Why Lower Training Frequency Might Be BETTER For Growth

higher frequency programs might not be as beneficial in the real world as they might seem from some of the resource literature hey folks Dr Mike here for Renaissance periodization why lower frequencies might be better for growth than a surface level analysis May indicate to you what a fun video topic for all of us muscle nerds let's talk about optimizing training frequency if you just look at the research by itself as the nerd that you are it looks like higher training frequencies are superior for muscle growth than lower training frequencies on average a good example of

this is Greg Knuckles from Stronger by science which I recommend him and stronger by science um as Superior resources to inform yourself especially if you're a fucking nerd uh Greg did an older review of the literature on this is now a few years old and it was a great review of literature because he looked at actual effect sizes difference between all the different frequencies one time a week two time a week three times four times five and even I think some studies included six time a week frequencies for the same muscle we're talking about training

biceps once a week versus twice versus dot dot dot six times biceps per week and what Greg found was that the more frequency you do on average the more muscle you grow over the span of a few months because that's how long most of the studies are what he also found was the difference between training once a week and twice a week was really big the difference between training twice a week and three times a week was not so big the difference between training three times a week and four times a week was very very

small the difference between five and six four and 5 Etc was either undetectable or basically like I we can't even confidently say there's a difference here anymore a lot of other reviews didn't find such an ASM totic relationship they found that generally 2x was Superior to 1x but anything 2x plus was roughly the same but most those lit reviews did volume equating which means that they looked at training people twice a week versus training them three times a week for the same muscle but the amount of total sets per week they did was the same

the problem is that really undercuts the value of high frequency training one of the values of high frequency training is because you're doing less each time you never accumulate a crapload of fatigue From Any Given session and thus you can do more frequent sessions and the addition of those frequent sessions together your overall weekly volume that you can do is bigger so for example if twice a week training high quality great training you can do 25 sets total you may be able to do a high quality 30 sets total with three times a week and

with four times a week you might be able to do 40 high quality sets total then it's like or even let's call it you know 38 or something well 38 sets for four times a week is a shitload more sets than 25 sets twice a week but if you say look if we do the study both groups have to have 25 well then you're undercutting the value of the high frequency group like that's that's not really fair so I thought Greg's review was really really fair in the sense that it treated the frequencies and the

volumes organically um ecologically soing look if you're training for higher frequency it's implied that you're going to be able to put in more volume because that's really how the real world works so in that case high frequency in my estimation does have a theoretical upside and an empirical upside if properly studied to lower frequency training in the scientific literature but this logic is sound but some compelling ideas May hem in the logic a bit for the real world because we start out with just scientific studies they say this maybe we hem this in a little

bit to give you a bit more of a constrained but more accurate view about what really is likely to happen in the real world and I can think of at least six reasons why higher training frequency may be a uh for Optimum result may be a little bit lower than we think just from this kind of evidence first D loads have to be integrated in the real world most training studies don't use D loads because you're using participants that are too weak being trained too infrequently or just not trained for long enough to even accumulate

need an amount of fatigue to require D loing but the rest of us that live in the real world and train on De in real world every 48 weeks or so we're going to need a D Lo here's the thing if you train time three times a week really hard you might need to De load once every four weeks if you train hard twice a week you might not accumulate as much fatigue because your total volume is lower and because you train fresher every time if you train four versus two times a week then actually

your intensity is higher like your load is higher you in a high frequency condition both lift heavier in every session and do more sessions and there's more volume total over the week that tends to crush you much more maybe you'll need to Deo instead of every four weeks with a high frequency condition three times a week if you train two times a week you might only need to De load once every six weeks and then so the total frequency of that entire Mesa cycle isn't just the accumulation phase which is 3x versus 2x it's the

accumulation plus D Lo and if you have more D loads training with higher frequency over the course of let's say a year the number of of sessions you get is actually smaller than you would think with a higher frequency still higher than the lower frequency but not by as much because the de loading has to be more frequent D loads count if you spend a quarter of a year D loading then versus another program where you spend a third of the Year D loading if you go two weeks up one week down because each of

the two weeks is 6X a week 6X a week 2x a week on the D loads the average isn't that you train six times a week it's much more now that you train like four times a week or something but if you train four times a week your D loads need to be interspersed much greater and so you still have higher frequencies with higher frequency but not as much Point number two untrained subjects are the vast majority of the people being trained here in these studies and studied in these studies they count for Less they

