An Argument for Maintaining Training Prescription From Week to Week

Background

A few years ago, everyone was all hyped up and bent out of shape about Godfather Mike T’s emerging strategies concept.  This was the new cheat code to unlocking world record breaking gainz in world record time.  All you had to do was create your microcycle, run it over and over and over and over again, look at the data, find your time to peak, and repeat new strategies based on your time to peak, and voila, miracle gainz.  I too was fascinated by what Mike had to say, the results he was reporting, and eager to experiment on myself.  Mike had done a great job describing a problem that can be difficult to understand and developed a viable strategy to combat it.  Periodization plans were built on assumptions, they are top down.  They start at the end and work backwards.  But if you want to individualize training, you need to start from the beginning. You need to start with the individual.  You need to start from the bottom and work up from there.   If you are unfamiliar with the Mike T’s emerging strategies concepts, Bondarchuk methods, Derek Evely, and have too much time on your hands, I recommend starting here:

I highly recommend Derek Evely’s Bondarchuk course at www.eveltraksport.com 

Time to Peak

I think where people got hung up, me included, was on this idea that there should always be a peak, conflating peak with a PR.  This makes people forget that there will be a time in training where you are trying to accumulate fatigue, not trying to perform well.  Accumulating fatigue and performing so well that you PR at the end of every block is not so easy.  Or we made the mistake of extrapolating time to peak off too little data, assuming they were a certain type of responder with a particular time to peak, anchoring on those two assumptions and driving themselves into ground trying to force peaks in subsequent training.   A few years ago, I argued that time to peak was simply people finding patterns in randomness.  I still think this is true.  I still don’t think time to peak is real. Success of time to peak was predicated on outside factors remaining the same.  Sleep schedule, nutrition, steps, etc.etc.etc. must all stay the same too.  Load is anchored on RPE.  However, the main advantage of using RPE to prescribe load is that a lifter will adjust the load based on the complexity of human performance based on ever changing outside factors. 

When you finally lock in TTP and achieve Jacked Wizard status

What I did learn and apply from this process is that there is value in individualizing a block length based on time needed until deload, or number of sessions needed until washout.  This was a very valuable coaching tool I learned from experimenting with the time to peak process. 

  The most valuable tool coming out of the emerging strategies model was the simple idea that one could probably learn more about an individual if the training prescription was maintained from week to week.  Everything stays the same: exercise selection, sets, reps, %, RPE, tempo, literally everything, except that load is anchored on RPE and will adjust according to individual performance on the day.    I really think people missed the mark on this.    It seems like when planning using a time to peak was not as simple or successful as we wanted, we threw out the idea of maintaining training prescription from week to week as well.  Almost as if the expecting a peak (PR?) with a given training dose in a certain time gave coaches or athletes some semblance of control over something we truly do not have control over.  When that control was not so clear, we went back to the old ways of changing things from week to week in an attempt to express an external locus of control over an individual’s rate of adaptation.   Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. 

How do we know what we know?

How do you know a training program works?  

Mike uses the idea that the first time you went to the gym you had no idea what you were doing, you just came into the gym and did some stuff.  The following week you would do the program again and see if you got stronger.  If this is our starting point, set up 1 week of a training plan.  Run it, run it again and see how things go the week after.  If we are always changing the program from week to week, how do we know if it is really working?  Are we controlling the progression or are we just changing the stimulus before it needs to be changed?  Learn how to milk as much progression as you can out of a single training stimulus.     Did performance go up? Did performance go down? Did load go up but performance based on E1RM stay the same?  Was there lifter error with RPE ratings?  What about if you start comparing training days?  Even then, how much would you really know after one week of training?  Performance could have gone up because the lifter is excited about the new program.  Performance could have gone down because the lifter was not completely prepared for the workload or stimulus.  So even running the same program for two weeks warrants a 3rd and 4th (5th…7th?) week of repetition.  If we admit the struggles of being able to tell whether training is going well or not when training prescription is maintained, how are we ever going to know if training is working if we are changing variables every week?  With all the dials that we can turn when it comes to planning training, if we turn one or two dials every week, we make it more and more difficult to really deduce the result of the training prescription. 

A sound check needs to include all the instruments and vocalists playing more than one song to make sure the mix is dialed in.   

Even then we will need to deal with the ego of the individual, reporting errors, missed training, ever changing lifestyle variables outside of the gym, and adherence issues. 

There really isn’t that much we can determine after one training week.  At the extreme ends we know whether a training program is way too hard (Bulgarian Method, Smolov, High Frequency/High Volume/High Intensity), or way too easy (1x/week minimalist method).  Even then I have had clients make unexpected gainz on programs or frequencies that I thought were way too easy or too little. 

I understand that this style of training is not for everyone.  It can be very grating to feel the struggle of training load or performance appearing stagnant, and seeing the same program come at you the following week.   

So where do we start?

