You’re standing in line 6 feet apart, waiting to get back into the gym clutching your ice-cold pre-workout, new gym bag, and fresh fit (because quarantine online shopping).
You wait for approximately 33 minutes. Perfect timing for your pre-workout to kick in.
You have to polish off the last bit so you lift up your mask to do so.
There are too many people over by your favorite dumbbell rack- so lucky you, you get a squat rack all to yourself (even though you planned on hitting shoulders)
You start squatting. You warm-up. Bar. 135, 225, 315 x10. It’s the first time you’ve had a bar on your back in 3 months.
The next day- you physically cannot move. “HELL YES SCORE! I LOVE THIS FEELING”.
The next week, the same scenario goes down, but you decide to jump up by 20 lbs ea side (that’s a 40lbs jump), & completely wreck yourself so you don’t revisit squats for some time… bringing you below square 1.
When I made my post about Maximal Recoverable Volume (MRV) last week, it was really well received. However, it left people thinking…how do I know what my MRV would even be?
The best way to determine your MRV would be to slowly progress yourselves until there is performance reduction.
Let’s say you’re squatting 225 for sets of 10, and you add 1 set per week, and you can no longer hit the 10 reps, then you’ve reached a point where you pushed past your MRV.
Or another way, which is more biofeedback related, is to go through a mental checklist:
-Do things feel unnecessarily heavy?
-Is my desire to train way too low?
-Is sleep off track and hunger down?
With finding the magic number of sets and reps, it takes time. You won’t get it down 4,6, or even 8 weeks back into the gym.
It will take several cycles to figure out your MRV
Especially, now, volume tolerance is highly variable with the type of training you 1.) like to do, 2.) external stress, 3.) nutrition, 4.)how detrained you are
There is no easy formula.
You must progress, but pay attention to performance and internal markers of increasing too much too fast.
Don’t be that guy/gal praising yourself for crawling out the gym the first day.
It doesn’t do you any good if you don’t come back until a week later!