Adaptation is Physiologically Expensive

It takes a lot of resources to keep the body moving from day to day.  Oxygen, water, food for both energy and to provide the building blocks for protein synthesis, sleep to rest our brain and our body so that we can continue living life the following day.  If your body is a business, your business is expensive enough to run just to keep the lights on, let alone make money.  But as strength and hypertrophy enthusiasts, we want more than just getting by, we want profit.  We want growth and adaptation. We are in the construction business, there is a period where we are using lots of resources and time to build a house.  But first we need to dig a hole to build the foundation.  Dig down first, to then build up.  We do this every time we train.  We stress our bodies, dig a new hole, then our construction team comes and builds something stronger on top of where that hole once was.   Along the way we are going to have to make sure we are making deposits in the right places so that we have enough funds for supplies, resources, paying workers, eventually reaping the profit of having built something new. 

Costs

Unfortunately, our business has costs.  If we are spending more money trying to improve the business, some of the deposits we make every day will go to cover those costs, rather than becoming income.  Remember that we want income, we want growth.  If your costs are high, but your deposits are also high, then you may have potential for greater growth. If costs (training workload) are high but our deposits (sleep, rest, food) are low,

Eventually we will run out of money and our business will go bankrupt.

Training stress is a cost.  This is a double-edged sword.  We must train hard to create a stimulus that is big enough to drive growth and development.  But there is a mental and physical fatigue cost to hard training.  This is why you can’t do things like out train a bad diet, or out train chronic sleep deprivation.  Make sure that your daily, weekly, and monthly training costs are not so high that they do more harm than good.  

Every time you rest or take a deload you are lowering your costs for that day or the microcycle.  If a deload allows you to lower your average costs for a month, to within an acceptable range, then it can be a very valuable tool when trying to train hard. 

Deposits

Every single action you take inside and outside of the gym is a small deposit into what we might call your strength and hypertrophy piggy bank.  Every time you train, you are making a deposit into your skill fund (remember that this has a cost as well).  Every single time you eat a meal, you are making a deposit into your muscle growth fund.  Every time you sleep you are putting a deposit into your recovery fund.  Assuming costs are controlled, more deposits will lead to more income (adaptation). 

Growth Funds

Slow, steady, bulking will yield the greatest performance improvement over time.  A slight caloric surplus for a long period will ensure that we are always making deposits into our growth fund.  At the end of the day, muscle moves weight, and you must feed muscle for it to grow.  Unfortunately, our muscle growth funds have a limit on how big of a deposit you can make from day to day.  The rate of muscle growth is painfully slow, and we cannot force feed muscle growth.  So, milking a small caloric surplus as long we possibly can help us build and retain as much muscle as possible, without needing to spend time in a caloric deficit too often. 

I would consider a caloric deficit to be a cost, or at least a decreased deposit size to the recovery fund.  On the flipside of that, I am not sure that being in a higher caloric surplus helps you recover better than you would if you are in a slight caloric surplus, you just store more fat if your surplus is too high.  This is why the dream bulks never work out how we want, we store too much fat and our expectations for growth and recovery are overestimated.  A greater caloric deficit probably negatively impacts recovery and performance to a greater degree, while beyond a certain point, a greater caloric surplus does not help us recover more or grow muscle faster. 

Withdrawals

Competition day

By the time you get to Competition Day, you have made a lot of deposits.  You have developed your skill, slept well, ate lots, reduced training costs, managed life stress, and it is time to go to the bank to make a withdrawal.  If you have followed the process, made the appropriate deposits, cut costs when needed (stressful life events, deloads, taper), then you should be able to realize the compounded growth of all your hard work when you go to the bank on meet day to make your withdrawal.  If you have done everything right then you should be able to go 9/9, PR all your lifts, and withdraw a huge total PR.  

After a meet you have spent all your hard-earned money, it is time to get back to business with your daily deposits so that you can withdraw a bigger total lump sum in the future.  Starting from this new base of capital that you have built up. 

The Stock Market of Gainz

There will be ups and downs in your journey.  Anyone who has trained for a long enough time know that training seems to have this volatile ebb and flow.  Sometimes your lifts feel like they get stronger every week or every training session.  You can see the growth created by your hard work staring back at you when you look in the mirror.  You feel indestructible every time you step into the gym.  This is a stock market boom period. 

It is important that we stay conservative with progression during this time.  If you are in a stock market boom period, you are there because of all the decisions and deposits you have made up to that point.  If you follow the process that got you to that point, you should be able to milk more long-term financial gain, with lower risk.

