What's the Best Training Split for Muscle Growth? | Dr. Milo Wolf

[Music] Welcome everyone to the ARP Shrink Podcast. I'm Nick Shah joined by Dr. Milo Wolf back again. What's up, man? I'm good, man. Just finished my AM workout. It's sunny hand at UK. It's a rear day. We're living. Sunny day in the UK. That's don't exist very often. Well, what do you get like six of those a six of those a year? Honestly, it's 90% of days of rain or something absurd. Yeah, that is crazy. AM workouts. You're doing two days. Yeah, just because I find my day structure is better if I split up into two. It makes the workout easier and I'm kind of a lazy bastard. So, you know, it helps. I got you. So it's not necessarily. It's kind of like one workout you just divided into two. Is that it? Yep. That makes sense. So the morning is calm on movements, evening is isolation movements. So, pretty easy stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So today we're going to dive into kind of like. What's the best way to describe it? What's kind of the best training splits for different groups? And so I'm curious because you just led with that. But like, how long have you been training a long ass time in Soify? So what's your exact training split right now? Because you just mentioned the two days. But like, what's yours look like? Oh, man. This is going to give people the wrong idea. Full body every day. Okay. Well, give us a little insight into why that is. Yeah. So, as I've gotten more and more advanced, leg training has gotten more and more difficult. And I don't know. Maybe it's some stuff like I'm fast-witched on and in, or maybe I'm just lazy. I don't know what it is. But. The way you move your hand. Yes, I am. It has both, maybe, yeah. Do we have more than like five sets of lower body compound movements in a single workout? I just, the quality goes way down after that on any leg training I do after. I also start taking way longer rest times because like I'm just getting so winded that after five sets of squats or five sets of leg press or we'll have you. If I then move on to do RDLs, one my legs are shaking. So RDLs aren't going to go too well. And two rest times are going to go from like, okay, I can do two to three minutes to, oh, I need four or five minutes to even feel alive here. For the same like stimulus at the end of the day. So for me, it was like, as I got more advanced, let me go ahead and spread out my leg training across the week more rather than trying to climb it into one or two or even three really high volume leg days. So that's one thing. Second thing is kind of like, as we get to in the research, spreading out volume more across the week. So instead of doing all your work for your chest in one day, doing it more spread out tends to work better. So yeah, both those reasons, mainly the former though, if I must be honest, like just I am. I'm a bit of a lazy bastard. I don't enjoy heavy leg days. No, I get that and especially as you get more advanced and the weights get really heavy. It's like, you know, what do you do? Kind of you end up having to take longer rest breaks. Um, so question on that. Let's dive into a little bit more. It's really curious. So let's say will you do like squats on Monday, right? Maybe a little bit more quads. And then the next day you're doing something more like a deadlift variant. Maybe a little bit more posterior chain because that how you, because how many days are you training a week? Six to seven. Oh, okay. Did you are? You do mean every day. Every day. Shit. All right. Every day is hustle and all right. All right. I respect man. That's awesome. Yeah. So just to your question, like I typically do sort of quads or glutes. Like I'm talking like a lunch pattern or a squat pattern or like press. It will have you on one day, then hamstrings the next, like a hip hinge, a good morning and a reminion that lift. Maybe a light curl sometimes. And then kind of switch back and forth. But more often than not, I'll do like quads, then glutes, then hamstrings. So there's always a bit of bias towards quads and glutes. Because the hamstrings and my experience do take a bit longer to recover from. So like I would say it's a two thirds to one thirds rotation. If that makes sense. Like quads and glutes, two thirds and hamstrings, one third. So like every third day, I do hamstrings. And then for two days, I do quads and glutes. Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. That's actually kind of how the RPI pressure has laid out. Because you know, one of the questions will be, when people usually start a template, they'll be like, hey, why is the hamstring volume so low? And it's like, well, if you have really dialed in form and you really get that stretch. And I know you obviously are biasing towards length and parcels. Man, add not to mention if you are more fast twitch dominant, dude, you can really get sore from that. We're talking several days. Because like how many sets are you? Let's say you're doing a good morning or a, you know, SLDRDL, I don't know, to me, they're the same thing. But actually, quick question. I agree. Okay. Good, good. Absolutely. I never got the, the confusion is the same as like, penley row and bent over row. It's like, okay, yeah, sure. Some people do like a dead stop at the bottom and a penley row, which is like, ah, you can argue whether that's better or not or whatever. But like, it's basically the same movement while we call it. Potato potato to be a, which put potato. I'm sorry. No one ever fucking says that. But just just one of those things that people say, yeah, I'm with you. Listen, it's like, okay, you're doing a bent row. All right, cool. Like, we're good. We're on the same page. We don't need to get in the nitty gritty there. But yeah, like, how many, how many sets are you doing? So if you train, um, you're kind of, uh, legs every day, like, I assume it can't be a ton of volume. It's not. It's one to two exercises for legs per day and three to five sets each. So it's like, it's pretty moderate. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, that's actually a little bit more than I thought you might say. Really? I figured it would be like four to maybe six sets, which I guess is not too far off of what you said. If it's three to five, because I'm sure you can ramp it up over time. You're not just for sure. And when you split it up across like obviously, hamstrings, quads, glutes and whatnot, it doesn't end up being like cool if you're doing six to 10 sets. Let's say six days a week. That's 35 to 60 sets in total across the week, which is like two big leg days, I guess. Not that similar from what a lot of people do. Yeah, damn. Okay. And then so obviously there's a big, a bigger muscle groups take longer to recover. And again, all this does naturally lead into today's topics. I don't feel like we're getting too off topic here. What about with arms and shoulders, smaller muscle groups? Is it, are you doing kind of similar to what you're doing here? Yep. So I'm specifically specializing on like upper body and general, because I've always had relatively stronger legs. But I'm pretty much training one chest movement, one back movement every single day. So I push on a pull. And then I'm doing, let's say like six out of seven days, also a bicep movement, also a tricep movement, also a side-delt movement, and then sometimes a rear-delt movement as well. Like it's pretty much like, if you want to conceptualize the full body, it's like push pull, one or two leg movements, and an isolation for the upper body. And so you're probably doing the chest back legs in the morning and you come back. Yeah, okay. All right. Because again, we are talking training frequency here. In training splits, do you, how long have you been doing this approach? So the twice a day kind of on and off for maybe about like eight years, I guess. Like, maybe times when I did, okay. Once a day, there's been times when I did twice a day, but I remember doing 13 sessions a week at one point. That was a good time in university college. But that's been like eight years, and then the full body stuff, honestly, it's been the way I train 95% of the time for, should maybe like 10 years. Okay. These are very valid questions. And because what I found recently is I started training, again, a lot more upper body focus. If I ever did compete, I'd be immense physique guy. So legs are largely irrelevant. And there's weight caps. It's literally cannot bigger legs. I started to notice a while because yeah, I was training shoulders four times a week, something like that. And listen, all good. I love it. Got some good results from it. But it feels like after a while. Now again, maybe this was, you know, pushing the limits of my own volume a little bit here and there. But I just feel like that high frequency just kind of would beat up my joints in, you know, tendons like, you know, I'm sure you've run into this before. Even elbows, forearms, even recently. I have a little thing with my shoulder. The first time ever I've had anything of my shoulder. And I'm like, well, shit, that's because I started doing shoulder, you know, shoulder presses, which I didn't wasn't really doing. Decent amount of pressing and then, you know, side delt or like an upright row, literally four, maybe five times a week. I think after a while, it's kind of caught up with me. It's like, how do you deal with that? Because I would imagine that. That would be my first instinct is like, "Doesn't that beat you up a little bit?" Yeah, I found it surprisingly manageable. I do think that my training does you age typically. So like a lot of people say that higher frequencies bother them more as they get like a bit older and stuff. Maybe it's just on a young buck and. I'm old, okay, I'm old, that's a take away. It's not much, you know, I have 38, so. I'm saying like age might matter, you know? Yeah, actually, yeah. When it comes to like frequency and splits and what works for you. That's I think like part of the reason why a lot of old-school bodybuilders who've been lifting for like 40 years and show up in the gym and boots and stuff tend to do like roast splits. And they're just like, yep, this is the way I train. Because they're so banged up that that's. It takes them like six days for their shoulders not to be cranky anymore with them. So, yeah, for me it's been honestly quite manageable if anything. So for this closure, I'm. I'm the sort of guy who never warms up. That's based on the research in part, like I'm pretty injury resistant. And I like. training efficiently. When it comes to the research on warm-ups, it's like, "Okay, you can have a small boost for hypertrophy workouts, but it's not like a huge thing either." So, I tend to skip it. And I kind of like the feeling of just being able to, "Okay, ahead into the gym, I get straight into a walking set, I feel just fine." And there's something nice about training all the major fundamental movement patterns your body's capable of every day. And kind of just feeling very, for the least, a booboo tour I could find, very in touch with your body in terms of like, "Oh, any point during a day, I feel mobile enough and like ready to just get into like a deep body or a deep squat." And the body just feels ready for it. Practicing those movement patterns over and over again does have a nice flow to me at least in my routine. And injury-wise, I hadn't really found anything. Like, it's not felt any different. You mentioned the age thing. I think it's super valid. How old are you? 26. Okay. Do you think as one would get older, there is more of a benefit to warming up. And I'll clarify how I warm up, because I don't think it's probably radically different than what you do, but I'll go a little context. Um, I would say potentially, anecdotally, I would definitely say a benefit from like the people I've coached and whatnot. Scientifically, could I provide you with a clear-cut reason as to why that be a case? No. But I totally do think it's probably true. Um, at least most older lifters I've worked with kind of tell me, "Hey, if I don't warm up for at least like five or ten minutes, I do tend to feel pretty cranky in my joints after the workout." So I would say like, I totally, yeah, probably. Yeah. So, okay, man, this is maybe could even be a separate podcast topic, but like, why is it then that there's just just prevailing, I'm going to amuse an air coach here, myth that like, you must warm up then, because I guess I've kind of always, yeah, I was warmed up somewhat. I think that exists then. Is it just like, you know, bro, like, hey, this is just how people do it. So that's just how people do it. In part. So I think a lot of the practices we have in the gym have carried over from sports and from like a lot of stuff that was done hundreds of years ago at this point. Um, yeah, it also depends on what you're doing in your workout and whether you care about maximizing performance or whether you're training for hypertrophy, right? Like if you're a power of the and you're waking up to a set of two or three close to failure or even a single, right? At that point, you kind of want to extract every single bit of performance you can get on that first set, on that single. If you're doing a hypertrophy workout and say you're even training in a higher rep range, like you say, you're doing 10, 15, 20 reps on your first set for the workout sometimes. Those first few reps of the set, well, they're all pretty submaximal anyways like the first 10 reps of the set, but they're also typically enough to elevate muscle temperature pretty quickly. So some of the benefits you would get from warm up, you can actually get from like the first working set in the first few reps. Um, so all that to say based on what you're training for, whether it's strength or hypertrophy and how many reps you're doing and whether or not you tend to find that your joints bother you if you don't warm up. I do think there's a kind of a range of approaches that can work. Maybe your ages and there as well, right? Like if you're older, you might find you need more warm up. But I would say