just don't count for as much inferential power to the rest of us who well train and it's probably not our first day of training most of the research is on looking at people to train between zero and three years total two to three years is actually considered train trained in in most of the literature it's almost a formal definition and uh G whiz you know that's trained but not so well trained a lot of us have watching this Channel right now have been training for three four five and and more years many of us the

folks that are in these studies uh they can take a ton of stimulus without summing up a bunch of fatigue because they just don't even know how to drive a hard stimulus they don't even know how to push themselves very hard and they're also not very muscular so they don't have a lot of muscle to recover so they can't accumulate a lot of fatigue they can imagine that their hamstrings are roughly the size of your forearms something like that how what is it going to take to overtrain your forearms Jesus Christ six days a week

two days for 18 months straight maybe you'll overtrain them maybe not even so when you look at someone who's been training for 16 weeks on a high frequency program and their hamstrings have made amazing gains like yeah but if I tried this my hamstrings would break into pieces within two weeks because I'm so big and so strong compared to these people that I can't recover at the speed that they're doing in addition to that cuz they're fucking noobs they have fresh joints right and your joints are not fresh they're a little beat up and also

they're so weak that they can't even beat up their own joints be like well wouldn't your joints start to fall apart after 18 weeks of squatting five times a week well theirs won't because they're they're squatting barely anything and their joints are fresh as shit you have had three knee surgeries and you're squatting fucking 200 kilos or some shit for reps you're just not going to be able to last like they do for more experienced subjects for more experienced trainees very high frequencies might not be nearly as sustainable as they are for the typical person

in a training study so that's definitely something to watch out for number three short-run programs are not the same things as years of training and extrapolating from one to the other is a potentially not good idea we can't simply conclude that high frequency is categorically better almost everyone that I've ever seen do squat every day has incredible results in the first several months makes sense idea in sport Science is called concentrated loading really focus on something pour a ton of resource in it it climbs up fast but then the fatigue catches up and then it

starts to Peter off I know almost no one who got really jacked and really strong and his maintaining it and successfully still adding with like a squad everyday program usually first three to six months it works great you just don't hear about them after that and they're like yeah in knes got fucked up hips dried up I don't know what happened but I'm trying to squat again but every time I do it hurts dope amazing there's a couple people on YouTube with YouTube accounts don't get a lot of followers some and uh they're like Squad

every day day number 696 working around a knee injury and you're like why why are you doing this almost no one who's gotten to be the best squatter or no one who's ever had the biggest legs in the conversation his squatter every day is it just like a hobby you're doing is it just fun look it has distinct upsides but probably not for forever the analogy here is that a jet like a fighter jet flies way faster with its afterburners on with the the red stuff's coming out than it does with just cruising speed but

you can't keep them on all the time you'll burn your engines out and you'll run out of fuel you don't don't like you know take off from fucking you know Washington DC and fly to you know Miami Florida only on afterburners just might not be a realistic option so just the same way you're not like high frequency is great yes for three months at a time whatever let's do it all the time like you might burn out people do it all the time at the very least just be cautious and extrapolating especially when most successful

very jacked people don't seem to go ultra high in frequency and maybe it's the Changing of the Guard maybe they're wrong maybe we'll all be training with higher frequencies in the future but maybe that's not true maybe you're wrong about that and so at least understand that scientifically we can confidently say look for short periods of time a Mesa cycle maybe two maybe three one two three four months at a time higher frequencies almost certainly give you better results for muscle growth but we shouldn't be so confident saying and thus I train high frequency all

the time you might not want to do that you might want to go through phases of higher and lower frequency I'll get to that in a bit next number four anabolic resistance is a real thing and it's been research confirmed at this point especially for more advanced people so if you train five times a week versus two times a week for the same muscle each session in the second week of the 5x is giving you very very small amount of muscle growth but each session in week two of the 2x a week training gives you

a substantial amount of muscle growth so yes higher frequencies might might be better because you get to train five times but training five times a week doesn't mean that you get the same amount of anabolic drive from each 5x session as you do from each 2x session because if you train one day and you train again the next day for the same muscle the amount of anabolism radically tapers off still there and over the whole week it still sums up to a higher total amount of muscle growth but if you train two times a week

