Throughout history, most popular coaches or educators will have 1 key concept that they are most known for, it is my goal for this to be mine if I’m to reach any sort of real relevance in the fitness world—that is how profound I find this concept to be.
The entire concept revolves around this idea of “Redundancy” and while in most cases this word is associated with a negative connotation, in this case, it actually provides us with a framework that simplifies this concept of “optimal” training and how to achieve what is “optimal” for us into a very easy-to-navigate place.
There is nothing very complex or inherently scientific about what I’m going to talk about, rather it is the simplification of more complicated and nuanced topics by using SHEER COMMON SENSE and CRITICAL THINKING to create a framework for training where we just really can’t mess things up.
I’m going to break this concept down into parts, how I came to it, what it means, and how it applies in practice.
Introduction
Like most any other gym rat and fitness coach, my driving task has always been to seek out the answer to “what is the best/optimal way to do whatever goal it is in the gym”.
This ranges from the best diet for fat loss or growth, best way to train, best exercises for whatever muscle, fastest way to grow or lose fat, etc.
For over 10 years this has been my quest, many of those years figuratively (and literally at times) locking myself in my home office and spending countless hours researching published studies, books, blog articles, forums, and even hiring some of the best minds in the industry for coaching or consultations.
On top of this, I have been experimenting and applying this knowledge in my own training trying to see exactly what works best and what doesn’t, effectively using myself as my own test subject in my n=1 sample size study.
As the years have gone by, this has expanded to coaching others, what has now become hundreds of people 1-on-1 with online coaching, dozens of people in-person, and thousands of readers on this Substack and other social media platforms.
All of this has given me even more data, anecdotal but REAL data that has been applied in the real world that isn’t always as neat and organized as some RCT studies done at a university. This has given me a wonderful database to pull from when combined with the academic data, personal anecdotes, and going back and forth with other professionals in our industry.
This has led to some conclusions that have remained constant and applicable to the overwhelming majority of people.
What you find most of the time, things are context-dependent on certain conditions like age, gender, training development/training age, lifestyle, i.e. all of the aspects that make each individual unique. Often times during this research we find that we don’t even truly know or understand what the answer or definitive mechanisms are that drive the results we are looking for.
In the context of fitness, especially in terms of hypertrophy, you end up seeing that there isn’t just one specific method that works and some things work best for some people but fall short for others—you find that there ends up being multiple ways to accomplish the same goal, even in cases where contradicting principles end up with similar results.
We find that there are parameters that must be met according to things like the SAID Principle and certain principles that must take place to get the results we are after, but these principles and parameters are dynamic, not absolute, typically they exist in ranges.
For example, we find that for hypertrophy, muscle growth happens well in ranges of 5-30 reps, we find that we can do as little as say 4 sets per muscle per week all the way to 20-30+ sets per week and see growth, we can work a muscle as little as once all the way to 4 times a week and that will let us grow well. These lists goes on, but it’s rarely an absolute like “10 reps is where muscle grows and if you do more or less it doesn’t” because the body is dynamic, not some fixed machine.
This is what caused me to take a step back and the answer slapped in the face…
Finding Our Happy Medium
In the context of muscle growth, we have data showing all these wide ranges of sets of conditions where progress will happen.
Now, what is the best way to do this?
The “best way” doesn’t actually exist universally. There will always be a “it depends” attached to this question because, for example, if the data (making this up) shows us lifting 5 days per week is the best for muscle growth, but you can only go 3 days a week because that’s just how your life is, but the data shows 3 days is still very effective, then is 5 or 3 days a week the best for you? It’s 3, only an idiot could argue this no matter how much theory they use because REALITY is that 5 days a week just isn’t feasible and won’t allow the consistency we need to actually make progress, but 3 does so by default it is the “best” in this context.
Let’s take this a step further.
If we have data showing us we need 4 sets minimum per week to stimulate muscle growth and we can do 20 or even 30 sets per week maximum to allow us to recover well in a way to allow us to grow at a more efficient rate, then we have quite the big range, don’t we?
So we know 4 is enough but maybe it isn’t going to give us the leeway or assurance we need that we are truly doing enough, and maybe 20 sets per week is just a lot for us and we are worried that maybe it’s going to cause us to have issues recovering which is going to hurt how hard/well we perform in the gym.
Logically, we could then approach this with a thought process that practices some “redundancy”—we could say that we will do 10 sets per muscle a week because we KNOW that’s going to be enough for us to grow without a doubt, simultaneously we KNOW it isn’t going to be close to enough that we might run into issues with recovery or even just time because 20 sets per muscle a week spread between all the muscles in the body is A LOT of total sets per week.
This creates a failsafe situation where we don’t have to question the effectiveness of our training, we can have the peace of mind and results that come from finding a safe happy medium between 2 “extremes”.
This doesn’t necessarily mean choose the middle route every time, rather it means to find a point where we know we are for sure doing enough but erroring on the side away from doing too much—in my opinion, doing too much is almost worse than not doing enough because it is so much more wasted time and effort.
Another example of this is why I do my 2 sets load and back off set rep/set scheme in my own training.
Data and literature show us that 1 set done to failure should be enough to trigger a growth response in the muscle. Data also shows we can do far more than this, it could even be 10 sets per exercise like what is done in German Volume Training.
Breaking this down further we know that sets in the 6-9 (5-8 is also a common number in literature) are very effective and on paper the most effective range for muscle growth. However, we also know muscle growth can happen at much higher reps, all the way up to 40 reps, however, based on this principle I limit this to around 20 for practical application.
