-: We're gonna start looking at beyond a single set
or beyond a string of sets.
So I'm looking at, this is like using RPE et al,
which basically means that I'm using RPE
for our examples here,
but anything that qualifies
that approximate to failure and effort would apply
to all of these principles that we're gonna go for.
I think RPE is probably the easiest one to work with
for these non-set specific things.
So you can say like, "Okay, I'm doing an RIR
for a given set, but if I'm looking at multiple sets,
sure, I could average that" or whatnot,
but one of the things we're gonna look at
is actually qualifying the RPE of an exercise, right?
So all of the sets,
so that means after you've done all of those sets,
what is your perceived exhaustion
or your perceived effort of that exercise?
So basically an RPE of 10 on a given exercise would mean
that if you asked me to do that exercise again,
I would have a significant drop in performance,
I would not be able to maintain any sort of quality work
in that exercise, right?
So you could look at that as sets in reserve
if you wanted to as well.
So the principles to take,
obviously, depending on what you do,
you may decide how you qualify that
with numbers or whatever,
but all we're really focusing on here
is gonna be the direction that things are moving.
So you could use RPE, you could use sets in reserve,
you could quantify all of the rep maxes
over that period, et cetera,
lots of different ways that we could look at this.
So just to define all of these a little bit more in detail.
So RPE of exercise, like I said,
is basically you're perceived effort
of all of those sets together,
and whether or not you're relating that
to how many more of those efforts could I apply
and still be productive, right?
So basically if you were to have to do another set
and you're like, "Oh, well,
I'm not gonna get very many reps,"
or, "My technique is gonna be really, really poor,
my control over the load," et cetera.
Or, "I'm just simply not gonna be able to perform it,"
yeah, you're maxed out there, right?
So that's gonna be an important metric.
When we look at a workout as a whole,
we're gonna break that up into the RPE of a muscle
versus just the RPE of the workouts,
and the difference between those is gonna be,
one is gonna be how much fatigue
and how much performance do I think I have left
in the individual muscle,
versus how fatigued am I as a whole,
because you can get to a point of fatigue
where it's just like, yeah, I'm just at that point
where it wouldn't matter what the activity,
the exercise, task was,
I'm just too fatigued right now, right?
And that's really gonna apply
when you're doing higher-frequency programs,
where you have a lot of muscle muscles per workout, right?
You're not doing a, we'll say a bro split
or a body-part split where it's like,
"I'm just doing chest today."
Obviously I'm just doing chest today
then we're really just focused
on that muscle portion.
In that case you can still use this
'cause say it's a quad day or something like that,
if your quads still feel good, but you're exhausted,
that might just mean
that for the volume and stuff you're trying to do,
you're just simply,
you don't have the conditioning for it, right?
So that can tell you, "All right,
maybe this isn't the best style
or type of training program right now,
because my limiting factor is not the program
that I'm trying to do,
it's either my cardiovascular conditioning
or my local condition,
something there is affecting my performance
to the point where I'm globally fatiguing,
systemically fatiguing, before I fatigue that muscle."
So these are gonna be valuable tools for you
when we look at making decisions to add sets,
to deload, et cetera.
So I'm gonna start just kinda covering
some of the basic principles before we get
into the practical examples.
So the first one we'll look here
is the ratio of the RPE of the set,
to the RPE of the exercise, okay?
And so what we're looking at
is that if the average RPE across those sets
is starting to peak, but the RPE of that exercise is not,
so that means that I'm doing these sets
and I'm taking all of these sets to a high degree
of high proximity to failure, but when I'm done,
I feel like,
"Man, I still have another one of those in me," right?
That would be one of these scenarios here, right?
Where it's like, "Okay, I'm putting in a lot of effort
on the individual sets,
but I feel like, when I'm done with whatever,
how many sets, say it's two, or three, or whatever,
but I'm not that fatigued from this particular exercise,
I could still perform at the same
or close to performance in that exercise," right?
Or maybe not close to, again, this is all on a scale, right?
First thing we wanna do is,
and this is gonna be on a lot of these,
is make sure the exercise execution is good,
because sometimes that's the thing.
This is like, "Okay, we get through,"
maybe these two things are screwing us up,
we're not attributing the RPE properly
in terms of what we're defining as why is this hard, right?
