Progressive Loading Part 3: Why the Novice / Intermediate / Advanced Framework Doesn't Work, and What to Do Instead

[SPEAKER_00]: Picture this, veteran lifter with three weeks of stalled squads. [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing is moving on the bar. [SPEAKER_00]: He's been sleeping enough, eating enough protein, and running a program that's produced games for the last few months. [SPEAKER_00]: So he starts hunting for what's broken, for volume, different exercises, maybe a different program altogether. [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe he tells himself, he's hit the intermediate to advanced transition and he needs a change.

[SPEAKER_00]: Across the gym from him is a brand new lifter on his sixth week of training. [SPEAKER_00]: He's just added 30 pounds to a squat and everyone says that he's a beast. [SPEAKER_00]: He gets told to add weight every single session because that's just what novices do. [SPEAKER_00]: The connected tissue is knees however, they've not been informed.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now those two lifters are running on the same physiology, both have the same for adaptive systems doing the same work, pointed in the same direction. [SPEAKER_00]: The difference between them comes down to how long each of them has to wait before the work that they're doing shows up on the bar. [SPEAKER_00]: and if you could fuse the wait time for a category, you start solving for the wrong problem.

[SPEAKER_00]: The four-year lifter ends up switching off a program that actually was working, and the new lifter ends up pushing ahead of what his tenants can absorb and maybe getting hurt. [SPEAKER_00]: This week on the Barbell Medicine podcast, while the novice intermediate advanced framework describes a measurement window more than it describes biology and what to do instead.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to walk through nearly 10,000 competitive power lifters tracked across more than 15 years of data. [SPEAKER_00]: We're going to look at why a $1200 withdrawal from a $1,000 bank account is the actual mechanism behind your buddies' first bow to the teletent anopathy. [SPEAKER_00]: And we're going to land on what a real stall looks like and what to do when you see one. [SPEAKER_00]: Today is the mechanism layer. [SPEAKER_00]: Why those categories exist?

[SPEAKER_00]: What they actually tell you and why most of what actually gets called the stall isn't really a stall.

[SPEAKER_00]: And to help me explain why moving on to your fourth different program of the year is not the move. [SPEAKER_00]: It's the second most handsome doctor in North America, Dr. Austin, Barackie. [SPEAKER_00]: What's going on, man? [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, I'm doing all right.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting way to think about things, the way you said it there, because I'm trying to think back, like when was the last time that I thought in my own training that I was like, quote, unquote, doing a program?

[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like I have just allowed my training [SPEAKER_01]: set up and, you know, my own programming to kind of ebb and flow with my goals and priorities and needs and limitations and aches and pains, and it's just kind of like in this perpetual state of evolution, with much less of a sense of like, I'm on a discrete program for a discrete period of time.

[SPEAKER_01]: Which I guess is different if you have like competitive like landmarks that you're working towards a meet and then you pay it off of it But I had you know, it's been a little loss instead of you know competed in powerlifting, but just thinking about discrete programs is something that's like been a little bit foreign to me for a while Just because of the nature of what my goals have been like influx for the past year.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I guess [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we feel full meta on this and be like, what defines a program? [SPEAKER_00]: Like, if you change the split, if you change the frequency, whatever, like, it's the ship of the easiest, except as it pertains to a training program. [SPEAKER_01]: If you swap out one variable at a time, at one point, is it a new program? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: What to find?

[SPEAKER_00]: That's, I mean, that's my whole thing with what is CrossFit. [SPEAKER_00]: What is five through one? [SPEAKER_00]: You know, when you're actually talking about these things. [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I mean, to your point, if you look at my in our app, [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I've got, I think I'm on my 28th block that I've programmed for myself. [SPEAKER_00]: I would say rough estimation that two thirds of those are the same program just tweaked, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, not AI kind of using feedback to do it. [SPEAKER_00]: It's human intelligence intelligence doing a lot of things. [SPEAKER_00]: What a concept. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, is it a different program?

[SPEAKER_00]: And so anyway, yeah, there are certainly people listening to this, hopefully, who are newly discovered us and they may in fact be on their second brand new program third program fourth program of the year they're just moving on because it's stall or whatever. [SPEAKER_00]: And so we're going to talk about why that may not be the move and why you think about different categorizations for people in training. [SPEAKER_00]: maybe mistaken.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, two terms will do most of the heavy lifting today. [SPEAKER_00]: Untrained, meaning less than roughly a year of consistent, progressively loaded exercise. [SPEAKER_00]: I should also know that this is mode specific, so someone can be untrained in cardiovascular fitness or cardio, conditioning training, and somebody can be trained in. [SPEAKER_00]: resistance training and vice versa. [SPEAKER_00]: So when we have untrained and then trained, everyone else.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you've been training for more than a year, in a particular modality, we call you trained, less than that, we call you untrained, just this sort of arbitrary line in the sand that we've drawn in the whole premise of the rest of this podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: And if you want to tune out, back to this, please don't. [SPEAKER_00]: But if you want to, none of this stuff really matters. [SPEAKER_00]: These terms that and then we'll contrast that against [SPEAKER_00]: doesn't matter.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we're going to drop novice, intermediate and advanced for most of the rest of this episode. [SPEAKER_00]: Those labels are in heavy rotation for coaches as a rough, heuristic, but they describe mostly a measurement window more than they describe anything physiological, biological, et cetera. [SPEAKER_00]: And we're going to spend the next approximately 60 minutes explaining why.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, underneath these labels, there are four adaptive systems that are doing the work and that they're same at month one as they are at year one as they are at year 10. [SPEAKER_00]: None of them switch off, none of them hand the work off to a different system, none of them transition into a new system at any boundary that this novice intermediate advanced framework draws.

[SPEAKER_00]: They run continuously across a training career, across four different time scales, and the time scales are most of what the novice intermediate advanced system gets wrong. [SPEAKER_00]: So the four systems that we're gonna come back to for the rest of this podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: One is neural, so neural adaptation. [SPEAKER_00]: This is the fastest. [SPEAKER_00]: These are, we're talking about recruitment threshold, reductions, firing rate increases antagonist suppression.

[SPEAKER_00]: We can detect this really in hours, days, weeks. [SPEAKER_00]: Muscle hypertrophy is slower than the neural adaptation, driven primarily by mechanical tension on the muscle. [SPEAKER_00]: This is usually detectable in weeks to months, and we'll talk about connective tissue, meaning tendons, ligaments. [SPEAKER_00]: This is the slowest of these sort of fast adapting systems.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're talking about [SPEAKER_00]: 6-8 weeks minimum to detect changes in stiffness longer when it comes to actual size or cross-sectional area of these tissues. [SPEAKER_00]: And then bone is remodeling in the background. [SPEAKER_00]: A complete remodeling of bone cycle takes three to six months with Dexa detectable changes that's x-ray technology. [SPEAKER_00]: Meaning maybe six to 12 months of consistent loading to show up.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the novice intermediate advanced framework has three claims, which we're going to basically test against the data. [SPEAKER_00]: Claim one is that novice intermediate advanced lifters have different rates at which these underlying adaptive processes function. [SPEAKER_00]: The cell biology is supposedly running at different speeds in these groups. [SPEAKER_00]: That's claim one.

