What is the Pocket?

“Make sure you stay in the pocket this week.”

Coach told me to stay in the pocket again this week, what does he even mean?  When he talks about bench he talks about back pockets, deadlift he talks about front pockets, but then top singles he talks about THE pocket? WTF is this mythical pocket, and how do I go there to stay?    

@squat.meme.deadlift

The pocket is that perfect place between going heavy enough to stimulate strength and hypertrophy gainz, but not so heavy that there is significant technical breakdown in a lift.  The bar moves well, individual technique is near perfect, and the lift is not terribly straining or grindy.  A pocket lift is not easy, but it is confident.  Most of the time, the pocket exists in that RPE 6-8 range, depending on the person.  You might say that “the pocket” is a way to try to conceptualize leaving a rep or 2 in the tank, taking what is there, executing to a high standard, or leaving a little room  to build momentum the following week. 

In Football, the pocket is the place where the quarterback is safest, with 5 offensive linemen protecting him, 3 in front, 2 on the sides, allowing the QB to effectively pass the ball to their teammates.  Now sometimes that pocket will collapse in front, and the QB will need to run, but sometimes QBs can step up into the pocket to deliver a great through.  If a QB gets happy feet and starts running outside of the pocket, leaving their protection, they are going to have a hard time.    When QBs leave the pocket they shrink their field, they must throw on the run, and often they make poor decisions that lead to interceptions. If your training performance is not where you would like it to be, step up into the pocket, don’t get stressed and start running outside of the pocket trying to force things to happen.  Most of the time, this will only create more problems.    Step up into the pocket, throw the check down, and live to fight another day.  If performance is down, acknowledge it, tell yourself to stay in the pocket, take what is there on the day, execute, and make a good training decision.

In music, the pocket is that sweet spot that stays true to the rhythmic foundation of the song.  If music is in the pocket, it’ll make you move along, clap, tap your toes, dance, sway, headbang, whatever you want.  But if a drummer or the music leaves that rhythmic foundation of the song, it will throw all the synchronicity away and leave people wondering what happened to the beat.  If a drummer is always leaving the pocket for ego filled flashy fills, or unable to land the down beat, they are going to have a hard time keeping people dancing.  The goal is to make people dance. If the drummer stays true to the song, stays conservative, uses tasteful fills following that rhythmic foundation, then people will be able to dance.  Make sure that your ego doesn’t get in the way of the dance taking place between you and the bar.  

That sweet spot exists in powerlifting as well.  If you train too light, your technique will be perfect, but you will never accumulate enough mechanical stress to create the kind of training stimulus required to stress our bodies enough that we must overcompensate and adapt to the workload being placed on us.  If you are training too heavy, and technique is breaking down, then you are just practicing letting your technique breakdown.  Let’s assume that we agree that the closer you get to a 1RM, or the closer you get to failure, the less technically perfect you will be.  The more you enter this zone of technical imperfection by training too heavy or too proximal to failure, the more you will slide into, and practice, the technical flaw you may be trying to correct.  Grindy lifts will also be physically, mentally, and metabolically expensive.  There is a time and place for this, but not every session. 

Lifting in the pocket does not mean that effort is low.  Effort is very high. 

RPE 7 does not mean 7/10 effort.  It means with a 10/10 effort you could execute 3 more reps. 

Train in the pocket, PR in the pocket. 

When training and living in the pocket are in sync, magic can happen.  Hopefully some of you have experienced this before.  You are handling your business outside of the gym, sleeping well, eating lots, life stress is under control, and outside of the gym, you have found that sweet spot between boredom and over stress.  This is living in the pocket.  Inside the gym, you have been staying in the pocket for months now.  Week after week, you come in, put the right weight on the bar, executing the right number of reps, at the right RPE.  Your training stimulus is appropriate for you as an individual.  You have been slowly chipping loads up over time, not forcing the issue, just taking what is there, always focusing on the process goal of staying in the pocket.  Then suddenly, the lifts you are hitting in training match your old competition PRs, only this time they are at RPE 7-8, and you have not hit a grindy lift in months.  If your training is always in the pocket, and you are handling your stress and recovery outside of the gym, at some point you will begin to hit PRs in the pocket.  Train in the pocket, PR in the pocket.  When done appropriately this will give you the confidence to open with your old PR, or heavier, at your next competition. 

I think that some people make the mistake thinking that training in the pocket is somehow easier training.  Or that reps at RPE 7-8 are easy or require less effort.  It takes a lot of patience and practice to train in the pocket. 

Training in the pocket does not mean that you never go to RPE 9 or 10.  I usually recommend that people take their accessory (isolation, supplementary, whatever) work to failure or close.  At that point you are just trying to fix weak points by mashing your muscles to make them grow.  I do not think that hamstring curls to RPE 10 are that systemically fatiguing or over stressful. 