yeah you don't you grow plenty of muscle in the first session but you you miss out on Tuesday miss out on Wednesday you're not spurring any more new growth you're just collecting the old growth and then when you train Thursday again if you compare the two Thursdays for the 5x Thursday and the 2x Thursday 5x Thursday you get a little bit of muscle growth because your body's like fucking Christ been at this for four fucking days what the hell am I supposed to do with this shit but if you train Thursday in the 2x it's

the first time you've trained in three days your body's like fuck yeah muscle growth and it drives it like crazy so if you compare 5x to 2x 5x in a week grows this much muscle 2x in a week grows this much it's not this much you would think two is like well two fifths of five no it's more like four fifths as far as muscle growth is concerned so if you really want to grow some muscle and it's absolutely number one priority for you to bring up your bicep fuck yeah five times a week four

times whatever you need to do but if you're regularly training the rest of your body you're getting pretty decent gains and fatigue is in the mix two times a week comes so close to five times a week much more than you would expect precisely because that anabolic resistance resets itself much more for two times a week versus five times a week it resets on the weekends but then you're back to Growing plenty muscle on Monday but the muscle growth stimulus on Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Etc it's just like not much left right you're you're kind

of squeezing the juice out of everything completely and then you just might as well get a new thing of juice but no you're squeezing it out still God damn it muscle you're going to grow for me I I just say so and it works you do get the most squeeze but it's a lot of effort for a very small outcome if it's worth it to you amazing just don't expect it to be double the outcome you'll be in for a really shit surprise because people will say high frequencies are better rarely do you have a

followup on social media with like what was the effect size for that like it was very small like oh fuck so unless I'm really prioritizing a muscle group maybe it's just not worth it for me to go super high frequencies this by itself is a good reason to suspect that higher frequencies might be ideal for one to two Messa Cycles at a time two to three months at a time after which your muscles are exhausted as the French would say and uh they might have to wait you know um I was involved in the situation

where I was like oh this is like just a couple weeks ago I was like um how many was it Scott I had been in bed with eight Playboy Playmates um guys I had to tell them ladies I'm human and even though I'm unbelievably well- endowed to the point of questioning my Humanity I'm made of Flesh and Blood and I had to say look come back and in 3 days and we can do this whole orgy thing all over again I just can't have you hanging around the apartment it's I live in a New York

skyrise 108th floor and kinobody say what is your name kinobody I have kinobody over the next day because as much girl love as I like men exist and boy are they beautiful KOB body comes into clean up the mess so to speak he's so good at cleaning he uses his whole body you ever seen somebody use their whole body to clean you the hell is going on in this channel folks why must I always bring this up that's for you to answer in the comments in any case two to three months go hard high frequency

squeeze the toothpaste out of that shit and then two or three months pick another muscle group to do that too and leave that muscle group the fuck alone to two time a week training you'll still get great gains not the best gains your body will refresh your mind will refresh your joints will refresh your anabolic resistance will drop and then you could hit it again later with that same kind of con cated loading next to make an even bigger point of this number five higher volumes and higher loads give you a less sustainable fatigue environment

and guess what higher frequency allows you to do higher frequency by putting more sessions in the week allows you to build up higher total volumes for the week and because you come in fresher each time you can even have higher loads how the fuck does this work let me explain to you let's have an example you do five sets of squats on Monday and then five sets of leg press right after after on Thursday you do five sets of squats and then five sets of leg press got it with me so far cool each time

you do leg presses Monday and Thursday you are fatigued acutely from having done squats so while your squat loading is super great your leg press loading is not as good I mean after you squat a bunch you're not really fucking not a much gas in the tank you can still have a great workout with leg presses for those five sets but not amazing now check this out that's a two time a week program we take the leg presses and we move them away from squats from Monday to Tuesday and from Thursday to Friday so now

we go Monday Thursday squats for five sets Tuesday Friday leg press for 5 cents if it's on a different day you've had some you're definitely stronger a day later for lifting then you are like five minutes later after you've completed your last five sets of squats so now the load on your leg press like literally how much if it's the same rep range which why would we change that sets a 10 to 15 nor after squats you'd be using 315 on the leg press or so now you're using 365 that extra 25 pounds on every

rep of every set of every session adds up so higher frequency programs because they allow you to come in fresher you don't have to train after doing a whole bunch of stuff you train fresh every time or more fresh your overall volume we already talked about is way higher or at least the same usually you can do six or seven sents of squat six or seven sets of leg press and then the volume is higher because of the frequency and the load is heavier on average cuz you're not as tired anymore from the shit you

