A Month of German Volume Training
on December 17, 2010

Hi everyone, it’s airport-blog-time again. This time I’m making a two-connection trip from Austin to Newark, and I’d thought I’d take the time to rave about German Volume Training, or GVT for short. German Volume Training is a technique used by bodybuilders to smash plateaus and put on a lot of weight in a short period of time. I can’t remember exactly how I stumbled upon this secret weapon, but I might have seen it on Hacker News at some point. Ironically, I tend to find out about a lot of fitness and nutrition nuggets on HN (such as Celiac Disease and the Paleo Diet, as it turns out).

But back to GVT, the underlying idea is simple: 10 sets of 10 reps of one composite exercise at about 50% of your 1-rep max, with 1 minute of rest between sets. You’re supposed to keep this up for four to eight weeks, and then take a week or two off. When you come back, you’ll be a complete beast. Does this sound too good to be true? Well, I put the theory to the test a few months back and kept detailed logs (as I usually do when I lift). What follows is my story, along with some tangential thoughts on the experience:

My usual workout routine for a given week is Back, Chest, Abs, Legs, Shoulders, Arms, and one day of rest. Sometimes I opt out of the leg workout if I’ve been running or jumping a lot, giving me two days of rest. I’ve found that this pattern is pretty ideal in terms of focus and recovery, so I didn’t want to switch this up, even for my GVT experiment. In true GVT, it is recommended that you only work out three days a week, and I would soon find out why.

The first day of GVT was August 18th, 2010, which was a Back day; the exercise I started with was a bent-over barbell row. I estimated my one-rep max at around 200 (although I think this was an under-estimate at the time), so I started with 10×10 of 95. I eventually realized that 50% of your one-rep max is actually a pretty insane number to start with in GVT. 10×10 sounds pretty reasonable at first, until you get to set 8 or 9. I’m glad I started out conservative on this first day, because I completed 10×10 of 95 without too much strain. Don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t say that it was “easy” either, just that it wasn’t insanely hard, as some of my later days would be.

The next day, I picked dumbbell military bench press for my composite chest exercise (which is not that composite of an exercise, actually). I went with 40 in each hand, which is slightly below 50% of my one-rep max on this exercise. I’ve never actually one-rep maxed this particular exercise, but I would guess that it would be either 95 or 100 per hand. Still, I would discover by set 9 on this day that 40 lbs would prove to be a little too much. I could only muster 9.5 reps on set 9, and then 8 reps on set 10. Keep in mind that sets are only 60 seconds apart, so when you find yourself failing on a set, your performance will degrade very quickly on subsequent ones. I would guess that this is why the technique works so well—as you get progressively more tired, you start recruiting every last muscle fiber you have to eek out the reps (muscle fibers you never knew you had!)

Two days in my log passed at this point, but I didn’t write down why. Since this was August, I think it’s safe to guess that I went windsurfing, and that I counted it as a Leg day with a day of rest afterwards to reset.

The next day back, I set out to do 10×10 of cable crunches. The standard disclaimer for all cable columns is that they’re tuned differently, so the actual weight that it says on the stack is pretty meaningless. What’s 40 lbs of resistance on your column could actually be like 80 lbs on another brand. In any case, I usually do 14 reps of 180 on this particular brand of column, so I chose 100 for the GVT variation. Unfortunately, it was way too easy, as I noted in my logs.

For Shoulders the next day, I attempted 10×10 of 35 in each hand of the dumbbell military shoulder press, figuring that I would tone it down one notch from the Chest day a few days earlier to get the same effect. Interestingly, in contrast to my failure at the end of the Chest day, my logs show that I did indeed complete this batch (albeit with a lot of struggle at the end).

Two more days passed at this point, and I’m not sure why either. My guess would be that I was just way too tired. This may be a good time to go on a tangent to talk about the time commitment you need to set aside for GVT. For the workout itself, you’ll probably only need 20-30 minutes, but the big time commitment you’ll really need is actually for your sleep. I noticed that after the first few days of GVT, I started to involuntarily sleep about 10 hours a night. I would wake up after 9 hours of sleep and feel totally exhausted. It was only on the weekends when I started sleeping like 11 hours that I felt recharged. So if you can’t afford, or aren’t willing to set aside, the time required to recover, then GVT may not be for you at this time.

It is now August 26th according to my logs, and the page shows that I did 10×10 of squats at 105. Around this time is also when I fully embraced the ATG squat (Ass To the Ground), which I now believe is the only correct way to squat. No more of that weaksauce knee-bend that you usually do. You will find that your previously “impressive” one-rep max number is actually a piece of fiction when you do squats correctly. I went with 105 on this exercise and ended up completing it, but with some difficulty and lots of sweat.

