Volume Hacks For Tough Movements

Volume builds muscle, increases heart and lung health and powers strength gains, improving form and strengthening soft tissues, and conditioning the central nervous system and metabolism to power you through tough sessions.

Great.

Here's an anecdote from my personal experience. At about 25 I was bored of weightlifting. My deadlift was getting good by my standards (bodyweight X2.25, so nothing spectacular but plenty for me) but my other lifts were stagnant at low numbers. I thought gymnastics looked cool and fun, tried a few seated Ls and was surprised how hard they were, and read a couple of articles about basic gymnastic exercises. OK, I thought, I'll head to the park, do maybe 2 sets of 12 muscle ups, then some lever work and round it off with a few planches at the end.

I truly believe that my own ignorance and naivety were gifts at this point. Because when I found I couldn't do a muscle-up, or even near one, couldn't even get close to a lever, couldn't even hold a faux planche, not for a second, not even close, I realised I had to be on to something. This stuff was worth knowing, because it was so hard.

I still think I was right about that, but along the route to being able to hold front lever, muscle up for reps and discover that I've been training planche all wrong and that's why I've never made any progress (can anyone see a pattern emerging?) I've discovered something that's useable if you're heading down the same route, but also if you want to train in the 85-95 percent strength or power ranges for anything else. Sprints, weightlifting, whatever. It doesn't just work for gymnastics, and if you have a stopwatch you can figure it all out for yourself, preferably without spending four years with your hands in the wrong position.

First, let's stop an identify what the actual problem is.

Because you can't do more than one. So if you're at the stage where on any given occasion that you try to perform a movement, you're not sure it's actually going to work, or you find that failure can creep up on you, saying "Oh, just do triples and work up from there" is kind of unhelpful. Tell you what, you do triples of gallimores and then get back to me and tell me how you worked up from there, OK?

So that's our problem. How do we build on singles?

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Well luckily for us there are several sports that have the same problem, so there are quite a few different solutions. I'm going to go into as many as possible,and depending on the movement you're struggling with, hopefully the answer that fits your needs in in here. If not, get hold of me in the comments and I'll see what I can do for you.

How To Build Volume With Singles

1: Time Your Singles

Treat singles as sets, and do them with timed intervals. Your body doesn't know the difference between 3 reps of above you can do 3 times and 1 rep of a move you can do once (well, more or less). So treat your single as a set. The first time you do this, it's research. Do your movement, then time it out until you feel ready to have another shot. Repeat until the rest period is over 5 minutes or you fail the move, whichever comes first. The longest time you got is the time you should use between singles. 

2: The O-lift Method

Doesn't require you to snatch. But it does require you to copy how O-lifters program their lifting. Olympic lifts aren't really something you can do for reps. Yeah, yeah, Crossfit, but look at their injury rate (and their horrible O-lift form) and you'll see what I mean. O-lifters do singles and doubles of their competition lifts, but that's not what we're interested in. We're interested in the rest of a training session. See, an Oly lifter might do a handful of snatches with weight in a training session. Technique, power, load — he's fried after six or eight. So now what does he do? He does lifts that are part of the movement of a snatch without its technical demands. The weight stay high and the reps stay low, so you might see him do sets of threes of overheard squats, high pulls and snatch grip deadliest or Klokov presses, all moves deigned to make him both stronger, and better, in the snatch. One more time: both stronger, and better. These support exercises are built out of parts of the snatch. 

So you can do the same with your movement. If you're using something that's based on progressions, you can use high-load support exercises that mimic part of the movement. For levers, you can do a loaded movement that takes the stabilisation requirement down but leaves the arm and lat strength requirement in, or vice versa. You want to preserve as much of the shape as well as the muscular demands of the target move as possible.This is probably the way that requires the most technical know-how and the best understanding of where you're weakest.

3: Greasing The Groove

When you do a movement often you get better at it. You're talking about neurological adaptations like improved motor unit recruitment and better motor patterning, as well as some muscular adaptations, all happening at once. If you want to program high volume singles without frying your central nervous system, try the grease the groove system — what a friend of mine refers to as "paying the tool to the exercise troll." Basically, all you're doing is doing a rep, or a partial — don't sweat getting it right every time - every time you pass the equipment. The most effective exercises to use with this are those you can do on a pull-up bar and the best place to put it is the bathroom doorway, in my humble opinion.

The least effective exercises are those that require special equipment — if you don't happen to have an Olympic bar and number plates just hanging around the place this isn't going to do much for your snatch. In that case, you could program this by figuring out where your target movement is weak and programming a "pay the toll" move that targets that weakness. If you're weak overhead, pay your tool with dumbbell overhead presses. No, you're not working directly on the move you care about, but when you go to do that move, your newfound stability and skill overhead will pay off.

4: Support

Rather than using the "O-lift Method," breaking your target movement into sections and training them, here you're looking at ways to build a volume base to support your target movement. So instead of focussing on the movement, you'll be focussing on the strength or mobility requirements that movement imposes. For example, taking the lever example we used earlier, levers require core strength and arm and lat strength, so you could look to hollow body work and rolling sit-ups like Russian or Turkish sit-ups, together with some reverse crunches or dragon flags, to build that core strength, as well as some L work, and pull-ups, dips and inverse rows to build general upper body strength oriented toward levers. When you're programming this way the temptation is to throw the toolbox at the problem. A bit of this, a few of those, two sets of these at the end because I like them.

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Hopefully you're closer to being able to build sessions that will move your tough movements forward. If you've found this helpful, or you think I've got something all wrong, or you just want more detail, get hold of me in the comments section below.