For the naturally skinnier/weak guy, do you usually find that they end up needing more volume or frequency as opposed to less? The old thinking used to be that hardgainers needed more rest and recovery. However, it seems more coaches now preach increased frequency and volume for this demographic. I am also not referring to a beginner lifter.
Do you feel the 12 week strength template or your hypertrophy template are enough volume for this type of lifter?
I am naturally smaller (small frame and skeletal structure - probably meant for endurance activities, but hate those - haha) and have a really hard time adding strength. I would like to run the 12wk strength template with a caloric surplus.
The only thing being “naturally skinny/weak” tells us is that you’re undertrained and have a hard time eating enough. I don’t necessarily think it’s a useful predictor of training response once you start training more and eating enough.
Assuming you’re actually a post-novice lifter, I’d run 12WS as is with your caloric surplus to see how you respond before adjusting the dose of training volume.
Thanks, Austin. BTW, I just listened to your programming podcast and pretty much all of my questions were answered there:) Sorry!
I would be curious to hear how often you have to add more stress (on top of something like the 12 week program, for example) for a client who has a poor response to training. Do you typically do this by adding more within a given day, or add an additional day (let’s assume the person has time to train more)?
Lastly, do you do any conditioning yourself? For example, something like you guys program for GPP? Or, do you just lift 4x/week?
We don’t tend to program for people to specifically strength train more than 4 days per week outside of special circumstances.
We have a number of strategies to increase stress, but most of them are related to increasing the number of exposures to a given lift per week, as well as the total weekly training volume.
And for me personally, when my work schedule gets tight, the first thing to go is the conditioning work, because I came to barbell training with an enormous conditioning base from a long career of competitive swimming. But when the schedule opens up, I’ll do some conditioning.