How to Use Minimum Effective Volume (MEV) for Smarter Strength & Conditioning in Athletes
In high-performance sport, every training decision has a cost. When an athlete lifts weights and does general conditioning, they use resources: energy, recovery capacity, central nervous system bandwidth, and in return, they (hopefully) get better. It’s the strength & conditioning coach’s responsibility to ensure the limited resources available produce an optimal payout at an acceptable risk/reward ratio.
A great starting point, and thereby a useful tool is using Minimum Effective Volume (MEV) to determine starting volume for weight & conditioning training: applying only the smallest dose of training required to stimulate progress, so that resources can be conserved for the broader demands of the sport.
In this article, we’ll explore how MEV works, why it matters for athletes and coaches, and how it can be used to make strength and conditioning programs more effective, more efficient, and more sustainable.
What Is Minimum Effective Volume (MEV)?
Minimum Effective Volume is defined as the lowest amount of training volume that reliably produces a positive adaptation, such as an increase in muscular strength, hypertrophy or increase in Vo2max. To give an example, in strength training this is usually measured in worksets per muscle group per week.
The concept is rooted in the principle of stimulus-threshold adaptation. For a training stimulus to generate a response, it must exceed a certain threshold. However, once that threshold is crossed, additional volume yields diminishing returns, especially in athletes with competing priorities like speed, skill, endurance, or tactical training. Because the goal of an athlete is to excel in their sport, not necessarily S&C. This means that after a certain point time is better spend elsewhere.
🔬 Contextualizing MEV Within the Volume Spectrum:
MEV: The least you can do to get stronger or fitter.
MAV (Maximum Adaptive Volume): The optimal range for maximal gains, where you make the most gains per “unit” of training.
MRV (Maximum Recoverable Volume): The upper boundary before recovery fails and performance deteriorates.
For athletes, MEV is especially valuable because it supports progress or maintenance with minimal interference, freeing time and recovery bandwidth for the sport itself. The nr 1 responsibility of a strength and conditioning coach is to make sure the athletes can play, practice, and are available at race/game day.
Why MEV is a great tool Strength Coaches can use for Athletes
Strength and fitness are non-negotiable qualities for sports. It underpins power production, movement efficiency, and injury resilience. But S&C training is only one piece of an athlete’s total workload, which also includes:
Tactical and technical training
Practice and competition
Travel and stress from academic or life demands
Excessive strength and conditioning volume, especially year-round, can become a liability especially in sports with a high technical demand where pure fitness is relatively less of a separator. By going with an MEV approach, the coach aims to spend as little energy and time as possible on non-sport-specific training while still achieving meaningful progress. Thereby freeing up as much time as possible for (more) sport-specific training.
It’s important to realize that although using an MEV approach can be an overarching philosophy at times, choices regarding appropriate volume should be made on an exercise-to-exercise basis. Meaning that while some parts of the program can be at MEV others can be at higher volumes.
🧠 Why MEV Matters:
Recovery efficiency: Less work = less recovery.
Time economy: Shorter sessions = more time for recovery, skill work, or sport-specific practice.
Joint and tendon preservation: Lower training stress reduces chronic wear.
Sustainability: Helps athletes maintain consistency across long, demanding seasons.
Instead of defaulting to “more is better,” MEV asks: What is enough? and builds programming from there. As strength and conditioning coaches, it’s important to realize that consistent progress over time is a lot more valuable than maximizing physical adaptations in the short term. Also, unless there are very clear physical limitations holding an athlete back, it often pays off more to maximize time and effort for sport-specific practice and since we’re dealing with limited resources, going with an MEV approach to strength and conditioning can be a great option.
How MEV Can Be Applied in Strength and Conditioning
It’s a tool that allows coaches to modulate training based on the athlete’s season, health status, and performance priorities. It’s a starting point from which to organize training.
Let’s explore four common contexts and, based on the overall objective, review what the advantage is of using MEV.
1. In-Season Programming
Objective: Maintain strength and neuromuscular qualities while prioritizing performance.
In-season periods are dominated by competition, high volumes of practice, and elevated psychological and physiological stress. During this time, the athlete’s tolerance for additional load is diminished, and priority lies with optimizing sport-specific performance; maintenance often is a higher priority than improving S&C qualities.
How MEV fits:
Prescribes just enough strength training to stimulate adaptations without inducing excessive fatigue.
Typically involves 2–4 working sets per key movement pattern per week, depending on the athlete’s training history and position demands.
Exercise selection leans toward compound movements with high transfer to sport.
Example: A rugby athlete might perform one lower-body lift (e.g., trap bar deadlift) and one upper-body push (e.g., DB bench press) per week at moderate to high intensity for 2–3 sets each. Research shows that low volume, high intensity often requires less recovery than higher volume training. 1 quality session a week is often enough to maintain strength numbers.
