I’m
completely late to the party on this one, but it’s one of those things that
sorta dawned on me while I was thinking to myself (because, again, something is
broken in my brain and this is what I default to) regarding the way we perceive
beginner trainees vs advanced. Beginner
trainees are constantly provided a basic linear progression program as a novice
program in order to “get their newbie gains”.
These programs will use a limited number of movements, to give the
trainee less to screw up and more to focus on, along with a limited number of
sets and reps, because the effective dose to get a beginner to progress isn’t
significant. As we’ve observed in the
sphere of physical transformation: pretty much ANY physical intervention will
result in progress, something that Alexander Bromely highlighted well in his
“Base Strength” book discussing a trainee who undertakes 100 push ups a day in
an effort to change. And along with this
bare bones approach to training, the trainee is instructed to add weight to the
bar every time they train. Keep the sets
and reps the same: just keep adding 5lbs total per workout. If you’re training 3x per week, in 6 weeks,
you’ll have added 90lbs to each lift (in theory). By about week 12, you’ll have “milked your
beginner gains” dry, and be ready to progress to a REAL program: one that does
things like balance fatigue against recovery, employ a variety of exercises, a
range of sets and reps, etc etc. But
when asked why only beginners use these programs, we’re told the same line:
“beginners can progress faster than advanced trainees/advanced trainees need
slower progression”. And we believe it,
because it certainly APPEARS this way.
However, upon review, I think we have this wrong. I don’t think beginners can progress faster
than advanced trainees: I think beginners are so much worse at training than
advanced trainees that they never generate significant enough fatigue in the
first place to NEED more time to recover.
Granted some beginners DO have supernatural recovery abilities...
That was a
long climb for this slide, but I don’t think it’s going to get any better, so
strap in. As I previously mentioned,
training is a game of balancing stimulus with fatigue with recovery. We have to generate enough stimulus to
trigger a growth response, but doing so necessitates accumulating fatigue from
the stimulus triggering (training), and we have to ensure we’re able to recover
enough from the bout of training to be able to train again and generate the
stimulus. If we’re too fatigued from the
previous bout of training, when we go into the next round, the body won’t be
able to divert recovery resources to IMPROVEMENT: it’s going to still be
working on recovery from the previous session.
And so now, we’ve dug the hole of recovery even DEEPER, and we just keep
going further and further into recovery debt until we eventually burnout and
crash in some sort of horrific manner and are FORCE to just plain take time
away from training and focus SOLELY on recovering. We can employ recovery interventions as
safeguards to mitigate against this withing a training block (ala a
deload/recovery week, increase sleep/food/make use of drugs/etc), but that’s
just getting into more advanced methods of recovering against the fatigue. Regardless, we understand the interplay
between these systems as it relates to training.
Alright,
cool, so what? The “so what” here is
that we acknowledge that training itself is what generates the fatigue, but we
must ALSO acknowledge that you have to be GOOD at training to be able to
generate a LOT of fatigue. Similar to
how anyone can throw a punch, but a trained boxer (following under the
instruction of Jack Dempsey) understands how to actually put their weight into
their punch in order to have more devastating effects, someone who is capable
in the ways of training is able to generate MORE fatigue THROUGH training than
someone who is new to training. We refer
to this as “neurological efficiency”, the notion of someone being better able
to recruit available motor neurons to more effectively express available
strength/strength potential in an effort, and consider this to be a FEATURE for
an advanced trainee…but it may, in fact, also be a bug. A powerlifter who is more neurologically
efficient at the powerlifts is going to be able to dig much deeper and access
further levels of strength when it comes to executing the big 3 lifts compared
to a newer trainee, but, in turn, that means they will generate greater FATIGUE
by digging so much deeper in the process.
This is why the advanced trainee is unable to follow these novice
programs as written: the fatigue they generate in one training session cannot
be recovered from in the time allotted for the next training session. They will either need a longer gap between training
sessions OR to train at a lower percentage than the true novice does, such that
their training does not generate unrecoverable amounts of fatigue.
