Adaptation Precedes Overload

If you are reading this, you are probably familiar with the concept of overload and overcompensation.  Our body reacts to stress by overcompensating, so that it can handle stress again in the future.  The human body wants to make itself more resistant to the stress imposed on it.  In order for your body to overcompensate, you must load it with a greater stress than was already encountered.  This is usually one of the first ideas we are introduced to when we step foot in the gym, whether formally or informally.  Either someone explains to you that if you lift these weights today, you should be able to do more weight or more reps in the future.  Or they explain that to grow bigger muscles, you will need to put more weight on the bar.  Where we eventually all go wrong is when we think we need to progress load or reps every exercise, or session, or every week.  At this point most of you have probably learned that strength development does not quite work that way.  We have all reached that point in a training program where we are scratching and clawing just to add one kilogram to the bar or add one rep to an amrap set.  We make our planned load progression from one week to the next only to fall short of the desired reps, worse yet, performance doesn’t only fail to improve, it goes down.  This is a real mind fuck the first few times it happens.  I am working hard, eating lots, sleeping well, by all accounts I am doing things right, why is performance down?  The real mind fuck is when you are excited about a new program, new variations, different set and rep schemes, altered exercise syntax, and then you get to week 2 and performance is already down.  What gives?!  How am I supposed to apply overload progression if my performance is already down in week 2?

Try to remember that adaptation precedes overload progression.  Load progression is the product of overload, not the cause.  You can add more weight to the bar because you have appropriately applied an overload stimulus. You were able to lift heavier weight because your body adapted to the stimulus placed on it previously.  When you change the stimulus of an entire microcycle, your body may need a few weeks to recover from and adapt to the new stimulus it is being presented with, especially as you develop in training age. 

If you start a new block of training, assume that the training variation will create a stimulus that the body may not be prepared for.  Even if the workloads are within your usual maximum recoverable volumes, the movement or intensity novelty alone may create enough mechanical and metabolic disruption that performance may not recover completely after the first microcycle.  Don’t freak out!  You made disruptive changes to your plan on purpose.  If performance suffers in the short term, remember that we are committed to the effect of repetitive chronic training stimuli over the long term.  This is another reason why anchoring load selection on RPE or RIR is a great strategy and tool.  Our body does not understand the number on the bar, those numbers are just made-up concepts anyway, your body only understands stress and movement practice.  Besides, last week you had come off a reload or pivot.  If we deload appropriately you should come into week 1 fresh and ready to perform well.  If week 1 is novel relative to recent training history, our body will have to adapt to that stimulus before we can apply progressive overload.  It is also plausible that day 1 of week 2 is impacted by the stress of the last couple training sessions of week 1, since they are no longer deload sessions. 

Mike Israetel’s Stimulus-Recovery- Adaptation Model is a great way of describing this phenomenon. 

Stimulus-Recovery- Adaptation is defined as the “sequence of processes that occur during and after training,” The basic idea of the model is that you have some baseline level of homeostasis, or in an athlete’s case, performance.  When our bodies receive a stressful stimulus, i.e. a training session, this stimulus will cause mechanical and metabolic disruption, setting off alarms at the physiological level, and a subsequent reduction in performance.  Every time you train you are imposing a stress on your body that will set off alarms that trigger responses to the training (increases in HR, breathing rate, and BP, fuel mobilization, lactate production, NS fatigue, etc.) that then create molecular signaling cascades, improving our ability to handle that stress of training.  If the stress of an individual training session continues for too long at too high an intensity, eventually you will reach exhaustion and must stop training. If the systems are presented with overloading stimuli before full recovery and adaptation has occurred, then this will create a deeper stimulus with an increased potential for adaptation. However, if this process continues recovery will not complete itself and adaptation will not occur. Allowing the body to fully recover and then some, will create positive adaptations up and above the original baseline.  Recovering original performance levels is easier than creating new ones so this process will take time and rest; building new tissue is hard.  If the body is not repeatedly presented with stress, then involution of that adaptation will occur.  In an ideal scenario we will present the body with a new stimulus at the precise moment that the peak adaptation has occurred. 

The point I wanted to make with SRA is that when you present your body with a brand new microcycle, the novelty of the microcycle will make a larger stimulus that you may not full recover from by the time the next microcycle comes around.   If said stimulus is repeated, the body will perceive it as less stressful the second time around, eventually recovering and adapting to it.   

So how do we plan for and respond to this?  First, see how the athlete responds mentally.  Some personalities will purposely undershoot the beginning of a block, trying to either make sure that they leave room for growth, or knowing they don’t want to overdo it in week 1.  Other personalities have the wherewithal and maturity to load less weight on the bar to nail the RPE prescription when performance calls for it.   A static RPE (on paper) approach will work well with this type of individual a lot of the time.  Knowing they will undershoot, you can leave top set RPE prescriptions static, and let them milk small progressions, building momentum over the block. 

An opposite personality will respond to the excitement of coming off a deload into week 1 of a new training block by performing very well, only to either experience more soreness, fatigue, or simply lower arousal levels in week 2, facing a downturn in performance.  If this lifter struggles with controlling their ego and load selection, using a dynamic RPE approach may be more beneficial, forcing them to undershoot the first few weeks of the block, controlling momentum by raising RPEs as the block goes on.  This should give their body time to adapt to the new stimuli and workload.  Adaptation is more physiologically expensive than we want it to be.  Adaptation takes time and resources.  If you are regularly frustrated by week 2 and 3 performances, try to lean into the idea that perhaps you just aren’t adapted to the change in stimulus.  Don’t freak out and start changing things in your training.  Play the tape to the end and see what happens. 