Helpful to have a good handle on both percentage-based and RPE based Programming

Select Microcycle goal

Select total frequency

Select total number of exercise slots per session. 

Select Movement Patterns or Muscles trained for each session

Select goal of each training session or each exercise slot.  

(Strength, Hypertrophy, Power, practice, speed, weak points, work capacity, variation, fun, GPP)

Select exercises, reps, sets, RPEs, %, tempos, based on these goals. 

Run your training week.  Run it again, and again.  Run it until you are certain that the training stimulus is null. 

Dr. Mike Israetel’s Voluime Landmarks Review:

• Minimum Effective Volume

  • The lowest amount of work that an athlete can do in a relevant timeframe and still measurably improve

• Maximum Adaptive Volume

  • The amount of training stimulus that yields the greatest adaptive response within a specific timeframe

• Maximum Recoverable Volume

  • Highest amount of work that an athlete can do and in a specific timeframe and recover enough to present a full overload in the next training timeframe (overload, does not mean full recovery of performance)  

If our training dose is minimally effective, we will get stronger in the second microcycle but only slightly.  If our training dose is maximally adaptive, we will get even stronger in the second microcycle.  If our training dose is maximally recoverable, we will be able to lift the same weights in the second microcycle, but we will not increase load.  If our training dose is supra maximal load will go down in the second microcycle. 

If our week 1 workloads are too high, and then we have a pre-planned set, rep, or intensity increase from week 1 to week 2.  Not only will lifter performance go down from week 1 to 2, but we increased the stimulus again, potentially digging a deeper hole of recovery debt.  If we hold variables the same from week 1 to week 2, the load may go down slightly if RPE is used correctly, the lifter will have a chance to adapt to the workload, assuming proper recovery and adaptation, then when week 3 rolls around loads will be back up and the lifter will be ready to progress further along in training.  This will let you know that the workload is within an individual’s ability to recover and adapt, they just needed a week or two to adjust to the new stimulus.  This can also be a product of an individual being excited about a new block or program and overshooting the first week or so.  This is going to happen, at least holding variables constant allows an individual to figure out starting points for each week or each session. 

If the workload is too high, then load will continue to drop through week 3 and 4 and you will know an adjustment needs to be made.  There may also be a time and place for this, say if you are trying to increase work capacity.  Sometimes we just need to work on building a bigger engine for our car. 

Quantifying volume landmarks is probably wayyyy more difficult than we think.  Research supports the idea that as long as hard enough (RPE 6+?) set counts are equated, hypertrophy outcomes seem to be about the same.  While outcomes may be similar, I do not know that I would consider a set to failure and a set with 3RIR to be the same stimulus, stressor, or create the same outcome in a powerlifter.  At some point athletes probably need to strain against load, so they will have to get a bit closer to failure. 

How Coach Feels Calculating MAV

For simplicity, let’s say we start someone with 3x/week training, 6 hard sets of squats per week, 9 hard sets of benchpress, and 3 hard sets of deadlifts (9 sets of SQ/DL total).  I usually consider a hard set anything above an RPE 6.5.  I try to consider that a set at RPE 9 is probably more stressful than a set at RPE 7, but this is very hard to quantify.  Just keep in mind that if training is closer to failure more often you will probably need less sets in total.  Forget about accessories for now, but assume that there are some, nothing crazy.  If this individual can handle something like 16-18 sets of squats and deadlifts per per week, and 18-20 sets of pressing per week, it will take a long time to truly figure out exactly where MEV, MAV, and MRV exist.  Then someone’s lifestyle will change, and all their volume landmarks will change along with it. 

So, what do we do?  Start at MEV and add 1-2 sets per block until we know we are at or above MRV?  This might take 4-5 blocks based on our example.  Remember that volume will be maintained every single week.  Who ever got a new client that was willing to spend 6-7 months tinkering and mashing away at highly repetitive, slowly ramping discovery blocks so that we might approximate their volume landmarks?  Clients want you to have the answer right now and to produce results immediately.  It might be more prudent to start someone with a more moderate training dose, maybe 12 sets of squat and deadlift, and 16 sets of benchpress.  But then it is plausible that you might start people with a training plan that is far too much work.  What you might think is low volume might be someone’s MRV.  No one wants to drive a client into the ground right off the jump.  This can be hard to learn and to assess if you have been playing sports and lifting weights your whole life.  This isn’t a bad thing; 2this is a good thing.  It means you can get good results without even doing that much.  Remember that we want adaptation, not high workloads for the sake of high workloads.  I could do this all day, trying to truly quantify volume landmarks becomes very difficult in practice, even more difficult if we are changing the stimulus from week to week. 

While I am pointing out how difficult it may be to truly determine volume landmarks.  The argument still holds that if you anchor a training stimulus on RPE, and change no variables, you can learn more about an individual in less time than if you are manipulating variables every week.  If you really want to get strong and jacked, committing to this kind of process for the long term will be tedious, but it will have its advantages. 

Van Gogh Train Your Muscles