[SPEAKER_00]: claim to the rate differences dictate a different progression model, novices add weight to the session each session because their biology has facilitated it. [SPEAKER_00]: Intermediates add weight weekly and advanced lifters add weight each month or longer and because of these different adaptation rates and claim three that program design differs by category.

[SPEAKER_00]: Banslifters need different volume, different intensity ranges, different exercise selection compared to novices, and this neat categorization system kind of tells you how to do that. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a prescriptive in a way. [SPEAKER_00]: Three claims, each of which is testable. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, Austin, before we get into the data, where do you see this novice intermediate advanced framework payoff and where do you see it cause trouble?

[SPEAKER_00]: Because I imagine you've seen two sides of this. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think we both have. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you see that label applied to a person, the intent of it, I think that is, I don't know, the will be most charitable too, is that it gives you just like a very general sense of how long has this person been at it?

[SPEAKER_01]: If anything, it doesn't actually tell you like how much adaptation they have actually gained because they're both of us have worked with clients for example, who, [SPEAKER_01]: come in relatively new to the game and you know really early on they identify themselves as like kind of a bit of a freak of nature and they tend to get real strong real fast.

[SPEAKER_01]: And others who have been training for a very long period of time and struggling to add some weight and so you can't necessarily make that determination based on just like actually how strong someone is necessarily. [SPEAKER_01]: And so more so I think you're kind of onto something in terms of like attaching these to some general sense of how long has the person been at this, how long have they kind of been in the iron game working it, improving these adaptations.

[SPEAKER_01]: Where have things kind of gone wrong or where have seen it cost trouble is? [SPEAKER_01]: when people take this very clearly oversimplified framework and use it to make very concrete decisions for their own training or for their clients training, meaning that they are kind of forcing a square peg into a round hole saying, I have deemed you to be an intermediate for example.

[SPEAKER_01]: And therefore, [SPEAKER_01]: You must add weight every week because that is what defines an intermediate. [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, that's not the direction that this relationship should go. [SPEAKER_01]: Instead of me deeming you an intermediate. [SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, your next week must be, you know, a certain increment in weight heavier than this week.

[SPEAKER_01]: I should more so observe your response and use that to inform my like assessment of kind of where you're at in your training journey. [SPEAKER_01]: And so it can ultimately lead people to make [SPEAKER_01]: somewhat foolish or sometimes very foolish decisions when it comes to their load selection and expectations of progression, if they are trying to force themselves into a particular category.

[SPEAKER_01]: The last thing is, you know, you pointed out these different systems, the neurological system, muscle, connective tissue, bone, [SPEAKER_01]: And that is itself, also a bit of an oversimplification, as are many things that we describe here, in the sense that it's not just those four systems that determine your performance on any given day, right? [SPEAKER_01]: We also need, you know, this nebulous concept that we talk about. [SPEAKER_01]: the stars need to align in various ways.

[SPEAKER_01]: Your psychology, your readiness, your alertness, your preparedness, and so whether or not you're able to increment the load or improve demonstrate and improve performance on a particular timeline is still not even determined purely by, you know, adaptation rates in those four systems. [SPEAKER_01]: So these things are just a lot more complex.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so that is part of why I think [SPEAKER_01]: Observing the person's response and being a little bit more kind of reactive to that rather than imposing a particular rate of progression on somebody based on where you have like labeled them makes more sense. [SPEAKER_01]: I am curious though, you know, we have touched on this topic. [SPEAKER_01]: You're calling this progressive loading number three, so we've touched on at least two times before.

[SPEAKER_01]: And outside of the fact that our audience is growing and we may have some new people here, why did you feel this needed another treatment today? [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think in the first section, we kind of talked about that progressive overload, the word itself was doing, and again, to use this pun. [SPEAKER_00]: How many more times will I use it? [SPEAKER_00]: Some heavy lifting.

[SPEAKER_00]: When people were saying, oh, if it's overloading, it has to be more than what I can currently tolerate.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so what we really wanted to introduce in part one is that the concept of progressive overload is probably better frame through the term progressive loading and that it is reactive to how the person is actually adapting and to the extent those adaptations are more detectable above the sort of noise that we see in day to day performance and once that happens yeah you should add weight should add reps you should add pace duration whatever. [SPEAKER_00]: right.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that was like part one. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like the words probably wrong. [SPEAKER_00]: If you look at it through this different lens, if your your training decisions become reactive, that was like part one. [SPEAKER_00]: Part two was more of a historical thing like how do we get here and addition some house to detect those adaptations when they do clear that sort of noise range. [SPEAKER_00]: So kind of a practical [SPEAKER_00]: Why do people get this wrong?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what is the source of that? [SPEAKER_00]: And if it's not just the word, and I do think that the framing novice intermediate advanced is the crux of most of that. [SPEAKER_00]: And to your point, you know, all models have problems, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And I think the issue here is the more literally somebody adopts this novice intermediate advanced, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And said, this is it. [SPEAKER_00]: The worse it serves them.

[SPEAKER_00]: If the novice intermediate advanced model, just said, look, as you become more trained, [SPEAKER_00]: the amount of demonstrable improvements of performance are gonna be less and less over time. [SPEAKER_00]: We wouldn't make me make this episode. [SPEAKER_00]: The problem is when that extends to prescription, whether it's prescription of progression, like you have to add weight every session, you have to add weight every week or every month, or whatever.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then subsequently program design. [SPEAKER_00]: You can give an experienced trainee and an unexperienced trainee, the same program, [SPEAKER_00]: Right. [SPEAKER_00]: And if the training load happens to match both of them, you're going to see great progress. [SPEAKER_00]: If it happens to match neither them, you could see not, you know, bad progress or no progress.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so the point is like, you can't tell what type of program somebody needs just based on if their classified as novice intermediate advanced, especially if those categories are based on how often they can add weight.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's why I felt like this episode need to be made. [SPEAKER_00]: Also, we haven't talked about training in a while, so we get to double dip. [SPEAKER_00]: People dig the training episodes. [SPEAKER_00]: I get that. [SPEAKER_00]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay. [SPEAKER_00]: So, if this novice intermediate and advanced frameworks first claim is right, that novices and advanced lifters are running biologically different adaptive processes, then we should be able to see that in some data. [SPEAKER_00]: Specifically, if the rates of underline adaptation actually changes when a lifter crosses the threshold from novice intermediate, the strength curve over a long career should show that change.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, one of the largest data sets that we have on this was published in sports medicine in 2024. [SPEAKER_00]: This is Christopher Littella and colleagues at Edith Cohen University in Australia, working with collaborators at two other universities. [SPEAKER_00]: They took the largest publicly available powerlifting data set from open powerlifting and asked a simple question.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you follow each lifters competition results over years, what is the curve of their strength gain actually look like? [SPEAKER_00]: They had nearly 10,000 lifters with up to 17 years of data. [SPEAKER_00]: So in total, 9,259 unique lifters pulled from the international power lifting Federation IPF database. [SPEAKER_00]: These are all in the open class. [SPEAKER_00]: Raw competition only drug tested federations.