Because what if it's something where it's like,
it's a complex exercise,
and so technically the lift is difficult, and so I say,
"Well, yeah, these sets are hard,"
but then I don't feel that fatigued from them, right?
So it could be either the way I'm assessing this
or the way I'm executing it, or a combination of both.
So we wanna make sure
that the it's not just in the details there
of how I'm either executing these sets
or how I'm qualifying those sets before we change anything.
But in this case,
the thing that we're probably gonna look at
is we should probably consider adding sets,
because if I'm doing two sets
and I'm doing them to all-out failure,
I'm pretty much capped on that stimulus,
and if I have the capacity to get more stimulus,
that's an area that I can progress in,
and so that would be the next logical step,
would be like, "Okay, 'cause I can only get so much stimulus
in a single set, now I'm going to add sets," right?
Because I have the capacity
to continue this exercise further.
Now, you probably saw from some of the charts
that we've already went through,
is that when we do that,
we may be able to lower the RPE of,
maybe if we're going from two sets to three sets, right?
And we were at eight, nine or something,
or nine, nine for those two sets, or whatever it may be,
I might be able to do like a 7, 8, 9 or something like that.
So what we can look at when we're adding sets
is that if we maintain the same average RPE,
that's gonna be a pretty big progression
because we've basically extended the volume of work
via sets at the same intensity,
we haven't dropped the average intensity.
What's likely gonna happen in smaller progressions
is as you add sets,
that average RPE will drop just a little bit,
but then you can start bringing it back up, right?
And so that's a smaller progression,
a big progression is trying to maintain that intensity
while adding the sets.
So depending on how big of a gap here is,
you could kinda decide
on whether or not you wanted to add a set,
and try and maintain the same average RPE
across those for the whole exercise,
or if you're like, "I'm gonna add sets,
I'm gonna let my RPE average drop down,
and then that's gonna be the metric
that I try and push up over the subsequent workouts," okay?
The final bullet on here
is you need to make sure
you take the entire workout into consideration.
So right now we're looking at a single exercise,
what if you have multiple exercises for that body part,
you have to consider how adding volume in one exercise
will affect the other exercises,
because you may have the opportunity to add sets
in multiple exercises and you may choose one over the other,
say, for instance,
that we're right now evaluating exercise two in the program.
If I add more volume or more intensity to the first exercise
for that muscle group,
it's that fatigue is likely gonna carry over
into the second one,
and so I need to be cognizant of what I'm gonna do
with the whole workout before I make a decision
on a single exercise,
and that's where some people can get in trouble
with oversimplifying
and reducing the Progression by Sets method,
is it's like, "Okay, well I just add a set to everything,"
and if you have a lot of exercises,
that's a lot more volume
than if you're doing very few exercises, et cetera.
So if we're gonna add a set, we need to look at,
if we have multiple exercises for the same body part,
are we adding a set to both?
Are we going up an RPE and whatever?
Is one staying where it's at,
we're progressing in just the other,
'cause it's gonna affect the former, et cetera?
We have to take that whole workout into consideration,
otherwise you can likely make jumps that do not work,
that's a excessive progression
if we don't consider how one progression
is going to affect another exercise within that session.
So if we flip that scenario, if you can't see,
the slide just changed here,
is if we look at if the exercises peaking,
but the RPE for the sets are not,
meaning that I'm getting fatigued via the number of sets,
but the sets themselves are not very fatiguing, okay?
In this case, again,
we're gonna go through those first two
and make sure exercise execution is good
and that we're actually qualifying
the RPE appropriately, right?
We could consider reducing the sets
and aiming for higher effort per set,
we could simply just keep that there
and keep the set volume there,
and keep continuing to try and climb the RPE,
but if there's a big gap here,
likely our work-to-stimulus ratio
is not gonna be very favorable
because we're just getting tired
from the accumulation of work,
but we may not be getting as many of the stimulating reps,
or we may not be getting stimulating reps
until the later set, but we're getting the stimulating reps
just because of overall fatigue
rather than the fatigue that occurs during a single set
that leads to that increased tension at the fiber level.
So you're probably not in a very efficient place
in terms of mechanical tension if this is happening.
Now, if we were to look at another goal,
just to give you a little tangent teaser here and say, like,
"Well, maybe we're focusing on metabolic output,"
there's definitely gonna be scenarios
where I don't want the individual sets to be hard,
but I wanna accumulate fatigue over time.
