HST vs. lower frequency w/ higher volume

Yes, I was serious. I eat fast food from time to time. Are you keeping an eye on your cholesterol, blood pressure, etc? As long as all those numbers stay good, what you eat doesn't really matter a whole lot as long as you hit your macros, get enough micronutrients and enough calories. I mean... you are worried that these foods will have a negative impact on your health? Right? So keep an eye on the indicators of whether your health is good or bad. If those numbers don't change much, or at all, then obviously those foods aren't hurting your health. Might be different for you, but I can apparently eat pretty much whatever I want and as long as I stay physically active, my numbers all stay good. I think it is the lack of activity that hurts most people when they eat "bad" foods.

Oh, as for fat gain... You will gain fat if you gain weight. No way around that. You can never gain 100% muscle. Ever. Even on steroids. So just accept some minimal fat gain along with the muscle gain, then you just cut the fat later. If you don't believe that works, well it's how I got from 140 lbs at 6-8% bodyfat to 240 lbs at 10-12% bodyfat over the course of the last decade.
 
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Thanks, Totentanz, I'll do my best to eat appropriate calories. Why don't we go back to questions on training: do you do classical HST, meaning taking 1-2 weeks of SD, and 1-2 sets per MG 3 times a week with progressive loads? Or maybe you've found it more appropriate to break the cornerstone rules of HST, namely SD and progressively loading a MG at least 3 times a week? Reps, sets, cycle length, IMO don't really count as rules, because they are variables, and can be changed and still be called HST.
 
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I train HST style but a little different than most. You don't have to train a muscle group 3 times a week either, you know. The principle is chronic vs acute stimuli, so you just need to train with enough frequency. Twice a week for a muscle group is fine. I train every muscle group about 4-5 times every two weeks. I also do two lifts for each muscle group. One lift I do using a heavier load, and the other I do a lighter load. I don't do sets but instead cluster, rest-pause or use myo-reps to reach a total rep target. I also have to do a lot of warmup sets for my bigger lifts due to my relatively heavy RMs for stuff like squats, deads, rack pulls, etc.
As for SD... I only SD after every other cycle, or if during the end of a cycle, I hit a plateau when trying to push for new RMs, I always SD after that cycle. I firmly believe that SD is very important for continued progress, and any time you cannot make progress any longer, you should always take a 9 day SD after that cycle. Every single time I take a 9 day SD, I always achieve new progress the following cycle. As long as I'm eating enough, that is.
 
Thanks. I've searched HST FAQ all throughout yet again, Bryan speaks of loading at least 3 times a week.
BH: HST is a method of "loading," as opposed to simply "exercising" a muscle in order to
make it grow larger. This is done without regard to muscle performance, although most people
inevitably get much stronger. Each muscle group is trained at least every 48 hours. The easiest
way to do that is to do full-body workouts, three times per week. The 48 hour frequency is
based on the time course of changes in muscle-protein synthesis after a workout.
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I kind of suspect that doing it less frequently and not hitting that sweet spot of 36-48 hours wouldn't count as HST.
Then again. if you're still making good progress, all is good. Going heavy 3 times a week is hard. I wonder if Bryan himself does that?
 
HST_Rihad said:
Thanks. I've searched HST FAQ all throughout yet again, Bryan speaks of loading at least 3 times a week.

I kind of suspect that doing it less frequently and not hitting that sweet spot of 36-48 hours wouldn't count as HST.
Then again. if you're still making good progress, all is good. Going heavy 3 times a week is hard. I wonder if Bryan himself does that?
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Well your suspicions would be wrong. You should read the HST articles. All of them, including the Q&A's. HST is meant to be flexible so you can adapt it to your needs and your daily living. The principle is Frequency: Chronic stimuli rather than acute stimuli. Not "Thou shalt work each muscle group three times a week" - it is not a commandment, it is a guideline.

Here is a link to the articles: http://hypertrophy-specific.info/articles.html
There are places where Bryan does say strictly that you must load each muscle group 3 times a week - this is because if he started telling people in the articles that they could do it less, people would end up with the old bodypart splits again eventually, and he was trying to prove to people that you can train a muscle group more frequently than just once a week. In the forums, many times over the years, it has been established that you can train a muscle group only twice a week and still get results.

