VIF - Frequency Flashcards
What is frequency?
“Frequency is what organizes volume and intensity. It is about how you spread the training stress you need across the training week.”
“Frequency is the way you organize your training to optimize its effectiveness and fit your schedule, while also being careful not to have too much (or potentially too little) training in any single session.”
What factors influence frequency?
- Learning
- Recovery
How does learning influence frequency?
“Strength is a skill and requires practice; and progressive overload drives hypertrophy.”
“All work in one session is not equal to all work split across 6 sessions.”
You need enough volume within a workout to engrain motor patterns, but not too high as to produce form failure and engrain bad motor patterns. You can’t do everything in 1 day, nor can you spread things too thinly.
How does recovery influence frequency?
Recovery will dictate how often we can train a movement/body part, and how much we can do per session, as well as what exercises we can do so as not to overlap.
“Our bodies are going to take a beating when we are training heavy and hard all the time.”
“You may very well get to a point where you need to increase volume, and your total training volume per week becomes high enough that how you split it up is very important. Doing too much in one session is a real thing that can happen and it may make sense to spread it out.”
What did the Raastad and Schoenfeld studies show?
“…The exercises, sets and reps and relative loads were the same across the week in both groups, and interestingly enough significantly greater increases in hypertrophy were observed in the group training full body three days per week”
“…strength and hypertrophy were found to be higher in the group that split their training into more sessions despite equal volume and intensity”
“We limit ourselves to the amount of volume that we can do in a week by trying to split the work across too few sessions and if we are relatively advanced, we could potentially be making better progress by splitting the high volume we must perform to progress, into more frequent, more manageable sessions.”
How do you plan for frequency?
- Determine your volume (considering number of exercises, sets x reps, rest periods and warm ups) for the week that you need in order to make progress towards your goal. Then consider how much time it would take to complete it all and consider what frequency of training would allow you to break up that training into manageable chunks that would allow you to perform it all with a high quality of focus, movement, and intention.
- Try out your proposed schedule. If you find that you have too much volume on any single day to perform well, look to reshuffle the volume across your current number of sessions or consider adding in another session to your training week.
- Likewise, if you find that you have a day that is completed quickly and with minimal fatigue, consider reshuffling the volume to put more on this day so that your other training sessions aren’t as fatiguing.
“Remember, that as we progress with our training (get stronger, bigger, and more advanced as a trainee) we will need to perform more volume in order to produce enough stress to keep our bodies adapting. So, in general the number of days that we will need to train will increase as we advance to accommodate these volume increases.”
What is the recommendation for frequency?
“However, for some strength athletes at certain points in a periodized plan it may be appropriate to use a higher frequency on specific lifts, with a lower volume per session to achieve specific outcomes.”
