RUBBER BAND PHYSIOLOGY

I heard this term in a podcast recently and it was really eye opening having this notion expressed so succinctly.  So, of course, I’m going to spend time taking something that says all it needs to say in 2 words and blow it up into 1000, because if 2 is good, 1000 is gooder!  The notion being presented here is similar to the “bodyweight/bodyfat set point” theory, wherein the body, desiring to remain in a state of homeostasis, will naturally gravitate toward a specific fixed destination as it relates to bodyfat/bodyweight.  Typically, this amount is “set” via our lifestyle during adolescence, and impacted by genetic and environmental factors, but eventually we reach a point where our body is comfortable, and when we attempt to push it BEYOND that comfort level, it may adjust temporarily, but ultimately it will fight its way back to its original starting point.  We’ve seen this with individuals that have undergone significant amounts of weight loss, losing 200+lbs of bodyweight only to put it all back on (and more) withing a few years, and we also see it with the perpetual hardgainer who fights so hard for that 20lb weight gain only to lose it all in a few weeks of poor eating.  The “rubber band” element here is the metaphor of us stretching the rubber band of our physiology only for it to snap right back to baseline on us…but let’s explore this a little more and see what lessons we can take from a rubber band.

Like don't believe everything you see from 2010s Elitefts...

 

Rubber bands, comically enough, have had a unique presence in the world of physical transformation, such that we can easily observe the lessons from them and apply them to our own biology.  Westside Barbell made their use incredibly popular, attaching them to barbells and employing them with the “Dynamic Effort” method.  This was taking the principle of accommodating resistance and applying it: the idea of making a lift HARDER the further along the range of motion that we travel.  The idea here was to teach the body how to accelerate through the hardest part of the lift, because the best way to overcome the resistance of the rubber band was to move against it as fast as possible.  If a lifter were to attempt to slowly overcome the resistance of the rubber band, they would get stapled in the lift.  If they moved quickly, they had a chance to survive, and then, when the bands came OFF the bar, the lifter would be accustomed to blowing through the lift as fast as possible.

 

However, what we ALSO observed through the use of resistance bands was something Louie Simmons deemed “overspeed eccentrics”, wherein, by employing the resistance band in the ECCENTRIC phase of the lift, the trainee was able to improve their CONCENTRIC force, in a manner similar to how plyometric training achieves outcomes.  Rather than discuss the specifics of this training, let’s observe the fact that, in order to achieve a maximal return on the eccentric phase of the lift, the resistance band needed to be started in a maximally stretched position.  If there was slack in the band, there was no overspeed eccentric achieved, whereas a tensed band would snap hard back into place.

Squats against bands are also less prone to these sorts of issues

Why does this matter?  Because, as we understand the set point as it relates to the notion of “rubber band physiology”, we are appreciating the reality that hard, strong, fast charges against our physiology stretches out our rubber band, resulting in an equally strong counter reaction of the band snapping back into place.  Effectively: the harder we push for change, the harder the body pushes BACK to revert and maintain homeostasis.  This is why crash diets create results that don’t last: the trainee loses the 10lbs in a week, and then the next week they’re up 12lbs.  Or they ran Smolov, added 50lbs to their squat at the end of the cycle, and 2 weeks later their squat has reverted to BELOW their previous max.  Or even in bodybuilding show prep, we see folks achieve ridiculous levels of leanness only to “rebound” and put back on 20-30lbs in a month.  They stretched the rubber band too fast and got snapped back on.

 

But what else can rubber bands do?  They can SNAP.  We decide to just keep on stretching and stretching until we’ve reached the end of their structural integrity and now we have a broken rubber band.  And if you’re the one STRETCHING that band, you know the end result in some pain when it snaps back and hits your flesh.  The body, once again, is no different.  If we decide to take these extreme measures beyond their “reasonable” periods of implementation (these quick fixes tend to at least have sanity in their prescribed durations), we end up with a BROKEN physiology.  In the training world, this is entering a state of being “overtrained”, in the nutritional world, it’s being “overdieted”, but in both cases, you have a BROKEN trainee now, and it’s going to take several months, if not YEARS to put humpty dumpty back together again.  We now need to rebuild the metabolism after months of running a 1500 calorie diet trying to FINALLY get abs, or we need to reduce our training volume and intensity down to bare bones to be able to FINALLY recover from fatigue enough to actually be ABLE to train.

The goal physique/strength of many of these trainees

 

So what option do we have?  Well, once again, for those of you that bought a set of original jump stretch bands, you may have noticed that, over time, they seems to LOSE some of that elasticity.  When we try to race against the band, it snaps right back, but when we just sort of gradually expand it, slowly, intentionally, we get the rubber band to accommodate to the new shape we’ve imposed upon it.  The rubber band is able to relax its contraction and stretch less and, eventually, it’s wider than we originally intended.  And if we were to take this rubber band to its logical extreme through this practice, on the day it DOES snap, it will not snap with a whiplike retraction and smack us back on our flesh, but instead more just sort of fizzle and dissolve.