that it is mostly kind of carried over from sports. And it might be something that's kind of generalized to all, you know, sports, practices and everything, even though for hypertrophy training specifically, in kind of more moderate rep ranges, it may not be that essential or at least you can get away with a pretty short warm up if you really must, you know. Man, I've got a thought here. I'm open to going either way here. I have so many questions about warming up. I feel like we can do an entire episode just about warming up if you want to or we can do the training frequency. I think we got a touch on both at some time. So like we can come back to this on a later episode, but like holy shit. I'm like, a lot of bells are going off my head. I'm like, I asked a million more questions about warming up. What do you think? Your call. Let's do a separate episode, just not the rail this entirely and keep it someone off on track. But I guess this kind of segues into frequency in the sense that, oh yeah, it all does. If you're doing a full body split, you probably don't need to warm up super thoroughly for every single muscle groups, you're not wasting a ton of time on warming up, I guess. That would be incredibly inefficient if you're warming up for five different muscle groups. You're going to be in the gym for three hours a day. Yeah, it takes the efficiency argument of a full body split right out the window. Next time we have you on, we'll do warm ups. I'm super. I got a million questions right now. I'm going to try to remember. I'm on the right. I'm down later. But all right. So really fascinating. So maybe something to frequency. And as you get older, maybe you want to spread it out a little bit more. I can see that just as is my own like, I do pretty much push pull legs. My leg days are kind of a joke though. If I'm being honest, and I usually throw in some like forums and calves and abs and because I'm like. I'm just not pushing it that hard. But like let's. One, we're talking about ourselves are both kind of advanced lifters. We're only start with advanced splits and then sort of work backwards to more general approaches. So if you're someone that's advanced and you're like, Hey, I'm all in on hypertrophy. So what's your opinion on like what's the best or ideal, like I guess based on the literature. Split. You know, is it is it push pull legs? Is it the bro split where you say, Hey, chest is Monday, right? Like everyone does just on Mondays. If you ever walk into a gym, everyone's mentioned. Let's go, baby. Yeah. It's an interesting question. And before I can give any numbers, I kind of have to break down what the research says. So I'll give a very brief summary. Keep it short. So it's not more anyone with the details. We kind of have two really big studies on this topic, right? One is a metanascist of all existing studies on frequency where researchers take two groups. They make one group train with say. Once a week further chest and one group say with three times a week for the chest and they do the same number of sets. Just one group doing it across three sessions, one group doing it across one session. And the metanascist by. Paladin colleagues looked at all the studies that did this looking at hypertrophy. And basically when looking at the impact of doing more sessions in a week for hypertrophy, there was a neutral to slightly positive effect of training a muscle group more often volume being equated for. Right. So same number of sets. If you spread that volume across more sessions, it's likely to have a neutral to a slightly beneficial effect for how much muscle you grow. Right. That was the first big study. The second one, which is more interesting in terms of, okay, but how often should I train right. Is a metanascist by Remington colleagues. So this time they looked at the effects of procession volume on how much muscle people built. So what they did essentially is they tried to see how many sets should you do in a workout to maximize muscle growth. They saw that the more sets people didn't work out, the more muscle they built. However, there were diminishing returns. Right. That for each additional set you do for say your chest and a single workout, you get a bit less growth compared to the last set you did. So you probably don't want to do like all your sets for the week in a single workout. What's more interesting still is how this relationship kind of moved from say zero to five sets from five to 10 sets and beyond 10 sets. So what they found effectively is that in this days they had doing more than about 11 sets for a single muscle in a single workout didn't reliably cause more growth. That's really important because that means that if you want to design a routine and you want to make sure it's maximally effective as just kind of like a hard rule, doing much more than about 10 or 11 sets per muscle in a single workout isn't the best use of your volume. You would be better off taking a save you're doing 20 sets. You're exceeding that 10 or 11 set mark. Taking those 20 sets and spreading it across at least two workouts so you get that down to 10 sets per workout per muscle or three workouts. So you close to the six or seven or even four workouts for five sets per muscle per workout. There's not really a bottom floor of like, oh, you need to at least three sets per workout per muscle to stimulate growth at all. That's probably not so much of a thing. Even just one hard set close to failure. It's going to elevate muscle proteins synthesis for at least like 24 hours. So provide your weekly volume is on point. There's not really a minimum amount per workout. But we kind of know that there is a maximum amount at least if you want to maximize your growth over the week. So that's a really good heuristical rule done for people to have is how many times you should train a muscle per week and what routine you should be using should be directly related to how many sets are doing for that muscle. And as a rough rule of thumb for every say 10 sets you do per week for a given muscle and by the way, that's in fractional. Counts. So what that means is if you do a set of bench press, for example, you would count that is half a set for your triceps because not the primary mover. It's a secondary mover, but still counts for your triceps. So three sets of bench press three sets of chess 1.5 sets for trash ups. Exactly. So if you were say doing a push day, you can get up to like 20 sets for your triceps pretty easily without realizing it, even though you're like, oh, I'm only doing five sets of push downs. It's like, oh, no, you did like 15 sets of pushing earlier and that can really add up. So 10 sets fractionally is not that much. So realistically, if you want to keep it real simple. I think for most workouts, a rough like cap per muscle should be around eight sets. So I think for every eight sets you do for a muscle in the week, if you just count them like directly like one exercise counts for one muscle, adding another workout in is the way I would go about it. And then you can go