Hey Coach T, I tuned in on your live stream and came here to ask 
Would it be better / possible for a Type 1 guy to split high volume sessions up into 2 sessions per day to avoid crashing dopamine / raising cortisol too high? (Raise the ceiling for volume tolerance?).
Much love
Splitting daily volume into two sessions, if possible, does offer many benefits and is very often superior to doing one bigger session.
There are some drawbacks too, depending on your goal.
PROS
Will likely increase the average quality of your sets, especially if you do a fairly high volume or have a low tolerance for volume. If you have a large workload in a session, it’s quite possible that your energy, motivation, muscle response to the neural drive and the strength of the neural drive get significantly lower in the later portion of your session, leading to a subpar performance By resting a few hours after the first 1/2 of the session, you largely prevent these.
As you mentioned, you get a smaller increase in cortisol and adrenaline in each session. Which MIGHT lead to a lower total level over the whole day, reducing the risk of desensitization.
You can get two releases of dopamine. It’s actually not for avoiding dopamine depletion like you mention, but getting two episodes of increased dopamine. Which can increase motivation. You might also reduce the risk of creating. resistance to dopamine by having the two SMALLER pulses instead of a larger one. But honestly, I feel like this “PRO” is stretching it a bit and is unlikely to make a difference.
You can do A BIT more overall daily volume. But that’s where people mess up: they use two daily sessions to double their training volume (or close to it), which will likely lead to stagnation or worse. You might be able to add something like 2-4 more TOTAL sets in your day without a negative impact on recovery, but most people should really simply do the same total daily volume over 2 sessions.
If you want to use two different types of stimulations per day (e.g. strength and hypertrophy; or power and strength) it might be slightly superior to perform each on its own session. I’d say that this is more important for 1As than 1Bs. 1Bs are actually pretty good at mixed training sessions, 1A are not.
CONS
Very easy to overdo the volume without noticing it while doing it
If your training volume is already low, and you just divide it into two extremely low volume sessions, you might not reach the adaptation threshold in each session. YES total daily (or weekly) volume matters for gains, but the amount of work you do in a session also matters. f you do session A with too little training stimulus, you don’t simply start from that point in workout #2… you don’t start from zero but close. So it’s quite possible that despite the total daily volume/stimulus to be sufficient on paper to trigger growth, you don’t progress because each session is insufficient on its own.
It’s not practical for most. I do have my home gym and work from home a lot, so I can do it. But it still diminishes my capacity to do other things, like spending time with my family and doing work.
If you are not resting between both sessions… for example you have intense physical or mental work, you might not get an improvement in overall set quality. In fact, it’s possible to do worse in the second workout then if you did only one larger session.
The early work in your workout can have and activation effect and an increase in muscle sensitivity to the neural drive, leading to a better contraction. This is mostly the case when you start with some fairly heavy multi-joint movements, the ensuing single-joint exercises will be potentiated and IF FATIGUE IS NOT TOO HIGH you get a better effect and feeling. You don’t get that if you do the heavy work in one session and the single-joint work later.
So really it can be effective… or not, depending on your situation.
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