Keep in mind that unless you are relatively advanced, there is no real reason to be applying all these changes to HST. There is no reason to reduce frequency if you are not advanced. Going heavy 3 times a week is hard, but I did it for the first five years of my training. I didn't quit squatting three times a week until my 5 RM was getting high into the 300 lbs range, and I was able to handle it no problem. I've done cycles where I was deadlifting three times a week when my 5 RM was 405. It will work fine for you as long as you are overeating and getting enough protein.

The only reason to reduce frequency is once you get to the point where you require more volume to continue to grow.
 
Thanks for the great response. Really interesting how your shared your personal experience with training 3 times a week. Very reassuring. It so happens that Bryan too has answered my question on frequency. In short: 2 times is no worse than 3, and as it turns out, is the only way to achieve continued progress in more or less advanced guys. I'm not going to label myself "advanced", but I think I'll give 2 times a week a try for the sake of increased per-session volume. Does that automatically shrink room for only 4 increases instead of 6, or should I extend each microcycle to 3 weeks to allow for 6 increases? That would make it a 9 week cycle (10+5+5N), not counting SD.

p.s.: I hate to say this, but once again, empirical evidence has taken an upper hand over theoretical science. For fewest errors science should always try to explain why something happens, NOT dictate how something works, even if in reality it does not work that way. In this case training 2 times a week presumably broke the recommended rule of 36-48 hours of elevated protein synthesis. Based on that, one may think that training twice a week should have been inferior to training every 48 hours in terms of muscle growth rate. But in reality it's no worse, and if you take into account other factors initially neglected, such as heavy load tolerance (my term :)), it ends up being better.
 
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See the 48 hour rule doesn't really matter in the long run anyway, since in trained individuals, it looks like protein synthesis isn't elevated as long as it is in relatively untrained subjects. Guess where we got the information regarding how long protein synthesis lasts? That's right... on subjects who were relatively untrained. Seems that along with RBE, as you train more, you also have to worry about shrinking windows of protein synthesis. How much do they shrink? We don't know yet. Unless there is some new research out there about this that I haven't seen yet.

If you decide to hit muscle groups twice a week, the best way is to use a split and lift 3-4 times a week. I've actually gone to a three way split only to keep workout length down to 45 minutes or less. But a two way split works just as well. I like DC's split. If you use that split, and apply it to HST, then it works really good. If you do not already know this split, here is what it is:

Day 1

Chest
Triceps
Shoulders
Back Width (rack pulls, rows, etc)
Back Thickness (chins, pulldowns, etc)

Day 2

Biceps
Forearms
Calves
Hams
Quads

If you can lift four times a week with this split, then you will still be getting plenty of frequency and, if you overeat and get enough protein, should grow nicely. I would stick to two weeks for each rep range just for simplicity.
 
HST_Rihad said:
Borge Fagerli (Blade), who once contributed to HST greatly, has stopped using HST's frequency exclusively for purposes of mass gains. He might start with 3-4 times a week, then lower it to 2/week, all the way down to 1/week, increasing session volume with it.
http://www.predatornutrition.com/An-Interview-with-Borge-Fagerli-aka-Blade


Some people go for an am/pm split, effectively doing 6 workouts per week and doubling their volume. Others like Blade prefer 2/wk or even 1/wk. This difference really makes no sense to me. If frequency is important, why did Blade choose less frequent workouts?
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You missed this: "...for a certain duration" - meaning that frequency is a variable I change on a constant basis, but I always default back to higher frequency. In fact, I find frequency periodization even more effective than volume and have had some extremely productive experiments training a lift or a muscle group every day. It’s a dynamic process, so stop looking for the perfect frequency/volume (or intensity, exercise, rep speed etc) - you need to change based on progress indicators and what you have been doing.
 
Blade said:
You missed this: "...for a certain duration" - meaning that frequency is a variable I change on a constant basis, but I always default back to higher frequency. In fact, I find frequency periodization even more effective than volume and have had some extremely productive experiments training a lift or a muscle group every day. It’s a dynamic process, so stop looking for the perfect frequency/volume (or intensity, exercise, rep speed etc) - you need to change based on progress indicators and what you have been doing.
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Thanks! Have you too discovered that doing an exercise 3 times a week, and training a MG 3 times a week are different beasts? Taking squats as an example, my strength levels dropped by about 15-20% after switching to a Squat-Leg press alternation routine (still done 3 times a week). Same thing for bench press alternated with dips - dropped BP by about 10%.
 
Then you’re not managing volume correctly, you are training too hard (close to or beyond failure) or you simply didn’t give it enough time. Look up Matt Perryman and Bret Contreras’ articles on daily and high frequency squatting.
 
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