[SPEAKER_00]: These lifters had at least three competitions on record. [SPEAKER_00]: The maximum window in the data set is about 17 years. [SPEAKER_00]: Now when I say open class. [SPEAKER_00]: there are some master's lifters that had signed up for both meets so you're getting that data there too. [SPEAKER_00]: They model each lifters squat, bench press, deadlift, and total as a function of years in the sport while accounting for age, sex, and body weight.

[SPEAKER_00]: The model lets you see the average rate of strength gain across a competitive career. [SPEAKER_00]: The greatest gains were in the first year. [SPEAKER_00]: No surprise there, roughly 7.5 to 12.5% above baseline in the first year. [SPEAKER_00]: And then up to 20% above baseline after 10 years. [SPEAKER_00]: The curve here is smooth and like an asymptote. [SPEAKER_00]: The curve climbs hard in year one. [SPEAKER_00]: It bends and keeps flattening out over the next decade.

[SPEAKER_00]: Each year adds less than the year before. [SPEAKER_00]: Same general shape across squat, bench press, and deadly. [SPEAKER_00]: So what does this mean? [SPEAKER_00]: You could read this finding and conclude something like this. [SPEAKER_00]: The framework says, novices and advanced lifters are running biologically different adaptive processes. [SPEAKER_00]: If that's right, then at the moment a lifter crosses from novice to intermediate, something physiological supposed to shift.

[SPEAKER_00]: If something physiological shifts, the strength curve should show it as a bend, flexion point, visible change and slope at that point. [SPEAKER_00]: There isn't one. [SPEAKER_00]: So the framework's wrong, and that argument, though, to me, is probably too strong, but before we get into a lot, we need to introduce an alternative explanation, the case that may be making for the rest of this podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: a lifter as somebody working with the same biological machinery, their whole training career. [SPEAKER_00]: They've got the same muscle protein synthesis pathway, the same neural recruitment hardware, the same connective tissue remodeling cycle, and so what changes across years of training isn't the machinery, what changes is how much room is left between where the lifter is and they're sealing.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're genetics, they're training history, and their life circumstances that all allow on top of that. [SPEAKER_00]: So in year one, the room is huge, gap is huge, and you're 10 the room, and the gap is small. [SPEAKER_00]: It's the same machinery, just less remaining room. [SPEAKER_00]: That's sort of alternative hypothesis, and both that story and the framework's biology shifts modes, story, produce the same sort of logarithmic curve.

[SPEAKER_01]: This brought something to mind if I can insert your little comment here because it made me think of something else as an analogy or like a similar related situation. [SPEAKER_01]: We're viewing this person, this biological organism and then delivering an intervention to them and the intervention is their training program and the training program or the training intervention will evolve over the course of their career.

[SPEAKER_01]: Most of the time that dose of training will tend to increase over the course of the career. [SPEAKER_01]: And yet we see this kind of long term, you know, as you describe like a logarithmic kind of plateau over a long enough period this time. [SPEAKER_01]: And because of the visual that that evoked in my mind of that type of a graph, I'm like, I've seen very similar graphs just like that very recently in the realm of GLP1 mediated weight loss data, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: So we have a human with a particular underlying biology, genetics, environmental conditions, things like that. [SPEAKER_01]: randomized trials of these medications, for example, as they get administered to a person at each given dose, right? [SPEAKER_01]: There's an initial relatively quick, quick weight loss and then it slows down and then it platoes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if you increase the dose, then that initial curve steepens a little bit and then it platoes at a little bit further lower weight level. [SPEAKER_01]: And all the way up to the maximum dose where there are diminishing returns, but that plateau happens a little bit later and later and later. [SPEAKER_01]: And so you have this intervention being delivered at a progressively increasing dose to a person with underlying biology genetics.

[SPEAKER_01]: You have a pretty substantial initial response, you know, depending on where they're biological and environmentally determined like ceiling is. [SPEAKER_01]: And then long-term always platos, right? [SPEAKER_01]: There are no humans who are like on these medicines or using these interventions really or any other, who just like perpetually lose weight forever. [SPEAKER_01]: In the same way that no one pursuing this kind of intervention perpetually gain strength.

[SPEAKER_01]: forever. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a really kind of analogous situation, a biology and environmentally determined kind of ceiling potential. [SPEAKER_01]: And then as your intervention, as it evolves over time, you approach that, of course, at a diminishing rate, but that ceiling is there. [SPEAKER_01]: And the underlying kind of physiology, the process is aren't like shifting gears or changing. [SPEAKER_01]: They're just responding with less and less and less room to go.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then you're inevitably going to plateau at some level [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, no, that's that's that's that's pretty elegant.

[SPEAKER_00]: If I think maybe if you're like an IAA novice intermediate advanced hard liner and you accept all three of these arguments, this first one is the easiest to reject that the biological processes, the physical physiology that's going on underneath the hood is changing and it's like probably not and we don't really see that in a lot of other circumstances too now. [SPEAKER_00]: two caveats to the study that I just presented.

[SPEAKER_00]: One, lifters cross these sort of category boundaries theoretically at different times. [SPEAKER_00]: And so when you aggregate thousands of lifters together, these individual transitions would average out into a smooth curve. [SPEAKER_00]: So if there were like sharp individual transitions, you might miss that. [SPEAKER_00]: Um, that said, think about what the framework this NIA framework actually prescribes.

[SPEAKER_00]: novice adds weight every session, intermediate adds weight every week and advanced lift or adds weight, you know, some time course longer than that. [SPEAKER_00]: That's a prescription for what the coach does, not necessarily a claim about how fast the cells are dividing or how fast the protein synthesis machinery is firing.

[SPEAKER_00]: And a curve produced by that prescription, applied to a lifter who is approaching their genetics, the only looks identical to this curve produced by the same machinery, less remaining room argument that we're making. [SPEAKER_00]: Both produce the same shape and the data can't really tell them apart. [SPEAKER_00]: So maybe this is supporting both arguments.

