What’s the best way to achieve muscular hypertrophy? This question goes around the air in all the gyms and everyone tries to answer without a consistent answer. It is a complex process, you need to find the best stimulus or even the best workout for muscular growth. What’s the most important factor? Should we prioritize volume? Or is weight more important?

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Volume and Intensity

Before we can proceed, we must understand these two concepts: volume and intensity.

Volume, in a training context is the amount of work done, meaning that all the sets and reps for a given muscle add up to a certain amount of volume (throughout the period of a week).

Intensity is related to the effort done in each set. As a norm, intensity is defined by the weight you can handle for a 1 rep max. In this case, your 1 rep max will represent 100‰ intensity.

Volume and Intensity are intrinsically related, since one will always influence the other. Greater volume, less intensity and vice-versa.

How to incorporate Volume Training and Progressive Overload

Volume Training, like the name indicates, will be done according to the mantra – “It’s better to do more!”. So, you’ll do lots of sets and lots of reps of variable intensity, but it’s probable that it won’t be too close to 100% (intensity). The logic is simple. The more work done for a given muscle, the better development it will achieve. Many bodybuilders opt for this type of training for this reason.

On the other hand, we have Progressive Overload, which contrary to what many people believe, isn’t just about intensity, but about progressively increasing muscular effort in each exercise/set, be it by adding more weight, more reps, more sets or even by cutting down rest time. This type of training is done by many weight lifters, even though they don’t explore all of the variables, focusing primarily on adding weight.

When you compare both, bodybuilders and weight lifters, along with their training styles, you are able to see that volume is an important factor in muscular development. If it weren’t so, weightlifters would have more muscle, since they tend to lift heavier. But that’s not true.

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Knowing that volume is a crucial factor for muscle growth, we can use it while following a progressive overload ideology:

• Progressively increase weight as it becomes easier;
• Increasing the number of exercises or sets or even reps;
• Increasing training frequency of certain muscle groups, progressively, to promote greater volume throughout the week.

This way you’ll increase training volume as well as intensity. Stimulate your body progressively, force it to adapt. These adaptation phases take their time, but it’s worth it long term.