my content menow anal.com you can subscribe to my newletter newsletter you get a tour of my most popular contents and you can see if you like anything awesome guys thanks for tuning in see you next [Music] time