Volume is the driver of strength training. Not only that, but volume is the driver of all training. You know how I get better at skydiving? Moar skydiving! Want to build more muscle? Moar volume!

Volume is the foundation that you build all the levels above upon, as well as the mortar that goes between the bricks. While certainly not the only important metric in strength training—you can’t increase volume indefinitely, and to do so would be ignoring the other directions you can make progress in—it is immeasurably important to your progress.

The surprising truth about training volume is that most people don’t do enough of it, and most people can handle much, much more than they currently do. Don’t believe me? Add up your daily volume from your past five workouts and find the average. (Don’t have a training log? Shame on you.) My money says the over-under is 8,000 pounds and I’ll take the under.

I’ve been precisely tracking training for myself and every member of The Movement Minneapolis for over four years, and have over 500,000 rows of valuable data. Sifting through this confirms a pattern that experienced coaches will find familiar – the people who make the most progress are moving about 15,000 pounds per workout with an average weekly volume of 50,000 to 60,000 pounds.

At the risk of oversimplifying: want more strength gains and better physique improvements in less time? Do more volume.

Yes, the intensity (the absolute or relative weight you’re lifting) with which you lift matters, as does the density (pounds per minute), but both my data and the body of scientific evidence available points to the same conclusion: neither matters as much as total volume.

Greg Nuckols discussed this phenomenon in his episode of Evil Sugar Radio. The Russians’ blunt tool to solve training problems is more volume. Based on results, this tactic seems to be working for them.

Three years ago, I took on a personal challenge to lift a million pounds of volume over the course of one month. I wrote about that experience here.

My challenge to you is to take on Million Pound November yourself. As a gym, The Movement Minneapolis has created a team challenge. Teams of members from the gym will be attacking this challenge collectively, pooling their volume to reach a total of a million or more by the end of the month.

Accomplishing this task alone is no small feat and is not for beginner or even intermediate lifters. You need both a solid foundation of strength, as well as a keen understanding of your own physiology so that you reap rewards from the challenge instead of it leaving you worse off than before.

For a bit of perspective, if you train three times per week for a total of 12 workouts, you would have to perform 83,333 pounds of volume per workout. Most people average 8,000. Training twenty times still means 50,000 pounds per workout. Training daily with occasional breaks leaves you with a more reasonable per-session volume.

Here are a few suggestions of ways to tackle #MilPndNov:

• By yourself, for the truly daring, and those who are ready for the challenge.
• In a small team of two or three training partners as a realistic and achievable goal, as well as a target on which to focus a month of training together.
• In a larger team of eight to 10 people, be they local or spread across the globe, to stay accountable and chip away together at a mountainous achievement.

No matter how you tackle it, the #MilPndNov will net you several rewards:

• Setting a habit of consistently getting to the gym and putting in the work.
• By and large, more volume equals more results. If you put in the work, your body will respond and adapt. You’ll like what happens.

A few guidelines are in order, but this isn’t a strict challenge and you’re welcome to interpret as you see fit:

• The main drivers of training volume are the big, compound lifts such as squats, deadlifts, ballistics such as swings, rows, pull-ups, and pressing. Heavy partials can massively inflate your training volume, and certainly have your place, but would skew the data. Stick to whatever variations test best for you, but don’t try to game the system by just doing partials just to rack up volume. You’re just cheating yourself. Or do, I don’t really care.
• Be reasonable with how you count your bodyweight exercises. Unless it’s in a handstand, you’re not pushing full bodyweight in a pushup, so estimate and adjust accordingly.
• You are the only one who stands to gain or lose here, so keep it easy and stay in a eustress state (i.e., don’t push through lifts that feel awful). Pushing to hit an external number might feed your ego, but it’ll break your body.

Throughout the month, I will provide resources to help you stay on track, keep you inspired and motivated, and also throw out the occasional door prize to keep it fun. And possibly a million pound meme or two.

 

Several years ago in late October I decided to undertake a personal challenge – the Million Pound November Challenge. I was already planning to participate in Movember the following month, but that wasn’t the real challenge. I figured as long as I am growing a mustache I might as well attempt a heroic feat of strength that can be accomplished only by someone growing a wicked ‘stache.

