-: Our key performance markers to watch kinda repeat
because pretty much they're pretty simple, 'kay?
Increase resistance to fatigue over sets,
so that means, we can get further along,
so if we start to see a performance drop-off
at five sets last week, we wanna be able to say okay,
well we were able to go at six sets,
or we were able to increase the reps
across all of those sets,
so we accomplished more volume via reps of the,
higher rep sets at the same loads before we fatigued, right?
So basically we just wanna make sure
that we're getting more work done before we fatigue.
That's the performance metric we're looking at, 'kay?
Volume and proximity to failure,
so the other thing you can look at too,
so say, let's say you started an AMPK phase
and you're doing, say, we'll say six-by-eight, right?
So six sets of eights reps and you hit that failure
on that eighth set.
So next time around,
you could keep maybe the weights the same, reps the same,
and see if you can't add another set,
and then that's the one that hits failure.
That would be one way of looking at this.
Or you could be like, well, let's just increase the load,
or let's increase the reps,
and see if we can't make it to the same point
before we fail.
That would be another way that you could look at it,
or what you could do is you could say, all right,
well let's stick with this,
I'm gonna increase the load a little bit
so that we still get to the point
where we're kind of at failure on that sixth set,
but I'm gonna progress another set
and see if I can't maintain that performance
or pretty close to it, even though I hit failure, right?
So those are all different options,
and it's gonna kinda depend
on where you're pushing that goal.
If you're really trying to avoid inflammation
and you're training,
you're doing relative high-frequency per muscle group,
you're probably not gonna wanna push the failure mark,
you're probably gonna wanna push one
of the other two options that I gave.
Increased local recovery between sets,
that's another thing you could do
is you could say all right, we did six sets of eight,
we're gonna keep the sets and the reps the same,
but what we're gonna do is we're gonna cut five,
10 seconds or whatever off of the rest interval
that was between those.
And this doesn't just apply to AMPK-based.
Incomplete Rest Method training,
you could apply the same thing to supersets, right,
so you could decrease the time between supersets,
you could increase the reps of supersets,
you could decrease or you could, so say you have a superset
and you're already doing two exercise back to back, no rest,
you could just decrease the time
before you do that whole superset again,
so say you have A1, A2,
but they're already smashed together,
you can't decrease the time between A1 and A2 anymore,
so then what you would do is you would say all right,
well just, the next round of A1, A2,
I'm gonna decrease the time there
and look at that recovery period.
And with supersets, especially if you're doing something
like a heavy-light method or something like that,
can give you a really good idea
of kind of how your tolerance is changing
because in this particular type of training,
you may not see that much improvement in the first exercise
of a heavy-light superset because it's,
that would be more of a strength-based adaptation,
but your capacity and your loads
on the second exercise show that one,
you're improving your tolerance to fatigue,
but also you're improving where your failure point is,
and how well you're actually able
to tolerate that heavier A1 exercise
when you go to the A2 lighter exercise that you,
in that state of fatigue, however close to failure you went,
you're able to perform more despite that.
And then increases in rep performance,
so basically just being able to do the same amount of sets,
same load, but more reps, so I put an asterisk by there,
'cause that may or may not be the goal
that you're going for, but in general,
if we're focusing on metabolic stuff,
this is probably one of the best places
to use rep performance increases
over just load performance increases,
so instead of doing progressive overload via load,
focusing on progressive overload via reps, because, I mean,
you have to take all this stuff into context.
If you're already close to the top of the rep range,
then obviously increase load,
and you can do the stair-step method
where you increase load then reps then back to load
then reps, which is perfectly fine,
but when comparing to other phases,
this may be one where your progressive overload method
is in reps more often than the others.
Now, when it comes to our biomarkers,
soreness is gonna be really, really important
when it comes to local metabolic,
because depending on the goal that you have, et cetera,
soreness can be a major indicator.
