Instructor: When we look at the
total number of sets that we're going
to use within the workout, we have to look
at whether or not those sets are still
giving me quality stimulus, or whether or not
I've passed the point where, like,
I've gotten all the stimulus I need
and now this is essentially just extra,
or if I've gotten to the point where I can't achieve
the stimulus anymore simply because of fatigue.
So when we look at things like,
when we see performance drop off.
What we'll get to there is like, okay,
if my performance is dropping off so much,
I may not be able to achieve the stimulus anymore.
So I could do another set, but at a lower
performance level, it's just extra work,
I'm expending extra energy, but I'm not able
to get the intensity or I'm not able
to accumulate the metabolic fatigue
because my performance has dropped so much.
I'm either not able to go as intense
or as long because of the fatigue.
So, in that case, if I continue to do more sets,
the only thing I'm gonna do is increase the amount
of recovery it's gonna take for me
to do this training or work this tissue again.
Or if there's a lot of systemic overload,
just even be able to train again, period.
So it could effect my frequency
for body parts that I'm not even training today, so
optimal training is enough sets to achieve
the stimulus and not anything extra
that is going to decrease from recovery,
'cause two things happen when I decrease recovery.
One is, my frequency of training is gonna go down
provided I'm intelligent enough to make the decision
to say okay, I need to take longer to recover
from this particular workout because I overdid it.
So, just simply gonna be able to make
less progress because my frequency goes down.
The other aspect is, recovery takes nutrition
and recovery takes resources, and sometimes
the damage that's done affects the ability
of certain nutrients to get in the cell
or the cell to do certain things.
So, when the cell is very depleted with energy,
it's not gonna go into anabolic processes yet
because it needs to get energy first
to fuel those anabolic processes.
So doing extra fatigue that is not beneficial
won't just decrease how often you can train
so you get less results because of less frequency.
It can also actually reduce the adaptations
that you're going for because you're simply
having to recover from the extra work
before you actually get to respond to the stimulus.
So, your goal that that recovery process
was supposed to have, whether that be
growing muscle or partitioning glucose
or whatever, may get delayed and may get reduced
because you're simply having to deal
with the extra work that you did.
So, it's like, you know, if you are carrying
something from point A to point B,
you're carrying, say, two bags.
And we put a bunch of bricks in it.
When you get to the destination,
you carried more weight there,
but say what you had in that bag,
say that bag was filled with money, otherwise,
and then we threw some extra bricks in there.
When you get to the end, you don't have any extra money.
All you have is bricks, which are essentially,
we'll say they're worthless.
Even worse, maybe the bricks rolling around in there
have torn up some of the money that you took
or maybe a hole ripped in your bag
and you lost some of it on the way
so you did more work, got less result.
That's what's happening when we go over in sets.
So, another thing to look at is once
that stimulus is achieved, even if there wasn't
a recovery issue, even if I had the ability
to recover from the extra work,
wasn't gonna affect my frequency,
because I'm just a recovery pro,
my nutrition is great, my stress is very minimal,
and I'm genetically blessed to recover really well.
By doing that, by going over, there's still
no benefit, and it can actually, as we get into
the next course we talk about program design,
you will see that what I could be doing
is making it so now, I have to progress faster
than I should, meaning I'm gonna be able to train
this particular stimulus or this particular program
for a shorter period of time 'cause I'm kind
of climbing up the adaptation ladder faster
than needed to get the results that I want.
The only thing that's gonna need to progress faster
is my workouts are gonna have to get more difficult faster
because I've set the bar higher for the next workout.
When we look at performing sets in
a fatigued state, so that could be
neurological fatigue, that could be
metabolic fatigue, both of those
are gonna decrease performance.
We're likely not going to get the stimulus that
we would if we were training in a recovered state.
So when we're doing intensity-based work,
we need to be able to have high performance,
we need to be able to have high power
output when we do that next set,
so, we need to have, basically, we need to
be training every set in a recovered state.
When we get to some metabolic workouts,
what we'll find is there's actual benefits
to being able to change the stimulus
by not allowing that full recovery.
So, understand that when you're doing a set,
the condition you go into that set,
will affect the stimulus of that set.
So, going into a set fully recovered
versus going in with incomplete recovery
are two different metabolic conditions.
You're gonna get two different neurological
and power outputs from those respective things.
So those sets are not equal.
Not equal in volume, not equal in stimulus.
When we look at fatigue, it's gonna
affect our ability to achieve that stimulus
of a set, we talked about that before.
But that fatigue may be the stimulus.
So fatigue will affect mostly intensity-based work.
So it's gonna take away from intensity-based
work first, but there may be a certain intensity
that you need to achieve the hypertrophy stimulus
that you're going for, in a hypertrophy program.
There may be a certain intensity that you need,
to start off your metabolic set.
Especially if you're doing something like a,
like a tri set, 6-12-25, you need to be able
to get something out of the six
or it's not worth doing the six.
So, if you don't have enough intensity
to make that six metabolically demanding,
well then your recovery needs to increase
because fatigue is gonna be taking away
from the intensity of those early reps.
So, we wanna make sure that,
we're getting the most outta that.
The other thing, that you need to consider,
with fatigue based work,
is execution.
A lot of people, and this could be
simply because your nervous system gets fatigued,
but also, there's pain and there's
hard breathing, and a lot of things change
when you get fatigued, it becomes harder to
stabilize, like sometimes it gets hard to stand.
