Quaranturnt Day 57 - Chest Asleep? Turn Up The Volume

Hey Quaranturnt Crew,

We talked about muscular hypertrophy last week, but I ended it with a vague notion of the value of time under tension. How much time under tension is enough? How much muscular damage, mechanical tension, or metabolic stress should I induce? What you’re really asking is “how much do I need to train?”

I can’t answer that question directly. But I can give you a framework for how to figure out the answer! I’ll do that by defining some things for you, and then I’ll give you a great link to learn more about that. 

The way we try to answer this question is by looking at how many sets one must do per week in order to reach various goals. That is, how much demand must we impose on a muscle group in order in order to reach various goals of adaptation. This varies across person, muscle group, and of course how the muscle group is actually stress (e.g. hard tempo sets will have a different impact than some throw-it-around sets). But having SOME answer to these questions, even if vague and handwavy, is more valuable than having no answer.

• MV - Minimum volume for maintenance. This is the amount you need to stress a certain muscle group in order to maintain the muscle mass it has. Certainly there are some genetic and epigenetic factors impacting muscle maintenance, but ignore that and jsut remember that if you stop working out, you will eventually lose most of your muscle. So keep in mind, there is a minimum stimulus needed to tell your body “you need to keep this muscle”.
  
  
  
• MEV - Min effective volume. This is the minimum volume needed to grow a muscle. Maybe you could do 10 sets per week in order to maintain the muscle, but to grow it, you’ll need 12 or something. This will grow the muscle, but not necessarily as fast as possible. 
  

• MAV - Maximum adaptive volume. This is the fastest you could possibly grow the muscle. How much volume should you do to reach that top rate. Any less volume and you could be growing faster with more input work. And more volume and the stress is likely so much that the catabolic factors are counteracting the anabolic stimuli.
  
  
  
• MRV - Maximum recoverable volume. This is the amount of volume where you should probably tone it back if your goal is to grow muscle, but you aren’t dying over the course of a few months of this. You are able to recover in time for the next workout, so the damage isn’t overall accumulating in an injury-is-imminent type of way. (This HUGELY depends on sleep, nutrition, etc. more on recovery later.)
  

One quick note I’ll mention but not get into - much of programming for fitness relies on periodization. This means you start out with some amount of imposed demand, then ramp it up to a higher demand, then maybe ramp it back down. This lets you ease your body into intensity, push it as hard as possible, then calmly release that pressure. So as you go through your hypertrophic cycle, you might start at the MEV, and over the course of a couple months, you’ll work up to your MAV. I know very very little about periodization, so honestly you know as much as I do now. 

To learn more about this, check out Juggernaut and especially their IG videos titled “Hypertrophy guides” for individual muscle groups. 


Then head to my IG Post and see today’s workout.