'Cause when we're challenging thing metabolically,
that usually means we're having to go to a certain degree
of fatigue, and if you're getting excessively sore,
that means either your exercise selection is poor,
your volume is wrong,
or maybe you're doing too many overlapping exercises,
it means something
is not working the way it's supposed to be
if your goal is AMPK.
Now, we're gonna talk about oxidative stuff at a later time,
but if you are going that route
where you're purposely going in inflammation,
soreness is still important except that you are,
you're looking for that soreness,
so whether it's you're looking to avoid it
or you're really expecting it to come and hit them hard,
tons of doms, that's gonna be a huge indicator
on whether you're on the right side of the fence.
And so I would say, of all of the biomarkers,
because this is such a locally specific stimulus
that we're going after, is that soreness
and your performance markers are gonna be probably 75%
of your decision-making right there.
You will probably be able to make the majority
of your decisions on whether it is too much
or too little based off of okay,
are we improving in performance in the training session,
and is the soreness where I would want it to be?
That's gonna cover the majority of it.
The next biggest one is probably gonna be the fullness
and water retention thing, is whether or not
we are actually seeing somebody look like they're filling up
or not, but again, that's easiest in somebody
that is fairly lean,
but it's gonna coincide with performance metrics.
So basically, if you're not nutrient partitioning
into lean tissue and you're doing this,
your performance is gonna go down,
you're not gonna get good pumps,
and you're gonna feel like crap.
If you are partitioning, then, well, you might be full,
but if you're full, if you got full muscles
but under too much fat to really be able to visibly tell,
you're still gonna feel like you're getting better pumps
in the workout, you're still gonna improve performance,
and you're still gonna feel good when you train,
you're gonna have good training energy
and your good training performance.
So there's a lot of redundancy in those things,
but when you do a refeed, or if you do a high,
you're bringing somebody's calories
or carbohydrates up during this phase,
a lot of times you can see
what would look like a transformation that would take six,
10, 12 weeks happen in a matter of days
because of that fluid shift.
And so that can really let you,
give you a gauge in a lean individual like yes,
this is absolutely working
and this is really what their body needed,
and it can also give you an idea
of when you've kinda plateaued in that and like okay, cool,
they're as full as they can be,
they're training good or whatnot, but all right,
we've run the bell now, we've accomplished what we need to,
we don't need to spend weeks
and weeks and weeks more doing this,
we can now return to hypertrophy
or whatever other stimulus
that we were gonna go through next.
Daytime energy is a decent one here,
because if you're really focusing
on making somebody more metabolically efficient,
we should see daytime energy improve.
If you're promoting a bunch of inflammation,
you will see daytime energy go down.
Sleep is gonna be a biomarker for every stimulus,
but what I would say is,
when you're focusing on local metabolic,
if you're making somebody sleep worse, you probably,
you must have missed a bunch of other stuff,
because they probably already were really sore
and they were getting bloated and whatever
because the systemic stress should not be that high.
So if you're getting sleep disruptions here,
it means you missed a bunch of other earlier signs
that things weren't going wrong,
or you completely screwed it up from the beginning
and it was way too systemic,
more systemic than you intended it to be.
The case that I see that happen the most
is when people underestimate
how systemically demanding a local leg workout can be,
so for some people, you throw the same thing at their quads
as you do their biceps, and then realize,
on that particular day, they have two days
of disrupted sleep and water retention after leg day,
'cause it's so systemically demanding for that person,
so this is especially prominent
in people that have a lot of muscle mass
or are very strong
and just can produce a ton of systemic stress
with their lower body or their large muscles,
and then that's
where you might have to reorganize the program
from kinda how you got your volume set up.
You may need to spread the leg workout,
or the leg work out, more.
The leg work, space, out, more across the week.
Appetite, so in general, if you're doing this,
appetite can kinda fluctuate in different directions,
so again, your other markers are gonna be the better ones,
because really,
if you're getting a good nutrient partitioning response,
post-training,
you might see appetite get really really high,
but then away from training,
somebody might be more appetite-stable,
because their metabolism is functioning better.