[SPEAKER_00]: But to me, [SPEAKER_00]: what we can tell from this is that the shape of long-term strength gain looks like an asymptote with diminishing returns. [SPEAKER_00]: The specific numbers are 7.5% to 12.5% strength gain in year one, and up to 20% after decade. [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, and resistance training across the lifespan of 10 U.H. [SPEAKER_00]: or reduces age-related decline substantially. [SPEAKER_00]: That data set also shows that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Two more findings from the paper before we move on because they also run counter to some popular claims. [SPEAKER_00]: First up is sex. [SPEAKER_00]: Females in this data set showed significantly steeper gains as a percentage of baseline gain compared to males. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the authors attribute this to a lower starting strength and lower prior training experience on average.

[SPEAKER_00]: Females, perhaps entering powerlifting, come in less pre-trained than the dude on average, so they have more available room above baseline to gain into, which neatly supports. [SPEAKER_00]: are hypothesis here, but this is not a categorical sex difference in adaptive capacity. [SPEAKER_00]: But when someone tells you that women can't get strong or they lack the machinery or whatever, the largest dataset says that we have the opposite.

[SPEAKER_00]: Also, the master's findings that I alluded to. [SPEAKER_00]: Females above age 59 still showed positive strength gains across the data collection window. [SPEAKER_00]: and males above 69 showed a slight decline, all about 0.35% per year. [SPEAKER_00]: Now if you compare that to what happens in the gen pop, people who aren't exercising, the strength decline at that age is closer to 1% per year.

[SPEAKER_00]: So master's power lifters are losing strength, roughly a third as fast as their non-training peers. [SPEAKER_00]: That's the resistance training protects against aging, finding, demonstrated cleanly in this 17-year competition data set. [SPEAKER_00]: So Austin, for a lifter who comes in, and they're frustrated that they only had five pounds to their squat in the last three months. [SPEAKER_00]: After adding 50 pounds in their first three months, they're more experienced now.

[SPEAKER_00]: What's the conversation like and how do you keep them training instead of programming a program hopping out of the impatience? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, part of this involves getting a little bit more background information on their training history and what their kind of expectations have been.

[SPEAKER_01]: If that is in fact the case, those numbers that you laid out, there's actually a good chance that, you know, they started out as most people tend to start out like well below their absolute strength potential on day one. [SPEAKER_01]: In other words, your early progress might be kind of. [SPEAKER_01]: artificially inflate it because it's not like you're working up to your, you know, five red max on your first day ever training.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then that's what improves by 50 pounds over the over the subsequent couple months. [SPEAKER_01]: Most of the time you're starting a little bit artificially light. [SPEAKER_01]: And then you're kind of, you know, developing your neurological adaptations, your technique, your proficiency, your consistency, um, getting over the early soreness and things like that. [SPEAKER_01]: And so.

[SPEAKER_01]: that early perceived rate of progress might be like artificially fast, and so this might not actually be that as dramatic of a quote unquote slowdown as it seems, but if the person's expectations were that they were going to have linear progress for a very, very, very long period of time, it might be time for a, maybe a hard conversation about those types of expectations.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I am also going to be taking a history unlike what is your training looked like and how [SPEAKER_01]: And then what if the rest of your life looked like outside of the gym, kind of the recovery aspect, the sleep aspect, the nutrition things, all the things that we know go into generating these adaptations.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, sometimes it's a matter of, oh, this person had some massive life stressors or job changes or various other things and they're wanting the progress to continue, but it might not be physiologically realistic or feasible for them. [SPEAKER_01]: getting a sense of where they're coming from, what they've been doing, where they're potential gaps in their game might be, and kind of helping to reframe expectations.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't necessarily like the idea of like aggressively resetting expectations, like telling them all your expectations are just like we need to throw them away, because that's also a way to like lose somebody, but just kind of gently collaboratively massaging those expectations. [SPEAKER_01]: I would say to be more in line with either kind of like average data that we're familiar with,

[SPEAKER_01]: data are not you the individual right those might give us some like kind of general expectations but at the same time some people are going to be you know above that and some people are going to be below it and more so at this point we need to just treat you as an individual based on what you're showing us rather than you know setting expectations based on how somebody else has responded to training yeah yeah well said and I think the program in hopping you know program hopping thing it's it's

[SPEAKER_00]: I struggle with this because it's like, again, what defines a program and when would I definitively recommend somebody change a program versus not and it's like, if the bones of your program, the reps, the sets, the exercise selection, the total amount of volume, proximity failure, all these sort of variables are reasonable. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that you need a complete program change, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: When I say reasonable, I mean, match you the individual, you know, your current fitness level, your resources that you have so on and so forth, right? [SPEAKER_00]: If they're not producing the gains that you want, I have less concerns about the sort of formulation of the program and more about the dosing, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Is that more appropriate for you? [SPEAKER_00]: But I too see a lot of bad programs.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like it just where almost everything is wrong and anchoring to that particular setup and just tweaking from there is more headache than it's worth and that's kind of I feel about the various 531 permutations for example, like

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, maybe it's more outspoken previously about 531 or whatever, but I'm like I don't know that we need to anchor to what is maybe fundamentally 531 like changing the rep scheme on a weekly basis or whatever or even anchoring to 5s, 3s and 1s like why are we doing this? [SPEAKER_00]: And I feel similarly about other programming styles, but somebody came up to me and they were like look, it's an upper lower split.

[SPEAKER_00]: And here's the total training load, and I'm mostly doing strength work. [SPEAKER_00]: I want to get stronger, and I'm like, well, this setup seems the bones are fine. [SPEAKER_00]: I would want to iteratively change from there. [SPEAKER_00]: And like, what constitutes, well, now this is a program change. [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I, again, this meta conversation about what, what is a real change versus just like a tweak? [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sure. [SPEAKER_01]: I have two thoughts. [SPEAKER_01]: And one of them is a little bit of a push back and to see your thoughts on like a defensive program hopping, so to speak. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, depending on the person's goals, obviously from the start, let's say somebody's goals are purely health related. [SPEAKER_01]: Honestly program how away in my opinion that you are sufficiently active with sufficient, you know, level of effort on a sufficiently regular basis.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like you're good with the majority. [SPEAKER_00]: Go ahead. [SPEAKER_00]: The only caveat I would make to that is that we know that exercise works better when it works for you. [SPEAKER_00]: So some so that it's not just the participation per say that is like the main thing, maybe 80% of the thing that the remaining 20% is like.

[SPEAKER_00]: It should probably still be making a little stronger, should be gaining a little bit of muscle mass getting a bit of cardiovascular disease. [SPEAKER_00]: But outside of that, yes, correct. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like unconcern, if it makes you happy and you're going to keep doing it, do it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: If somebody does have performance oriented goals, then obviously the question of specificity comes into play as far as what their program should kind of start to prioritize a little bit more. [SPEAKER_01]: But even then I can see a degree of like an argument for some amount of program hopping and the way I'm thinking about this is is twofold. [SPEAKER_01]: I think one is going back to our prior discussions on like long term athletic development.

