Less is More and More is Less

“Do as much as necessary, not as much as possible”

I recently heard this quote on a podcast and it got me thinking a lot about the culture around training and fitness in today’s world. With the explosion of CrossFit and the trend of insanely high-volume training, it seems like there is a belief among many people in and around the fitness industry that more is better. People will feel like they haven’t gotten a full workout in unless they are panting, drenched in sweat and can’t move their legs at the end of a workout. While you may get a toned body and nice physique doing things this way, from a performance standpoint this is far from optimal. If looking good is your only concern, then this is definitely an effective strategy. However, performance training relies heavily around the management of fatigue, as fatigue reduces performance. The goal is to tax the system just enough so that it causes a physiological change and improvement in performance, without causing excessive amounts of fatigue. This can be a fine line to walk and we’ll discuss in further detail a number of different strategies on how to not end up on the overly fatigued side of that line. Ultimately, using unnecessarily high volume is an inefficient way to train and ignores a concept called minimum effective dose.

The concept of minimum effective dose (MED) is probably most commonly used in the world of medicine and prescription drugs. In medicine, MED states that medicine should be prescribed at whatever the smallest possible dose is that elicits the desired effects of the drug or intervention. Anything beyond that is inefficient, wasteful, and potentially harmful. This idea can be applied to so many other areas, but I think it is incredibly important when talking about exercise. It ultimately boils down to efficiency. In medicine and in exercise, we always want to be as efficient as possible with what we prescribe (whether it be a drug or exercise). Using the analogy of a coach or trainer being a doctor, we, as trainers, should look to prescribe the smallest amount of exercise necessary to get the results we are looking for. Anything more is pointless, a waste of time and could potentially lead to injury. Why spend 2-3 hours in the gym doing an inordinate amount of work when 1 hour will get you the desired affects you need.

To me the concept of MED also relates to the idea of diminishing marginal returns from economics. The law of diminishing marginal returns suggests that after a certain point getting more of something doesn’t offer you as much utility or benefit as when you first received that thing. For example, if you are given an Xbox you get a certain amount of joy and benefit out of that one Xbox. Now if you were given a second Xbox, that wouldn’t elicit nearly the same amount of joy or benefit for you as the first. You can see how if you keep getting more and more Xbox’s that you gain less and less enjoyment with each successive Xbox. This concept is one way to view excessive volume in training. At a certain point you stimulate the physiological response required to gain the traits you hope to improve. So why add more volume after you have reached this point? Again, both the concept of MED and diminishing marginal return have the underlying theme of efficiency. In the fitness industry, I think we can learn quite a bit and take away a lot of knowledge from other industries. These are just two concepts that have a huge applicability to training. We have all heard the saying “work smarter, not harder.” I believe that this saying is another good way to think about the concept of MED.

After hearing the first quote, I was reminded of a sprint coach who follows a similar approach to his training and utilizes the concept of MED. Tony Holler is a highly successful high school track coach who is very adamant about not adding excessive volume to training just because you feel you need to crush your athletes. He often talks about not training a racehorse to be a plow horse. The idea here being that if you want to train an explosive athlete to perform optimally, you should not train them like an athlete that needs to be able to do lots and lots of work. This is due to the almost polar opposite nature of training an explosive athlete versus an endurance athlete. Everything from the job that is required of them to their physiological make-up is different. He talks about his views on excessive volume in training in an article he wrote for Strengthcoach.com which you can read HERE (see facts 4, 6 and 9 in the article). The article itself goes into a lot of depth about his views on training sprinters in specific, but there a lot of good takeaways for training in general. Ultimately, I think it is important to know the purpose and the “why” of your training. If your purpose of training is to crush yourself with tons of volume then great, do that. But if your goal is to get faster or jump higher or get stronger, you probably don’t need as much volume as you think you do. The main takeaway from listening to Holler is that we should question and look deeply into the need of adding more and more volume to training. Is it really important to what your goals are? Is that extra volume going to get you the desired results? May it potentially hinder your results? I think these are all important questions to ask when examining the “more is better” and “go hard or go home” culture that surrounds training in today's world. Don’t get me wrong, there is definitely a time and place for high volume training, but it is important that you are cognizant that more is not always better and sometimes less is more.

So how does one determine the MED for their training? This is a tough question, but there are a couple guidelines and factors I like to consider when determining this. The first thing to know is that there is no hard and fast rule of how much training is effective. Its really a game of trial and error. Before anything else, it is important to always question what you are doing and why you are doing it. Know what you are looking to accomplish and use that as your guide. When looking at your program or training always bring it back to your goals and desired results. Is what you are doing getting you closer to those goals? Is it necessary to get you to reach those goals? If not, don’t do it. If it is producing the results you want, keep on keeping on. To be able to tell if you are really hitting that MED, it is crucial to listen to your body. How are you feeling after training? Are you able to recover before your next workout? And, ultimately, are you seeing results? That last question will take time to be able to answer, but the more in-tune you are with how you are responding to your training the better. Lastly, when it comes to determining how much volume you should keep in your training, remember the following: the higher the volume, the more recovery time is necessary. If you crush something like the German volume training protocol which consists of 10 sets of 10 reps of an exercise, your body is going to need a lot more time to recover than if you just do 3 sets of 5. So, depending on how frequently you train, you should adjust your volume accordingly. Theoretically, you can train everyday of the week if you are keeping the volume incredibly low and avoiding fatigue (this is an actual method of training that has been termed micro-dosing). If you train less frequently, say 2-3 times per week, you can keep the volume higher since you have more time to recover.

At the end of the day it really comes down to knowing why you are doing what you are doing. Are you just training to train? Or are you training to improve speed or strength or hypertrophy? Know your “why”, use that to guide you and remember to keep your training efficient.