But because you're creating
that strong nutrient partitioning drive
and you're basically sucking glucose out of the blood,
you may have people like, man, when they're done,
I want a cinnamon roll,
and some pancakes and drink some syrup.
But then, away from training,
their appetite may be really leveled out and really,
their tolerance between meals is much better.
And then morning heart rate and HRV,
those are gonna kinda be like sleep,
and those are things that may always have some application,
but basically with those,
all those tell you is just like all right, you need to look
and figure out what is stressing out the body,
why we're under-recovering, and so much and so forth.
Especially here, because it shouldn't be a gigantic,
this shouldn't be the most aerobically taxing thing,
so we wouldn't necessarily expect to see the HRV crash.
If we're focusing more on an AMPK type method,
we wouldn't expect to see a lot of inflammation,
so we wouldn't expect to see a big jump
in morning heart rate.
But if we do start to see those things, then there's a lot,
could be some under-feeding issues,
could be some over-training,
it could be some screw ups of the stimulus,
but what I would say is, by the time you get there,
you probably missed some other things, right?
So if you're doing metabolic training
and you keep running into, you're hitting these things
that are further down the list here, sleep, appetite,
and heart rate, then I would say,
you may need to do a better job of assessing performance,
soreness, and where they're shifting their fluid.
Okay.
Let's go through the examples of overshooting the stimulus.
So if you're overshooting the stimulus,
you're likely gonna see regression
in the early workout training markers.
So that would be, you're not able to increase the load
or the reps in the earlier sets,
or you just come in feeling,
so, you ever go in the gym
and the weights just feel heavier than they should?
So if we're creating too much inflammation,
usually when we're doing this type of training,
we're doing it at a high frequency,
and so what can be normal if you are pushing that
and you are overshooting the stimulus is people will come in
and those earlier sets,
the weights just feel heavier than they should.
Excessive soreness, that's gonna be your big one, right?
Especially if you're focusing on AMPK.
Lack of soreness if you are focusing on oxidative
and inflammatory.
This lecture we are focusing more
on the AMPK-type local metabolic stimulus,
not the local inflammatory stimulus, just FYI.
Extramuscular water retention, so more subcutaneous bloat,
so that's gonna be puffiness throughout the whole body,
face, fingers, hands, forearms,
you'll see the vascularity will go away if somebody is lean.
They just overall look less defined.
And if it's over-training,
we should see that there's an improvement in that
after an off day, definitely after two off days.
That can always be a thing to check,
if you're not sure whether it's training or nutrition,
is just have people take two consecutive off days
and see what happens there.
A lot of times when somebody needs two consecutive off days,
you'll find that more in larger-muscled individuals
that can create a lot of stress and stuff
where their body just may need two days off
to really clear everything that would cause them
to be holding a little bit of water
and a little bit of bloat.
Just the more muscle mass you have,
the more stress you can create,
and you only have so much liver and kidney and resources
to be able to get rid of all of that.
Increased anxiety and trouble falling asleep
will be signs that your training has pushed over
into being too inflammatory, so if we do this right,
we're improving metabolic flexibility
and we're improving nutrient partitioning
and we're improving our ability to utilize fat
and conserve carbohydrates.
If we push the needle too far,
all of that stuff pretty much gets reversed, right,
so we create an inflammatory situation where now,
our cells are gonna be more glucose hungry, right,
we're gonna get up-regulation of the GLUT1 transporter
that's gonna just basically try
and pull carbs in all the time,
and we're gonna be stressing out the nervous system more,
et cetera, so maybe some of you guys
have seen the research on, that, the research
that is being interpreted
as high-rep sets cause more central nervous fatigue
than heavy sets, and, here's a hint,
I'm gonna do some content on this,
but it's a degree of failure
because you can't take a six-rep max
to the same degree of failure that you can a 20-rep max,
because when you're done with the six-rep max,
there's a lot more reps that you could do at lighter loads
to get to the same degree of failure as a 20-rep max,
so when we're in these scenarios,
we are able to push the central nervous system closer
to fatigue 'cause we are using lighter weights,
and so as we're pushing to failure,
we are pushing closer to failure,
and that is simply more taxing to the nervous system.
