Training Frequency: Why More Isn’t Always Better
As a young lifter, one who was just getting into the sport, I had a few go to resources that were both a good and bad influence on me. Like any kid who was 19-20, I found people who were successful and wanted to emulate them as much as I could.
So, by default I found the most jacked, the smartest, and strongest lifter at the time, Layne Norton, when searching for, “science based powerlifter”. Comical yes, but at least I had good intentions.
For those who do not know about Layne, in short he is a multi-time national champion in the USAPL, was a champion natural bodybuilder, and a world silver medalist at the sports largest meet, IPF Worlds. Beyond that, he’s posted information content to the lifting community for the better part of 10 years, long before I was even able to access the internet without permission from my parents.
Back to the original gist of the story, I became very fascinated with how Layne trained. In particular, I would watch his IPF Worlds prep video a couple times a week, always finding something mind-boggling with how he held together to put forth the performance he did. Layne was squatting 4 times a week, benching 4 times a week, and deadlifting 2 times a week to attain the adaptations he needed to acquire new strength gains.
If you are familiar with training frequency, you probably are floored with the aforementioned splits and for good reason. However, at the time I was not. I knew volume was a main driver for strength, intensity was needed for exposure and adaptation, and frequency was just kinda put at the wayside. Seeing a high level lifter with, at the time, a 600+lb squat, close to a 400lb bench, and a 700+lb deadlift, train with such a high frequency sparked a lightbulb in my brain that maybe I was capable of more than what I was doing.
I was right, at the time I was squatting twice a week (one of those days being front squats… if you do front squats as a powerlifter you should have a good reason, I did not), deadlifting once a week, and benching twice a week.
I brought my frequency up to 3x per week squatting, 2x per week deadlifting, and 4x per week benching. I made some good gains at first but over time the training I was doing would simply be too much to recover from. Meaning the volume I was doing associated with that frequency was way too high for my recovery abilities at the time.
I was confused because I am much smaller than Layne and was lifting much lighter weights so it was not registering why this was such a tough thing for me. After all, I came from an athletic background with a high training age, why is this so difficult for me?
The smart thing to do would have been to drop this frequency or modulate the volume. I did neither and I stalled hard on 2/3 lifts for the better part of a year. For a full year I put 5lbs on my bench press and 10lbs on my squat, although my deadlift had gone up considerably, however I attribute that to me fixing my technique that looked like an olympic lifting clean and I still pulled everything in squat shoes. It took an injury in spring of 2019 to finally knock me back down to Earth and reset and I am thankful for that and here is why.
I got stronger doing less.
When assigning frequency I personally believe there are a few factors you need to consider when finalizing a training split.
What are you used to? Simple, but powerful. I like to use analogies for things like this to drive home the big picture. Let’s use running as an example: if you are used to running 25 miles a week, what will be the outcome if you triple that to 75 miles a week with no adjustment period? If you are somewhat rational, you will probably say it’ll be incredibly difficult and not sustainable and you would be spot on. Choosing 35 miles a week for a couple weeks, then 45, then 55, then 65, then settling into 75 would be a much better solution to adapting to your training. Why is this? Well we operate on recovery curves and imposed demands. Meaning, if we are used to doing 25 miles a week, that is the stimulus we are adapted to and the one that is consistently imposed to us, when we rapidly increase that, the tissue associated with the movements are not “ready” for that much load or volume yet and we either get one of two scenarios: adaptation or injury. If one of your biggest possible outcomes is injury, to me, that is not something you should play around with. To put it even simpler, when we first train, we are extremely sore to the touch whenever we train a muscle, over time we build up a tolerance and the 3 sets of 10 with 100lbs we started with week 1, no longer yields the soreness it did at the beginning in week 10. Tissue needs many things to adapt but one common denominator is time. Anecdotally speaking, if you simply do not believe me, I challenge you to up your training frequency for each lift, up by 2 days a week and get back to me on how you recover. Bottomline, small increases = best gains and adaptation.