[SPEAKER_01]: and how early on in the training life span, or try somebody's training career, sampling can be beneficial for a lot of different reasons. [SPEAKER_01]: And you think about the youth recruitment methods that are used, I don't know, I think in China, or something to develop their Olympic athletes, and they just like bounce them around between different sports to find something that they're good at, and then they select, [SPEAKER_01]: For that.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's like the more extreme version where you're literally changing between entirely different disciplines, although, you know, there's also even an argument for that, you know, in terms of improving being associated with improved outcomes in single sport athletes down the line is those who have participated in more things early on, although there's a lot of caveats to that type of interpretation.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then the other thing is even within a narrower range of specificity, not to say that you should be bouncing between powerlifting and weightlifting and then basketball and pickleball and swimming and things like that to get better at one or deadlift strength. [SPEAKER_01]: But even within a narrower band of specificity, like about the [SPEAKER_01]: quote unquote program hopping within the strength training realm.

[SPEAKER_01]: You may happen upon something that either clicks with your psychology bit better, gets you motivated, gets you a training harder in a way that leads to some better outcomes, or just find something that may be physiologically resonates or works better for you, your physiology, your, I don't know, tissue tolerance, recovery capacity, whatever the case is.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so, some maybe moderate amount of program hopping if it was to happen, that might be a reasonable time to do it, kind of a more of a sampling exploratory phase earlier on. [SPEAKER_01]: That I could see an argument for that instead of rigidly adhering to like this has to be the best method for, you know, everyone who is at this stage of trainer who falls under this like call it a novice intermediate advanced type label again, an example of like.

[SPEAKER_01]: forcing a square peg in around hole like forcing the client onto the program or the training onto the program instead of saying like we have a lot of options out there and then there are some people who maybe you're going to do great with like a double progression type set up and that gets a motivated other people who are really going to enjoy amraps other people who are going to enjoy some aspect of the 531 maybe somebody else who instead of that enjoys a I don't know the the Fibonacci sequence program where you use different numbers instead of 5 and 3 and 1 I don't know so that's kind of a a thought that I'm curious what your

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, again, I think it just comes back to definition like what is fundamentally different program. [SPEAKER_00]: Like when I think about a strength program, right? [SPEAKER_00]: It's like a pretty wide range of things that it would be, I would consider viable for that goal if we're talking about one rep max strength. [SPEAKER_00]: And so like if you go from primarily your training in the six to eight rep range, right, versus primarily training the one to three rep range.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, both are like in the sort of strength training realm. [SPEAKER_00]: Are they different programs, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Or if one program uses [SPEAKER_00]: You know, double progression. [SPEAKER_00]: Another one is more like repeat sets or percentages like these different programs or just like tweaks. [SPEAKER_00]: And so again, the definition matters. [SPEAKER_00]: If you're calling those program hops like exploring different setups.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm with you thousand percent if it's more like, okay, this is definitively like strength. [SPEAKER_00]: And now we've moved so far from that a hypertrophy and we're doing that for strength game than a less inclined to to agree. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that's more what I'm getting at now again, all of this is to say. [SPEAKER_00]: the training, the formulation of the training needs to be relevant to your goals.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if that is out of place or the setup that you've anchored yourself to is so rigid that it cannot adapt to you, then I'm in full favor of, let's do a full rewrite. [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, otherwise I'm kind of like, I don't know, a lot of programs are reasonable like starting points and then tweaking from there is kind of the general thing we're doing here. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I talked enough that you've got to agree with it. [SPEAKER_00]: That makes sense.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the curve on its own does not kill the framework's biology claim. [SPEAKER_00]: The same shape is produced by both stories. [SPEAKER_00]: The NIA framework's biology shifts modes, and the same machinery less remaining room story. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's the same curve. [SPEAKER_00]: Both produce an asymptote with diminishing returns, and the date on its own can't tell them apart.

[SPEAKER_00]: where the framework actually breaks down is one level below, when you walk through what each of the four adaptive systems is actually doing across the training career, the cell biology is the same in the new lifter and the four-year lifter. [SPEAKER_00]: What's different is how much room is left to a depth on each system and how long each one takes to register a change.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the next 30 minutes of this episode, we'll walk through them fastest to slowest, and for each one we'll talk about the

[SPEAKER_00]: So let's start off the neurological adaptations. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the nervous system recruits the muscle through a relatively strict hierarchy called the size principle, Henneman's size principle. [SPEAKER_00]: At low forced demands, the smallest, most fatigue resistant motor units fire first. [SPEAKER_00]: as forced demand increases larger fast-witch motor units come on.

[SPEAKER_00]: The order doesn't change with training, what training changes is the efficiency of the entire process. [SPEAKER_00]: Lower thresholds to reach those sort of high-force motor units faster firing rates better coordination between muscles pulling in the same direction, more complete suppression of the muscles that would otherwise oppose the movement. [SPEAKER_00]: So picture a single nerve cell connected to a small group of muscle fibers.

[SPEAKER_00]: This bundles what physiologists call a motor unit. [SPEAKER_00]: And every contraction is the sum of all of the motor units firing. [SPEAKER_00]: The bigger the load, the more motor units the nervous system has to recruit, and the faster each one has to fire. [SPEAKER_00]: Del Vecchio and colleagues in 2019 had untrained subjects strength trained for four weeks.

[SPEAKER_00]: They measured what each motor unit was doing before and after using a technique called high density EMG that picks up the electrical sort of signature of individual motor units rather than averaging them across the whole muscle.

[SPEAKER_00]: After four weeks, the motor units fired faster and the motor units that previously only came online at high efforts were now showing [SPEAKER_00]: It's the same hardware, but better software, and that's what people mean, I think when they say the first month of training those gains are mostly neural. [SPEAKER_00]: The liftor hasn't really grown anymore muscle, not appreciably so anyway. [SPEAKER_00]: The liftor got better at using the muscle they already had.

[SPEAKER_00]: But long-term, this sort of story is incomplete. [SPEAKER_00]: So picture what happens when you try to extend your knee, your quadriceps, on the front of your thigh, has to fire. [SPEAKER_00]: Your hamstrings on the backside of your leg have to relax. [SPEAKER_00]: If both fired at the same time, the leg doesn't go anywhere. [SPEAKER_00]: Every coordinated movement requires the muscles on one side of a joint to get out of the way of the muscles on the other side.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the spinal cord handles that coordination through a sort of reflex circuit. [SPEAKER_00]: When a motor signal from the brain goes out to the quadriceps, the same circuit sends an inhibitory signal to the hamstrings telling them to back off. [SPEAKER_00]: Two synapses, one signal pulls the trigger, one signal lifts the break. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, at 2025 review by Letchy and colleagues in the Journal of Physiology pulls the data together on what training does to that circuit.