So you can push the body into more of an anxiety state
when you combine that stress with the inflammatory stress
because we are doing this in a way
that is oxidatively stressful,
if you are pushing over to the inflammation pathways.
Increased sleep disturbances,
waking in the middle of the night, and in this scenario,
if it's from overshooting the stimulus,
which would likely be pushing too much oxidative stress
and more neural stress, you might look at more of the 3:00
to 5:00 a.m. type when we're kinda talking about
kinda that Chinese medicine clock.
Does not mean that it's exactly between three and five.
You have to kinda look at that
where it relates to that scale of this is,
this would be according to somebody
that goes to sleep around 10:00 p.m.,
so obviously if they go to sleep earlier or later,
then you kinda shift that scale,
and then just also understand that oh, they woke up at 2:45,
so I guess it's the other one.
I don't think it's that black and white, right?
Remember, we're looking at all of this data together,
so take the whole, look at the whole puzzle,
not the single piece when it comes to those sleep windows,
but it can be something
that sometimes helps you make the decision
between decreasing training versus increasing food,
which you will see on the next one.
Increased morning heart rate, downward trending HRV,
pretty much covered those.
Basically we're getting too much inflammation.
Obviously, if you are getting sleep disturbances,
you're also probably gonna get increased morning heart rate
and decreased HRV.
The thing is is that it may take one or two days
of really poor sleep before you see a big change in HRV,
but the morning heart rate might show a little bit sooner,
but because there's multifactorial things in all of that,
that's why you look at all that information.
Poor blood sugar and energy management between meals,
so if we're getting good nutrient partitioning,
good metabolic flexibility,
we should be able to sustain our cellular energy
and glucose between meals.
If we're getting hangry, that means likely,
we have a lot of inflammation
and that is actually decreasing
our cellular energy efficiency,
making us need more carbohydrates, higher blood glucose,
therefore more cortisol, et cetera,
and therefore more hangriness between meals.
Now let's look at the other side of the coin,
the under-recovering side, 'kay, so in this case,
we'll see more regression in the later portion
of the workout, so the overdriving the stimulus
was a lack, or decreased performance early in the workout,
under-recovering means, well, we got training adaptations,
but we didn't supply enough nutrients
to actually partition and fill up those cells
to then be able to get the increased tolerance to volume,
right, so we ran out of glycogen too fast,
'cause we weren't eating enough
or getting enough carbohydrates,
so that's a sign that it's more on the nutritional side
if you have good performance early and pitter out late.
Increased sleep disturbances,
waking in the middle of the night,
so if it's from not enough nutrition,
it may be more the 1:00 to 3:00 a.m. type,
or multiple time windows
if you just aren't having enough calories period,
so if it's just a carbohydrate thing,
it might end up being more of like okay,
you're getting those disturbances
between the one and three window.
If it's a overall calorie balance thing,
and you're just in too much of a deficit
for this type of training,
you might be getting disturbances all mixed
throughout the night.
'Kay, again, those aren't black and white things,
those are just patterns that we kinda see over time,
so if somebody is in one of those scenarios,
take all of the data into account.
I think that's just, I like the sleep window things
and I like the sleep biometrics,
but people tend to take them too much as rules,
and I just wanna make sure you guys have that perspective.
Same thing, increased heart rate in the morning,
downward trending HRV will also happen with under-nutrition,
so that won't necessarily be a good marker
for determining what the problem is,
but just that there is an issue.
