The fundamentals of training program design – frequency
Nikola Man
Last week we covered volume, the king of hypertrophy. Today we continue with our series on making an optimal training program with a brief (at least I hope so) piece on frequency.
We define frequency as the number of visits you pay to the gym in a microcycle. In simple terms, you get frequency when you answer the question: “How many times per week do you go to the gym?”. A small note here, even though it rarely happens, some programs are set up on an 8, 9 or even 10 day basis so a microcycle there is not a week. That being said, for the vast majority of the population, a weekly routine will be the common practice and I will stick to a seven day microcycle which starts on a Monday and ends with a Sunday.
What is the importance of frequency? Well I am glad you asked, but I have to explain something else first. There is a process called muscle protein synthesis which is basically the process of building muscle mass. During the course of this process your muscles are sensitive to protein intake and as the name of the process suggests, your body is synthesizing new muscle protein. You can think of this process as adding bricks to a wall. Now, this text could get a hell of a lot more complicated and scientific and it would probably have to be split into 5 or 10 parts for me just to cover everything that happens here on the biological and chemical level so I am going to leave at the brick wall analogy. Anyhow, this process takes up to 48 hours, it could take a bit longer in some extreme cases, but for the most part it takes two days. What does this mean for our frequency? Well if you do chest on Monday (as bros normally do) and the muscle building process is done on Wednesday, then you are essentially resting for no reason until next Monday.
Unfortunately, the gym culture is riddled with this mentality that you should basically die in the gym and if you don’t have to be resuscitated after a workout you did not even train. Don’t get me wrong, you should train hard and there are many ways of ensuring that you do, some of which have been mentioned (RIR scale) and most of which will be covered in two weeks when we discuss intensity. Without effort there will be no progress, no gains, no Instagram stardom and most certainly no biceps (or glutes for the ladies) to show off. However, hitting a muscle group two or more times per week yields better results for beginners, intermediate trainees and early advanced and even some advanced trainees. Hitting a muscle group once per week MIGHT be optimal for the elite of the elite (you’re not in this group simply because less than 1% of all gym goers are).
Only two points left to make before I wrap this up. One, volume is the king of hypertrophy as we already established in the paragraph on causes of hypertrophy in this text. If we want to increase volume, it is very easy to achieve just that by adding a session to our week, meaning that frequency goes up and teams up with volume to produce results. The final aspect to note is the size of the muscle being trained and how often it can be trained. The bigger the muscle group and the heavier you can train it, the less frequently you will be able to train it. For example, quads, chest and back for the most part are large muscle groups so naturally you will be able to use a lot of weight on the main lifts for these muscle groups which in turn causes longer recovery periods. On the other hand, we have the side deltoid and the triceps which you can hit 3 or maybe even 4 times a week because these are small muscles and you simply cannot overload them sufficiently to cause recovery problems, well, technically you could, but that would lead to a high risk of injury and quite frankly it would be stupid.
There are really only two key takeaways:
The muscle building process takes usually up to 48 hours. Train every muscle group at least twice a week
I say at least because some groups you simply will not be able to train more than twice due to the size of the muscle which then dictates how heavy you have to train it in order to provide sufficient stimulus, whereas some smaller muscle groups can be trained up to 4 times a week
Stay tuned, next week we will take a look at some of the more popular splits and I will also give out some nice recommendations as to what you should do depending on your level.