-: So, this is just to kind of illustrate,
as adaptations occur, how we're keeping pace with it
and the threshold
for the minimum effective stimulus increases.
So minimum effective stimulus would be
kind of this bottom right, or left, sorry,
left corner of this curve.
And so, in order to continue to optimize progress,
we need to impose a training stress
that keeps pace with that.
So say we train, a week later, we come back,
there's no time scale on this intentionally,
but we see that that curve shifts a little bit to the right.
And so, not only does
the minimum effective stimulus increase,
the optimal stimulus would also increase,
so, as illustrated here,
the red being the minimum effective.
And so, over time, as adaptations occur,
you absolutely need to be doing more
to remain in the same spot on the curve,
is a good way to think about it.
It doesn't mean you have to be doing more
for it to be effective, but for a given point on that curve,
over time, you're going to be needing to do more
to stay in that location.
Okay, so effective training status,
no surprise here.
Novices, they're gonna experience greater magnitudes
and rates of adaptation
compared to well-trained individuals,
and some of that goes hand in hand, like magnitude and rate,
taking a novice, adding 20 pounds to their squat
over six months is,
or probably even shorter than that,
20 pounds to their spot over two months,
it's gonna take a well-trained individual
much longer to do that, to get that same 20 pounds,
so for a given timeframe,
the magnitude is going to be greater on average for novices.
A lot of that has to do with what we talked about before,
with increased neurological efficiency,
and this can actually be the case, too,
with exercise selection.
If you change exercises in a well-trained individual,
they're going to see these greater magnitudes
as they sort of learn the movement.
And if you go from a leg press to a back squat,
if you've never, it's been a year since you back squat,
your back squat's gonna climb pretty quickly, right?
So, for a given timeframe,
curve's gonna see a larger shift to the right
in novice individuals, so as we become more well-trained,
you're gonna see a lower return on your investment.
So you can see here, novices,
this is across the same timeframe,
let's say two months.
They're gonna see that larger shift, and because of that,
as we become more well-trained,
we're gonna see a lower return on our investment
for a given stimulus and given increase in stimulus.
So going from the point of this curve
to the point of this curve, these two red curves,
you're gonna see a pretty robust increase in progress,
or it's, let me back up.
So the increase in progress that's provided by that,
the increase in performance,
is going to require this increased magnitude of stimulus
in order to keep pace with that,
whereas, for a well-trained individual,
lower return on investment,
it's gonna require a larger stimulus
for a given magnitude of adaptations,
and you're gonna see a lower return on that,
which on the surface, like, I'm glad.
I didn't know that,
didn't really understand this concept as a novice athlete,
'cause that can be a little bit discouraging.
It's like, okay, it's gonna take you 10 years
to look the way that you envision, and over time,
you're gonna be having to work harder for less.
So that's why, like, the novice phase
is an enjoyable time as a trainee, because you're seeing
these pretty rapid increases in progress.
So, also, with increased training age,
there is a reduced rate and magnitude,
which we need to increase the stimulus
in order to stay above the stimulus threshold,
so I think this is kind of the main point
I want to take away from this,
is these more assertive progression formats
or adding low to every single session,
that might be more beneficial or even necessary
for a novice athlete,
but for an advanced athlete,
I think there's that pressure
for a lot of people in the back of their minds,
like, okay, I need to progress the stimulus in order,
the lowest weight increment,
it's five pounds, in many cases,
and a lot of times, you don't need to do that
in order to stay above that stimulus threshold
or stay in the same point on that curve.
What may require you to stay at the peak as a novice
might be a 15-pound increase over a given period of time
versus a two-pound increase or a three-pound increase
for a well trained athlete.
And that's a positive to take away from the above point,
which can sound sort of negative,
is the fact that you don't need to be as aggressive
in your magnitude of progressions as an advanced athlete,
nor are you really able to be.
So what that means in practice is, these adaptations,
they do not hinge on beating the log book
every single session.
Yes, your performance should be increasing over time,
but that upward trend,
the slope of that line is gonna be lower
than with a novice athlete.
So, in what situations may that be the case,
where adaptations are a little bit more accommodating
for this increased progression or increased magnitude?