Another key consideration is even if 6-9 reps is “optimal for muscle growth”, if we allow ourselves to get stronger in say 12-15 or even 15-20 reps, this can translate to us becoming stronger in the 6-9 rep range + the fact we might not always be able to progressive overload the 6-9 rep range but maybe (and happens often) we are able to progressive overload in, say, the 12-15 rep range—this would drive a growth response independent of the 6-9 rep range.
So, here becomes the logic of doing a 6-9 rep load set then a 12-15 rep back off set. We are taking advantage of more of the rep range where muscle growth happens to try to ensure we are doing more than enough to grow.
This also takes advantage of the fact that maybe sure, 1 set of 6-9 might have been enough to grow, but by doing a second set at 12-15 we have most definitely made sure we checked all the boxes to cause growth.
What about 3 or more sets then?
Sure, we could absolutely do this and likely be just fine, but what I have found is after the 2nd set, my performance on that specific exercise will decrease substantially resulting in even less weight to even try to do the same number of reps. Now this could still be effective, BUT could we not then just perform another exercise we are more fresh at thus better performance/heavier weight, and try to progressive overload that movement to give ourselves a better chance for muscle growth?
There isn’t a right answer here, both methods of either doing more subsequent sets of the same exercise or doing an entirely new exercise can work, but we want to use logic and common sense within the overall “big picture” context of our entire training program and goal to see what makes the most sense for us while ensuring we have both done enough, yet not stretched into too much.
Adding to this, a key concept that is often overlooked is just how much we can grow from a single session/week/month/training block and what determines that rate of growth.
What you’ll find is at the end of the day, the difference in doing more than this point of redundancy ends up not being a huge difference over time. We can only progress so much, it’s not like we can add multiple reps session-to-session to a single lift, we are just happy when we get 1 extra to trigger a growth response. Within this, we also have a finite amount of calories and protein to utilize a day to grow and we have factors like myostatin—a hormone that limits our rate of muscle growth—so at the end of the day we can see a large amount of diminishing returns trying to do everything we think is going to maximize growth.
For this reason, ensuring we’ve done enough by a good enough margin but also ensuring we are staying away from too much is smart as even if it’s not “optimal” on paper, likely the difference in real-life application and results won’t look much different.
I find it much smarter to ensure we are recovering well and can perform our workouts as well/intensely as we can to be a much more meaningful endeavor. Doing so will help us limit fatigue, keep our body feeling well, decrease the risk of injury, and allow us to train for longer periods before needing to take a break/deload which can directly and indirectly lead us to better growth than if we are pushing the limits for diminishing return and thus reaching a point of significant accumulated fatigue quicker.
Practical Application
In its essence, we can use this Redundancy Principle to create programming that will work essentially universally for pretty much anyone because it puts us within all the parameters that will allow us to get results.
A place where this shines is for those who want to establish their own programming and experiment with what works best for them. You start at this point of Redundancy and you tweak your programming up and down to see what you respond to best, but because this starting place is solid, you actually have a good basis on where to gauge and judge your subsequent changes.
This isn’t necessarily a fixed point, it can vary based on how long you’ve been training, your age, what style of training you enjoy most, etc. but it will all fall within a certain range. It does require you to have a little bit of background knowledge (in terms of muscle growth, the answers are literally here) but you can find these parameters pretty much anywhere and in the published literature for training.
For coaches, this is an EXCELLENT, the best even, way I’ve found to create programs when working with a new client. We never really know how an individual will respond best, but we do know if we follow this framework they will be in a very good starting place. This is part of the method that goes into creating the programs I put out and why they work universally for essentially everyone who has used them (to this day I have NEVER gotten feedback that one of my programs didn’t work).
Again, this isn’t just going with the middle ground, it’s more intelligent than that, what it is rather is using common sense to error towards the most favorable result while ensuring we have enough margin of error that we aren’t missing on any big results. In a sense, we are operating within the spectrum of “optimization” because we are working in a set of conditions where we’re doing just a touch more than just enough but so far away from too much that we aren’t getting any negatives such as excess fatigue or “junk volume”.
It’s important we don’t fall into the thinking trap that “more is more” because in fitness it absolutely is not as the body has finite recovery capabilities. We also don’t want to do the absolute bare minimum if that means that we are potentially leaving progress on the table that can be resolved with such a small amount of extra effort that it in no way affects our recovery because if the difference between 1 and 2 sets is what compromises your recovery when it’s been shown the body can handle north of 30, even 50 sets per muscle a week, then you have bigger issues.
Funny enough on the subject of issues, on the phone the other day I was bitching and moaning, going on about how if the healthcare system in the USA was actually good, doctors would give their patients exercise advice and actual plans, like a universal printout as the principles of fitness ARE universal, and how that would help some people (not all, but *some* would actually apply it), and that’s when it hit me that you could build something exactly like this using this principle of Redundancy.
All-in-all this is a philosophy of extreme common sense, we are being redundant in a way that we are absolutely ensuring we are getting the results we want. I will expand on this more in the future and build it out more specifically as this is my brainchild and I way I look at fitness that just makes absolute sense to me.
This is a post I want you to really think about and see where you can apply this to your own training and see how this works for you.
#WAGMI
Your friend,
- BowTiedOx
DISCLAIMER
This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Please consult a medical professional before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol. These are opinions from a Cartoon Ox.