I failed at one of those tasks, but I succeeded spectacularly at the other. On a cold, dark night in mid-November, I had to cut short (pun intended) my goal of growing a wild and wooly mustache because of a photo shoot that came up.

But, I did lift a lot of weight.  In fact I lifted:

399,280 lbs of Sumo Deadlifts in 1550 reps
152,989 lbs of Kettlebell Rows in 2513 reps
97,539 lbs of Push Presses in 2694 reps
51,483 lbs of Chin-Ups in 272 reps
59,220 lbs of Push-Ups in 329 reps
14,580 lbs of Pull-Ups in 81 reps

Those lifts and the many others I did added up to a grand total of 1,066,554 pounds in 22 workouts from November 1st to November 30th.  In fact, I hit the one million mark on the 27th.

I will discuss the role of volume in training a bit more in a blog post announcing something exciting tomorrow, but suffice to say that volume is one of the main drivers of strength training. If there’s one thing you can do to see better results, it’s just simply do more work.

What did this do to my body?  From November 3rd to December 5th I gained 5 inches from head to toe:

Bodyweight: +5lbs

Waist: .75″
Neck: .1″
Shoulders: .8″
Hip: 1.25″
Thigh: 1.25″
Arm (Bicep): .63″
Forearm: .5″
Chest: .25″

During this period I maintained a body fat of around 7-8%.

What did it do to my strength? I didn’t specifically test any strength quantities directly before and after, but I can tell you that a few months later I hit my best-ever triple-bodyweight deadlift of 603 at 195. In addition to that, I was over all probably the strongest I have ever been.

What did I eat?  Pretty much whatever I felt like.  A couple times we went to Axel’s Bonfire and crushed bull bites, a half a chicken, sides, and the epic chocolate chip cookie with ice cream dessert.  I probably drank 4-5 quarts of chocolate milk during the month, usually a quart at a time.

Other times I just wasn’t all that hungry, so I ate when I got hungry.  That’s it.

Supplements?  Just creatine.  Jack3d on occasion.  I don’t think I had a protein shake all month.  Maybe a couple.  Nothing worth writing home about.

Did I feel crushed all month: no.

Did I feel tired all the time: no.

Was I sore: no.

Did I get hurt? No.  (In fact, I resolved a shoulder issue that crept up beforehand.)

Every movement I did tested well and I stopped all sets before the elements of effort set in.

Would I recommend to everyone that you set an external goal: NO.  It is too easy to get focused on the goal, and break your body when you stop listening to it. (But if you do tune in, it just might be possible.)

One more thing to consider is what was going on in the rest of my life at the time that I did this. In short, very little. I was able to direct much of my ability to resolve stress towards my training because I had much less stress in other parts of my life. While none of the training was distressful, it is likely that it wasn’t because of how much extra stress I could handle. I’ve attempted this amount of volume in a month one other time and I had to shut it down because I just couldn’t handle it, so context matters.

Walk into any GNC or nutrition store (which is in itself sort of ironic in that they don’t sell any actual foods, the best source of actual nutrition) and you’ll find a bright-eyed reasonably muscled twenty year old standing in front of a wall of pills, powders, and potions happy to tell you what supplements you’re totally missing to actually get results from working out.

By and large none of these do anything worthwhile.

But there is one supplement that is so overwhelmingly positive that I think every man, and some women depending on a caveat I will mention later, should be taking it.

That supplement is creatine. It is likely the most studied sports supplement on the planet, and is not in any way shape or form a steroid. Creatine is a naturally occurring organic acid that is synthesized from amino acids in the kidney and liver. Creatine is, at the risk of over-simplifying, used in the formation of ATP which is the actual energy source your muscles use directly to contract.

Creatine is not an essential nutrient, although you likely get a sufficient amount of it if you eat a balanced diet including animal protein, because it can be synthesized from L-arginine, glycine, and L-methionine. That being said low levels of supplementation, on the order of the typical dose of 5g/day, have shown numerous positive effects that indicate that dietary and intrinsically produced amounts are not sufficient to gain as much benefit as you can get from supplementation.

