Volume

Volume is the overall amount of work you are doing at the gym. It is best to measure this on a per body-part basis and I usually measure it in no. of sets per week. A general rule of thumb for an effective amount of volume is 10-20 sets per muscle group per week.

The reason it is a range between 10-20 is to account for variation in ability. A beginner does not need nearly as much volume as an advanced trainee who has been at the gym for years.

This is also just a guideline for the most optimal muscle growth. If you have limited time and can only do 5 sets a week then its better than nothing and you will still make progress.

Lets put this into context

A beginner trainee decides to train chest twice a week. We want to aim for about 10 sets for chest in a week (maybe even a bit less as this is a beginner). This means we need to do 5 sets of chest per workout.

Lets pick 2 exercises from our list of chest exercises: The bench press and the machine press

So a chest workout would look like.

1. Bench Press 3 sets

2. machine press 2 sets

Intensity

Intensity is how hard you are pushing your sets. For example a warm up set with light weight is low intensity, and a working set with heavy weight where you go close to the point of failure is higher intensity.

Failure is the point where the muscle physically fails to complete the rep, no matter how hard you try, gun to your head you physically cannot do another rep.

A certain Intensity threshold must be met to grow muscle effectively. Fortunately, you do not have to go to absolute failure to build muscle, but you do have to get pretty close. About 3-4 reps before failure as a minimum.

This is a general rule. But as a beginner if you have never touched a weight before, any lifting at any intensity will have a good effect.

When you start off: Go quite easy with low intensity and slowly ramp it up over a few weeks to let your body get used to the new stimulus.

As a beginner you do not really need to go to failure at all. However it is good to know what true failure actually feels like so you can better estimate how many reps away from failure you are. Every so often on your last set of an exercise, take it to true failure.

For example if you take a set of a bench press to true failure and managed 10 reps, and 3-4 reps before failure is the minimum intensity we need, then next workout you know you need to do at least 6-7 reps in a set.

This is where most people fall short, they underestimate their intensity and they do not push hard enough.

As you progress over time, the more intensity is needed. I have been training for 5+ years so for me to make gains I need to push closer to failure and sometimes to complete failure.

Frequency

Frequency refers to how often you are training a body part. Usually it is measured in number of times per week.

The best frequency to follow is training a body part twice per week.

A Body part usually takes around 48-72 hours to recover after an effective workout, meaning that 3 days later you are likely fully recovered and ready to train that body part again. If you train a body part twice a week instead of once that extra volume adds up over time and you can see significantly more gains than just training once.

You can try training more than this ie. a body part 3x per week. But there is a drop off to this as you have to be more aware of recovery and ensure you are not overtraining. This is why 2x a week is a better rule of thumb.

Training Split

The split is how we split up our training across the week. A simple example is an Upper/Lower split where we train the lower body one day and upper body another day.

It looks a bit like this

Monday: Lower body

Tuesday: Upper body

Wednesday: Rest

Thursday: Lower Body

Friday: Upper Body

Saturday: Rest

Sunday: Rest

In this example I would be training my entire body twice in a week. On Lower body days I would train legs

and Upper body days Chest, back and arms

This is one example of a split but there are many different ones.

• Full body 3-4x a week: Every training day you train a muscle from each body part

• Upper/Lower 4x a week: 2 Upper body and 2 Lower body workouts

• Push/Pull/Legs 6x a week: A push workout training chest/shoulders and triceps. A pull workout training back and biceps, and a leg workout. Repeat 2x a week

Do not forget Progressive Overload

remember Once you have a good programme in place, the goal is still progressive overload. Over time you want to increase the weight with your selected exercises. If you use the same weights for a long time you will stop seeing progress