Hey guys
About to run PB 3 and noticed that presses are done every day.
I understand why this is beneficial from a powerlifting aspect, but is this neccessarily beneficial for hypertrophy.
From a recent article:
"Frequency refers to how often a person exercises a particular muscle or muscle group in a given time frame. By convention, frequency is usually assessed per week.
Given the dose-dependent relationship between training volume and exercise adaptations described above, the impact of different training frequencies must be done carefully by comparing programs with the same weekly volume, but different frequencies. If the frequency of an exercise program goes up, thereby increasing exercise volume, we would predict a greater improvement in strength, muscle size, and so on. However, we couldn’t determine if this was due to the changed frequency itself or the increase in volume.
Existing data suggest exercise frequency doesn’t seem to matter unless it changes exercise volume. However, the data presented so far is limited to exercise sessions with volumes less than 10 to 12 sets per muscle group. Less than a handful of studies have looked at whether higher volume programs respond differently to altered exercise frequency, but the results don’t seem to indicate much of a benefit to increasing exercise frequency for strength or hypertrophy when the volume is greater than 10 to 12 sets per muscle group or movement.
Doing a higher number of sets in a single session (low frequency) likely produces more fatigue than spreading the same number of sets over many days (high frequency). [10,11] As fatigue goes up, it becomes harder to improve skills and movement efficiency through motor learning, which are important to strength performance. [11,12] Additionally, splitting up the same amount of training into more sessions (high frequency) may be a practical strategy to keep the amount of time spent training manageable."
For rest days, I think the practical utility is for managing fatigue to allow the trainee to train with enough intensity - weight on the bar, volume- reps and sets, and exertion level- to generate the adaptations they want.
If there isn’t enough rest between sessions for the program and the individual, results may suffer because people aren’t able to do enough. If there’s too much rest between sessions, results may also suffer because people aren’t able to do enough due to time constraints.
This probably matters most when people are doing very fatiguing training sessions. Programming concerns aside, if you’re beat up going into the next session and your strength, work capacity, and motivation to train are way down…that may limit results if it happens often enough. On the other hand, a well-designed program where each session isn’t too fatiguing probably doesn’t need a lot of rest days. Training 4 or 5 days in a row isn’t unheard of for me or some of our lifters depending on programming and scheduling, for example.