Modulate Your Frequency... The One Time You Won't Tune Low

If you've not gotten the message that I like music wherein the guitars are drop-tuned to the point where they sound like a bass with a blown-out PA, you've not been reading the blog. I like my music tuned low. Way low. In spite of that affinity, I don't like the frequency of my workouts to match the drop-tuning of those guitars. Instead, I enjoy high frequency in my workout regimen, due to the fact that a high workload forces greater metabolic changes, it's fun, and I find that I'm better able to both maintain higher bodyweight and relative training weights with more frequent trips to the gym. The question with which I am constantly faced, however, is how one should go about increasing their training frequency without suffering the myriad deleterious consequences of the dreaded scourge known as overtraining. Lest I get going on a rant, we'll simply delve into the benefits of increased training frequency, of which there are legion, and then we can revisit the aforementioned scourge and call down a pox on the imbeciles and assholes who've fear-mongered the fuck out of training.



Why Should You Increase Your Frequency?
The standby for any internet genius whose mouth far outpaces his lifting progress is to scream to the heavens that no natural lifter could possibly lift more than 4 or 5 times a week. Their argument is perhaps solely predicated upon the idea that if a lie is repeated often enough, it will eventually become truth. Alas, fuckers, this is not to be. How do I know?

Old-school strongmen trained and exhibited their strength constantly. By constantly, I mean every fucking day. These guys were in heavy demand at the turn of the century, as evinced by Louis Cyr's salary of $2000 a week in 1885 is equivalent to $47000 now... there's not a fucking strength athlete on the planet who makes anything even vaguely approximating that these days. The strongmen of yesteryear were made of stern stuff, though, and due to their high demand and the fact that they'd not been inundated with pseudoscientific claptrap about "overtraining", they trained for hours a day, every day. Likewise, Saxon and Goerner trained 6 days a week, and regularly held exhibitions and contests to showcase their strength and prove their preeminence in the sport. Thereafter, guys like Paul Anderson, Bob Bednarski, and even Bill Pearl kept the flame of high frequency training alight, as they busted their asses in the gym 6 days a week, come hell or high water.(Purposeful Primitive 15, 19-20)

The aforementioned men had a rather massive head start on the average modern trainee, however, and it wasn't solely the fact that they boasted gigantic ballsacks and bulletproof colons filled with indomitable spirit and general intestinal fortitude. Instead, these guys had the massive benefit of a life far harder than those of our own. People today are fucking soft, and I don't mean in a "holy fuck get me a seatbelt extension because my fat ass cannot be encircled by this paltry six feet of fucking airplane seatbelt"- I'm talking just in terms of basic lifestyle. People back then walked places, they shoveled shit by hand, built shit, carried shit, and basically busted their fucking asses all the livelong day. Once they'd grown to something approximating adulthood, they took hard fucking jobs, where they busted their asses all that much more. Bridge builders in the mid-19th century worked all day with 18kg sledgehammers- modern sledges are 6.3kg. English railway navvies at the same time were expected to shovel 20 tons of Earth a day, and Nepalese porters who weighed less than 50kg routinely transported loads of 90kg 95km over steep mountain trails at that time. (Manthropology 30-31)

These navvies are so much harder than you, you might as well be looking at a pack of velociraptors.

The aforementioned facts leave you at a massive disadvantage, and likely at a bit of a loss. Even 20 years ago, people were far more active than they are now, so with every passing day the gap between the work capacity of yesteryear and that of the modern trainee grows greater. The resolution to this crisis, however, should be plainly evident.

The Solution

Start exercising more. Simple enough, right? This does not necessarily mean that you need to drag your ass into the gym twice a day and lift near-maximal weights until your eyes pop out and you shit blood. As much fun as that might sound, it's time to temper your enthusiasm with a modicum of sense- if you're fucking dead, your squat's not likely to increase much, is it? Thus, don't be fucking retarded.

One of the best ways to avoid complete mental enfeeblement is to heed the advice of the Bulgarians, who found "that after 35-45 minutes of rigorous weight training, the body's natural blood testosterone level would decrease by up to 80%."(Big Beyond Belief 22). While you might find this to be somewhat exaggerated (as I do), it's good to bear in mind, as it will keep you from training for hours nonstop on a regular basis. It also lends itself to the idea that high density training is ideal- "only when a muscle performs with greater resistance in a unit of time than before , will its functional cross section need to increase... hypertrophy is seen only in muscles that must perform a great amount of work in a unit of time." (Power Factor Training ripshit, mega-great-white-shark-battling-a-killer-robot intensely, you're going to transmogrify yourself into strength athlete of bygone-era badassitude, if it's done with the proper frequency.

But then, how frequently should you train? There's no easy answer to this question- Zatsiorsky himself states at the beginning of his seminal work that "it is absolutely unclear which criteria one should use for selecting proper intervals between consecutive workouts." (Science and Practice of Strength Training 13) Why's it so difficult? As I've stated before, capacity is a wildly shifting target, due to the massive number of individual factors, both biological and environmental, that play into its determination. For this reason, you're going to have to feel this one out like a blind man at an orgy. Trial and error is your friend here- just like you don't want to ram your cock into someone's eye socket because you jumped the gun and you can't see what the fuck you're doing (you're still blind and at an orgy in analogy-land), you don't want to miss out on the whole fucking thing and fail to double your bodycount in a single night because you were too busy being a pussy to dive into a pile of naked people and fuck your way out. Don't make fucking excuses that will lead you to pass up on the opportunity to increase your volume, but don't force yourself to train when you feel like you might die in the process, either. It should be as natural and organic a progression as you can manage, in spite of your acidic hatred dripping from your pores like an Alien with ebola because you're surrounded by sweaty fat motherfuckers jostling each other for a cheeseburger at lunchtime.

Next- baby steps to badassedness.


Cites:
Zatsiorsky, V.  Science and Practice of Strength Training.
Costa, L. Big Beyond Belief.
Sisco and Little.  Power Factor Training.
McCallister, P. Mathropology.
Gallagher, M. Purposeful Primitive.