used to do you're spreading it out that is amazing for driving hypertrophy duh more weight more volume fucking gas me up Scotty the problem is is that it turns out again to no surprise whatsoever that higher volumes per week and heavier loads within those volumes Drive fatigue much much more and the thing is is that sometimes your muscles are totally fine but in most cases your joints and connective tissues have a fatigue tolerance or an ability to heal from fatigue that's slower than your muscles so you might be like hey man my biceps are ready

to go o but my elbows I don't know or my quads are ready to go but my knees aren't having a lot of fun this implication of higher frequency empowering you to do more means you get the upside of doing more but also the downside you get the bigger stimul and the more muscle growth but you also get the gnarlier fatigue and that's both uh joint and connective tissue fatigue and systemic fatigue I mean fuck me four leg workouts a week with eight fucking sets each time versus two leg workouts with two sets each time

or sorry 10 sets each time which one you think is going to fuck you up more and that's not just totally adding sets that's also psychological I mean you finish Monday's leg workout you're like oh I I generally like to smoke a cigarette in the parking lot after every workout I finish um It's Made of $100 bills or whatever I don't care the butler's give me the cigarettes I I don't even ask for them anymore I smoke a Siggy and I'm like oh man that was awesome thank fucking God I don't have to do that

again till Thursday but if you're smoking the sigy after eight sets of fucking squats and you're like oh what's tomorrow fucking god eight sets of leg presses and I get one day and then I fucking have to do the whole thing over again holy shit psychologically the shit catches up to you and then all of a sudden you're not giving your best effort and if you're not giving your best effort why the fuck are you doing the program it's a contradiction in terms or or I'll say uh giving your best effort is more uh more

of a primary concern than just going in there and fucking doing the work so this higher fatigue environment is a problem and it means it's not a sustainable coming back around to that advice of do it for a few Mesa Cycles until you really burn the fuck out and then stop don't just assume higher frequencies are better I better train them all the time it's not designed necessarily to be done all the time we also know that not only do you keep all the muscle you gain on lower frequencies for sure but you also can

still add muscle just a little more slowly on Lower frequency so you got to understand that if you want your best longterm you got to try hard rest try hard rest try hard rest you can't just be like try hard forever and then die well you will die but you won't get jacked so just the same way that's a thing in workouts you don't work out 24 hours a day you work out for a few and then you rest the rest of the time that kind of time scale or that kind of pattern of go

hard and back off expands to every time scale so there'll be times of uh the week which you go hard and then the weekends when you go easy there'll be times of a messa cycle where you go super hard and then you Deo just the same way a training block can be really hard with higher frequencies two or three meeses in a row and then you switch the pace and ease up on those muscles so you can go hard on something else that's absolutely a thing and it works it works lastly this is a big

deal and it's becoming more of a big deal and have more videos in the future about why this is a big deal in the research literature most studies that train people and that assess training frequency for example or anything else they're training studies the programs those people get are generally twice a week or three times a week they come into the lab and they do their sets of leg extensions or leg curls and squats or whatever the fuck else they're doing in the vast majority of the cases the subjects either do not train outside of

that context at all or do their own training which is usually just not training that fucking hard then when we look at it and we see a study on the quadriceps that was like Hey 4X a week is better than 2x a week you're like oh fuck I got to train my legs four times every week hold on a second what about systemic fatigue well in the studies it doesn't fucking matter because a lot of those people the majority of them just show up for four leg workouts a week and do nothing else physical I

mean on the one hand locally it's tough for the quads to recover from that but seems like they did in the study dope guess it's not a local limit it's not a quad limit but also training three times a week total it's just not that big of a pat on the back and not much systemic fatigue but your dumbass is reading the fucking abstract or reading the title of that study and not reading through the methods and not thinking of the shit in a nuanced way then you're like of course I should be training my

legs three times a week uhhuh but you also train your chest you train your biceps you train your back your shoulders your everything else that level of systemic fatigue sums up to something fucking insane than if they actually did a study where they ran your program on all the subjects and they did three times a week like training it might be the reality that hey yeah actually they did make it for 12 weeks and then you got to try it out but more likely they'll try and realize that after six weeks half the study participants

