How Your Body Feels is a Lie (Sometimes)

Sometimes, how your body feels is a lie. 

We can probably all think of a time where either we did not want to train, thought we were too tired to train hard, figured we were too sore to perform well, flat out did not want to train, but then after you get moving, you end up having a PR training day.   Sometimes your perception of how you feel on a given day does not end up lining up with how you perform in the gym.  We have probably all had the opposite scenario happen as well, we feel fresh and are excited to train but for whatever reason performance just does not line up on that day. 

The first thing to note is that the hard training drives the performance.  High performing training drives even more high performing training.  If you have been sore and feel fatigued, it is because you have been training very hard and accumulated fatigue.  But you have also accumulated the stimuli that drives higher performance.  To get to your highest level ever, you will have to have accumulated your highest quality training stimuli ever. Obviously, this will not always be the case, sometimes we will be fatigued, and it will express itself in your performance.  But occasionally, usually when expectations are understandably low, we end up having a great day.  Anecdotally, I try to get clients to believe in themselves to the point where they expect to have a great session every single time.  I believe in belief.  You never know how far belief will take you when it comes to things like training performance.  That daily belief yielding a 1% improvement in individual training sessions can really compound over months and years.  Believing you will perform well even when you are tired.  Believing your chronic pain experience will dissipate as you warm up.  Believe in yourself even when things are going to be hard, you’ve been training for this moment. 

Your performance will be average

A fellow coach, co-worker, and friend of mine did a study on his own personal readiness vs. his performance.  He used a questionnaire to rate his daily readiness and compared it to his performance based on E1RM.  His findings?  Whether readiness was high or low, aka whether his fatigue felt low or high, or whether he felt good or not, performance was not indicated by readiness.  When compared to all his training during this time period, performance was often average, regardless of whether perception of fatigue was high or not.  The vast majority of your training be average by definition.  If you can tick that average up by even a small percentage simply by believing you will have good sessions, even when you are sore and tired, that is highly valuable over the long term.   

This is Powerlifting, you are going to feel it.

There is going to be a cost associated with hard training.  Hard training is going to be hard, and you are going to feel it the next day. Some people argue day 2 is usually the worst, even then sometimes soreness or achy joints can last even longer. This is Powerlifting.  You are going to feel it.  Sometimes you just need to do hard things.  You too, can do hard things.   I have heard too many anecdotal examples from individuals who say they have discovered that they perform better when they feel this way.  With enough experimentation they have found that their best performances, whether in training or on meet day, do not always come when they are feeling fresh, or after a taper or deload, they come when they feel as though they have been fighting for their life.  Funny how the best performances might come from the times when your body has been preparing for it, it’s almost like that’s how training works.  Expect to be strong when you have been training hard, there are too many people that lift at the highest level who can vouch for this.  You should be carrying fatigue and soreness into your taper week.  If you are hitting PRs in the middle of a hard training block, then lean into that strategy a little more. 

Default Deloads

The worst mistake that some people make is that as soon as they start to feel what might be perceived as too much fatigue or soreness, is that they immediately want to deload, lower workloads, or use lighter weights.  Understand that our body adapts to the chronic repetitive stimuli of hard training.  What happens is that either you deload too early, before forcing your body to adapt to chronic training stimuli, or too much, and your body loses some of the adaptations it had gained in the block prior.  Worse than that is making the decision that workloads were too high because of fatigue and soreness, even though performance based on E1RM had indicated that things were going well.  Performance may recover in the short term, but it is plausible that you are holding yourself back from a bigger total in the longer term.

There are times during a training plan where a coach may purposely be trying to drive fatigue up, in the hopes of eliciting adaptations further down the road.  Sometimes the goal is work capacity, hypertrophy, weak point training, and performance may be suppressed by both the type of stimulus and the magnitude of the stimulus.  If you are using a higher rep, higher volume, lower specificity protocol, and then  shift to a lower workload and feel and see performance tick up, don’t necessarily jump to the conclusion that lower volumes are best for you.  You may need the period of higher workload to drive the performance later during the lower volume period.  The default deload of changing a training stimulus can often yield a performance benefit.  If you experience this, don’t make the mistake of getting rid of the higher volume period that came before it.  If you are in the high-volume period, sore, tired, and your performance is down.  Don’t freak out, control what you can control, accept that this period is only temporary, and know that your training stimulus will change soon. 