even. even further than that if you want to, because I'm not really a harm in doing more workouts and spreading it out even more right. If anything, you could argue, hey, there's the initial returns. So spreading it out even more could be beneficial. And that's kind of why I tend to think of full body approaches, most flexible, especially for training with high volumes. But that's kind of a heuristics. So for the advanced lift, it wants to maximize growth, right? Let's assume they're doing 20 sets per week per muscle on average, right? Like the right sets, which is like high volume training, not crazy high volume, but pretty high volume training that a lot of people can recover from. And you'll see amazing growth with it. If we're using that kind of figure of 10 fractional sets or let's say eight direct sets, we're talking about like minimum two to three, probably more than that, ideally sessions per muscle per week. That means that if you're training like 60s a week, you can make a push pull like split work, right? Because you're training each muscle twice a week. But you need to make sure you're in the gym every single week for 60s. If you're not really consistent, for example, a push pull like split where you might not be hitting every muscle twice a week, probably not the best idea. Upper lower tends to be very versatile. And that for most people, you'll still get like 48 hours of recovery between sessions. So if you struggle to recover anything, that can be really nice. And it still gives you at least two or maybe three times a week between each muscle. So for more like moderate to high volumes, that can work great. Full body splits are just the most versatile where you can really just play volume as much as you need to. You don't need to train every muscle recession. You can kind of allocate volume as is most effective overall. So it's a all through routines come work, but it depends on how many days a week you're training and how much of volume you're doing. That all checks out. Okay. So I have a couple kind of clarifying questions here. So this is just based on my understanding. Please correct me if you think anything I'm saying is a little off. So because you mentioned, you know, the 11 sets kind of be in the theoretical top end there. So about, you think that's still a pretty good rule. Let's just say let's make up a couple examples here. You got some guy that's been lifting for a while. He weighs 220 pounds. And you got a female who's also been lifting for a while, but maybe weighs 120, 130, whatever. Similar rules apply there. Do you think like bigger person, less volume, like smaller person can handle more? Like what do you think on that when it comes to that frequency? That's a really tough question because scientifically we have next to nothing on it. So we can kind of only rely on anecdot. anecdotally I would say that generally speaking women can recover from more volume. Just physiologically there are certain sex differences that make women able to recover from more and men less. When it comes to larger versus smaller individuals, let's say more muscular versus less muscular and stronger versus weaker. That's a bit more anecdotal again. Like sex differences are very well established. I would say from people I've coached and from kind of going from more beginner to more advanced, I would say there's probably an effect where the more muscle you have, the stronger you are, the less volume you typically can tolerate. But at the same time, the kind of low mind fuck there is typically that comes along with a lot more training experience. Things like muscle damage, via things like the repeated bout effect, basically just the phenomenon scientists use to describe, hey, when you train, as you expose your body to the same stress or over and over again, it's response, a case soreness muscle damage, all that stuff tends to decrease. And so even though stronger people and bigger people on average, I would say would tolerate a bit less volume, they're often also much more trained. They've been training for way longer. And as a result, they can actually sometimes tolerate more volume overall than weaker people or smaller people. So I'd say experience is a big one, probably the biggest one as far as volume tolerance goes. Sex is definitely one where women can tolerate more volume and potentially need higher frequencies as a result. And then sort of sheer muscularity and strength do play a role, but I think it's a relatively small one. Got it. That makes sense. And then the question to build off of that one then is, yeah, as you do something more and more and more, you're less likely to get sore. Typically the first time you do something to get really sore. So let's say someone's trying to train with more frequency and they get sore, especially in the beginning part of a program. Let's say there's some new lifts, some new movements, whatever in there. Do you think it's okay? Let's say, hey, I just hit my chest and I did push on Monday, whatever. That's why it's time to do it again on Wednesday. Ham's still a little sore. What do you think on that? You just kind of like, I'll just shut up. No, that's a good question. Soreness is a decent predictor of recovery, but performance is kind of the true hallmark. So what I would have them do is get in the gym and just get started with a chest walk out on a Wednesday. This is our within a week or two, they won't be sore for Wednesdays workout anyways. Their body's gotten used to the Monday workout. But ultimately to know whether or not recovery is truly an issue, they kind of need to test it. Test the performance and see how it goes. If their numbers are on par with last week's workout on Wednesday, it's all good. I think soreness is much less of a, it's much less predictive of true recovery than actual performance will be. So I'd say that's the main thing I would go by. And I would say that some minor soreness, like I would say, even up to moderate soreness, not a big deal to train through. Generally speaking, when someone is too sore from a workout, one of two things kind of is true when it comes to like routines, right? One is they did all their volume in a single session for the week. And like, yeah, if you do 30 sets of your chest in a workout, you probably going to get sore. So change exercises and stuff like that, you're going to get sore. Or the second thing is their total volume is just too high, or at least they're not ready for it yet. So the other body hasn't adapted to it yet. So evaluating which one is true can be really helpful. If you're dealing with like chronic overlapping soreness, it's usually that weekly volume is too high, right? And maybe you need to take their tiny bit to allow your body to adapt it and then come back up. Or if it's like just crippling soreness for a few days out the week, it's probably the one workout that's really just messing you over. And that's the one you should look at. And potentially, that's the sign that you should be spreading out your volume more than you currently are. Yeah, yeah, that