Just because you SAY it's light doesn't mean it is
But why this
is enlightening is due to what it points out about our assumptions on the
realms of training. When discussing
percentage based systems, it would appear that the percentages of a novice do
not match up to the percentages of an advanced trainee. An advanced trainee’s “90% of 1rm” may
actually BE something like 90% of their 1 rep max, but a novice trainee’s 90%
may actually end up being more like 60% of their 1rm, and that’s because they
can’t generate enough force when attempting 1 rep to actually get WITHIN the
realm of their 1 rep max potential. The
strength is there, latent in their system: they simply lack the tools to
realize this. It explains why training
maxes are a necessity for some while an obstacle for others: some folks
actually CAN achieve close to their maximum potential when they try and, in
turn, training can be incredibly fatiguing when training around their max
loads, while others are near their max loads simply because they’re so bad at
training that their “max” isn’t anywhere NEAR their potential max.
But beyond
this, it also explains situations wherein a trainee undertakes a novice program
and stalls out much faster than another novice who achieves ABSURD levels of
strength. The individual in the former
more rapidly progressed in their ability to realize true maximal strength
within their training sessions and, in doing so, found a way to generate
unrecoverable fatigue within the timeframe of the training program, whereas the
latter is simply someone gifted with an abundance of strength while still struggling
to maximally realize it. If you think of
an ape in the wild, they are significantly stronger than us humans, but they do
not invest the types of efforts we do in learning how to maximally express
their available strength. Were they to
undertake such training, they could progress for a LONG time adding 5lbs per
session before they eventually finally started working within the realms of the
max capabilities, generating too much fatigue to be able to recover and being
forced to undertake a different training modality.
And if the ape is alone in the woods and no one is around to see it lift, does it still get +1/+2?
Which, in
turn, means that the internet witchhunt that occurs when a novice trainee
stalls out early in a novice program is even sillier than usual. All we are observing, when this occurs, is
someone having found a way to generate more fatigue than they have available
recovery. Now, yes, part of the
intervention here COULD BE to engage in some manner of physical fitness
improvement in order to improve one’s ability to recover in general (because
many raw beginners in this era come into training incredibly unfit) but it can
ALSO be to acknowledge that this individual simply outpaced their available
strength with advancing neurological efficiency.
When you
think about “natural athletes”, these are simply people that are blessed in
such a way that they are able to rapidly adapt to the demands of a new
activity. Their bodies are simply more
aware and capable at learning physical skills compared to us of the more oafish
persuasion. If we acknowledge that such
individuals exist, surely there is the case where one such individual could be
naturally gifted as an athlete AND they’ve squandered their gifts through a
sedentary lifestyle. What we’d have there
is the perfect storm for early novice burnout: a trainee with minimal strength
potential that can be rapidly realized.
Within a month of the novice program, this individual has figured out
how to more effectively recruit available motor units than the average trainee,
and soon enough they’re just digging the recovery hole deeper than the next guy
can. This isn’t a failure at all: this
person has graduated early! The internet
will chide this, saying that someone with a 135lb bench is still a novice and
just needs to keep on eating more and doing their 3 sets of 5, but that’s
absolutely slapping a bandaid on the problem (effectively just making the
trainee heavier so that the weights they are moving a reduced percentage
compared to their bodyweight, ala the “mass moves mass” mantra). Instead, it’s time to acknowledge that this
trainee needs to move onto a protocol that allows them adequate time to recover
between training bouts WHILE shifting emphasis to improving their strength
potential. They’ve realized all the
strength they have: it simply isn’t much.
Time to accumulate
And then the
theory can get REALLY interesting when we consider how to reverse this and get
an advanced trainee to employ a novice progression program. Primarily because Dan John, by way of Pavel
Tsastouline, already figured this out: Easy Strength. Easy Strength looks a LOT like a basic linear
progression program, especially when trained 3x a week (which is within
tolerances of the program). 3 sets of 3
of a limited number of movements, trained 3x a week, for 40 total
workouts. HOWEVER, the load of Easy
Strength is what makes the difference, for the trainee is told to NOT strain
during this lifting (hence “Easy” strength), which, if we use percentages, can
put the load around 50-60%. However,
again, with an advanced trainee, this is a REAL 60% load, which is a GOOD
thing, because it means it’s enough to generate the STIMULUS to create change
yet won’t cause such excessive fatigue that there is an inability to
recover. It’s why Easy Strength is set
up the way it is and works the way it does: we took that same novice program
and simply set up a training load that won’t floor the advanced trainee. In turn, novice programs won’t work solely on
novices because of some unique ability to progress faster than advanced trainees:
they work on ALL levels of trainees, so long as the actual appropriate load is
implemented.
I originally
thought I was done at this point and wrote a concluding paragraph, and then I
came back and wrote another 1500 words or so, so let’s call this “part I” and
stay tuned for part II.
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