Volume Micro-cycles

[Edward Smith]

Ido, (and other experienced forum members)

You have talked about alternating intensity and volume withing micro-cycles. Well I am giving it an honest shot right now, however I'm seeking some advice about progression on a volume micro-cycle.

Is the aim to push up the volume over the cycle, intensity (load) over the cycle or a combination?

Do you have any example templates for a guide?

Ed

[braindx]

To push up the volume you can add reps in accordance with your increases in strength, or add additional sets.

Developing intensity is much harder with bodyweight compared to weights because you have to use progressive decreased leverage or add a weighted vest/ankle weights/etc. to the exercises you are using. The amount of progressions/exercises is limited in what you can with this.

Usually the progressive volume or intensity is performed week to week as needed. I think they tend to work better than SSC but SSC is better for beginners because it allows a decent rate of progress plus the underdeveloped connective tissues are allowed to adapt as well.

Once you get more experienced I think you should move into volume/intensity cycles.

[Donald Lee]

Braindx is right about the difficulty of doing this with bodyweight exercises. With bodyweight exercises, going from 3x3 to 5x3 or 5x5 is essentially going from an intensity cycle towards more of a volume cycle.

With weights, you can make more abrupt changes. You could switch between 3-8 week long cycles of intensity and volume with deloading in between and/or at the end or not at all. You could also wave volume and intensity weekly within those cycles. You could also potentially wave within the week, but if you're doing the other stuff, I doubt it's necessary to have to do that. If you decide to switch between intensity and volume blocks, I'd suggest you begin with the former before you mess with waving weekly.

I will give you some examples:

Volume Block

Week 1-(3-8) - 3-7 sets x 3-5 reps

Intensity Block

Week 1-(3-8) - 3-7 sets x 1-3 reps

*********************************************************************

Volume Block

Week 1 (High Volume) - 5-7 sets x 4-5 reps

Week 2 (Low Volume) - 5-7 sets x 3-4 reps

Week 3 (High Volume) - 5-7 sets x 4-5 reps

Intensity Block

Week 1 (High Intensity) - 4-7 sets x 1-2 reps

Week 2 (Low Intensity) - 4-7 sets x 2-3 reps

Week 3 (High Intensity) - 4-7 sets x 1-2 reps

[Edward Smith]

Sorry,

I was in a rush so I couldn't expand upon my question.

With a volume micro-cycle there are two primary ways you could go about it, you could ramp up the volume over the cycle, i.e 3x5, 4x5, 5x5, 6x5, etc.

Or you could ramp up the intensity, maintaining the total volume (set at a high volume), like in GVT (German Volume Training, 10x10) in which you perform ten sets of ten reps increasing the weight over the cycle.

Braindx, raises a good point. With bodyweight it is harder to manipulate load in such small increments. So, for practicalities sake it's probably better/easier to increase the volume rather than intensity.

[Donald Lee]

With weight training, when you are doing volume and intensity blocks, you generally are trying to increase weight lifted. Doug Hepburn did some training with maintaining the weight and hitting certain set and rep requirements before upping the weight. One thing you need to be careful of when employing this strategy, even with bodyweight, is overfatiguing yourself by consistently going to failure. This is where RPE could be a very useful tool, since increasing reps increases tonnage moreso than increasing weight/intensity.