Key benefit: Prevents regression in key qualities (force production, joint stability) while conserving energy for practice and recovery.
2. Skill-Intensive Training Phases
Objective: Prioritize motor learning, decision-making, and technical/tactical development.
Certain periods, like pre-season camps, system installs, or high-cognitive-load practice blocks, require athletes to devote more mental and neural energy to skill acquisition and strategy. Note, though, that pre-season camps can also have the objective of building physiological qualities, for which MEV is likely not the best choice.
High volume strength work can interfere with these processes via:
CNS fatigue
Peripheral soreness
Reduced proprioception and movement fluidity
How MEV fits:
Drive strength without taxing the CNS, thereby impairing coordination or motor control.
Example: A tennis player working on changing/adapting certain parts of their serve might only do 1 high neural-load focused session a week while in the specific training block..
Key benefit: Ensures physical qualities remain intact while maximizing sport-specific neurocognitive development.
3. Return to Training / Post-Injury
Objective: Safely reintroduce mechanical stress to deconditioned or recovering tissues.
Following injury, illness, or time off, athletes have a lowered capacity for mechanical loading. Resuming high-volume lifting too early increases the risk of tissue overload, inflammation, or re-injury. So initially, a MEV approach could be appropriate. However, towards later phases of return to play, only MEV won’t be enough anymore.
How MEV fits:
Establishes a controlled reintroduction of stimulus.
Provides enough intensity and volume to drive adaptation, but stays well below MRV to leave enough energy for recovery.
Example: An athlete returning from rehab might begin with 2 sets of bodyweight split squats and glute bridges before gradually progressing to external load and more volume over 2–4 weeks.
Key benefit: Balances adaptation and safety, while rebuilding movement patterns and neuromuscular confidence.
4. Tapering and Peaking
Objective: Maximize power output and readiness by reducing fatigue before competition.
In the final 1–3 weeks before an important game or event, the goal is not to gain strength, but to remove any lingering fatigue to aid the expression of fitness qualities and peak power output.
How MEV fits:
Training volume drops to or even below MEV to allow full recovery.
Intensity is maintained to preserve neuromuscular drive and tissue stiffness.
Example: A sprinter might go from 4 weekly sets of squats at 80% to 1–2 sets at 85–90%, with more rest and reduced accessory work.
Key benefit: Preserves adaptations while enabling supercompensation and peak output.
Realize that in all these cases, going for MEV means you are still chasing progress in fitness. For each of these scenario’s the choice could also be to reduce even further to maintenance volume, which is often even lower.
When is MEV not appropriate?
There are times when going with an MEV approach is likely not the right choice:
When an athlete is clearly limited by their physical qualities, or during training phases where the focus is on building physical capacity like in the pre-season. In this case, the main driver behind performance improvements is physical and should therefore be optimized. Which means an MAV approach or at least something closer to that threshold is probably more appropriate. Obviously, keeping in mind that all other (sport-specific) qualities are still maintained with adequate volume.
When the athlete has limited sport exposure, like during off-season or season breaks. During these times, it’s simply a missed opportunity not to capitalize on the extra time available. In this case training should be above MEV towards MAV.
When all attention & energy needs to be focused on competition or training, and driving S&C adaptations are no longer a KPI. In this case training will be below MEV or no training at all.
Strength Athlete vs. Bodybuilder: Understanding the Volume Divide
It’s important to distinguish between the needs of competitive strength or physique athletes and other athletes. For competitive strength & physique athletes their objective is to maximize certain qualities associated with S&C, for other athletes S&C is just a means to and end, and enough is enough.
Bodybuilders aim to maximize hypertrophy and train well above MEV—often above MAV—because muscle growth is their end goal.
Powerlifters may also push toward MRV for peak strength, especially near meets.
Athletes, by contrast, must balance strength with speed, skill, and game-day performance.
For athletes, the additional cost of adding extra training volume for 1 specific quality might not be worth it if, by spending those resources on other qualities, like skill practice, they can improve their overall performance in the long run. This, in the end, is the art of programming and coaching: Figuring out where energy is spent the most efficiently from the perspective of athletic performance, not just physical fitness.
Conclusion: Precision Beats Excess
Minimum Effective Volume is more than a training metric—it’s a tool.
For coaches, it means asking, “How much is enough?” and programming with intention, not inertia.
When applied correctly, MEV:
Maintains or even drives performance when recovery is limited
Protects athletes from burnout and overload
Supports sustainable strength development across a long career
In strength and conditioning for athletes, the goal isn’t to train the most—it’s to train the smartest.