That's what we would expect if we were doing, say,
like an incomplete rest method
where we're repeating a sub-maximal load over and over again
with very short rest intervals
to accumulate a lot of metabolic stimulus,
then this would be a scenario.
So, reminder,
we're talking about these things in the mechanical tension,
and then you can take these principles and diverge them
to multiple stimuli, okay?
So, and of course take the entire workout into consideration
'cause it could be that the reason
that you have this condition in this exercise
is that maybe the prior exercise,
you're creating too much fatigue,
or maybe you're supersetting with another muscle group
and you're not resting enough between the two, or whatever,
and so you're getting this sense of fatigue here,
even though you can't quite generate the intensity
that you want at the set level,
but you're just accumulating fatigue over time
because maybe you're not resting enough
between doing two exercises or whatever, right?
So look at that whole workout context and see,
is there something going on here
that would be throwing off this ratio?
And if I change it, how does that affect the entire workout?
Next, let's look at the ratio of the exercises
versus the muscle ratio.
So this would be if we have multiple exercises
for the same muscle over that workout,
and then what we notice is that the average RPE
of the exercises I'm doing,
so not sets, but the actual exercises, right?
Is peaking, but the RPE for the muscle is not.
So that means, let's say I have two exercises
for whatever it is, chest, okay?
And when I finish,
I take each of those exercises to the point
where it's like I feel like I've gotten everything
that I need to,
or as much as I could productively out of those exercises,
but I still, at the end, feel like maybe my chest
has a little bit more in it,
or a portion of it does, et cetera, okay?
Still doing our quality control,
in this case I've added,
"Make sure the exercises are not redundant,"
because you take a muscle like the chest,
the chest has three main divisions of it,
and each of those has multiple directions of pull
in terms of the fiber.
So the pec, to tax the pec,
the pec is one of those muscles
where if you'd use exercises
that essentially work exactly the same,
but they happen to be at different places in the gym
or you're using a different implement, right?
It's like, "Well, I did flat barbell press,
and then I had flat dumbbell press,
and then I did flat flies."
Those are exercises that would all be very redundant, okay?
Because it's the same arm path,
the same resistance profile, et cetera,
I'm just changing the thing that's in my hand.
A lot of times this'll happen,
people will go from a freeway to a machine or whatever,
but they're still doing relatively the same thing.
So if our exercises are too redundant,
what's gonna happen
is we're gonna be working the same portion of that muscle
across those other exercises.
So the exercises may seem like,
"Okay, I'm getting as much out of this as I can,"
but there's other portions, there's other fibers,
there are other divisions of that muscle
that could have been taxed more or stimulated more
had I picked exercises that,
maybe I picked one
that biased the clavicular head of the pec
and another one
that biased the costal division of the pec, et etera.
You're gonna be able to get way more stimulus
for the pec as a whole by picking exercises
that aren't redundant,
and taking each one of those
to a relative proximity to failure and fatigue,
than you are going to be picking exercises
that essentially do the same thing.
'Cause when you do the second exercise,
that fatigue's just carrying over,
so your performance and the stimulus that you get at,
that is just gonna be less,
but it's still gonna be perceived hard.
Maybe neurologically it's slightly different,
but not different enough
to really warrant a larger stimulus for the muscle,
but just adding a lot of fatigue to those things
that were already fatigued, okay?
So quality control in terms of our RPE assessment.
By this point we should have already checked all the control
of exercise execution,
that's always a good thing, right?
If we're not doing the reps properly,
none of this other stuff matters.
But the next thing is, here we could consider adding
or changing exercises.
If our exercises are too redundant,
we should probably change them, right?
If it's a muscle group or something like that,
where it can work in a variety of poles
or we have the ability
to hit a variety of resistance profiles or whatever,
we may be at a point
where it's worth adding an exercise, okay?
And that may require that we reduce the volume
of the other exercises.
So say I had two exercises
and I wanted to progress to three exercises
or something like that, or I have one exercise
and I wanna progress to two, okay?
I may need to cut the volume down on one of those exercises,
and oftentimes when that's the case
what we can do is we can cut the volume down,
but maybe bring up the RPE of that exercise,
and then add that second exercise,
'cause otherwise it's like, if we add an exercise,
you're not gonna put it in an exercise
and just do one set of it, right?
