Sometimes I hear something or read something that clicks in my brain, making me consider something I probably should have known anyway, but since we live in our brains, justifying and rationalizing the way we think and the choices we make, it occasionally requires an outside voice to break into the inner monologue. I was working, but needed some distraction and was listening to podcasts in the background. I rarely listen to the 3DMJ guys, although I respect their knowledge and experience. I’ve just never found their podcasts calling to me like some others do. As I listened to the conversation about steroid use and the occasional accusations of being secret pinners, Brad Loomis said something that took me back. He talked about how the temptation to use something was certainly there, not so much for the muscular improvements but more to feel like he did when he was younger. He said he was 48 now, and sometimes it was a struggle to just get out of bed, let alone hit the gym and train hard.
I’m older than Brad, and I’ve been dealing with fairly significant fatigue for quite some time. I alternate between considering whether it’s the heat here in the swampy Charleston summer, or the extended low calorie diet I’m on, or whether I’m sick or perhaps recovering still from being sick. What I don’t consider is whether I’m recovering properly from my actual training!
In my PT Course, I learned a lot about training volume when it comes to hypertrophy and it continues to be a widely discussed topic, with lots of studies trying to improve the knowledge base. There seems to be a consensus that there’s an inverted U curve of volume and results, with more work producing more hypertrophy to a point, where it either plateaus or begins to drop off. There’s also a general consensus that there’s only so much volume needed in any one session to stimulate the biochemical reactions to training that lead to increased muscle protein synthesis, where additional volume doesn’t lead to additional hypertrophy, but more likely to just more fatigue and eventually muscle damage.
I revisited my Volume Calculator from my training course and while it’s obviously speculative, it’s at least something I can use to try to figure how much work I should be doing. The factors under consideration are:
- Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced
- Gender
- Recovery factor
- Energy balance factor
This require some subjective analysis and honest evaluation. I’m obviously not a beginner, and I sometimes think I’m advanced, not because of my level of muscularity or strength, but because of my long time exposing my body to resistance training. But I think fairly, I’m closer to intermediate. Gender is an easy one (females tend to need more volume, or more accurately, tolerate more volume) but Recovery Factor is something I didn’t give enough weight to. I used a Factor of 1, which is defined as: No major life stress, decent sleep quality, high well being; for example a student outside of exam periods.
While I generally have a low level of life stress, to consider myself at 56 years old to have the same recovery level as a college student is absurd. To hear Brad Loomis talk about his lower levels of recovery and energy to train generally really hit home. Perhaps the reason for my high levels of general fatigue, that include having to lay down in the early afternoon instead of reaching for more coffee, or to lay down in the early evenings when the fatigue from my afternoon workouts kick in should have been a indicator that I’m not recovering well!
I changed the Recovery Factor in the Volume Calculator to the lowest setting, and set the Energy Balance Factor to a .8 which indicates a 20% calorie deficit below maintenance (which is a best guess, but I’m very clearly in a decent deficit having lost 23 lbs over the last 6 months) and my suggested volume is 10 weekly sets per muscle group. That’s a 33% reduction over the volume I’ve been doing the last month or so, which itself was a 21% reduction over the volume I was doing before I started my diet.
I’m going to go ahead and drop the volume to 10 sets and see how I feel after a few weeks. I know that’s enough volume to at least maintain the muscularity I have, which is probably all I can really aspire to while in a calorie deficit anyway. I am hopeful this will help, because while I love to train, and I want the most results I can get, feeling run down 50% or more of my day is starting to get old. Like me.
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