Greed

What might happen if we get greedy? The prime client training example is when a lifter hits a milestone lift for the first time, and they smoke it.  A good example is when someone benches 315 for the first time, and it isn’t even that difficult.  The following week they come in for their top bench single, and they hit 315 again, only this time it was a little harder.  Greed and ego make them go straight to 320 the following week, having already decided on that number before they got to the gym because bench has been booming lately, and they know that last week they could have probably benched 325. They get the PR, but 320 moves even slower.    The next week comes around, and a 315 bench is an all-out RPE 10.  What happened?  Remember that 315 was an all-time PR, it was the heaviest weight they had ever lifted.  That bench PR has a cost.  The thing that got you to the point where you could bench 315 was not reps at or above 315.  What got you there was a lot of submaximal practice of 1-3 reps between 270 and 300lbs. 

Meet day Greed might be the worst kind of greed.  Attempting numbers that you have not made enough deposits for strictly because your ego is getting in the way.  Remember to be honest with yourself when it comes to meet day, there is a penalty for making an overdraft that will either express itself later during the day, the next day, or the next week. 

Bull Market

It has been my experience that for the most part performance in the gym will mirror how things are going in life.  When life is good, lifting is good.  When you are taking care of yourself with sleep, managing stress, planning rest periods (deloads, vacations), taking part in a positive social life, and managing training load, performance in the gym tends to mostly be progressing in the right direction. 

Hate to say it but those of you that are young, in school, single, no mortgage, no kids, low life stress should be milking this period of your lives for all that it is worth.  Train as hard as you can, eat as much quality food as you can, sleep as much as you can, and ride that S&H 500 bull market all the way to the bank. 

People are probably tired me talking about how training results change and slow with time.  I am not sure that I even think this is due to age, but due more to the stresses that life throws our way.   Work stress, financial stress, relationship stress, mortgage stress, parenthood stress, training stress.  All of this is stress. Stress is stress is stress.  All of this has a cost, and it becomes more difficult for our deposits to keep up with our costs over time.                                                                                                                       

If you are in a bull market, take advantage of not only the performance improvements that you make in the gym.  But realizes the way things are going is because of how you are handling yourself outside of the gym.  On top of that, since things are going so well outside of the gym, you probably have extra time and energy to find something else you might be able to improve.  Perhaps you realize that while you are chilling out and watching tv at night at night, you could fit in 10-20 minutes of passive stretching.  Or maybe you could go for a couple quick walks throughout the day to get your steps up, improve your mental health, heart health, keep your hips happy, and improve your digestion. 

Bear Market

There are going to be times in every lifter’s life where deposits are low, heck we have probably all delt with times when deposits were low, and our costs were really high.  Busy final years of undergraduate or postgraduate studies, relationship troubles, long hours at high pressure jobs, poor sleep quality, disrupted nutrition.  Times when it feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day.  

A family addition seems to be the biggest catalyst for a bear market that I have seen as a coach.  If nothing else, new parenthood leads to disruptions sleep quality and decreases in total sleep, increased stressors managing the lifestyle changes, increased anxiety wrapping your head around the pressures of parenthood, all the while needing to continue going to work and taking care of all the other life responsibilities you already had.  

                  If we are in a Bear market, the most important thing we can do is stay consistent.  While a Bear market may necessitate reductions in training load, frequency, and/or volume, it is still important that we continue checking the box and complete some training.  Some deposits are better than no deposits.  It takes way less training and resources to maintain an adaptation that has already been created than it does to create new adaptation.  If you have accumulated some savings, and have an emergency fund, you can handle the bear market and simply do what needs to be done to maintain while you are in this period that has a lower potential for growth. 

Stock Market Crash

An injury is a greater physical disruption than the stress of training.  You need to keep making all the deposits you were making to regenerate the tissue where the injury occurred.

Injuries will happen in any endeavor that is being pushed to the extreme.  In the words of Eric Helms, “we aren’t practicing knitting.”  Accept this, be smart about your training, but if an injury does happen, keep chipping away at your deposits in order to make sure first that you maintain as much of your strength and hypertrophy as you can, second that you return to training as quickly as you can, and lastly so that the physical and mental stress of the traumatic injury does not bleed into the rest of our day to day life and just compound stress further. 

Long term financial planning – consistency and time

Some people have get rich quick schemes, some of them even pay off, but it has been my experience that often the risks of these programs or methods outweigh the rewards.  Most people got rich over decades, or generations.  At some point in every lifter’s journey, they will accept and admit that this journey towards our strength and hypertrophy goal will take a lot of time.  Time in the gym, time meal prepping, eating, sleeping, resting, the journey eventually becoming more enjoyable than the end goal.  Most of the jacked and strong people I have ever met have been in the game a long time.  Muscle builds frustratingly slow, and even when you build 5-10lbs of muscle, it feels like you look the same as you once did, and you just want more. 

Small consistent deposits over years and years will lead to the strength and physique you are looking for, but you need to make sure you are checking all the boxes and driving growth in your strength and hypertrophy piggy bank.  Months and Years, not Days and Weeks. I stole this from Paul Carter a decade ago, and it has never held more truth for me.  Months and Years, not Days and Weeks.