Things like I talked about above,
exercise selection is a big one,
new exercises, coming off a layoff.
You could be an advanced athlete that hasn't trained,
and take a two week vacation.
I mean, you're going to see this retraining effect
occur pretty rapidly, and so, it's dependent on,
there's context there.
But with more advanced athletes, on average,
the rate of progression is going to be slower
and should be slower.
-: The one other one that I might add in there,
just because I know a lot of people
may have taken this approach,
is people that tend to start their meso-cycle
with very, very conservatively, right?
Like, that's closer to the RP model,
where they're starting closer to MAB and climbing.
So if you're taking that approach,
then you're gonna have to,
because you're starting at further left on the bell curve,
you're gonna have to basically put in
or progress a little bit more aggressively if you start.
So instead of starting at the optimum,
you're starting on the far left.
Then, in order to continue making results,
you're going to need to definitely progress
a little bit more aggressively.
-: Yeah, yeah.
If you're starting on the,
and I talked about this on day two,
and since we brought up that kind of approach
of working from MEV to MRV,
which isn't, MRV, by definition,
by the definition that's provided generally,
is the maximum amount of work
you can recover performance from.
That doesn't necessarily mean
that's where it crosses the X axis here,
whereas MEV, based on this model,
is going to be where it crosses this stimulus line.
MRV could be, it could be past this,
but the point being, we don't have enough research.
And I talked about this in the section on day two
with set progression,
how there's not really any research
that tells us one way or another,
whether progressing from a low amount of sets
to a higher amount of sets is going to be better
than trying to hover in the mid-range.
So it's not like,
it doesn't mean that that approach doesn't work,
or it doesn't mean that it's not optimal.
We just don't know,
and I think there's some drawbacks to it logistically,
but I just want to make that clear.
Like, I don't think we're necessarily against that,
we're just not, or at least myself,
I just don't think that increasing sets is required
in order to continue to make progress.
Volume is certainly associated with hypertrophy,
in a dose-response manner, to a point,
but I would look more at performance within each set
as kind of dictating how you manage your volume
across a meso-cycle and your overall recovery.
So, yeah, if you end up,
if you're starting here and your average ends up
near the top, that might be just as good
as staying at the top or trying to stay within the top.
And then, there's pros and cons to both, I think, arguments.
Okay, so why is rate of progression so important?
Hopefully, by now, this is fairly intuitive,
but what happens when we progress the stimulus suboptimally?
Let's say we have a novice or we start a new exercise,
we see a large shift to the right of that curve,
and we come back and we add five pounds,
or let's say we perform one more rep,
but we could have performed two more reps
in order to meet the same degree of effort
as we did in week one.
That could be a case where you sort of,
whether intentionally or unintentionally,
sort of sandbagged where you could be.
And so, I'm a big fan of like progression formats
that are autoregulated,
that sort of account for this a little bit,
and I think using scales like RAR
and Y-relative effort is so important,
is because you can, for a given relative effort,
you can compare apples to apples and know,
like, okay, for this degree,
like if we just have a static progression
where we increase by one rep each week,
but our ability to adapt is
exceptionally well at that point,
we could have pushed it a little bit more.
And realize, too, the more often that this occurs,
the smaller the shift to the right is going to be over time.
So, eventually, you may kind of catch up
to that middle point, but it doesn't necessarily mean that,
over time, if you can hang out
at the top point of this curve, you're going to see
the most long-term gains.
And so, that's what's gonna, go ahead.
-: Well, and our goal is not necessarily
trying to get the shift to go to the right faster or slower.
Our goal is that, every week,
we're accumulating as much adaptation as possible.
So every time that you are doing less than optimal,
in terms of adaptation,
you're potentially leaving a little bit of results
or rate of progress on the table.
But the goal isn't trying to race to the right to make it
so you have to have the most stimulus possible, right?
-: No, no, I agree there.
I think it's just a byproduct.
The curve shifts is a byproduct of
how much you're increasing the stimulus
to where you're at on that curve
in the time prior to that.
So, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that,
'cause I was probably a little bit misleading.
Okay, so then,
I think I have one other example here.