To wrap up the first rotation, I concluded with a day of Arms. Of course, the problem with arms is that you need to work your biceps as well as your triceps, which are opposite forces. The natural thing to do, it seemed, was to do 5×10 for biceps and then 5×10 for triceps. I also went with 90 seconds of rest between each set since the arm muscle groups are much smaller and generally need more time to recharge. Another thing worth noting is that I did the five sets of biceps first, and then the five sets of triceps. Another way to structure the workout might have been to interlace the biceps sets and triceps sets. I’m not sure how true to GVT that would be, however, since the idea behind GVT is the constant, periodic strain on the muscles.

The two exercises I chose were ez-bar curls (outer grip) and skullcrushers (also known as overhead tricep ez-bar extensions). I chose 75 lbs and 85 lbs, respectively, because I figured that triceps were generally stronger than biceps, but I underestimated how badly the first five sets would drain all of my muscles. My rep count for the 5 sets of biceps curls were 10, 10, 10, 9, 7 (meaning that 75 was probably too much); my rep count for the 5 sets of skullcrushers were 10, 8, 10, 8, 8 (meaning that 85 was probably also too much). I didn’t note this in my logs explicitly, but I suspect the reason why the third set went back to 10 is that I rested for 2 full minutes after the second set, and for each subsequent set after that.

On this last day of the first rotation of GVT, it was already August 27th, so a full 10 days after my first day. One recurring theme I see in my logs over the next four weeks is that I routinely have random days off with blank pages. I never bothered to write down the excuse (probably because I would feel too bad writing “Too tired today”), but it’s worth noting because four calendar weeks of GVT actually meant only three full rotations (of Back, Chest, Abs, Legs, Shoulders, Arms, and rest), whereas in my usual workout, rotations are mapped one-to-one with weeks. This constant drain really started adding up, so I basically gave up after four weeks because I couldn’t sustain the effort beyond that, and having to sleep 10 hours a day was pretty annoying in terms of productivity. To be honest, I was amazed at how hard it got towards the end. The rule for upping the weight is if you successfully complete a 10×10, you can increase it by 5% next time, and I really only managed this a couple of times over a month.

So for all of this toil, what did I gain? Well, coming off of a 10-day rest after my month of GVT, I started back up slowly. I did a week of bodyweight and another week of bodyweight plus kettlebells after that. Yet things felt easy during this time, and I started wondering if I was going easy on myself. But this is why I keep logs: the numbers don’t lie. Longtime readers will know that I am trying to climb back up to the elusive 225 bench press, which I had reached only once in my life in the early months of 2009. But that’s also when I tore something in my right wrist. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to get back up to that level again, but all of 2009 was basically lost to trying to recover my wrist. Since then, I’ve kind of gotten stuck at 4×165, which is a very pathetic number to be stuck at. Until GVT, that is.

After these combined seven weeks or so (4 weeks of GVT, 1 week of rest, 1 week of bodyweight, 1 week of bodyweight + kettlebells), I rocked out 8×185 in perfect form like it was nothing. I didn’t even bother getting a spotter because the weight acclimation sets (one-rep sets of weight leading up to the target) felt ridiculously easy. I was psyching myself up to finally try 1×225, but of course, Thanksgiving rolled around, and I decided to take a rest for logistical reasons. Well 10 days later, I seemed to have lost some mojo. Right before the break, I took a few body fat measurements, and I clocked in at 7-9% pretty consistently. But after the break, things went south. When I got back to the gym, my arms were shaking trying to hold up just 175 on the bench, and my body fat measurements were now consistently 12-15%. There were too many variables over the break to pin it down to anything specific, but certainly the lack of exercise, the increased eating, and the lowered protein intake would all combine for this embarrassing devolution. But let’s not talk about this now, because I’m working to get back in shape for my return to 225, and this time I’ll do it in spite of the holidays.

Oh, and lest you think that all I do is bench, I should probably also mention that post-GVT, I saw a lot of improvements in my efforts towards the one-arm pull-up, military shoulder press, ez-bar biceps curl, and basically anything else I tried. I had also gotten a good deal bigger, to my chagrin. You see, right before GVT, I went out to get a shirt tailored. It came back to me post-GVT, and, by that point, didn’t fit anymore (my chest, neck, and shoulders had grown, according to the tailor). Luckily, the guy was nice about it and offered a second shirt at 50% off with the adjusted measurements, so I’m still waiting on that one to come back. I’ll write an entire separate post about my sartorial experiences later on, but for now allow me to close with some final thoughts on GVT.

German Volume Training. Pros:

Cons:

As usual, do some research and critical thinking of your own before you embark on any journey inspired by advice on the Internet. Though with that said, I leave GVT a 5-star rating: “A++++ Would use again!”