While creatine doesn’t make you magically gain muscle, in concert with a strength program you can improve your gains by a measurable margin. A 2012 review in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research of almost a hundred papers concluded that creatine supplementation effectively amplifies the effects of strength training for strength and hypertrophy, improves quality and benefit of of high intensity speed training, improves aerobic endurance performance in trials lasting more than 150 seconds, seems to produce positive effects on strength, fat free mass, daily living performance and function in young and older people, demonstrates a long-term up regulation of gene expression when creatine is administered together with resistance training and basically makes you a sexier beast as long as you actually lift when you take it.

In 140 characters or less: you can get a little more work or volume out of every training session.

In terms of fat loss, NY Times Bestselling Author John Romaniello says: “People often avoid creatine while they’re dieting because they believe it’s a muscle building supplement only and it’ll prevent them from losing weight. This is true in an obtuse way, where only the weight on the scale matters. It’s true that creatine might prevent you from having that “boner-inducing” experience of losing 10 pounds in the first week because you drop so much water weight. But I don’t care about water weight, I care about my clients losing fat. Creatine helps in a number of ways with this: The first of these are obvious in that it allows you to perform better in strength training. However, a secondary benefit is that it helps in the retention of lean body mass under a caloric deficit.”

In terms of sport and athletic performance the data so far is astonishingly conclusive: creatine works and it works well.

But that’s not even the biggest reason I think you should take it.

A growing body of evidence is showing that creatine may have as many benefits for brain function as it does for skeletal muscle. For example, an Australian study using vegetarians (they tend to have lower creatine levels and as a result provide better test subjects – yes, you might be getting enough for these effects from eating meat) showed that in a working memory test people taking creatine were able to recall an average of 8.5 numbers compared to 7 for those taking a placebo. The groups were flipped after , washed out for 6 weeks, and then tested again and the effect persisted.

For those athletes playing contact sports that lead to inevitable concussions, a 2000 study showed that creatine may have neuro-protective effects in the case of traumatic brain injuries to the tune of 36% in mice and 50% in rats.

All of these benefits come at an exceptionally low cost. The European Food Safety Authority, which is significantly more stringent than United States regulators when it comes to food additives and supplements, published a memorandum stating that long-term intake of creatine at 3g per day is risk-free. While I don’t necessarily believe that anything is inherently risk-free, these are strong words from an authority with extremely high standards for safety and evidence.

The biggest risk from creatine seems to be in that it sucks a little more water into working muscle and may affect hydration in high heat – but this is easily mitigated by maintaining good hydration.

You get all of this for under two pennies per day. Creatine monohydrate, the only kind you need, is one of the cheapest supplements out there. From True Protein you can buy 500g in bulk, roughly a 3-month supply, for $7.45. (Or a kilo from Amazon for $19 and free shipping with Prime.) You can buy even more and get it even cheaper, or drop the dose to 3g/day and stretch it even further to under a penny a day. Especially relative to the amount of benefit you can’t find a better deal.

I mentioned a caveat with regards to women. The main issue is that due to creatine causing an increase in water retention some women may feel “bloated” or that creatine causes them to look puffy. This is an individual thing in both effect size and reaction to it, so the best thing to do is just to try it out and see if it works for you. If it doesn’t, simply discontinue taking it and you’ll return to your normal physiological levels of intramuscular creatine in a few days.

None of this is to say that it is impossible that some body of evidence in the future won’t reveal some unknown and long-term non-linear effects. Anything is possible. But as the evidence stands right now, creatine appears to be both the safest and most effective, both in terms of sports performance and other cognitive and neurological benefits, supplement available. And it’s pretty damn close to free.

In a world full of junk supplements, creatine is a shining beacon of truth and light. I strongly recommend testing it out and reviewing your training logs to see if you notice a bump in performance. If you use a cognitive training service like Lumosity you may be able to track the cognitive benefits there, although I would argue that the benefits are on the order of long-term small percentages that matter but may not be measurable. Either way, I think creatine is a solid “why would you not” supplement.