You're probably at least gonna do at least two,
probably more productively, three sets.
So in that case it might be like,
"Well, okay, if I'm adding another exercise
and I'm putting three sets in it,
I probably need to take at least one set off
of this other exercise,
or one set off of two other exercises," et cetera.
So again, it goes back to that,
take the entire workout into consideration.
More often than not it's gonna be the changing of exercises,
if you're at a point where it's like,
you have a lot of things that it's like,
"Okay, I should add an exercise, I should add an exercise,"
it might be time
to just kind of shift the programming, right?
And to go to a different program
if you're seeing this pattern of, like,
"Well, okay, everything seems
like I should be adding exercises,"
this is like, "Okay, well, how many things can we add
before this starts becoming a very different program?"
That's a decision that you can make
depending on your programming style,
whether you wanna have a program
that kind of morphs over time or whether you wanna say,
"Okay, this is probably a good place for us
to stop, deload," or whatever you wanna do,
and then jump into something else
that's built up a little bit differently.
Now let's flip that on its head, okay?
If the muscle is peaking, but the exercises are not, right?
So I'm getting fatigued in the tissue, right?
But when I go to the exercises, it feels like,
"Hmm, maybe these aren't quite as difficult or whatever."
Again, we wanna just do that same quality control, okay?
Make sure our exercises are not redundant
because that can be the thing too,
is that we could just essentially
kind of tax the motor pattern,
especially if we're using big, complex, compound exercises,
that all of a sudden,
it is just getting technically difficult
or something like that for that muscle,
and in that case it's like,
"All right, I can't control it
with this particular muscle anymore,"
but at the same time the exercise itself is not that hard
'cause you just can't load it that much, okay?
So I wanna make sure picking good exercises,
make sure they're not redundant,
make sure our quality of RPE and stuff is all good, right?
And then in this case
we might consider using fewer exercises, okay?
So if we're in the scenario
where it seems like we're getting what we need
out of the muscle,
but then we just have other exercises on it,
and those other exercises, what we're likely doing,
if we feel like we can keep performing in them,
what it may be happening
is we're just having really good compensatory mechanisms
to help us perform those other exercises.
So this is one of the reasons why sometimes it's good
to have those more isolated exercises later,
because then in this scenario,
you don't have the opportunity to, say,
compensate with other muscles,
but say I'm doing a press towards the end of my session
and it's a machine press,
or something relatively fixed and stabilized,
maybe in that case I could have had flies
or something that was more isolated,
and so my pecs are pretty spent,
but when I get to that second exercise,
I'm really good at cheating with my triceps,
my delts or whatever it may be.
All of a sudden I can be like, "Yeah, my chest is shot,
but I can still do these presses."
That then comes back down to the exercise selection
and the execution, et cetera,
is that might just be the issue,
so we might never get to the situation
if we're doing those checks and balances
from the get-go early on.
But if you do end up here,
it could also just be
that you're just doing too many exercises,
and so you're working into exercises
where once you get to it, that muscle's already fatigued
and so you're starting it
with those compensatory mechanisms already in play,
and that's essentially what you're working on there,
so the muscle stays fatigued,
but because your task performance of that exercise
is probably low,
'cause it's built off of using compensatory mechanisms,
you feel like you can keep doing it
at these subpar level,
because you haven't fatigued
those compensatory mechanisms yet, right?
But it's not really doing much more for the stimulus
and the target muscle.
Probably this is not a scenario
you're gonna get into that often if, like I said,
you're doing the checks and balances
from the earlier principles.
Okay, now let's look at the muscle-to-workout ratio.
So this first one is, "If the RPE of the muscle is peaking,
but the RPE for the workout is not," okay?
First point, that may be totally fine, right?
That may be exactly what you want,
no need to adjust anything, just cool, we're good to go.
Which may be the scenario in a lot of these things, right?
Again, these are principles,
they're not like, "If this, you must do this change,"
that's why there's all
of these different checks and balances
on top of each other, right?
Because you could want to maybe not be completely exhausted,
You have to look at it too, I mean,
say today is arm day, right?
You're having an arm day.
How exhausted are you gonna be as a whole after an arm day?
