you can usually go 3 to 4 months before a prolonged multi-week recovery. by volume i mean the actual total amount of weight lifted in a week per muscle group. generally you want to train somewhere between 10 and 20 sets at 60 - 80% one-rep max within one or two reps of concentric failure. then you increase the number of sets each week for each muscle group. so if you start at 12 and your mesocycle lasts 5 weeks, you would hit 16 or 20 on the last week, and your muscles would have grown to accommodate the increased weekly volume. the difficulty in planning for this comes from calculating which exercises target which muscles, to what extent. e.g., bench press hits your triceps but only secondarily (you wouldn't get sore triceps just from benching). so how do you calculate that auxiliary volume into your weekly total? that's where the periodization templates help.