What’s going on, guys?
Sean Nalewanyj, www.SeanNal.com and I got a question from a subscriber here asking about
German Volume Training.
And he wants to know is German Volume Training effective for muscle growth?
I’m looking for a new style of workout and the trainer at my gym was mentioning it.
So, for those who don’t know, like the name says, German Volume Training or GVT for short
is a high volume style of training that originated back in the 1970s and it was originally for
weightlifters to put muscle in the off season.
And the basic premise behind it is the ten-by-ten approach where you’re basically doing ten
sets of ten reps on a big compound exercise like a benchpress or a squat or a chin-up,
and you’re using the same weight across all ten sets at sixty percent of your one
rep max.
So that means that you would find a weight that you’re capable of doing about twenty
reps with but you would stop at ten reps and do a total of ten sets.
And once you can do ten sets of ten with a certain weight then you would increase the
weight on the next workout.
And then the more recent version of German Volume Training, because you’ll see different
variations of it in terms of the exact workout structure, but it’s where you use antagonist
pairing where you’re switching back and forth between two different exercises that
hit opposing muscle groups.
So for example, a benchpress paired with a chin-up or a squat paired with a Romanian
deadlift and you would do ten sets of ten on each switching back and forth.
And then usually there’s also a second pair of exercises you do after that as well using
a lower volume of three sets each.
So would German Volume Training be effective for building muscle, I mean, keep in mind
that any training routine where you’re using enough intensity and enough volume for each
muscle and where you’re achieving progressive overload overtime is ultimately going to add
muscle size and strength to your body.
And German Volume Training is obviously been around for a long time and it’s been used
successfully by plenty of lifters which is why it’s still around and still popular.
But I would say in the vast majority of situations for the average trainee it’s not something
that I would recommend, just because the overall amount of volume per session is, I would say,
unnecessarily high and so even though you might make gains doing it it’s just not
going to be an optimal approach and you’re probably going to be better off by lowering
the workload per session a bit, which is going to help you recover more quickly and then
you’re going to hit each individual muscle group more frequently throughout the week
and probably make faster gains that way.
Remember that you can only stimulate so much hypertrophy in a single training session.
And doing more and more sets doesn’t automatically mean more growth.
It’s going to work on a bell curve where doing a certain amount of volume is good but
as you do more and more sets and move beyond that optimal amount where you’ve maximized
the hypertrophy response, you’re just going to be eating into your recovery time, you’re
going to be more stress on your central nervous system, and more stress on your joints than
you really need to.
Keep in mind that German Volume Training was originally design for elite level weightlifters
and so we’re talking about people who are already highly trained with good genetics
and whose entire day is basically revolved around weight training.
And with drug probably was a factor as well.
But for the average natural lifter, this amount of volume is just going to overkill in most
cases.
And then because you’re doing so many total sets and the rest periods are fairly short
your cardiovascular system can actually start to become a limiting factor as well, especially
on big exercises like squats or deadlifts.
So what I would say overall is that if you’re an advanced lifter who’s already close to
their genetic potential and you just want to try something new and more challenging
to see if it might help you squeeze out some additional gains then German Volume Training
is something you could experiment with and see how it goes.
But for everybody else, especially beginners, I mean if you’re still in your first one
to two years of training or even one to three years for that matter, I can’t see any reason
whatsoever why you would need to bother with German Volume Training.
So for everybody else besides advance lifters just stick to more conventional style of training
and keep it more basic.
Because a German Volume Training routine is likely just going to burn you out.
And even if it doesn’t burn you out and you can recover from it, it probably won’t
be optimal and you’ll be performing way more work per session than you really need
to.
It’s hard to give exact volume recommendations because it’s really depends on the person
and on their experience level and their genetics and things like that but a good overall guideline
for the average lifter would be to directly train each individual muscle group somewhere
between one and a half to three times per week, and using a total weekly volume of anywhere
from about, say thirty to sixty reps for smaller muscle groups, and around seventy to a hundred
and twenty reps for larger muscle groups.
But those are just estimates to keep in mind because it really depends how heavy you’re
going, how closely you’re training to failure as well as individual differences in terms
of training tolerance.
And again, those are weekly figures for all workouts combined.
But as long as you’re training decently hard, at least a rep or two short of failure
and you’re striving for progressive overload and performing good quality sets using good
form and good technique then as a natural lifter you really don’t need to perform
a ton of volume in order to gain muscle effectively.
And you don’t need to spend hours and hours in the gym either.
And so something like German Volume Training, it just won’t be necessary in most cases.
So, I hope this was helpful.
If you do want to get access to my exact recommended workout routines, including plans for beginners,
intermediates and more advance lifters along with meal plans, supplementation advise and
twelve weeks of one-on-one coaching then you can grab my complete Body Transformation Blueprint
by clicking here or by visiting www.BodyTransformationTruth.com using the link in the description box.
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Thanks for watching, guys.
And I’ll talk to you again soon.