Increased appetite, especially increased cravings
for carbohydrates and whatnot which relates
to the following bullet point of poor blood sugar
and energy management between meals,
loss and load-based performance
despite positive cardiac conditioning markers,
just like we saw on the systemic one.
Increased water retention, if it's under,
if somebody isn't producing enough energy,
likely we're gonna see more abdominal bloat,
which is funny 'cause they need to eat more
to have less abdominal bloat,
but that tends to correlate a little bit,
whereas if it's more training-based,
people will be more bloated whole-body,
and then if it's under-nutrition-based,
people may hold more abdominal bloat, right?
And you won't see as much, or no possible improvement
after a day off,
especially if you're having kind of on and off day nutrition
or whatever, so you will tend to see better drops
in bloat on off days when training is the issue
than under-feeding is the issue,
'cause obviously you're probably not making up enough
for the under-feeding on your off days.
Decrease training drive, motivation, decreased neat,
and daily energy, so just overall,
so if you're over-training somebody metabolically,
with a local metabolic stimulus,
and you're increasing anxiety,
they may be more anxious and more alert during the day
'cause they're making more stress hormones.
If they're, if your training is good
but you're just under-feeding them,
then they will go into energy conservation mode,
so their training and drive, motivation will go down,
they'll move less, so you'll see their step count go down,
they'll just have less desire to train,
just lower overall energy throughout the day,
but it won't be debilitating tired like you get
when you're over-training and a hypertrophy or whatnot
where it's like, oh, I'm really, I wanna nap, sleep,
it'll just be like yeah, you know, why stand if you can sit?
Basically just more so energy conservation mode.
And if it's, you're really pushing into the, kinda like,
all right, I'm inflamed and under-eating,
then we're gonna get that increased irritability,
mood swings, and just overall poor wellbeing.
This will usually be the sign
that not only are you off in calories,
but you're drastically under-eating carbohydrates.
Okay, let's move onto the under-stimulating.
Little to no improvements in performance markers,
while also no signs of under-recovering.
That's gonna be, (chuckles)
that's gonna be pretty much a consistent one
across most of the stimuli.
Big ones for under-stimulating in local metabolic
is not getting great pumps or volumizing the lean tissue.
So these workouts should be workouts
that are highly correlated with people getting good pumps.
Now, depending on who you're working with,
they may not know what a pump is,
what it feels like, whatever,
and so that can be part of a client education thing too,
of kinda noting that, but I mean, if you want to,
pull out your tape measure, it's arm day or whatever,
and actually measure how much volume changes
in somebody's extremity
that you happen to be working that day.
If you're doing arms and delts or whatever,
AMPK, IRMs or something like that, go 'head,
throw that tape measure around their biceps and triceps
and let somebody get their flex on
and see what it's like pre and post-workout.
That can be just a cool, motivating factor
for these types of training anyway,
'cause sometimes people are like, wait,
I just gotta sit here and do the same thing?
I'm literally just, for like seven minutes
during this eight-by-eight protocol or whatever?
For some people, they hate it, some people love it,
some people are indifferent,
but if you're like hey, you know,
but look how pumped you are
after doing this or whatever, and people're like oh,
that's kinda cool, right?
That was totally worth the seven minutes,
I gained a half-inch in my biceps, whatever it may be.
And then little to no changes in body composition
or even the reverse of the goal.
Usually, regardless of what goal you happen
to be doing a local metabolic stimulus for,
we should see a positive change in body composition, right?
And that's, even if it's for hypertrophy
and you're doing this, right,
because you wanna be eating enough carbohydrates
and whatnot, but you should basically be creating the demand
for those going in the right places,
so unless you're just eating like a jackass,
you shouldn't be putting on body fat
in any of these cases, right?
You should definitely be shifting
towards a lower body percentage,
if by nothing else other than the fact
that you're accumulating more lean tissue
via all of the glucose and water that you're storing.