How strong are you? Again, simple but powerful. This is a bit of anecdotal principles and experience and a bit of physiology. Essentially, the stronger you get, the less exposure you need frequency wise to maintain your strength. The key word here is strength, not skill. Skill is very unstable in this regard, strength is very stable. Do a sweep of top lifters and monitor their training. I would wager that within 9.5/10, a person who squats over 800lbs is not squatting more than twice a week. I would also wager, the larger a person is, the less frequency they tend to do in general. In short and in general, bigger people lift heavier weights. We can argue relative strength all we want but simply put, an exposure to 900lbs on a deadlift by a 370lb man will be infinitely more fatiguing than 315lbs by a 105lb female despite the latter being over 3x bodyweight and the former being less than 2.5x bodyweight. This goes hand in hand with the next criteria I have but this is a concept that is not fairly intuitive I know, but in practice that is the case almost every time.
How are your leverages for a given lift, what is your size/gender, and how is your technique? If you are long limbed, wide stanced, sumo deadlifter with a very small range of motion, you will be able to get away with more frequency compared to a shorter limbed conventional puller with a longer range of motion. Range of motion in this sense is how far the bar is traveling something I think most people overlook. 9/10 programming for the sumo deadlift is light years different than the conventional pull with all other variables being the same. If you know for a fact, due to levers, your squat looks like a folding chair and you never really feel it in your legs, it is probably best you limit frequency per week to avoid interfering with deadlift training, doubly so if you are a conventional puller. Additionally, things scale up for people in smaller weight classes and scale down as you go up. We can get into why that is in depth, but in essence it has to do with the concept I explained in the last point about absolute strength. Gender plays a role as well as it has been shown women can flat-out handle more work on average than men. If this is something you disagree with, I can point you to the direction of a Stronger by Science article that would sway you to this side of the argument with empirical data.
What realistically makes sense? What is sustainable? This is the most bro-science of the bunch but I find this to be the biggest driver in my own personal decision making process when assigning frequency. People have lives outside of training and do not have infinite times to train, the majority of the time at least. If you know that doing a certain lift, say the squat, will require an extra 30-45 minutes per session each time to work up to certain weights, you can quickly see how fitting every lift in the course of a week while still having dedicated rest days becomes increasingly impossible as sessions with multiple lifts in the same workout approach hours upon hours. Maybe this is sustainable for the short term and you are willing to bite the bullet in some fashion but I promise you, regardless how much you love training, 5-6 4-hour sessions a week will burn you out and spit you out the other end. In meet preps where maybe we need to buckle down a bit, maybe you can extend your sessions to account for benching 4-5x a week on top of multiple days of squatting and deadlifting, but peer out objectively and assess whether that is a long-term approach and something you can adhere to. I will use me as an example here a couple months ago when I worked manual labor. I am a rather light weight male and squat low bar, bench with a fairly moderate grip, and pull conventional. Given what we know about the aforementioned points, it probably does not make much sense for me to squat once a week, deadlift 3x a week, and bench once a week. However, due to my work being general physical activity, it also probably does not make sense for me to be benching 4x a week, squatting 3x, and deadlifting 2x. I settled in on 3 bench, 2 squat, and 1 deadlift and it worked very well. So naturally, you find a middle ground and work with what you have in front of you. Think objectively.
All in all, to wrap things up, I now make more gains with less frequency/volume than I did with more. At my peak I was squatting 3x per week, benching 4x, and pulling 2x. Now, I squat on average 2.5x a week (one day is light, light high bar work), bench 3x, and pull only once. With this protocol I have put 42 extra lbs on my squat, 20 extra lbs on my bench, and 40 extra lbs on my deadlift.
More is not always the answer, start on the low end and build yourself up. If things are not going well, conversely maybe observe taking volume/frequency AWAY, assuming you are not training a lift under 2 times a week, before you consider adding more.
Best wishes, stick with the minimum effective dose,
Erik