[SPEAKER_00]: Technically called diecinaptic reciprocal inhibition, you can use that at the bar later to impress somebody. [SPEAKER_00]: Long-term strength athletes show that break lifting signal more strongly and faster than recreational active people do. [SPEAKER_00]: In a train lifter, the quad fire is harder because the hamstrings get out of the way more completely. [SPEAKER_00]: A larger fraction of what the muscle could produce actually reaches the bar, the machine, the dumbbell, whatever.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now adaptations like that take years to develop. [SPEAKER_00]: They cannot be attributed to muscle size alone either. [SPEAKER_00]: The train lifter isn't just stronger because the muscle is bigger, but rather the train lifter is stronger because the wiring around that muscle is [SPEAKER_00]: Now, we got to do a few caveats as we want to do here on the barbell medicine podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: We're talking about EMG or electro myography.

[SPEAKER_00]: This picks up electrical activity that the muscle produces when it contracts. [SPEAKER_00]: You stick electrodes on the skin over a muscle. [SPEAKER_00]: You ask the lifter to do something. [SPEAKER_00]: And the bigger the electrical signal, the more the muscle is firing. [SPEAKER_00]: That's the sort of basic version here. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, in a study from 2019 by Ball Shaw, they used EMG to compare three groups.

[SPEAKER_00]: Untrained subjects, 12 week train subjects, and a group that had been training consistently for 40 years. [SPEAKER_00]: They looked at the electrical signal coming out of the working muscle in each group was pushed as hard as they could. [SPEAKER_00]: The four-year train group's signal is 44% larger than the untrain groups. [SPEAKER_00]: On the surface, that's a great version of the neural adaptation continues to make differences long after the first month.

[SPEAKER_00]: Bigger signal, more firing, stronger lifter. [SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, it's not that clean. [SPEAKER_00]: Scarabot and colleagues in 2021 ran a follow-up that exposed a problem with the measurement. [SPEAKER_00]: Bigger muscles produce bigger EMG signals on their own. [SPEAKER_00]: So when you correct for that, some of the 44% goes away. [SPEAKER_00]: The signal that looked like neural adaptation was mostly just more muscle, in fact.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there are some neural adaptations that take place after the first year, but the magnitude is more modest than, you know, that previous 44% number implied. [SPEAKER_00]: The lift rate of year at year four isn't dramatically better at firing the muscle than the lift rate month three, they mostly just have more muscle to fire.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the point here is that the train lifter and the untrained lifter aren't running different neural hardware is the same, but the four-year lifter just has less room left to adapt because they're already further along. [SPEAKER_00]: It's the same machinery with less remaining room, exactly what the curve predicts. [SPEAKER_00]: Austin, is there anything practical a lifter can do to get more out of the sort of neural side or is it mostly automatic once you're training consistently?

[SPEAKER_01]: know the cool thing is that there is there are things that you can do the main one being that you can try and that sounds like a like a simplification which it is but we know that at least on the concentric phase of your movement so for example when you're standing up out of the bottom of a squad or you're pressing a bench press off of your chest or you're lifting a deadlift up off the floor.

[SPEAKER_01]: that kind of muscle shortening phase to actually move the load when that is done with maximum volitional intent when you are trying as hard as you can to basically accelerate the bar as quickly as you can during that phase even if you're lifting the same load.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you're doing that with maximum intent in that way, you actually get more adaptations out of the set and out of the training, compared with if you move the same load without doing that, and certainly more than if you deliberately slowed that component of the movement.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think that this is something that I have felt, I think one of the first times I felt it was definitely when you're going for a load that you're not super certain that you're gonna get early on in your training career. [SPEAKER_01]: And you're like, oh, I'm really gonna have to lock in on this and really maximize my focus.

[SPEAKER_01]: But also when we've both dabbled with velocity-based training, whether these kind of devices that you can attach to your bar and it'll measure your bar speed. [SPEAKER_01]: And it almost gamified the experience of training in the sense of you wanting to hit not necessarily like a certain number of reps or a certain weight, but rather for the weight that you were lifting, you wanted the device to measure the highest bar speed possible.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I would I felt a little bit of a change in how I approached my lift, trying to accelerate things to maximize that speed. [SPEAKER_01]: And then once I got the feel for how to do that, [SPEAKER_01]: didn't end up like needing the velocity device long term in order to continue doing that in training. [SPEAKER_01]: And that ended up being super useful and something that I've often advised people to do.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's almost like you learned how to unlock a different like another level or an additional gear. [SPEAKER_01]: I remember actually noticing the same thing like back in my swimming days.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was face-to-face with like a guy who I'd been going back and forth with as a rival for like most of the season and I was like so pissed That I was like I'm gonna like bury this guy and I found in that race like a new gear that I had never previously accessed before even though it was the same race same distance

[SPEAKER_01]: same stroke I felt like I was trying before and I was trying certainly afterwards, but there was like this additional gear that I like discovered and then from then on out the rest of my training and my racing was fundamentally different and the same applies in strength training. [SPEAKER_01]: So this neurological aspect, even if the weight does not actually move very fast because it is very heavy.

[SPEAKER_01]: the kind of neurological recruitment that you have to do in order to try even harder to accelerate it will get you better adaptations than you would if you don't do that and certainly better than if you moved it deliberately slowly with a concentric tempo. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, I think the way I think about this neurological adaptations is like it's the software. [SPEAKER_00]: If everything else is hardware, then this is software.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there are multiple ways to kind of update or upgrade your software, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Unlock a new level, for example, or get a better processor. [SPEAKER_00]: And so yeah, trying hard, trying to move everything, particularly the concentric as fast as possible. [SPEAKER_00]: There's also some evidence on like bringing the bar down faster on a bench press.

[SPEAKER_00]: For example, can be more useful for bench press strength, [SPEAKER_00]: But also just exposure to the test itself, there's sort of a familiar, you know, becoming more familiar with the test. [SPEAKER_00]: We have pretty interesting data that people like Maxine out day after day after day after day after day, continue to get stronger for a set period of time because they get better at the test, which is mostly neurological.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're not growing, you know, more muscle mass at the time that they're becoming not only better coordinated. [SPEAKER_00]: but also perhaps some other stuff, whether they're unlocking another gear or whatever. [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, you can get more out of this with some programming tweaks, but to your point, if even if the program remains the same, trying as hard as you can on each rep, you're gonna get more out of it, generally speaking.

[SPEAKER_00]: So those are neural adaptations. [SPEAKER_00]: The same hardware is running in the new lifter as is in the four-year lifter, with less remaining room to adapt in the experienced one. [SPEAKER_00]: The frameworks claim that neural adaptation is a novice phase phenomenon that hands off to high-purch feet after six weeks is the wrong story. [SPEAKER_00]: The two overlap from session one and they continue across a training career.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's the same machinery the whole way through with less and less remaining room as the training history accumulates. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the whole through line of this episode. [SPEAKER_00]: I purge your feet next and that's running on a slower clock than the neural side. [SPEAKER_00]: The cleanest study on what early growth is actually made of is actually one of the most elegant things that I've ever read in this literature.

