Everyone has minimum and maximum capacities for workouts that will lead to strength gains. There are lifters with succeed with a minimum amount of training. They start with warm up sets and work their way up to a single work set for each exercise and they only do one exercise for each muscle group. Andrey Malanichev is an example of a world class squatter who uses this strategy, and he generally only hits each exercise just once per week.
Andrey Malanichev Squat Workout
There are also lifters who want to find the maximum limit of training volume that they can perform without overtraining. These lifters either do several work sets of an exercise or they do several exercises for the same muscle group. Max Aita is an example of a great squatter who has pushed his workouts to the limit in terms of training volume and training frequency. During one stretch of his lifting career he squatted every day; often several times per day for thirteen years. I don’t know if Max still squats every day, but he is not afraid to do a substantial amount of very hard work sets. I have seen a video of Max doing five sets of squats and go to failure on every set. He is perhaps the most relentless squatter I have ever seen and prefers maximum capacity training rather than minimum.
Max Aita Relentless Squatting
Experiment
Some lifters take the time to find their minimum and maximum capacity for how much they can train without suffering negative effects from training too much or too little. The only way to do this is to experiment with smaller and smaller amounts of training until you find the minimum amount you can train while still making progress. The opposite is done by training more and more until you find the maximum amount you can train while still making progress.
What is the point of knowing the minimum and maximum amount of training that you can do while still making progress? The benefit is that you can occasionally increase or decrease the amount of training in order to keep your body from stagnating from the same training. When you increase the amount of training that you do, your body must increase the rate and/or magnitude of protein synthesis in order to rebuild muscle tissue by the next workout. Your body must also increase the rate at which glycogen and creatine phosphate is synthesized to replenish your muscles with energy. Once your body has been programmed to speed up its rate and magnitude of recovery, you can cut back to the minimum amount of training that you can do while still making progress.
Overcompensation = Better Recovery
Why cut back to less training after doing more training? Because your body will be programmed to overcompensate by over-recovering or overcompensating with more protein synthesis and more energy synthesis than the demand of the workout. In other words, if your body has been trained to recover from four or five sets, but you only do one set, then one set will be easy for your body to recover from. Your body will actually recover more than it needs to by growing bigger and stronger.
Programming for Overcompensation
Lifters use both short cycles and longer cycles to program for overcompensation. A short term training cycle can be done over the course of a single week. For example, a lifter can do five sets of eight to ten reps for his lifts on Monday, three sets of five reps on Wednesday, and one set of five reps on Saturday. By doing this he would be training to his maximum capacity for a productive workout at the start of the week. As the week progresses, he trains according to his minimum capacity for a productive workout.
Deload Every fourth Week
Another common strategy that lifters use for programming for overcompensation is to do high volume workouts for three weeks followed by one to three weeks of lower volume workouts that can also be done with a lower training frequency. Lifters commonly deload or cut back every fourth week. If you find that you benefit from the cutting back for more than one week, then you can cut back longer.
In the end, each lifter must take the time to find their own capacity for the minimum and maximum amounts of training that they can do while still making progress. The next step is to learn how long to use each type of training before transitioning to the other. It may take a lot of experimenting to do this, but in the end, it may lead to more progress. I have used very consistent training with little or no change for months and I have also used highly varied training. Both types of training work if you take the time to find workouts and training cycles that work for you.
If I had to recommend a training schedule that is a well designed training method that programs your body for overcompensation, I would recommend the Texas Method. It evolved out of the five sets of five reps routine and was tweaked over and over again until lifting coaches hit upon a training formula that worked exceptionally well for the vast majority of lifters. The specifics of the Texas Method can be learned by following the links below. Best of training to you.
The basic explanation of the Texas Method Starts at about 3:20 in the video