Right, because you shouldn't be gaining fat mass,
even if you're doing this
as part of a overall hypertrophy goal.
So let's walk through our kind of pendulum here
between the whether I decrease training
or increase nutrition, little bit more detail,
but still a lot of common sense, right?
So workout difficulty.
If it's too high, decrease training.
If it's too low, probably should focus on,
or I shouldn't say, but if it feels low,
probably we should make an adjustment on the nutrition side,
right, and again, when it comes to body composition,
that could be up or down, 'kay?
Post-workout exhaustion.
Same thing as last week.
If somebody's just floored after training,
there's probably a pretty good chance the solution
is not more food, it's probably training, right,
needs to go down.
If they're perfectly fine after training,
then there's probably a chance that okay,
then it's probably a diet thing.
Appetite goes down, that would be more of a sign
that we're gonna decrease training.
I got a asterisk next to the appetite
because it's wishy-washy,
would definitely not be towards the top of the things
that I was using to really make that decision, for sure,
because there could be reasons on either side
that would increase appetite, but chances are,
appetite is only gonna go down
if you're creating a bunch of,
if you're making a person more anxious
by creating too much inflammation and more CNS stress.
So I would say, appetite going up could be either,
appetite going down,
likely err on the side of decreasing training.
Loss of or poor strength-based performance,
especially earlier in the session,
we're gonna decrease training,
loss of late workout performance,
we are going to focus on increasing nutrition.
Volume comparison, diet comparison, things like that,
same shifts.
To be honest, I figured
that this would be one of our shorter lectures
because when it comes down to it,
because this is so local and specific and it's pretty much,
are we performing better,
are we able to utilize the nutrients,
does it look like we're storing them in the right places,
cool, that's a huge portion of it.
This is a pretty simple one.
Of all of the stimuli,
I would say this is the simplest one to assess
from a, which direction do you need to go?
The more creative thing will be is you have a ton of options
on how you can change programs.
So, and that doesn't mean that it's,
you just have more options, right,
it doesn't mean that it necessarily harder,
but you may have, you may just have to choose
between three or four solid good options.
But that's a problem for Adam and Cody to solve
for you guys, and the practical call.
See, I leave them the hard stuff.
So then, if we're looking at the too little sign,
we just have the inverse of these things.
I'll repeat myself here a little bit, but I'm gonna,
on some of these things that are repeats
as we go through the weeks,
you guys don't need me to say that workout difficulty,
too low, too high, exhaustion, too low,
it's just, it's gonna be the same thing.
Now, on the not enough stimulus or whatever,
the appetite dysregulated thing, in this instance,
appetite being dysregulated would be that appetite
is very different around training
versus the other portions of the day.
So if you see that, right, then chances are
maybe you're not getting adequate post-workout nutrition
or something like that,
so that could be something that you can kinda look at there.
And, I mean, the rest of it is, it's pretty much the same
as last week, right?
How does the volume seem?
Really, if we're looking at, is it too little stimuli,
I'm just gonna go back to that slide,
'cause that's really the,
this is really the most important things
that you're gonna get out of that, right, is just,
little to no improvements in performance,
not getting great pumps, and volumizing lean tissue.
That's, those are your big things, right?
Not hitting failure on prescribed sets,
that's a really good one too
because if you're doing an AMPK phase or whatever,
you want them, you have a, okay,
what's the cumulative fatigue we need to be getting to?
If they're not getting there, then you have to figure out,
what does it take, is it gonna take more reps, more sets,
more load, less rest, whatever to be getting there,
'cause even in that case,
they could be getting positive results,
but likely you're leaving results on the table
if you're not hitting the appropriate amount of failure
by the end of the session,
and so because metabolic demand requires us
to push to a certain degree of failure,
so I mean, I could do a lot of submaximal sets
in a hypertrophy phase, still get a hypertrophy stimulus.
May not be the best one, but you can still get it.
But if you only push the needle halfway,
you don't really create that much of a metabolic stress.