[SPEAKER_00]: Muscle growth happens when individual fibers add contractile protein. [SPEAKER_00]: Also non-contractile protein to the muscle will grow. [SPEAKER_00]: The primary driver here is mechanical tension, which kicks off the M-tor pathway, the mammalian target of rapomis and pathway, which drives muscle protein synthesis and the muscle fibers will grow over weeks to months.

[SPEAKER_00]: the sort of contemporary or latest synthesis on what drives muscle growth is from Roberts and colleagues in 2023 published in the physiological reviews. [SPEAKER_00]: A few popular ideas get dismantled there. [SPEAKER_00]: 1. [SPEAKER_00]: Metabolic stress and muscle damage.

[SPEAKER_00]: They were once framed as these sort of independent drivers of muscle hypertrophy alongside mechanical tension, and they're now mostly understood as downstream correlates of the conditions that produce muscle growth, not independent causes. [SPEAKER_00]: The second is this sort of post-exercise hormonal milieu, the hormone hypothesis. [SPEAKER_00]: Your testosterone goes up, your growth hormone bumps every time you train in supplement companies prey on this sort of understanding.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, they don't predict hypertrophy or strength gains at any meaningful timescale. [SPEAKER_00]: Mechanical tension does the work. [SPEAKER_00]: The rest is the company you get to keep when you do the work right. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the study that earns its place in this particular segment, I think, because it changes how you should view hypertrophy the time scales and so on and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is from Domus and colleagues, and it's a Duterium Oxide Studies, published in 2016 in the Journal of Physiology. [SPEAKER_00]: They needed a way to measure how much new muscle protein their subjects were building across weeks of training, while the subjects went about their normal lives. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, most existing methods give you a single snapshot in time, which won't tell you what's actually accumulating across a training blocker cycle.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Tuturium is the heavy version of Hydrogen, the same atom that's in regular water is just slightly heavier. [SPEAKER_00]: Drink water with the heavy version in it for a few weeks in your body uses that heavy hydrogen to build new proteins including new muscle and you can then biopsy a small piece of the muscle way how much heavy hydrogen got built into it and that tells you how much new protein is the muscles laid down over the whole window.

[SPEAKER_00]: Untrained men 10 weeks of training and the researchers track muscle protein synthesis the entire time. [SPEAKER_00]: Early in the training block, the muscle protein synthesis the liftor was generating wasn't correlating to actual muscle growth. [SPEAKER_00]: It was correlating with markers of muscle damage, something like C.K. [SPEAKER_00]: or creatin kinase. [SPEAKER_00]: The body was building protein, but the protein was repair work, not growth.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sort of just keeping your head above water, right? [SPEAKER_00]: At week 10, once the body adapted to the training stimulus and stopped treating each session as a sort of novel insult, the same muscle protein synthesis started correlating with actual growth. [SPEAKER_00]: The relationship was pretty tight. [SPEAKER_00]: The R value was 0.94. [SPEAKER_00]: It's the same machinery, the entire time the body just stopped using it for repair only and got to use it now for building.

[SPEAKER_00]: This was also reflected on imaging studies. [SPEAKER_00]: So the thigh cross-sectional area, the thigh size, at week three, what you see when you take a selfie in the mirror. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, this was up three to four percent at week three. [SPEAKER_00]: But most of that wasn't new muscle. [SPEAKER_00]: It was fluid. [SPEAKER_00]: The body sent to the area to deal with the training-induced muscle damage, basically inflammation.

[SPEAKER_00]: I got bigger due to that inflammation. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, at week 10, the thigh size was up 7 to 10 percent with most of the inflammation resolved. [SPEAKER_00]: That's the real growth and you should probably wait for the gym selfies at that point. [SPEAKER_00]: The first three weeks of the, I'm getting bigger sort of, uh, [SPEAKER_00]: thing you might pick up is mostly water.

[SPEAKER_00]: So before you post those bathroom mirror progress shots, give it a minute, the caveats to this study, of course, as we as we do here on the podcast, those untrained men, small sample, the exact percentages are population specific, but I think that principal still holds that early visible changes in muscle size mixed repair with growth. [SPEAKER_00]: But we already knew that trained lifters grow slower. [SPEAKER_00]: That parts never really been in dispute.

[SPEAKER_00]: The question here is whether they grow slower because they've gotten closer to their ceiling, and they have less remaining room, or is it because the underlying machinery has become less responsive per unit of training stimulus. [SPEAKER_00]: And the current data sets that we have can't really tell which one it is. [SPEAKER_00]: But why does this even matter, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the NIs framework claims that advanced lifters need different programming, and that leans on the second answer being true. [SPEAKER_00]: They're just less responsive. [SPEAKER_00]: If the machinery has generally become less responsive, you need a different stimulus to get a response. [SPEAKER_00]: If the machinery is the same and the sort of space between where you're at currently and your ceiling has just gotten smaller, you don't.

[SPEAKER_00]: You apply the same stimulus, you get a smaller response, and that's what the closing the distance to the ceiling actually looks like. [SPEAKER_00]: So, Austin, to me, I think that the window of what works and what you can tolerate just gets narrower, something like the minimum effective dose of training load that you need to actually drive growth and the max recoverable training load, they get closer and closer and closer and closer as people approach their ceiling.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think about that? [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's a reasonable kind of heuristic or reasonable paradigm for this that you are likely to need to do more but you're going to start to bump up against some of those physiological limits and there are ways obviously beyond a certain point that you can stretch your training tolerance.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think that both of us are able to sustain and tolerate quite high training loads, but if you ask us in any given week or two weeks to bump up our training load or overalls [SPEAKER_01]: 10 or 15 percent. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that we would feel awesome on the back end of that if that was done kind of all at once. [SPEAKER_01]: And so we are, you know, you're walking a finer and finer line to try to eke out, you know, tiny or entire tiny or increments of progress.

[SPEAKER_01]: as you approach that ceiling. [SPEAKER_01]: I think this is a reasonable way to look at it. [SPEAKER_01]: And then the other thing is fundamentally, if you examine, say, our training trajectory over time that led up to our peak levels of performance, the nature of what that training looked like was not radically different.

[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, it's not, you know, that because that also further argues against some sort of like, [SPEAKER_01]: phased response where there's like biology kind of switching or becoming like dramatically more resistant to things. [SPEAKER_01]: In general, we did similar styles of training over very long periods of time. [SPEAKER_01]: And we continued responding. [SPEAKER_01]: It was just slower.

[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't that we, you know, if the biological gear shift and we're like, oh, now we need to switch to this, you know, much different style of training.

[SPEAKER_01]: I remember, you know, leading up to my all-time PRs on all the lifts, I think I ran the same, more or less the same weekly cycle for like over a year and just kind of as we've talked about road the wave where some weeks were a little stronger, some weeks were a little, you know, down in performance and then the net trend over a long enough time span was up and up and up until those PRs happened.