This can even happen in the opposite direction.  Program hoppers infamously jumping from program to program may have experienced this.  Individuals that go from low frequency, moderate to low volume, high relative intensity (RPE) programming, that shift to a program using higher volumes and frequencies will notice an uptick in performance simply by changing the training stimulus.  It is common to jump to the conclusion that lower volumes no longer work for you as an individual.  This is probably not true.  There is a time and place for all types of training.  Just because you need a little bit more workload to drive adaptation right now, doesn’t mean that you can’t take advantage of a lower workload strategy in the future.  “gotta keep the body guessing.”  A stimulus becoming null due to the repeated bouts effect does not mean that you can no longer use that stimulus forever.  It means that you just need to do something different right now. 

In the new world of weekly training singles and Instagram, the belief has been built that we always can and should be performing well.  We need to be strong for the Gram and we need to get better every week because that is what our favourite lifters are doing.  Even if you are so dialed in that performance is improving every week, the improvement will be a fraction of a percent, and may not actually express itself in a 5lbs increment of bar load.  If you want to build a skyscraper, you need to dig down first and build a proper foundation.  If you want to build a massive total, you probably won’t be hitting a total PR in the gym every single week.  If you are worried because you are not maintaining peak performance when you are in the off season or even 4-8 weeks out from a meet, then you should reevaluate your thinking.  This idea that we should be able to progress 1RM or E1RM all the time… good luck. 

When should you be sure to believe your body?

There are going to be aches and pains that come with powerlifting.  To quote Dr. Eric Helms, we are not practicing knitting.  We are practicing moving as much heavy steel as we possibly can through a full range of motion with our bodies.  Our muscles, tendons, ligaments, connective tissue, bones, and brains are going to take a beating.  To some degree you are flat out just going to have to work through this.  You are trying to be the best version of yourself ever, there is a cost to that.  You are trying to lift the heaviest weights you have ever lifted; it is going to take its toll.  If you are dealing with aches and pains, don’t just expect that training will be in the toilet.  Try to work through the aches and pains.  A proper warmup can go a long way to flossing the body and preparing it for hard training.  That paired with the expectation that I will feel physically and mentally ready after completing my warmup can work wonders and keep you training for the long term.  If you are dealing with some aches or pains, and you complete your normal warmup, or do your prescribed prehab work, and the ache or pain does not go away, this is a time to be sure that you listen to your body.  It doesn’t mean you need to abandon your plan just yet, just be sure to listen.  If pain increases with load progression, listen to your body and back off.  If a particular movement or range of motion is especially pain free, listen to your body and try to train around that issue using different movement selection. 

Last warmup is the prescribed RPE

                  If you work up to what was supposed to be your last warmup set and it is either slow, at the prescribed RPE, or moving worse than you want it to, this is a time to listen to your body.  Don’t ignore these signs and move up to your planned load anyway.  This would be silly.  Yes, I want you to ignore your fatigue and go through your whole warm up process.  I want you to believe that you will have a strong training session despite the muscle soreness.  But if your last warm up is telling you your planned top set isn’t there on the day, don’t ignore this information and progress load anyways.  The is listening to your ego.  The ego is the enemy. 

Feels Good Man

The last thing to note is that even if you are sore, tired, foggy, fatigued, and your performance was in fact down during the session, is that you will feel better after the session.  Good days or bad days, if you train hard, you will feel better after the training session, especially if you are in the right head space.  On a good day, training makes that good day even better.  On a bad day, you go in, train, complete tasks, check boxes, exert yourself, and low and behold your body and brain send you signals that all this hard work feels good, even though you are sore and tired.  Expect greatness.  Believe in yourself.  You are sore and tired because you have been working hard.  You are also stronger because you have been working hard.