So, execution can go out the window
and what that means, is well now,
we're doing something completely different,
it's like a totally different exercise.
We might be recruiting other muscles
because we're using body language
or we might be changing the resistance profile
because we're relying on more momentum,
you know, it might be recruiting more against,
or whatever, tissues to share the load.
Whatever it may be, we have to look at how
is fatigue impacting my ability to maintain execution.
So, the ability to continue to work
while fatigued is directly dependent
on your ability to maintain execution
in that fatigue state, both from a
physiological perspective, like from
the nervous system and what not.
And from a mental perspective.
When things get tough, do you resort
to ways to making it easier, or do you embrace
that and you squeeze harder, you fight
that fatigue with pretty darn good form,
or very least, there is a certain amount
of form that is acceptable to lose towards
the end of a set, or the end of a workout,
because it's still producing a quality stimulus,
but then there becomes a point,
where there's so much break in the execution
and the form, that it's not longer beneficial.
We're into this situation where
we're just doing extra work that's
taking away from recovery, but no longer
contributing to the goal of the workout.
We already talked about neurological and energy
system base, but it is important to understand,
from an energy system standpoint, with workouts
that have a high systemic load, you're using
a lot of different muscle groups, so you're super
setting multiple muscle groups, or whatever.
You have to look at the energy system
of the whole body, which incorporates
the adrenals, and the liver, and the pancreas
as well, not just, the energy systems
within that individual muscle that happens
to be working that set, because that muscle
may be reaching out to the blood for glucose
and that glucose has gotta come from somewhere,
it comes from the liver, so when we get
into program design, we're gonna talk about
this massive flow of energy that happens
when we're training, and where there can be
bottle necks on whether or not we're able
to maintain performance and what parts
of my body are getting taxed if I'm working too
much tissue at a time and my nutrition happens
to not support that particular training stress.
The size and the number of the muscles
that are involved are really what's gonna impact
the systemic load of those particular sets.
So, the more muscles that you're using in a
particular exercise, or when you do
a set of that, it's more taxing to me
neurologically, more taxing to me metabolically,
because I'm sending more waste out
for more tissue, and I'm demanding
my body to control more muscles
to a greater degree, simultaneously.
So when we're looking at that systemic load,
we need to look at size and number of muscles.
From a neurological perspective,
you could also look at the number
of joints that need to be stabilized.
So anything that loads the spine,
the spine is a ton of joints, that's more
neurologically complex than things that
tend not to overload the spine.
Range of motion is also one that you can throw
in here too, 'cause obviously doing quarter
squats verus full squats, if you do
six quarter squats verus six full squats,
would you count them as the same volume?
Absolutely not.
Would you say that they load the system the same?
Absolutely not.
The full squat, the greater range
of motion, is going to be higher volume.
Those sets are going to count to a greater
degree, they're more significant, if you will.
So, when we look at incorporating sets,
where we have this complex nature
of a lot of tissue, fewer sets
may be tolerated within a workout.
If the workout is fatiguing enough systemically,
that may even be fewer exercises
per body part, simply because the body part
is not the limiting factor, as
the systemic ability to keep up with
that workout, that becomes the factor.
When we look at sets verus the exercise
that we choose for them, the more
exercises that we have, the fewer
sets per exercise, that's pretty simple, right?
If I'm gonna do, 20 sets,
if I pick two exercises that maybe, I do 10 each.
If I have four exercises, I'm likely
gonna divide that up a little more evenly.
So, all things considered, number of
exercises and number of sets per exercise
tend to be inversely proportionate.
That does not mean that the total sets per workout
goes down when you do more or less exercises,
two totally different things.
So, number of sets per body part,
now that can be correlated to total per workouts.
So, when I have more body parts,
I tend to be able to tolerate more sets
per workout, because I'm distributing
that load across the body, especially when
we're comparing equal tissue size.
Obviously, systemically I could
handle more sets of bicep, tricep,
delt, and calf work, than I could quad,
hamstring, glut, and lat work, right?
Big muscles verus small muscles.
So, within the same context, right,
we're talking about, okay, if I was
doing more muscle groups, well, I'm likely
gonna have more sets, unless I'm comparing
big muscle groups to small muscle groups.
But, when we look at how many sets per workout,
and we look at just number of exercises,
often times more exercises usually come
into play when you can afford to do more sets.
So, if you can only handle six sets for quads,
you might, one exercise might be best.
Maybe, most two exercises of three sets.
Or one of four, one of two, or something like that.
But, you're probably not gonna have
three exercises and do two sets each.
Or four sets of one and one set of two other.
You need to have enough sets where
you can distribute them to the point
where you can actually get some quality work
done in each exercise, where it's not really
worth having that exercise in there.
The only time you're gonna use,
say one set per exercise, is when you're using
that exercise for like a, a finisher,
or for some specific metabolic purpose,
just at the end of the workout.
Like you're throwing in a Japanese
drop set, or something like that.
You're doing a heavy squat workout,
then you just throw one set of leg extensions
to produce a little bit of metabolic work
at the very end, something like that.
Then yeah, maybe we add that one set
of one exercise, but when we talk about
traditional usage of an exercise, we tend
to need higher numbers of sets, in order
to be able to incorporate more exercises.