What is Training Volume?

Hello! Have you increased your training volume lately?

One of the most important advances you can make over time in strength training is to gradually increase your training volume.

This will ensure that you become stronger over time. Training volume can be thought of as the total muscular work you perform during a workout.

You may have seen this kind of calculation for training volume in other apps: sets x repetitions x weight used.

If you perform a set of 20 repetitions with a weight of 50kg, according to this calculation you have completed a training volume of 1000kg.

This will then give you a total weight that can be used to compare your training volume over time, e.g. performed 1200kg vs 1000kg in the previous month.

However, the problem with this calculation is that using this total weight as training volume is very dependent on the repetition range in which is training.

For example, if you perform an exercise all the way to exhaustion and achieve 20 repetitions with 50kg, you will have a training volume of 1000kg.

You can achieve the same training volume with 10 times 100kg, but the impact on you would be much greater.

It is virtually impossible to be exhausted with 20 repetitions with 50kg and then be able to perform 10 repetitions with 100kg. Maybe 60-70kg for 10 repetitions would be realistic.

In addition, different exercises produce very different values with this calculation.

For example, it is not out of question that 10 repetitions of side raises with 10kg (= 100kg) will exhaust you more than 3 repetitions of deadlifts with 50kg (= 150kg).

This makes training volume and fatigue hard to compare when you train using different repetition ranges and different exercises.

Treeceps therefore takes a different approach and calculates your training volume for each muscle group based on how many sets of an exercise you performed for that muscle group.

More details on how Treeceps calculates your training volume using Gains Hearts in a better and more comparable way, I will explain next time in the tip "Gains Hearts and Training Volume"!