You may not be exhausted at all,
but your biceps and triceps may be fried,
again, totally fine,
but if you're built your program in a way
where you kinda wanna have.
Like, say you're doing a lot of body parts,
it's a total-body program, half-body program,
whatever it may be,
is that you can kind of say like,
"if I'm not reaching a certain amount of total exhaustion
or total fatigue, that likely means that I have areas
that I can add some work to," or who knows,
maybe you're just super, super conditioned,
or maybe that's an issue,
that your local conditioning at those individual muscles
is so poor compared to your systemic conditioning,
which will happen sometimes,
and say people that have a really good aerobic base,
but they haven't been doing any resistance training
they just can't create that much work
at the local level to really tax them,
so that may be totally fine that this is the condition,
but you may be wanting to progress them to the point
where they can actually tax themselves systemically
with those local muscle tissues
'cause they're able to get more out of them.
So they'd be focusing on improving their motor recruitment,
their ability to create intensity, et cetera.
So, could be totally fine,
but some things that you could consider
if that doesn't seem like it aligns
with your program structure and your program goal,
you could consider spreading that volume out
for that muscle across maybe more days in that week
or microcycle, you could consider adding more work
for some other muscles,
or adding some other muscles to the workout, right?
Or you could simply say,
"All right, let's try and challenge the muscle further
to confirm the accuracy of my RPE,"
'cause maybe the reality is
that I'm just over overrating the RPE
for that muscular work, right?
So those are some considerations you could take
if it doesn't seem like that should be the case
for that program.
If we flip that, right?
If we say the RPE of the workout, okay, is peaking here,
but the RPE for the muscle is not,
again, this may be totally fine,
especially for some of those metabolic-based programs,
likely if we're focusing on mechanical tension
or (indistinct)-based goals or strength-based goals,
this is not gonna be the scenario that we expect to see
or that we're striving for with our program design,
but like I said, it may be fine, okay?
You have to take into context what should be the reality
based off of the way that you're programming, right?
So we wanna make sure your exercise selection,
your execution is good, again,
'cause that can be the thing, right?
If you're doing a lot of exercises
and you're using a lot of compensatory mechanisms,
you may just not fatigue the tissue well, right?
You're not getting enough isolation,
either because of poor execution or poor exercise selection,
so by the time you're done, you've done a lot of work,
so you're tired, you're fatigued from the workout,
but your muscles are not fatigued either to the same
or the appropriate ratio compared to your systemic fatigue.
So if we rule those out, it's not exercise selection,
it's not execution,
we could also consider some things here, okay?
One would be decreasing the frequency for that muscle groups
and maybe training it fewer times per week,
but increasing the volume per session,
or the intensity per session, or combination of, right?
Volume of stimulus would be the main thing
that we're going for.
We could look at reducing muscles on that day, right?
So these two kinda go together, right?
Obviously if we're reducing frequency for one muscle,
we're probably turning it down,
but it could be not so much
that you're not doing enough for a given muscle,
it could be that you're doing too much of another thing.
So it just depends on the way that you look at it, right?
You take that from both directions,
you're gonna get relatively the same result,
it just depends on whether or not we're focusing
on maybe reducing systemic work,
or increasing muscular work,
or it could be some combination of both.
The other thing that we could do
is we could just look at challenging the muscle further,
again, to confirm the accuracy of that RPE, right?
So it could be, in this case
maybe we're doing more work volume than we should be
because what we think is an RPE of nine
is really a seven, right?
And so our volume-of-work
to volume-of-stimulus ratio is off,
so we're just accumulating too much tonnage
over the course of this session
because we're not programming efficiently.
So when we looked at the different rep ranges,
and the different intensities, and how that correlated
to efficiency of stimulus versus work volume,
these can be some of those things
to kinda let you know where you're at in that ratio
of volume of stimulus to just volume of work,
for that person.
If we're just getting fatigued
because we're fatigued from tonnage,
from the amount of work we're doing,
but we're not getting enough stimulus,
that's not gonna be productive for adaptation,
and what we'll see is in those cases
is we won't likely be able to progress in the way
that we want to, right?
So this is another checks and balances for,
"Am I actually being efficient
with the work that I'm doing in terms of stimulus,
rather than just doing a lot of work?"
(adventurous guitar music)