are already gone because they're like I can't do this anymore and the other half are just starting to get weaker progressively over time big fucking problem so we look at studies in isolation but in the real world we have to contextualize them into what we're doing already and you guys out here like watching this channel you're probably training four to six days a week four or five or six days a week and you're probably training most of your muscles if not the large majority you can't simply say wait I'm going to go to high frequency

for everything hold on a sec that's not what they did in the studies then it could be that if you try it your systemic fatigue is so insane that later you realize you're like oh oh yeah it turns out nobody can do this you could find out that you can do it just have a bit of reverence for the process and go okay I'm going to try to increase my frequency in just one muscle group the rest I'm going to keep the same and I'm going to see how it goes a few weeks later and

a few weeks later you might be like this really works my quads are much bigger now amazing or you might be like holy shit this is unsustainable and if you find that to be the case you have rediscovered reality and you're back to like oh I see why most Champion bodybuilders don't train their quads three or four times a week most of them train them one to two times a week because that's all the systemic fatigue can handle but you can do one better you know periodization to some large extent maybe from this channel maybe

from other resources and you know that you can focus on something while easing up on everything else so if you really want your quads to come up you can really focus for a few weeks and a few months and then take the focus off and make sure that systemic fatigue is entirely uh in the realm in which you can control it and then later you can focus on your chest or on your back whatever else you want and that brings me to the final Point here the implications from all this first what do you get

when PhD sport scientists collaborate with Pro bodybuilders the most effective muscle growth training app ever made get yours [Music] now higher frequency programs might not be as beneficial in the real world as they might seem from some of the research literature which means that the my take home from this and you don't have to have your take home from this be this just take it for what it is I think three times a week is high frequency for most people I think two times a week is normal I think one time a week is low

frequency that's how I how I contextualize it five or six times a week training can work for smaller muscle groups like forearms and side belts and biceps sometimes but for like chest and hamstrings and back it's just very unlike likely you're going to be able to pound away five six days a week um for weeks and weeks on end and get your best results that's Ultra psycho high frequency in the context of a total program it just might be Overkill it might work for you but if you're thinking of doing high frequency and you've never

done it before try three days a week for the shit for like a muscle or two at a time don't go to six right away that's insane if you get great results from three way better than from two try four times next time go up nice and slow if you're going to do this I absolutely recommend a few Messa Cycles in a row picking a few muscle groups at a time going high frequency there and then backing off seeing how the results were and then trying that on a few other muscle groups instead of just

like switching to a highfrequency training plan where you train every muscle in your body fucking 18 times a week or some shit like that that's Overkill and lastly watch your fatigue especially your joints and conductive tissues if you're on the fucking hack Squat and week eight of a fucking legs everyday program or four time a week legs and I come chat with you because I see you at the gym and you're like hey you look like one of our subscrib and you're like GE is Mister thanks for noticing me and I'm like it's not Mister

it's doctor it's just a respect thing you know I'm kidding and I'm like hey how are you feeling on this plan you're like dude fucking dope man I love it like okay yeah your legs look bigger you're like thank you so much how are your knees you're like o not good my knees it just get worse every workout what are you thinking where's that going to lead to I'll tell you cuz I've seen it a bunch your knees get fucked up you have to go to one time a week with like wait you start losing

a little bit of muscle and then stabilize at 90% of what you had before 3 months later your knees heal completely and you're ready to do high frequency again to get back up to 100% to have the same cycle repeat itself don't overreach to that magnitude especially not your joints and connective tissues your best high frequency program is one in which just in the tail end of the last one to two weeks of the entire block two or three mesas of it in the last one to two weeks of that program your joints feel unsustainably

fucked up that's a great high frequency program because you know you're pushing it but it's just for a few weeks that you're fucked up you heal after a week or two of that shit go back into normal volume training everything heals completely after a few weeks later and then boom you're Off to the Races a couple months later you can repeat that process again but if after one month of high frequency when you have planned three more months your joints are fucked up where are you going where are you going nowhere you're going to fucked

up joints and I'll tell you this going hard in the gym means you squeeze the life blood out of your fucking muscles pain but if your joints hurt consistently worse and worse over time you're just being a fucking idiot there's nobody's gonna give you an award you get zero blowjobs from the prom queen Scott um prom queen is she still dressed with her the crown and the sash when she's giving you that the good old bee or heeg in the motel room later or is she dressed in something else or is she neaked I think

I want her to keep it on for the status yeah my man someday I'll have sex with a pretty girl but until then I'll see you next time