This bias came from my observations of physical culture (a lot of successful strength training traditions preach higher frequencies, but lower frequencies seem to be the norm for lifters purely focused on hypertrophy), my non-quantitative assessment of the research (several individual studies found significant strength differences in favor of higher frequencies, but very few have found significant hypertrophy differences), and my lack of focus on this issue as a coach (I mostly just train people for strength hypertrophy is a near-universal side effect, but it’s rarely my primary focus with my athletes). My assumption coming into this article was that, when training volume is equated, higher frequencies were probably beneficial for strength, but probably didn’t matter much for hypertrophy (past a frequency of twice or maybe thrice per week). So, I got back to the grind to analyze the effects of frequency on hypertrophy.įrom the outset, I want to make my pre-existing bias clear. But then I thought more about it, and I realized that the whole reason I wrote my last article was the recent renaissance in the frequency research. I linked a lot of people to Schoenfeld’s 2016 frequency meta-analysis, which found that frequencies of at least twice per week were better than a frequency of just once per week, with insufficient evidence to make conclusions about even higher frequencies. After all, the two factors that seemed to be the most important for explaining the benefits of frequency for strength development (higher average rep velocity, and increased opportunity to practice motor patterns) don’t seem like they’d matter as much for hypertrophy. I responded to all of them that frequency probably doesn’t matter as much for hypertrophy. After my article on training frequency for strength development last week, a lot of people asked whether higher training frequencies were also better for hypertrophy.
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