 

This is one of those inconvenient truths about physical transformation: it simply can’t be rushed.  But not in the sense that “if you try to rush it, you won’t get results any faster”, but more “you won’t get results any faster AND you’ll end up worse than when you started”.  There are CONSEQUENCES for rushing.  In the case of crash dieters, due to bodyfat set point, after they end up crash dieting and losing a lot of weight through a combination of fatty AND lean mass, the body will try to rush itself BACK to its original bodyweight, and it's agnostic about how it gets there.  It wants ANY sort of mass, and this is why yo-yo dieters struggle so much.  They come back from the crash diet with more fat and less lean tissue, and then they try to crash diet again.  And since they have less lean tissue, they need to eat even FEWER calories than before to get the same results, so they’re MEGA starving, only to shave off what little lean mass they have, just to put back on even MORE fat and repeat the cycle until it can’t be sustained and now they’re in the worse possible place they can be.  The dude that just keeps chasing the intensity dragon, running peaking program after peaking program, just fries out their central nervous system and loses what little muscle they had due to a total lack of accumulation phases in their training, and eventually they find themselves trying to peak to a 1rm that is lower than their warm-ups when they first started training.  The consequences of trying to rush are that they make us go BACKWARDS.

Yeah pretty much

 

Instead, a gradual and sustainable approach needs to make up the majority of our time in the world of physical transformation.  Which, upon review, I basically took a long time to come to Dan John’s “Park bench/bus bench” concept, but it’s a good concept.  The majority of our time, in pursuit of physical transformation, we need to be just slowly stretching this rubber band of ours so we can sneak up on our biology and not even let it know that we’re transforming.  We make the process gradual and gentle so that the body gives way to the changes and finds it an acceptable state of homeostasis.  When we undertake those BRIEF moments of intense rubber band stretching (think Super Squats with a gallon of milk a day or a 28 day Velocity Diet run), we take that runway we gained against the rubber band and resume the GENTLE stretching of it, fully understanding that the body is going to try to snap that rubber band back at us, and the “gains” we made during that time AREN’T going to last.  But, perhaps, they’ll be a slight head start that we can work from, so long as we give the rubber band a moment to adjust.    

 

         

BEGINNERS DON’T PROGRESS FASTER: THEY’RE JUST BAD AT TRAINING (A DISCUSSION ON BEGINNERS, INTERMEDIATES AND ADVANCED TRAINEES) PART II

I actually already wrote the end to this earlier, but the more I think about it the more I want to continue writing on it, so if these next few paragraphs come out of the blue, it’s because I wrote them AFTER I thought I was done.  And, in fact, now I’m just making this “part II”.  But stick with me here: we’re learning that our attempt to shortcut language has limited our dialog on the discussion of training.  By classifying trainees as “beginner, intermediate and advanced”, we, unfortunately, made it a COMPETITION to STOP being a beginner as soon as possible and try to ACHIEVE being intermediate/advanced.  But really, what we understand here is that these classifications were simply meant to identify PROFICIENCY in the skill of lifting: NOT achievement.  It was not “congrats: you trained hard/long enough that you’re now lifting some REAL intermediate/advanced weights and have earned the right to use an intermediate/advanced program”, it’s “congrats: you’ve learned how to more effectively recruit your nervous system toward the task of these SPECIFIC movements and can now exhaust yourself harder/faster than a less proficient trainee”.  Which, honestly, is kind of a terrible prize to win, because it requires us to NOW employ advanced TECHNIQUES to be able to achieve the same kind of results we witnessed when we were using a more basic protocol previously, but let’s keep diving in as far as pros and cons go.

We should have the same reaction for winning this prize

 

We’re establishing exactly what newbie gains are: it’s the rapid growth that occurs simply because improved proficiency moves in an exponential rather than linear pattern, and the further away we are from our maximal potential, the faster along the line we move.  With that, we can use that to our advantage as an advanced trainee by selecting to train movements in manners that we do NOT possess an advanced level of proficiency in.  And, in fact (sorry, my mind is all over on this), this explains why Maximal Effort lifts are rotated in the first place in a conjugate training system, and WHY they’re rotated more frequently for more advanced trainees than junior ones.  When we rotate in a brand new lift, proficiency is poor and we aren’t able to actually get all that close to our REAL “100% of 1rm” on the movement, so we train it hard that day, put in a lot of effort, but don’t dig as DEEP into our recovery well as we could if we were better at it.  But when we come back to it NEXT week, we take those skills we developed and find ourselves in a position wherein we CAN dig deeper AND, in turn, impose a greater recovery demand on ourselves.  A more advanced trainee is going to develop those skills faster than a novice one, simply from having “been there/done that” over the course of their training history: they’re better capable of developing the skills to maximally recruit their nervous system.  This is why a more novice trainee can stick with a max effort lift longer than a more advanced one, with 3 weeks with 1 lift being possible for a novice while an advanced will either rotate in a new movement each week OR make changes to the parameters of the lift (go for a 3 rep max on the first week, then a 1 on the next week, for example).