So you can see, like, over time,
if you are moving to the right,
but progressively more suboptimally,
let's say we increased one rep here, one rep here,
you're shifting lower on the curve.
So keep in mind, on this second situation here,
going from week one to week two,
we're still at an optimal, or not optimal,
we're still at an effective stimulus.
We're just on the left side of that curve,
but because of that, the next session,
if we make a little bit more progress
and we do one more rep again,
we may fall lower on the left side of that curve.
And so, it adds up over time.
I think the big point, I guess the big takeaway for this,
from my perspective, is having an element of auto regulation
to scale your stimulus based off your preparedness
on a given day is advantageous.
It's gonna avoid you falling excessively
on either end of this spectrum, the left or right,
or, worst case, outside of that.
All right, so similar, what's gonna happen
when we have an excess rate of magnitude of progression?
So this is kind of the reverse.
You can see over time
that this could be a situation of an advanced athlete
who's trying to add 10 pounds
to their working weights each week for a given rep range,
or for, say you're doing three sets of eight
and you're trying to add 10 pounds each week.
Eventually, this could be a very, week three,
this could be a very high relative effort week.
It can be very fatiguing, but ultimately,
it's a progression that exceeds your rates of adaptation
for that point in time,
whether that be your training career for a given exercise,
but the same thing can happen if you're too aggressive,
is you can fall outside of that optimal range.
And what Cass said earlier, if given the option,
we would both agree,
it's better to be below optimal or outside of optimal,
because you could have been doing more,
versus, okay, I'm outside of optimal
because recovery is now,
I'm burning the candle at both ends, you know?
So it's like, I think, too,
that people can fall into this trap,
like the volume trap,
where they need to keep progressing things over time,
and I've had athletes come to me,
and this can tie back into exercise selection,
where they feel, for a given muscle group,
the peak of their curve is, say, right here.
In this situation or this graph,
like, let's say it comes up, peaks right there,
when, really, because they have this mentality of,
okay, I need to progressively do more, more, more,
I can't back off volume and make progress.
What results is like, okay, once we do back off volume
or clean up your execution, you may find that that optimal,
you are much further to the left in terms of stimulus
in order to reach that optimal point.
So, yeah, I think I probably, this is a little bit wordy,
but point being, the excessive rates of progression
can push you outside that,
and having that mindset of needing to do more,
like, okay, I've progressed off this much in the past.
Therefore, I need to do at least this much,
in many cases, letting your foot off the gas
shifts you back to the middle, and so, it's all,
sometimes, with my thoughts on progressive overload,
one of the critiques has been like,
okay, isn't this sort of semantics?
Because you do need to progress the stimulus over time
in order to make progress, and I think,
if you look at it from that lens alone, yeah, it does.
Yeah, is your ability to perform
a result of these adaptations?
Or is your
performance driving these adaptations?
And it is both, but understand that,
when you're looking at it from managing,
like a long term approach to your training career,
that progressively doing more,
it can get you into trouble if you're not reactive with it.
It can push you to the right side of that curve,
and I see this quite a bit, especially with,
like an example I think I gave when we did this originally,
like I had an athlete come to me that,
his set volume for chest was very high
and it was the weak point for him on his physique.
And we looked at video and it was very clear
execution could have been better
and exercise selection could have been better,
so we cleaned that up and, all of a sudden,
he's making better progress off of half of the volume
that he was doing before.
And so, just kind of keep that in mind,
don't fall into the trap of like, okay,
now your stimulus threshold is now here
because this is what you're making progress off of.
It could still be below that.
Do you have anything to add there?
-: One thing I would think might be helpful
is if we look at this one and we look at the previous one
both as if we just kind of go through,
like, practically what this would look like.
So let's say like the first example here we have,
the left one, where it's optimal, right?
If we just, or we can start here, too.
Either one's fine.
So if we say, okay,
the left bell curve, where we're hitting optimal,
what does that represent?
Let's say maybe it's somebody doing four sets at three RIR.
It's just then what does that look like
as they're going to the next one?
We say we keep sets the same.
Now it's like, okay, well, maybe now a couple of those sets
are four RIR instead of three RIR,
so they were maintaining that, right?
