Frequency, Intensity, and Volume

I'm gonna take a break from writing about fallacies related to complex systems, and touch on a topic everyone should be thinking about when it comes to programming (for yourself or others) for fitness, strength and conditioning, or whatever you want to call it.

Every program contains three factors that need to be taken into account: frequency, intensity, and volume.

Frequency refers to how often you're training. The most common way to do this is to look at how many training sessions you have in a week.

Intensity refers to the effort involved to do the work, and often relates to the impact on your nervous system and your ability to recover. In the strength world, this is often thought of as a percentage of one's one-rep max (1RM). Rate of perceived effort (RPE) can also be used. In the CrossFit world, work/time is most often used, especially when it comes conditioning pieces. In the endurance world, heart rate can be used, and in other situations like tempo work, you'll work off of a percentage of your best effort (e.g., repeat 400m efforts at 85% of your mile time) There are other ways to assign intensity, too, but the ones mentioned above are the most common. 

Volume refers to the total amount of work done in a training session. This is most commonly done by counting either total reps or in some cases (primarily barbell strength work), total tonnage (sets x reps x pounds). Most often you're only concerned with the working sets when figuring out volume or tonnage.

Each program will have a mix of these three factors (there are many other variables that come into play like exercise selection and training goal(s), just to name a couple, but those will be a topic for another day).

Each of the factors can be grouped into general buckets for ease of reference: high, medium, or low.

There are no rules written in stone regarding these three factors. Different people will respond better to different mixes. That's just how it goes. Much of it comes down to personal preferences, in my opinion. Some people like a certain mix, and because they're consistent with that mix, they do better. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is not one right answer for everyone, just the right answer for you (and it may change over time).

The one thing I can say with a fair amount of certainty is that at some point, unless you're young and have all your lifestyle factors dialed in, or you've been training for years, are at an elite level, and have built up to it, you will crash and burn on a high frequency, high intensity, high volume program. If you're lucky (and don't fall into either of the two categories above), you can use this approach for a very short duration (maybe a month) to bust through a plateau or reach a short-term training goal, but you better cycle off this approach or you'll end up regressing (and that's the best outcome).

For me personally, I've tried all kinds of mixes. Recently I've gone back to a high frequency, medium intensity, low volume program where I train the whole body every session. I'll share the exact program in another entry. I've written enough on this topic for now.