Hi doctors, before I ask you this question, I was wondering will you ever come to Europe for BBM seminars, especially Balkan region?
Question is - when is best time to increase stimulus if isn’t enough. For example: we have individual who is running a 6 week powerbuilding program and was doing 12 sets for chest at week 1 of training, week 2 still 12 sets and week 3 - 13 sets. He didn’t experienced any DOMS through these 3 weeks, his bench remained the same (same reps, same RPE). Now, my question is when is best time and how much stimulus should he increase (especially volume from 13 sets)? Is it possible to predict will that amount stimulus cause productive training stress?
Basically, what I’m asking is if one amount of volume isn’t responding well, when is best time to increase it?
Hope you will reply, cheers!
Claire and I will be in Greece next month. Maybe we’ll do a little seminar or meet up.
For this particular individual, did you test his 1RM? Any measurements to share? How was his sleep?
I discuss my thoughts around troubleshooting in the Low Fatigue template’s eBook. If the environment was setup for gainzZz, e.g. good sleep, nutrition, and so on, then I typically favor an increase in training load for those who aren’t sore, feel otherwise good, and are motivated to train.
As far as how-to increase the training load, that is a bit more complex. In a person previously doing lower volume, e.g. <10-15 sets per muscle group/movement pattern, I’d favor increasing volume. If a person was doing more volume than that and the goal was hypertrophy, I’d favor going closer to failure for the hypertrophy-focused work. Just a few examples there.
Thanks for reply Jordan!
His sleep time was good. He’s sleeping 7-8 hours and he’s doing pretty good with that. I did not test his RM yet. He’s currently eating 2.1g/kg of protein per day (including animal’s and plant’s style). He is in calorie deficit (500 calories from maintance). His measurements are decreasing slowly.
His bench is same for weeks now (and only exercise that isn’t progressing is bench), although he’s benching 3x/week and doing other chest exercises.
I don’t know that they need more training load at this point, especially with the increase in weekly volume. I’d give it some more time.
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