Training Intensity

Relationship between Volume & Intensity for Strength Training

Volume refers to the number of movements, muscles worked, exercises, tonnage, sets and reps or any combination of these.  This can be calculated per session, over a week (microcycle), over a month (mesocycle) or over a year (macrocycle). 

Intensity refers to the amount of work required to achieve the activity and is often described in two ways.  The first way is closeness to failure; the second as a percentage of 1RM.

Manipulating Volume and Intensity is important because the body has limits to displaying strength and endurance and recovery becomes significant in an effort to overcome the imposed physical and psychological trauma of the training effort.

Cycling the Volume and Intensity of training over weeks and months prevents training plateaus and reduces potential for overuse injury.  Often Elite Level and Olympic Athletes will cycle their training over yearly periods, sometimes even following 4 to 8 year macrocycles.  

Although it appears that Volume and Intensity have somewhat of an inverse relationship, ie the higher the volume the lower the intensity and vice versa; in practice this is not always the case. 

In fact all Volume / Intensity combinations serve a purpose:-

Medium [V] / Medium [I]:  Is the strength training staple.

High [V] / High [I]:  Pushes the trainee into moderate over-reaching and leads to greater gains after an unloading period or taper.

Low [V] / Low [I]:  A useful combination for active recovery or transition phase.

Low [V] / High [I]:  Often used to reach a personal best performance.

High [V] / Low [I]:  Is widely used as base training for steady progress. 

It is important to realize that during any given cycle, loading parameters (sets, reps, closeness to failure, rest between sets, order of exercises, number of exercises, length of session, recovery, etc) must vary.  This is the craft to intelligently cycled training or Periodisation.