Quality Over Quantity: The Truth About Training Volume

The guy who's doing two fucking movements per body part.

The guy who's doing two fucking movements per body part. His chest day is only inclined bench and pec deck. His leg day is only leg extensions and hamstring curls. If he goes at those sets like a total freak, he's going to beat the guy doing 75% his intensity with like a fancy pants. Three sets of chest, three sets of pause rep. Sam's right, and this is exactly what most people get wrong when it comes to training volume. Everyone talks about volume as if it's just the total number of sets you do. But tension is the actual stimulus for growth. And the amount of tension you create depends on how close or far away you are from failure. So not all sets are created equally. If you go into the gym and do five exercises with 15 sets total for a muscle, but you leave three to four reps in the tank like most people do, it looks like high volume on paper, even though the actual growth producing volume from each set was lower. Whereas if you do two exercises with four sets total, but they're all zero to one reps from failure, it looks like low volume on paper, even though the growth producing volume from each set was higher. That's your real hypertrophy volume. It's not just the total number of sets, it's the amount of high tension work you apply to the muscle. A typical chest workout we use inside trainwise might be exactly what Sam meant mentioned an incline press followed by a pec deck. A quad workout could be a leg press and a leg extension. It doesn't look like much on the surface, but if those sets are truly pushed with high effort, it can generate better results than someone doing three times as much at a lower intensity.