You guys have seen the physiology.
We have to cut down that ATP, we have to shove up that AMP.
That requires a certain degree of effort
and a certain level of failure.
And so from a practical standpoint,
when you're doing your workouts or tracking them,
if they're not getting there,
even if they happen to be making good body composition,
whatever, just know that man, chances are,
we could be doing better.
So that's a huge one for under-stimulating, right?
When it comes to under-stimulating
in terms of a calorie deficit, again,
this is the place where I'd be focusing more on recomp
than I would on weight loss,
so that's why I didn't spend a lot of time
on coming up with a bunch of different ways to try
and find out if the calorie deficit is small,
or is big enough,
because you're gonna be chasing mild weight loss
and big chunks of body fat percentage here.
And so really, that's your marker, right,
is the body fat percentage moving in the direction
that you want?
And if you're getting
all these positive performance adaptations
and they're getting good pumps or whatever,
but body fat percentage isn't moving,
that's what would be my decision
of to bring the calories down.
I would not necessarily base that decision on weight,
how much weight they are losing.
Because it's impossible
for you to know how much lean water they're gaining
in proportion to how much fat they're losing to know,
are we losing weight fast enough, because like I said,
in some cases, gaining weight
while losing body fat may be a very good place to be
during one of these phases.
So the last one of our possibilities here,
the incorrectly stimulating,
which in this case is stressing.
Excessive local soreness, or no soreness in the case of a,
if you were doing oxidative programming,
but that's kinda the big one, is this should be,
this should not be the,
you know, I have trouble sitting on the toilet type program,
so if you're getting that,
then you know that you are pushing past what you need
to get the metabolic adaptations
and more into inflammatory stress.
Fatiguing in strength instead of reps,
so that's one where you might have people,
it's like oh yeah, I can go up in weight,
but if you start adding reps or decreasing rest,
then they don't tolerate that at all, that's a sign
that they're probably not getting the right stimulus,
so you need to work on that.
If they're fatiguing aerobically, so if the limiter
for them being able to maintain the density
and actually tax the local tissue
is they're just getting out of gas too fast
before they can actually fatigue that.
Especially this can be challenging on large muscle groups.
So in this case scenario,
your workout program might be good,
but this might be the wrong time to do it,
you may need to actually spend time on a phase
that improves them aerobically more like a systemic phase
so that they can actually tolerate the local tissue work
to the point where they can take that local tissue
to failure and that's the limiter and not their aerobic
or cardiovascular system.
If they're, you're looking at their biomarkers
and you see all of the signs
that we talked about last week of, or two weeks ago I guess,
of systemic stress,
then probably we are incorrectly stimulating.
But it may only be on some of your days.
It may only be on the big muscle group days,
so you may kinda look at trends over the course of the week
and see if they're just being negatively impacted
after certain days, 'cause it could be
that after lower-body days, things get worse
and then they kinda get better,
and then it's this cycle up and down,
and so that's where then
maybe you can redistribute your volume a little bit better
for that individual.
Increased sleep need, this is that, okay, I'm getting tired,
or I'm still tired even after the same amount of sleep,
the same quality of sleep or even better,
so this, that's a sign that you're using too much volume,
which sometimes, with these methods,
because there's a lot of supersets and dense sets
and things like that, people can sometimes tack up a ton
of volume very quickly and not realizing it
'cause they're just doing so much
and they're resting so little, they just,
there's such a work to rest ratio that before they know it,
they've really increased the amount of volume,
it's just that it's coming from a lot of reps
in this scenario, rather than hard sets.
And so if you get that,
chances are you're putting too much of a volume stimulus
and not enough of a metabolic stimulus on them,
so you need to decrease the volume,
increase the magnitude of what you're doing.
And then not getting good pumps, right?
I'm not gonna talk about that during a lot of the phases,
but this is the phase
where pumps are definitely a really good marker.
(air rumbling)