Once upon a time I argued that I did not think time to peak was real, and that athlete responder types were either patterns in randomness, personality types, or a response to lifestyle factors. While I still think that is the case, the responder prototypes are still valuable to understand, and worth reviewing for people who are less familiar with the Emerging Strategies and Bondarchuk/Evely bottom-up systems. 

There are apparently 3 general response types to any repeated training stress.  Type 1 responders basically just improve every single week until they don’t.

Type 2 responders generally have a dip in performance at the beginning of a mesocycle and then continue to get better until they reach their peak condition. 

Finally, type 3 responders are mostly stagnant in their response to training at the beginning of a cycle but then have a very drastic improvement after weeks of repeated stimulus. 

I don’t have enough knowledge or data on these responses to argue for or against these response types.  But I would venture a bet that the individual response type categories that we think we see in individuals are more random than we would like.

When I look at a type 1 responder, I see a functional intermediate who is just one of those people that is going to get better despite what they do, “the young gun”.  No matter what you say they will try to outdo their performance from the week before, often successfully, against their coach’s better judgement. 

On the other hand, I also see an intelligent top-down planner who purposely starts too light at the beginning of a training cycle, giving themselves room to progress to a potential performance improvement at a future date.  I call this training personality “the accountant” after my client who executes this to near perfection every single training cycle.  Meet after meet they go 9/9, smoke all their attempts leaving weight on the platform and realize the small steady improvements that add up significantly over time.   This is a personality type, not an adaptation type.  Most people’s ego cannot handle this slow methodical approach.  We want results right now.  We want more weight on the bar right now.  “Why would I undershoot?  I will improve my strength faster if I lift a heavier weight today.”  Will you?

When I look at a type 2 responder, I see that someone’s training was initially above their capacity but after a few weeks they built up enough capacity to be able to recover from and then adapt to the training stimulus.  On the other hand, I also see someone who is overzealous during the first couple weeks and their performance suffered during subsequent weeks because of it.  I might also see someone who didn’t get enough sleep or rest for the first couple weeks of a training cycle.   This volatile personality and lifestyle leading to volatile performance in the gym as well. 

A Type 3 response looks like the response of a lifter with a more advanced training age that has a very good gauge of their performance capacity and may come to the gym week in and week out with little volatility in their training performance.  Advanced lifters might go months without realizing any performance improvement.   I might also see someone who takes the same warm up jumps every single workout, and then when they reach that same “heavy” load each week they call it there, or on the other hand they might just be afraid of going heavier.  Every week they take the same jumps p to the same load which ends up being “heavy enough”, somewhere between a 6.5 and an 8.5 rpe.  Their sharp shift in performance might be the delayed expression of a slowly improving performance, it might be caused by the expectation of being further along in the training cycle, it also might be that the individual pushed harder knowing that they had a deload or pivot block approaching. 

A weird anecdote coming from Derek Evely’s Bondarchuk course is that Bondarchuk says that eventually everyone becomes a 3.  Is that a training age thing?  Is that a maturity thing?  Does training maturity eventually curb the personality volatilities that might arise?  What should we even do with that info?  Do we use a static RPE model knowing we may have to deal with the fact that we will see performance stay the same for multiple weeks.  Or do we try to game the system with a dynamic RPE system, starting lighter and ramping things up so that weights are at their heaviest when performance should begin to improve.  Do we use an undulating model to facilitate more recovery and keep athlete intent high?

Undulating models are great.  I know I personally do well with different undulating models, whether we are using different reps from week to week or just manipulating RPEs to have some weeks further from failure and some weeks with a higher RPE. 

The lower stress weeks allow an athlete to recover from the heavier/harder weeks while still facilitating good practice.  The athlete just needs to make sure that on the lighter weeks, they are staying light!  Timing up undulating models to provide peaks can be difficult.  Attention really needs to be paid to when the athlete truly performs at their best.  Even trying to decide what order of undulation, or magnitude of change can be difficult to dial in for any individual.  Is it best to have the lightest weeks before the heaviest, or after?  Should the reps change by steps of 1,2, or 3?  How much variance do I want in RPE? Half steps? Whole steps?

Another weird Bondarchuk anecdote is that he doesn’t use deloads, or pivots or anything like that.  Note, Bondarchuk is a track and field coach, not a powerlifting coach, so loading requirements and specificities are not the same.  But still, no deload or washout, just a program change.  He argues that if you do this you will see more peak performances, and therefore greater result over the long term.  The peaks matter. 

  I am getting very off topic.  The main idea I wanted to get across with this ramble is that adaptation is going to precede overload progression. You need to plan for that in some way, whether that is checking your ego, giving the training time to let itself cook, manipulating your loading to have heavier and lighter weeks, or all of the above.  Stay chill on load progression, especially early on in a new block of training.  You won’t be able to rush the process.  You can’t force feed adaptation with more volume.  You can’t force feed growth with more food.  Training too heavy, more often, with worse form, will probably not develop your strength in the way that you think.  Find ways to work on the recovery side of the curve rather than tinkering with the stress side of the curve.  Recover better from less work and yield the fruits of your labour that way.  Consistency and time always trump.  Whenever I am pointing a finger at you, I am pointing 3 at me.  Aim for the chip.