David Dellanave

If you’re newly paying attention to training volume, whether for Million Pound November or simply because it’s an important metric to understand how your training affects your body, you may run in to questions about how to track certain things.

For a bit of background, tracking accurately and diligently is a critical component of the Movement method of training, and I’ve built two tools to facilitate it. One is internal to members of my gym, the other is adaptifier which is available to the public.

As such, we’ve had a lot of time to figure out how to quantify various things that might at first seem hard to track. This applies to keeping score for Million Pound November as it does every day tracking.

• Bodyweight Movements: Use an appropriate percentage of bodyweight. For example, push-ups are about 70% bodyweight in the hands, adjust accordingly for decline or incline. Bodyweight lunges are about 50% bodyweight, whereas bodyweight squats are about 25% bodyweight. Pull-ups are 100% of bodyweight.
• Core & Short-ROM Movements: Things like sit-ups or planks aren’t as obvious to track as a bodyweight squat for example. For these I arbitrarily use a value of 25 or 50 depending on how challenging they are. It’s not perfect, but gives you a consistent way to quantify them and that’s more than sufficient.
• Carries & Non-Stationary Movement: Use the weight you’re carrying as your resistance, and equate about 10 yards or meters of distance as 1 repetition. Multiply accordingly.
• Weighted Movements: Use the weight on the bar only. I don’t count barbell back squats as a 25% bodyweight squat plus the barbell.

A couple points on tracking in general if you’re NOT trying to keep “score” for the MPN Challenge:

• Running & Other Cardio: Use your pace on a scale of 1-10 as your resistance, 10 would be as fast as you can go. For reps, multiply your distance in miles or kilometers (just be consistent) by 100. i.e. 1 mile = 100 reps, or 26.2 miles = 2620 reps.
• Random Other Movement Things: Quantifying things in other forms of training can be really useful, even if they don’t fit into convenient buckets. After a while you’re understand what 3, 5, or 10 thousand pounds of volume “feels” like. You can rate an indoor climbing session on a scale of 1-10 of difficulty, and then track the volume based on that feel of how much work you did. Provided you’re internally consistent,  it’ll be useful over time.

I can’t stress enough how important tracking volume is. Whether your training is going well or poorly you can tell an enormous amount about what is going on simply from this one number. Once you get a handle on how to manipulate volume and how your physiology responds, you’ve unlocked one of the major keys to unbelievable progress.

As you can probably imagine, moving a million pounds of total volume in just a month pours on a fair amount of stress. For context, I’ve lifted six times in the past six days, and accumulated more total volume than any of the six-person teams currently doing the challenge at The Movement.

You might think that I’m well on my way to injury, or that I’m doing a lot of pre-hab, correctives, or soft tissue work to stay healthy. But I’m not doing any of that bullshit, and I won’t get hurt.

I’m confident I can keep loading on the volume not because my form is perfect, I’ve done the right warm-ups, or because I’ve dutifully done my corrective exercises.

The reason people get hurt lifting is not because of what and how but what and when.

The exact same movement done the exact same way one day can be the movement that hurts you the next day. Which is why so many injuries seem so random, so sudden, and so unpredictable. Sure we try to explain it after the fact that our form felt off, or it was because of what you did the day before, or whatever. And maybe that is true, or maybe it’s just ex post facto.

The actual reason for most training injuries is that you did something at a time when your body couldn’t handle that stress.

If only you could have known that it was a bad time to do it, you could have avoided it.

But you can.

​The core benefit of using biofeedback to test your movements and exercise is a way to filter out the things that your body is responding badly to right now. If you test negatively to a deadlift with just the bar, how do you suppose your body is going to respond when you load double bodyweight onto the bar? Yeah sure you might get away with it in the sense that you don’t become aware of an acute injury, but your stress load and margin for error is going to be right at the very edge.

Over the years I’ve had countless people come back to me and say “David, I really wanted to do frogger thrusters but they didn’t test well so I did them anyway, and that’s when I felt a pop in my back.” I never like hearing these stories, but I’ve heard enough of them that it’s important to note.

Let me state this as plainly as possible:

I have not found a single more effective way to avoid injury than to test all your movement with biofeedback.

No screening strategy, no stretching protocol or system, no corrective exercise model, nothing is even remotely as effective as simply testing all your movement, doing what tests well, and modifying or skipping what doesn’t.

Despite the many, many attempts there is no way to reliably predict if someone is going to get hurt. Movement screens don’t work. But we can know right now, from one moment to the next how you’re actually responding to movement.

Corrective exercise systems fail for the same reason. They’re not reliable or predictive because they assume everyone responds the same way to the correctives. If it’s a “corrective” it’s good for you, right? No, because if it doesn’t test well then it’s just bad movement. On the flip side all movement that tests well is corrective. You know what is a great corrective exercise for posture? A heavy deadlift (that tests well.)

Biofeedback is like my secret weapon when it comes to staying healthy and being able to continue training consistently, even at extreme volumes and frequencies.

If you’re not testing all your movement my only question is, why not?

Every November we dust off the Million Pound November challenge at my gym. The quick description of it is that it’s a team effort (teams of six this year) to lift a million pounds of volume in one month. This challenge was born out of a something I undertook many years ago to do it by myself.

This year up until October 31st I had no intention of doing it myself, but one of my gym members asked me if I was doing Million Pound November at the exact right moment and I said: “Well. Yeah, I think I am.”

It’s hard. Alone it works out to be 33,334 pounds of lifting every single day of the month. In a team of six it works out to about 14,000 pounds over 12 workouts. Much more manageable, but still requires consistency.

Anyway, my point in all of this is that I want to create some context for those volume numbers, because total training volume is one of the absolute most important variables in training, and yet one that most people never give any thought to.

Did you know that most humans eat between three and five pounds of food per day? Whether you eat all your meals from the value menu at McD’s or fresh vegetables and hunted game, you probably eat around the same total weight of food per day.

There’s an inherent relationship between hunger, satiety, food density and volume.

As there is with lifting volume.

Most workouts, whether a bodybuilding plan, a heavy low-rep powerlifting session, or a high-density metabolic circuit come in around 10-15,000lbs. You’ll “feel” a workout around this volume as something that was fairly easy to accomplish and you likely won’t feel beat up after it.

Around 20,000lbs is where a workout gets harder just to complete it. You can again “feel” when you’ve crossed into this territory. You’ll also notice a significant difference in your results when you’re regularly hitting this kind of volume.

Finally, at 30,000lbs and above you’re in an entirely different orbit. It’s sort of the workout equivalent of eating 10 pounds of food. You can do it, but you’re going to work hard for it. It requires shifting gears, lowering overall intensities to ranges you wouldn’t normally train in. Believe it or not, once you’ve crossed this threshold it’s not that hard to double, or even triple it. In the same way that once you know how to pace yourself to run five miles, you can pretty easily run ten or fifteen.

Paying attention-to and manipulating total volume can be an extremely powerful lever in your training. If you haven’t been making much progress, try literally doubling your average workout volume. Things will change, believe me.

In case you’ve never paid any attention to volume, it’s simple to calculate. Simply multiply the total number of reps by the weight moved. Let’s say you deadlift 350 for 3 sets of 8 reps. 350 * 24 = 8500. Do this for all your movements and add it all up.

I’d encourage you to go back through your notebook for the past few weeks and calculate your volume. I’d bet it’s under 10,000 on average. Now you know one big thing you can manipulate for better results.

For my part, I’m 154k pounds into the month, and I haven’t trained yet today. On Wednesday I’ll explain how I use biofeedback to stay healthy with so much volume.