A pocket single will not be a pocket single unless you apply maximum effort and compensatory acceleration up into the bar.  On top of that, it is usually followed by back off work (e.g. x1 at RPE 7, followed by 3x8 at 68%), that while maybe shy of failure, I would not say it is easy.  Most programming that tries to apply pocket principles is usually paired with moderate to high frequency, moderate relative intensity (RPE), and moderate to high volumes.  Staying shy of failure is usually very important with this style of programming, because one of the main goals of higher frequency programming is that it yields more sport specific practice more often.  if you are attempting to increase frequency while regularly training to failure, or with very high workloads, you may run into issues.  I am getting off topic, but one of the main goals of training in the pocket is that your practice should be better, but you will also recover in time to practice again sooner.  Again RPE 8 means you have 2 reps in reserve when you are applying maximum effort, not that you are applying an 8/10 effort. 

To effectively train this way you will need to learn to check your ego.  The ego is the enemy of pocket-based training.  Train effectively and flex your ego on the platform on game day when you execute huge PRs. 

Holding variables constant

While not all training programs are set up this way, more and more people are working with a program where most of the variables are held constant on paper, but the load is anchored on RPE, letting the individual lifter regulate their training load from week to week.   On paper the sets, reps, intensities, exercises, tempos, etc., all stay the same.  If the lifter is recovering and adapting, the load on indicator sets will go up, and subsequently so will backoff volume.   The main argument and advantage of this programming style is that it helps a coach or athlete confirm that what they are doing is working or not.  While I do use some undulation, or variable prescription strategies from week to week in some of my programming, I do appreciate the value of holding variables constant, and use this strategy often.  To be effective using this kind of strategy a lifter must be able to practice patience.  Sometimes performance might go down from week to week, this can be due to a myriad of factors both inside and outside of the gym. When this happens, it can be easy for our brains to quickly jump to the conclusion that there is something wrong with the program.  While of course this may be true in some cases, take a step back, take a breath, and evaluate whether you think that is true, or you need to handle some business outside of the gym.  Maybe it’s just an off day and you need to re-evaluate later.  If you are in week 2 of a training block and your performance is down a bit from the week before, it could be that performance was higher in week 1 because you were just coming off a deload or washout.  Or it could be that you overshot week 1 and your body is still recovering from that microcycle.  If you stay in the pocket, use slightly less weight, but nail your RPE, your performance should recover by the following microcycle.  If you try to force load up during week 2, overshoot your RPE, it is possible that your performance will go down again the following week and you will death spiral into another cycle of overshooting.   Don’t let your ego get in the way of you effectively staying in the pocket.  If you are training hard, and performance seems to be maintaining, then you are executing effective training.  This means that you are recovering from your workload from week to week and performing at an appropriate level.  At some point, whether it is after a deload or taper, or if things are really dialed in, your performance will begin to increase.

Water Drip Torture

 This metaphor is morbid, and I am stealing it from Derek Evely, but it is a good one.  This programming style is like water torture, one drop of water on your head will do little damage, but the accumulation of many, many drips can cause big problems.  Training is the same, only opposite.  You have big drips, small drips, you can change the frequency of the drip.  Slowly but surely, drip after drip, your body recovers, adapts, and sets new baselines for strength and performance.  If we appropriately add stress for periods of time, and make sure that we remove stress for other periods of time, we should be able to facilitate adaptation.  Add stress, then remove stress. 

Some criticisms of this programming style are that if you are never changing anything then your variation is not high enough from week to week and you are not creating a novel stimulus, one might argue that staying in the pocket too often means that one does not train heavy enough, or that you are not practicing straining enough, total workloads must be high and therefore more time consuming, and even though technique and bar speed might be better, the workload is higher quantity but lower quality. 

Quality > Quantity

Interesting to me that the main argument against staying in the pocket is that your training quality will suffer.  How can that be? Given that I just tried to describe that the main benefit of leaving reps in the tank is that your technical practice will be of greater quality.  This method should allow you to get a greater quantity of high-quality reps.  While this is true, and I highly recommend this method for a lot of lifters, one can still argue that your training quality, not the quality of your technique at a given moment, but the quality of the actual training is lower.  At some point you will have to strain in your powerlifting career.  1 rep maxes move slow and sending lifts to an RPE 10 is literally the sport we have chosen.  Let’s see who can lift the biggest rock. 

Let’s compare two different training prescriptions.  One is more moderate absolute intensity, moderate proximity to failure (lower RPE), higher volume.  The other prescription higher absolute and relative intensity, higher proximity to failure, but lower volume. 

Similar prescriptions

X3 at RPE 7

4x5 at 75% 

X3 at RPE 9

AMRAP 75% to RPE 9

(anywhere 7-12 reps ?)

Even though the first prescription will yield more total reps, faster reps, better technique, etc., the second prescription will have more straining reps.  Specificity to the sport is higher using the second prescription, and therefore one could argue that the quality of the training is higher, even though the quality of the technique may be lower.  I think there is great value in using both strategies, there is a time and place for both in my programming.  A few things that will help the pocket lifter get the most out of their prescription are, more frequent practice, always practicing compensatory acceleration (push as hard as possible on every rep, and really being honest and conservative with RPE. 

I am getting off topic, the goal of this blog was to convince you to learn how to spend most of your training time in the pocket, especially on your heavier work.  I can argue the values of manipulating volumes and relative intensities another time.  Train in the pocket, PR in the pocket.