checks out. Um, so that person in this theory, let's say you're just like brutally sore. We've probably all been there for listening to this. Like shit just happened sometimes. You haven't done lunges in a while. You do some lunges. Hey, good luck. You're fucked. Excuse me, I'm going to cheer up. But like, yeah, you still think, hey, let's say you're supposed to do that a glute pattern again on Wednesday, training on Monday. You're real, real sore. Do you still say, hey, you go kind of test it out, see if your performance is okay? Or like, what, what if you think there's a cutoff? Do you think there's a cutoff where you say, you know what, it's probably better to push your back a day? Yeah, great question. I would personally or on the side of trying to work out anyways. Ultimately, like the worst thing that can really happen is you warm up, you do your first set and your performance is garbage. And you call it a day and you train something else instead. But hey, at least you made it to the gym, you test it out whether your soreness was actually correlated with truly poor recovery here, or whether you just had really bad soreness, because maybe you slept badly or will have you, but your performance is unimpacted. But I think the right approach typically will be trying it out. And if really your performance is down, then that's a sign that you're kind of in a fatigue hole and taking it easier for that workout for that muscle is going to allow you to kind of dig your way back out of it. Yeah. So yeah, that's the approach I would generally take when it comes to like many things, by the way, even for things like minor joint pains, let's say for example, you train chest on Monday and your shoulders are kind of bothering you since Monday, but you're supposed to train chest again on Wednesday. I would still say instead of just skipping it all together, approaching the workout, trying to see if you can still negotiate something about that workout to make it happen is always better than just kind of outright skipping it, because it oftentimes gives rise to a workout where otherwise it would have been none, where it gives rise to like more volume across the week. All of those things are good from like a habit formation perspective, hypertrophy perspective, all that stuff. And maybe there's perhaps just some you get some blood flowing in a way that actually be a net benefit, hundred percent, even if it feels like crap. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So again, we're still sick into advanced lifters. So all that kind of checks out. And so I guess this goes back to your framework of like you look at the total volume, maybe don't do more than like 11 sets per muscle in any given individual workout, because I'm just thinking in my head, some of the trains, like they're they're on the fringe of intermediate, advanced, they've been training for a number of years. Like how do you make that determination in your head of, you know what, I've been training four times a week. I like it. Should I go up to five? Are you just kind of solely basing it on those volume numbers or like do you have a better kind of framework or he's the he's for it? Great question. I think that's where left or psychology comes in and some other stuff that isn't strictly individual muscle group related, right? So we can take the view of frequency purely as it relates to all right, how many times do we need to hit individual muscle groups and tissues to maximize their growth? That's kind of a very local or isolated view of things. We can also think of perspective when it comes to how many times you should train per week in general of how much can you realistically do in a workout productively? Because if you're exceeding that, then by definition to get better results, you're you would probably better off spreading that out more across more workouts across the week, right? I think there's kind of some practical landmarks or numbers I use for this stuff, and then there's also kind of like some psychology to back it up, and a practical test you can use. The practical test and the psychology behind knowing whether you're doing too much in a single workout and you should be training more days a week is something called the pacing effect. Basically, and pretty much everyone who's listening to this has probably experienced it. It refers to the idea that when you know you have a big workout coming up, whether it's running 15 miles in one run, or whether it's doing 30 sets in a single session, you're not going to give it your all in the first mile in the first two sets, because you know you've all another 28 sets after that. The pacing effect does just mean that workout quality suffers as workout length increases, all else being equal. It's not always going to hold true, and it may kind of get worse and worse past a certain point, but it's generally worth having that effect in mind. When it comes to rough numbers, in my experience, most people can't really do like more than around 30 sets in a single workout that productively. I think obviously different people are going to handle that differently, you know, people with athlete mentality or a group mindset or whatever it might be, might be able to handle more or some of the people, but I think generally more than around like 30 sets per workout, like hard, close to failure sets, is going to be challenging, especially for like more challenging muscle groups, where it takes more psychologically to amp up for it like legs. So the rough ballpark, I don't love to see people do more than around 30 sets per workout, much more than that, because it typically means that set quality is suffering, and that actually if you took that workout and spread across two days instead in 15 sets, oftentimes you might be training one or two reps closer to failure on average, then you will have been otherwise, because you were just kind of like holding back, so you don't want to end up destroyed by the end. So that's kind of the heuristic I use. I think another one that's kind of practical that people can use to determine, alright, should I be doing more days in my week? Is one, are you doing more than 30 sets? But two, are your numbers lower in your current workout routine? Like say, for RDLs, right? You can do 315 for 10 usually. But right now in your routine, you're consistently doing like 315 for 8, and you're kind of progressing, but it's slow, and you're kind of below your all-time best numbers in similar conditions. If that's true, and your workouts are also kind of long, there's a good chance that you haven't gotten weaker, you're just holding yourself back because you know the workout coming up is really difficult. And if you notice that your numbers are lower because of longer workouts, that's a good sign oftentimes that you probably want to train more often, and a bit less per session. Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense. Again, it's the pacing effect. And this, yeah, to me, this kind of kind of ties back the idea of like, man, if you've got eight sets of hack squats or something like that, you just, again, I remember training in my early 20s in New York City dude, the just amount of psychological amp that I would put into that top set, there was no way that I could do eight sets, impossible. But I could fucking crush it for that top set. I'm talking like, no, probably would have been what? 210 kilos for like eight high bar ass or grass squats. I'm fried after that shit. Like I got headphones in, I'm listening like the craziest death metal in the world. Like I got videos of it too. I'm like, run in halfway across the gym, like jumping into the bar. Like, yeah, there's something to that. And my total volume would be, I would do that. And then fucking my doing after that, not very much. So I, yeah, that absolutely has to be taken into account. And I love that you mentioned the age earlier because like, there's a little bit probably the psychological ego effect too, where like I just don't do that anymore. So I'm like, yeah, I've got 10 sets. So I'm not gonna get so amp up on the first one. I got nothing left. Yeah, it's a little bit of the pacing effect. So that's a good call out. I think it makes a lot of sense. And even something I've talked like Mike and Jared about too, where if you've ever heard about like their music choices, one sometimes Mike trains without music in like his home gym, but to me, it just seems weird. Like I trained with country music. Yeah, you know, whatever. It's just kind of like, yeah, in the background. Jared, I think, uses like trans music or something like that. Like, do you listen to music when you train? I do. And the choice is kind of very honestly. And it's not even related to the workout. It's more like just what I'm into at the time. What I'll say is people who listen to podcasts while training. You are a different beast. You know, I was literally thinking that in my head because I'm like, I can't do that. I'd be like, what am I focused on when I'm doing here? And I'm lifting. I don't know. What am I doing? It's like, you're trying to do, I don't know. You're trying to do, you're trying to specialize in two different things I want to do. You kind of do each one not so great. I don't know. Just my thoughts on it. If you can do it, hey, good for you. I'm just probably not absorbing anything that I'm really listening to on that podcast. And if you're listening to this podcast right now while training, you go out to more reps than you. Hey, fuck yeah, let's go. Ship it. Full-sand baby. Let's go crank up. Yeah. Switch it, pause throwing some fun enough. I've probably said this on the podcast before, but I used to, there was a song every time I was deadlift. I would only play this one particular song because I was like, I want to basically train my body that when this song plays, it is time to fucking full-sand deadlift. And it was Mudvane Dig. I have not listened to that song in probably at least 10 years because I'm just like, I don't really deadlift anymore. So yeah, then it just raises your heart rate upon hearing it. My, listen, I should try it sometime, but if I'm like, whatever going to do, I don't know, I don't train as psychotic anymore, but just like put it on and see what happens. Who knows, maybe I'll give that performance effect. Maybe there's just some lingering stuff there. It's crazy, man. I feel like the insane ramp up and psych up for the one set of squats with like four and £5 or £5 or £5 or deadlift to whatever it is. It's almost a ride of passage to experience like, okay, when you're trying to push the weight every single week and push the reps every single week, you go to lengths untold to just hype up more and more, prep for it more and more extensively. It's like a ritual. It's something worth going through with only to realize, okay, there is a more productive way to train and not spend the three hours beforehand anxious about that one set. Oh, man. Oh, yeah. I remember riding the subway in New York City feeling anxious. I'm like, this workout is going to be brutal. Like, like a little butterflies in the stomach. I, yeah, it's been a long time since I've had that. Maybe going for a big PR or something. I think I was trying to hack squat 405 for 10. That's probably still two years ago or something like that. I do remember getting a little bit of that. I was setting in like all day business meetings and I knew I had to train at night, which I almost never do. So I'm just like, man, I don't know how productive I was that day because I kept thinking I was like, man, I can't wait to go train. Oh, man, I can't wait to go train. Anyways, I feel like, you know, let's kind of bring it back. So we're getting, that's advanced, go crazy. Listen, I absolutely write a passage, man. That's just fun. Also, just powerlifting training, like, because that was almost more powerlifting training than it was. We were kind of hypertrophy focused, but not really, right? If you're looking at the volume. But it's fun, man, you want to be strong as shit. There's a little bit of ego early 20s. You can get away with all that love that I'm here for that shit. So that's kind of some bit more advanced. Now, let's move into like intermediates. You've been training in a couple of years. I guess your heurus still kind of applies here, right? Like, you just kind of look at total volume and you split it up based on that. But like, do you have different rules if you've got someone that's beginner, intermediate, advanced? Like, how do you make those determinations and how often people should be training? 100%. So one downstream consequence of that, like, 11 set rule. Let's call it is that how often you train a muscle should also depend on how many sets you're doing, right? So we can kind of break things down by one, what your goal is and two, how long have you been lifting for? So the maximizer, let's call them, like the advanced training, who really wants to just put on as much muscle as possible. We probably do want to train most muscles like two to four times a week, maybe more if you really want to like, spec into a full body approach. Just to be able to spread that hive on your doing across the week into the maximally efficient set up. Then for people who just want to make gains, like let's say they're more in the quarter, sort of like five to 10 sets per week per muscle ballpark, which is enough to make like, some games where like you're building muscle, but you're not spaying that much time in the gym. Let's say you're in the gym for a total of like two hours a week, right? If you're doing only five to 10 sets per week per muscle, you can get away with training it once or twice a week. And you're likely like basically maximized growth. So that means that if you're just wanting to see some growth and you're not really trained with high volumes to begin with, honestly, just training each muscle once or twice a week is just fine. That could be one or two full body workouts a week. That could be like an upper lower split, can be whatever you want, but once twice a week is just fine. And then finally for the person