Fit to Transform Podcast with Coach Nikias
Oct 2, 2026 · 55 min · 9 segments
PhD student and fellow coach Dakota Tiede joins me on the show to discuss a study he has recently contributed to. If you increase volume by 20% or 120%, which increase yields the greatest gains? Tune…
Dakota TiedeGuest
Nikias TomasielloHostalso was thinking of a different takeaway and i agree with you on the first one what i was thinking was also that they went from their typical volume of 15 sets up by either 20% or 120%, which is such a sharp increase that some people may be reluctant to make so quickly for fear of an inability to recover.
And we have seen from this study that over eight weeks, even such a, let's call it an overnight increasing volume by 120%, it didn't really seem to cause so much fatigue as to impair adaptations.
So a takeaway for me would be, well, if you're in a situation, for example, where you've had to deload for a week and then returning to your typical volume would be a 120% increasing volume.
It doesn't seem like you have to wait and go through a gradual process of going from your deload volume up by two sets, then up by two sets over several weeks.
You could just go back to normal and it doesn't seem like this will impair your ability to adapt.
Yeah, that is another great thing to point out, and thank you for doing that, right, is that we don't see impairments in hypertrophy, right? We don't see people start to regress, which is sort of, you know, another point I believe that they were getting at with the idea of this study, right, is they thought maybe they would start to see that inverted U type relationship that, you know, 10 years ago, people thought that might have still been a thing.
Whereas, you know, you would probably have to get up to pretty unreasonably high volumes to start to actually see regression, right? Beyond what even competitive bodybuilders think.
are doing right so if anything we see a plateauing at these really really high volumes right and again we just have less data in general at these high high volumes like 30 plus uh sets per week right so there's a lot of uncertainty But there's still really no indication that you would regress from that, right? So it doesn't seem like all this extra volume is causing so much fatigue that you actually start to lose muscle and underperform, right?
Even in the Pellan meta regression that we've been referencing, I believe they were looking at up to 40 sets per week, maybe even higher.
And all they saw was that there were diminishing returns for hypertrophy, but there weren't inverted returns where people started seeing regressions.
So, I mean, that's a good takeaway for people practically, right? Even, you know, an aggressive increase in volume is probably at least safe in terms of not losing muscle, right? And you maybe don't need to worry about doing a ramp approach, right? If you do want to increase your volume, you might be able to get away with just doing that sudden increase.
As a coach, I like kind of like a step wise increase in volume, right? So if we're talking about like over the course of a year, we're trying to ramp up volume in a client, instead of doing a ramp, I guess I shouldn't say ramp up, right.
If we're trying to increase volume in a client, instead of doing a ramp approach where, you know, maybe each week we're adding sets or instead of doing that sort of overnight approach, which would be similar to what, uh, was done in this study, right.
So maybe we do a training block where we add two sets and then the next training block, we add an additional two sets and so on and so forth.
Um, That way you're eventually getting there over time, but you're not, again, it doesn't seem like it has any negative effects, at least in terms of muscle growth, but I think there could be potential negative effects in terms of like mood state and your perception of fatigue, right? So I would prefer to sort of still take that slow approach and slowly increase over time rather than the overnight increase that is, you know, pretty large.
I would agree with you and you beat me to the punch which is a good thing because you're the guest but I was going to bring up the fact that in this study ultimately they were looking at molecular and morphological changes so changes at the molecular level and also at the level of the shape of the muscle but they didn't collect participants feelings around training so whether the 20% increase group felt like the training was easier to recover from than the 120% increase group we don't know about that and obviously that is an important layer because if you feel like you can't walk if you increase volume by 120% overnight clearly that is going to be a problem for your consistency
And I do think, you know, I've experimented with sort of different approaches across my own training career and with clients.
also was thinking of a different takeaway and i agree with you on the first one what i was thinking was also that they went from their typical volume of 15 sets up by either 20% or 120%, which is such a sharp increase that some people may be reluctant to make so quickly for fear of an inability to recover.
And we have seen from this study that over eight weeks, even such a, let's call it an overnight increasing volume by 120%, it didn't really seem to cause so much fatigue as to impair adaptations.
So a takeaway for me would be, well, if you're in a situation, for example, where you've had to deload for a week and then returning to your typical volume would be a 120% increasing volume.
It doesn't seem like you have to wait and go through a gradual process of going from your deload volume up by two sets, then up by two sets over several weeks.
You could just go back to normal and it doesn't seem like this will impair your ability to adapt.
Yeah, that is another great thing to point out, and thank you for doing that, right, is that we don't see impairments in hypertrophy, right? We don't see people start to regress, which is sort of, you know, another point I believe that they were getting at with the idea of this study, right, is they thought maybe they would start to see that inverted U type relationship that, you know, 10 years ago, people thought that might have still been a thing.
Whereas, you know, you would probably have to get up to pretty unreasonably high volumes to start to actually see regression, right? Beyond what even competitive bodybuilders think.
are doing right so if anything we see a plateauing at these really really high volumes right and again we just have less data in general at these high high volumes like 30 plus uh sets per week right so there's a lot of uncertainty But there's still really no indication that you would regress from that, right? So it doesn't seem like all this extra volume is causing so much fatigue that you actually start to lose muscle and underperform, right?
Even in the Pellan meta regression that we've been referencing, I believe they were looking at up to 40 sets per week, maybe even higher.
And all they saw was that there were diminishing returns for hypertrophy, but there weren't inverted returns where people started seeing regressions.
So, I mean, that's a good takeaway for people practically, right? Even, you know, an aggressive increase in volume is probably at least safe in terms of not losing muscle, right? And you maybe don't need to worry about doing a ramp approach, right? If you do want to increase your volume, you might be able to get away with just doing that sudden increase.
As a coach, I like kind of like a step wise increase in volume, right? So if we're talking about like over the course of a year, we're trying to ramp up volume in a client, instead of doing a ramp, I guess I shouldn't say ramp up, right.
If we're trying to increase volume in a client, instead of doing a ramp approach where, you know, maybe each week we're adding sets or instead of doing that sort of overnight approach, which would be similar to what, uh, was done in this study, right.
So maybe we do a training block where we add two sets and then the next training block, we add an additional two sets and so on and so forth.
Um, That way you're eventually getting there over time, but you're not, again, it doesn't seem like it has any negative effects, at least in terms of muscle growth, but I think there could be potential negative effects in terms of like mood state and your perception of fatigue, right? So I would prefer to sort of still take that slow approach and slowly increase over time rather than the overnight increase that is, you know, pretty large.
I would agree with you and you beat me to the punch which is a good thing because you're the guest but I was going to bring up the fact that in this study ultimately they were looking at molecular and morphological changes so changes at the molecular level and also at the level of the shape of the muscle but they didn't collect participants feelings around training so whether the 20% increase group felt like the training was easier to recover from than the 120% increase group we don't know about that and obviously that is an important layer because if you feel like you can't walk if you increase volume by 120% overnight clearly that is going to be a problem for your consistency
And I do think, you know, I've experimented with sort of different approaches across my own training career and with clients.
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