 

But back to newbie gains: this means that an advanced trainee can use this principle to their advantage OUTSIDE of the max effort lift example.  From a mass building perspective, this is the genius DoggCrapp, because having 3 different workouts you rotate between limits the ability to acquire skill rapidly in the lift AND there is a protocol in place that, once a lift stalls, you simply swap it out for a new one and repeat the process.  But we even see this in the strength building world as well, with Dan John’s “No, Mild, Wild” movement variation protocol in “Easy Strength”, wherein a trainee either makes NO change to movements between cycles (or after 20 workouts, depending on their approach), a Mild change (from flat bench to incline, for example) or a WILD change (from strict press to dips, for an example).  Funny enough, many would consider these programs and protocols to be ADVANCED programs (Dante himself advised no trainee under the age of 26 with less than 3 years of training experience take on his program), but they’re advanced programs that endeavor to generate a BEGINNER response to training.

You say that like it's a bad thing!

 

But on that note, let’s also discuss some of the advantages that COME with being an advanced trainee compared to a beginner.  Because, as previously established, it’s a game balancing stimulus, fatigue and recovery, and the advanced trainee runs into the issue that they’re so GOOD at lifting that they can generate more fatigue than the beginner trainee despite doing the same AMOUNT of work.  But we have to understand that, BECAUSE of the differences of abilities between the two trainees, what is prescribed vs what is performed differ.  Where this shines through is in the instance of “single set work”.  This is something that an advanced trainee can actually excel in, whereas a beginner will most likely flounder.  An advanced trainee, so capable in recruiting their nervous system to the task of lifting the weight, can, in ONE set, generate sufficient stimulus such that they WILL get a growth response.  They’ll also, in that one set, generate enough FATIGUE that they, most likely, will get minimal benefit by adding an additional set, as the fatigue they generate will outpace the stimulus benefit, meaning they’ll be forced to recover MORE while receiving FEWER gains.  A beginner, however, will most likely NOT be capable of generating much stimulus OR fatigue in one set of work.  The solution?   More sets, of course.  We can’t dig as deep, so we, instead, dig many shallow holes so that we achieve the same AMOUNT of stimulus and comparable fatigue.

 

So then the question comes up: why aren’t ALL advanced programs simply single sets then?  In fact, why is it that, frequently, we see instances of advanced trainees performing training programs with volume that we say is TOO MUCH for a beginner?  Doesn’t that work in opposition to the previous realization?  Not quite, because we previously established the notion that recovery ITSELF is a multifaceted attribute, influenced by a variety of variables which, in themselves, can be manipulated.  The obvious answer is “drugs”, and yes: those CAN impact recovery, but so can simply general fitness levels, nutrition, sleep and age.  Someone who has maximized their recovery capabilities opens themselves up to the potential of being able to endure greater degrees of fatigue than other trainees, and what this means is that they can continue to generate stimulus beyond levels most trainees can WITHOUT generating an unrecoverable amount of fatigue.  From a practical standpoint, the issue here is the law of diminishing returns, in that the amount of fatigue generated from each additional set of training does NOT return an equal amount of stimulus, but, instead, the stimulus tends to drop off exponentially while the fatigue increases linearly.  HOWEVER, for those that ARE in pursuit of the absolute peak of physical achievement, diminishing returns ARE STILL returns.  While most folks can get 80% returns with 2 sets of hard work, if you can get 90% returns with 10 sets AND you can still recover in the same amount of time as the guy that can only manage 2 sets, you put yourself in a position to be able to outpace that individual over a long enough timeline and stand out as a “freak” amongst normal people.

10 sets of 10 may be called "junk volume", but it sure seems to have some non-junk results

 

Which is an argument for the benefit of physical preparation, nutrition, sleep hygiene, etc.  People wonder the “why” behind that, and there it is.  And, in turn, it also shows that all of that stuff is irrelevant if you’re not willing to actually CAPITALIZE on it once it’s present.   If you’re the recovery master but you’re just putting in the bare minimum, you’ll get those returns.  But if you’ve mastered recovery and LEVERAGE it to eek out those diminishing returns, you’ll see the benefits of your efforts.

 

---        

 

Folks, in truth, I wrote this post more for me than for you, because I was learning AS I wrote it.  But that said, I hope my ramblings proved beneficial in some way here.

BEGINNERS DON’T PROGRESS FASTER: THEY’RE JUST BAD AT TRAINING (A DISCUSSION ON BEGINNERS, INTERMEDIATES AND ADVANCED TRAINEES) PART I

 

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.