who just like wants to maintain size, whether it's you've been training for 20 years and you're pretty happy for physique or your own holidays or your de-loading, whatever it might be. Because you only need around probably three to four sets on average. to maintain muscle size in a week. Honestly, just one more cut is fine. So people often ask, oh, during a deal of week, should I do the exact same week or not? And there's a lot of things that go into that, or like maintaining that habit with a huge one, not feeling rusty when you come back, all that stuff. But from purely physiological, tissue retention perspective, you can just train that muscle once a week. You could do one for body workout for the week and be just fine. So there's a kind of like core consequences of that rule we can derive for different people from different circumstances, right? When it comes to beginner versus intermediate versus advanced, like I mentioned, for the advanced lifter who kind of wants to maximize growth two to four times a week is a good range to start with and kind of go higher if they want to, or if they want to really maximize efficiency potentially. Generally speaking, as you become more trained, your resilience to the stress of lifting weights, so the muscle damage incurred, the soreness incurred, the fatigue cost in general grows, and you'll be able to tolerate more volume and benefit from more volume. So generally speaking, as you go from beginner to intermediate to advanced, your volume grows and so does your frequency. I would still use the same heuristic fundamentally of hey, for every five to 10 sets, you do for a muscle a week at a day. Yeah. But because you'll be doing more sets total, it just means that as you become more trained, you'll probably be doing more days. It's not a nine day effect, right? It's more, it's more function of your volume than it is your training experience. Yeah. That makes sense. I would, 'cause again, this was sort of what I was thinking in my head. Beginners, one or two times a week, seems totally fine. Intermediate. I'll say two to three. I think you probably made the case for two to four there. Advanced, you're probably in the four plus. Kaviat being, like you said, maintenance shit happens, life occurs. Your advanced, you can drop down and still sort of at least maintain, maybe have some slight gains one to two times a week. But there's limitations there, 'cause obviously you could only add so much volume and if you're training twice a week. So most advanced people, man, there's always a little bit of the brow stuff here, so I wanna call that out. But also, no offense, you're not advanced to your training two times a week. I'm sorry, you can just not. You can say that, but come on, we all know, all of us have been training, you're like, come on. You know, you've been training twice a week for 40 years and you finally made it to the dot state. And yeah, I guess, right? I remember so, fun enough, I remember when Mike built the old school, like, cell physique templates that we had. And we're like, okay. I remember this conversation where Mike's like, come on, and I'm like, I'm not making an advanced two times a week option. He's like, if you're advanced, you're at least three times a week and I was like, yeah, that kind of checks out. So again, if you're going to classify yourself as advanced, I know your training more often. Just, this is just something I'm bifled, whatever it is, right? We're all like a little addicted to it straight up. Like, we love it. And I'm just, again, boring life circumstances. Finals, a new kid, you get married, whatever you're traveling, I get all that. But like, your normal shit is going to be pretty often. I mean, you're doing it 13 times a week. That's, that's real intense. I'm at six by the way. Like, you're two times, you're actually more than two times a better person than I am. That's what I'm taking away from it. That's how it, so we do it. Yeah. That's true. It's not looking good for you, buddy. My slowers run out. I'm just retiring. I'm gonna take out, I don't know, knitting or something. More up your alley. Yeah, so just like one thing I wanted to mention, because we obviously touched on routines, is to kind of think of them in numerical terms, right? Like, full body, there's not really a ceiling to how often you can train each muscle, right? Like, if you really wanted to train it seven days a week or whatever it is, with upper lower, on the other hand, assuming you're doing one session a day, and you're only training six days a week, you're not looking into like asymmetrical routines, you're training up for four days a week and one week and three lower days. You're really capped at three times a week for your upper body and three times a week for your lower body. So that routine works really well, up until around like 30 sets per week per muscle when you count it fractionally. If you do only four days a week, you're only getting twice, so that kind of works best if you're up to 20 sets per week per muscle. Push, pull legs on the other hand, has a ceiling of twice a week frequency, right? Since you can only do it six days a week. And so as a result, if you're doing like, roughly 20 sets for actionally per week per muscle or fewer, it can work really well. But you do need to make sure that you're training six days a week consistently to be able to spread that out. Now, that doesn't mean you need to stick to like an established routine. And I think that's something you probably frustrated as well as like, oh, what's your favorite routine? Or like, what's the routine I should follow? And part of us to say if no routine, like just spread out training as it should work, like you don't need to train quads with hamstrings with glutes with calves on the same day, necessarily, and your body turns off growth if you train quads and biceps on the same day. Like your body just responds to training stimulus, as opposed to the routine and the random allocation of muscle groups across the week. You are really pushing the boundaries here of my mental capabilities. And I'm like, what? No, no, you can't do that. I know you can, folks, listening, but like, this is just, let's, we have to acknowledge there's just like some type of psychological constri- I don't know, whatever that exists in the world. Because people have always been training like this, I don't know that you probably just have some biases inherently built in of like, well, this is just kind of how it is. Same with the warm up that was why I was fascinated with that topic earlier. Just something to it. I don't know how to quantify that, but like, it is challenging some of those beliefs. And really, that's what science is all about. You're like, hmm, is that actually the case? Yeah. The reason I mentioned that in part is specialization or emphasizing different muscles. Because there'll be times in your life where you say, look, man, I don't want to train legs anymore. I'm Mr. Nick Shaw. I compete in physique, training legs doesn't my thing anymore. And you say, you