And then, in the next week,
like, maybe a couple of those sets are three
or maybe a couple sets of four.
Maybe one set is even a five RIR or whatever,
so it's like we see that, like in this example,
what would be happening is that the relative RIR
would be increasing or RPE decreasing,
where we would want to probably maintain
the same RIR or RPE, right?
Versus the other example, where we're going too far,
if you want to move back to that one.
So if we use the same kind of baseline starting point,
saying it was like, okay, it was four sets,
averaging three RIR.
Well, now, in this instance,
I would say, in some cases,
you do need to progress maybe a little bit,
but it wouldn't necessarily be like,
you wouldn't go from having four sets at three
to then four sets at two RIR.
Like, that would be much too significant of a progression,
an effort or whatnot, right?
And then, so maybe that's what happened here,
and then the second one is progressing
to where they were averaging one RIR
across those for sets or whatever.
So, in this one,
they would be like progressing their RIR down or RPE up
too fast relative to what they needed,
whereas, in the opposite one,
you would essentially see the RIR going up, RPE going down.
Which is, I mean, there's really not,
there's really not any instances,
other than if we're deciding to,
like the example I give, where it's like,
in the instance where I do add a set,
then maybe the average RIR goes down a little bit
to accommodate for that volume,
so it's not such a big of a jump.
But outside of that, I don't ever see a point of progression
where your RIR or RPE would go down,
unless you thought you were on the right side
of the bell curve, right?
And you were trying to get back to back to optimal.
But if you think you're an optimal and you're progressing,
you're never probably gonna decrease your average RIR.
-: Agreed, yeah.
And I think that's, one of the-
-: The increases, I'm sorry.
-: Yeah, that's one of the reasons, I think,
just in a practical sense,
I like this using a static RIR across them as a cycle,
in many cases, not always,
but I do like that it makes somebody very familiar
with what that specific RIR feels like for them.
And it's easy to,
you may have it in your head, okay,
I'm gonna do 10 reps here with this load,
or that's your goal.
Maybe last week you got nine,
and you get to the 10 reps and you realize
you're still at a higher RIR than you were the week before.
It's like, take those additional reps
that are there for the taking
within the parameters of your program,
within the relative effort that's assigned.
I think that's one of the reasons I like that.
Yeah, those are good practical points for sure,
like your RIR generally should not be decreasing
across a meso-cycle, for hypertrophy anyway,
unless you do find you're on the right side of that curve,
or, like you said, Cass, maybe you're limited by recovery
or capacity between sets,
and pushing higher would really push things to the right.
You can back off RIR, maybe add a set,
and still progress the stimulus without smoking yourself
for the rest of the session.
-: You meant to say increasing, right?
You made the same mistake I did.
RIR shouldn't be increasing.
-: Yeah, yeah, it shouldn't be.
Well, RIR, no, RIR would be going up across a meso-cycle.
RPE, yeah, so you shouldn't be training
further from failure as you progress.
-: That's the point. -: So I was right, yeah.
-: We wouldn't want RIR increasing,
'cause that means we'd be getting further away from failure.
-: If you want to just ditch the acronyms completely,
like you don't want your sets to be getting easier,
in most cases.
-: The phrase I always use,
and I got this from one of my football coaches,
is listen to what I mean, not what I say.
-: Exactly, exactly.
Okay, so as you guessed,
this is just kind of driving home the point,
what does optimal look like on a session to session basis?
It's scaling the stimulus
based off of your rates of adaptation
and trying to stay the top of that curve
as often as you can.
And it is hard.
You never know with certainty where you're at,
and I think that's an important point,
because I'll get people that are,
will email me, clients or inquiries that'll email me,
that give this very narrow range,
like, okay, I progress either
somewhere between like 14 to 16 sets per week
for this muscle group.
And while sets per week is a good proxy for stimulus,
it has its limitations as well.
And so, I like having a reactionary model
built into the progressions
that are less reliant on sets
and more reliant on set to set performance
and seeing how things are progressing within each set,
rather than obsessing over,
like, okay, this is the total number of sets
regardless of proximity to failure for those, so, yeah.