know what? Let me emphasize my chest and back and arms and all the muscles people actually care about instead of legs. And that means you might be doing five or 10 sets for your legs per week, but you might be doing 20, 30 plus sets for your chest back, biceps, triceps, whatever it is. That's when routines should kind of fly out the window, right? Because if you're constraining yourself to a push pull leg split, but you're emphasizing, say, let's switch it up, chest and quads. All right, now your pull sessions look like you're doing 10 sets for the walk out. Is that the best use of your time? Or could you just add more chest and quad work into your pull session? And all of a sudden you're spreading out the volume more effectively, because you're not training each muscle only twice a week. So as you specialize on different muscles, obviously you want to train them with higher volumes and therefore more frequently, but you also want to tend away from a push pull leg split. And more towards maybe an upper lower split, or maybe towards a full body split, or maybe just a split that allows you to best distribute the volume across the week regardless. So yeah, that's kind of a rough tip I want to give for people emphasizing different muscles or training different muscles with different volumes. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. It does open up the possibility as a full body training becoming more of an option, because you're just kind of trying to pick and choose when you throw in some of this volume. So yeah, no, that makes sense, man. And so I'm actually I'm glad that we started with your training split first, because now it sort of ties back in, it's like, well, this is kind of why you're doing it. Yeah, exactly. So I do it because I'm emphasizing upper body in general. And that allows me to also split up leg training, like I mentioned, make it a bit easier. Right. In your own, when you're figuring out your own training, so you're counting all the fractional sets too, like when you're figuring out your volume. Yep, okay. So I feel like I don't actually probably do that. And again, I know that I am behind the scenes, because the way that I group stuff, but I guess when I think about it, again, this is just, I don't know, I'd love simple frameworks. Just, I don't know, it's just how my brain operates. Yeah, I'm just counting the main ones. Like, but I guess that being said, I, 'cause right now I'm looking at my volume, I pulled up in the RPI Purchase, I was curious. 'Cause I'm gonna throw out these numbers, and you're gonna make it, this is gonna seem that high. I was getting ready for a photo shoot that we did down in Miami. It's just fun, I get not really training legs a whole lot. So week three, it was like 13 sets of chests, 12 sets of back, 14 sets of triceps. But as I'm saying that, those tricep numbers, well, it's more like 20. Yep. 'Cause I got, yeah. Which, you can count on counting on the over pressing or anything on the sword if you want. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It wasn't counting the pressing movements. Yeah, 13 sets of biceps, but I'm adding on six more. So it's really 20 sets of triceps, 19 sets of biceps, shoulders, then we start to get into the question of like, now we're doing front delts, rear, like, because front delts, and again, maybe this is actually why I got a little bit of the shoulder thing, because yeah, that's 15 sets of shoulders, lots of fucking side raises. My front delts are taking a beating from all the pressing movements, 'cause I don't, when I count shoulders, right, I'm not, yeah, I'm not doing front raises. I know I'm taking care of with all the pressing, so. Yeah, okay, it's really interesting. And then I mean, it's embarrassing when I tell my volume, five sets of quads, four sets of hamstrings, eight sets of calves. - Life's good, man. - Life is good. - You're living in life is good. So I got one more question for you. This is just sort of like a theoretical. I wrote down earlier when you were talking. - So let's say, right, let's just imagine the scenario, there's only two options here, right? Made up world. Your choices are to cram in 30 sets, right? And one workout. The other option is like, you just don't have the time. So it's like, you're zero. You just can't train twice a week. So those are your two options. It's like, you just cram it all in, you just get it done, even though you know diminishing returns and all that. 'Cause the other option is like, you just, you can't make it for whatever reason. Is that an okay thing in your mind? Of course, just because it's diminishing returns doesn't mean it's no returns. And just because we can say like, above 11 sets, you're gonna get super reliably a lot more growth. Doesn't mean you're probably gonna grow a bit more. It's just like, the way I put it is, let's say you're selling T-shirts. I love New York T-shirts, you're a scammer. - I'm not gonna live in New York, baby. - Like let's say you're selling in one store and you're selling out, right? Like you're doing really well. You could ship more T-shirts to the exact same store, but if you're already selling out, why not expand to other stores and potentially get even more total sales? So what I would say is getting more volume and a single workout will still be positive, but it's a question of wouldn't you be better off doing it in another workout and getting even more of benefit? - Yeah. - So if the app is, you can only train a couple times a week, you can cram it all in, even though diminishing returns still better than zero returns. Into the big takeaway is, even the kind of sub-optimal training is better than no training. - For sure. And frequency and routines in general take a backseat to the more important stuff. Like fundamentally what matters most for muscle growth is kind of the dose, where how many sets you do the volume and how close to failure train are by far bigger and more important variables and drivers of muscle growth than how you distribute it or organize it, as you will. But frequency does matter and knowing what the science is on the topic should hopefully let you train more effectively. - Yeah, that makes sense, man. This has been great. Mark it down. Next one we do is all about warming up. I'm gonna come up with a bunch of questions. We're gonna talk about why these myths exist 'cause they do. And yeah, I got a lot of questions there. - Yeah, I wanna rattle off some of them. - I'm excited. - How but I'm not going to. Dr. Mallow Wolf, thanks so much for joining. Appreciate you coming on. And on a number of times now, you're the man, thank you. - Thank you, Nick. - Awesome. Everyone tuning in, thank you so much. I know you've called out before, called out again, what's your Instagram handle 'cause it's where you post a lot of good stuff. - Dr. Mallow Wolf, my full name, you'll find me. - Yep, M-I-L-O-W-F. - W-O-L-L, he's really one better. It's not out too. But again, thanks so much for coming on, man. We will catch you on the next episode, everyone. - Thank you. (upbeat music)