[SPEAKER_01]: and so it was just a matter of trying to find how to thread that needle of like finding a dose that I could tolerate that led to that response and then just being patient and doing it day in and day out for like weeks and weeks and months and months and years and years. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, it makes sense to me. [SPEAKER_00]: It's, you know, corroborates my experience for sure not only personally, but also professionally working with people.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, you know, the listener is thinking, [SPEAKER_00]: You know, or like, that's the problem they want to solve at the end of the day. [SPEAKER_00]: Now some look, there's some ceiling, there's some max, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And people don't like to think about that. [SPEAKER_00]: They're like, what do you mean unlimited is how much strength I can gain to my look, man?

[SPEAKER_00]: If there were no limits here, right, shout out to Master P. That means that everyone would be able to theoretically squat a thousand pounds or more, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Or everyone should be able to deadlift 700 pounds. [SPEAKER_00]: And it's like, well, [SPEAKER_00]: Clearly that's not the case right. [SPEAKER_00]: There's some limit and there's a lot of things that go in to those limits.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, one of them is modifiable to some extent, which is how much training load you're willing to expose yourself to. [SPEAKER_00]: The upper limit there is what can you actually tolerate, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think as you become more and more trained. [SPEAKER_00]: those things become closer. [SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so if you don't have the resources to train as much as you need to, well, that's problem number one, and then problem number two is if you do have those resources at some point, you're not going to be able to recover from the many way and right, and so you just you get closer and closer to these things, these things get closer and closer together.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what produces that asset. [SPEAKER_00]: That's how I think about it. [SPEAKER_00]: It's the same answer in the muscle as in the nervous system. [SPEAKER_00]: The same machinery is running in the new lifter and the four-year lifter with less remaining room to adapt into as training history accumulates. [SPEAKER_00]: The framework's category-driven prescription is solving for a biology that isn't changing modes in the first place.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now to the system, the framework gets most consequentially wrong, the one where the early training injury story actually lives, which is connective tissue. [SPEAKER_00]: So tendons attach muscle to bone and transmit the force, the muscle produces into actual joint movement. [SPEAKER_00]: They adapt to mechanical loading the same way the rest of the system does, but on a slower clock. [SPEAKER_00]: This is the system, the early training injury store story lives in.

[SPEAKER_00]: So how do tendons adapt? [SPEAKER_00]: Two different things change when attending adapts. [SPEAKER_00]: The first is how stiff it is, meaning how much it resist stretching when force is applied to it or deformation. [SPEAKER_00]: A stiffer tendon transmits more of the muscles force to the bone instead of absorbing it.

[SPEAKER_00]: The second is how big the tendon is, meaning the cross-sectional area, if you cut it like a piece of rope, the stiffness changes first and size changes later. [SPEAKER_00]: Both matter, but the lifters sort of feels the stiffness change before the size change because stiffness is what determines how much of the person's muscle contraction, the muscular force, actually reaches the bar that dumbbell the machine, the whatever.

[SPEAKER_00]: The tendon adapts most when you load it heavy. [SPEAKER_00]: Heavy contractions will call it 85 to 90% of the lifters max, which tends to move relatively slowly each time you lift. [SPEAKER_00]: For several sets per session, several times a week for at least 12 weeks. [SPEAKER_00]: That's the protocol that has been shown to drive the largest tendon changes. [SPEAKER_00]: As a meta-analysis from 2022, 61 studies, 763 participants, some caveat there.

[SPEAKER_00]: They only, mostly recruited untrained individuals. [SPEAKER_00]: There were only three studies with the head well-trained individuals. [SPEAKER_00]: And those three studies didn't actually see 10 in stiffness change much, even with hard training. [SPEAKER_00]: It's the same machinery, less remaining room, smaller short-term response, which is consistent through the, with the through line of this episode.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the data set on, you know, well-trained individuals is pretty thin. [SPEAKER_00]: The numbers that matter for programming like what to use this for. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, Kubo and colleagues ran a study where subjects train their calves with hard, sustained contractions for several months while researchers tracked both the muscle and the Achilles tendon over time. [SPEAKER_00]: It's in the back of your leg by your ankle.

[SPEAKER_00]: Muscle strength went up by month two, but tendon stiffness didn't catch up until month three. [SPEAKER_00]: Even when the protocol was specifically designed to drive tendon adaptation, the tendon was still weeks behind the muscle. [SPEAKER_00]: Think about this, like the muscles the engine in the car, and the tendon is the chassis that transmits the engine's power to the road. [SPEAKER_00]: In early training, the engine builds faster, it gains more horsepower than the chassis.

[SPEAKER_00]: The muscle can produce way more force for the tendon has finished reinforcing itself. [SPEAKER_00]: for it. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, Austin, you see the consequences of the muscle outpacing, tendon mismatch all the time. [SPEAKER_00]: What's the pattern and what does the conversation look like and what's the framing you use with the presumably newer lifter who's sore in the wrong places?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this comes up a lot in rehab related conversations, whether relating to somebody who's experiencing, for example, a tendonopathy or a muscle tear, or somebody who is post-op from something.

[SPEAKER_01]: So in the context of muscle tears, which are fortunately uncommon, but do sometimes happen for a variety of reasons, whether in the gym or people who got a little too spicy with their getting excited with high intensity, sprint training on flat ground and pop the hamstring or something like that. [SPEAKER_01]: And as our friend and colleague Dr. [SPEAKER_01]: Miles has said, you will often feel better before you are better.

[SPEAKER_01]: In terms of the symptoms and proving before the tissue is in a state where it's ready to be fully loaded and tolerate that for adaptive purposes. [SPEAKER_01]: So there is a little bit of a lag time there that needs to be taken into consideration. [SPEAKER_01]: When it comes to the tendons, they're even slower. [SPEAKER_01]: And so a lot of times, you know, the person's muscles and their joints and their bones might all feel quite good, but if they're dealing with a tendonopathy,

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, depending on which tendon we're talking about, the, quote, unquote, natural history for recovery of it can be on the order of three or four months for certain tendons upwards of like a year or more for things like elbow tendon up at the shoulder, you know, rotator cuff syndrome, sometimes things like that that can take even longer to recover.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that's, you know, despite our best efforts in training and sometimes even independent of any training, the natural history might be for recovery, but just over a very long time span, something about the nature of those tissues. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, blood flow and various other things that I don't think it's as worth getting into the weeds on, since it's not terribly modifiable.

[SPEAKER_01]: In terms of leading to clinical outcomes of like, oh, now instead, we can recover in two weeks instead of like, you know, two months. [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's those are some areas of big discrepancies. [SPEAKER_01]: When it comes to post operative situations, again, we have to have to respect those tissue healing timelines and load them. [SPEAKER_01]: commensurate with that.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then you've talked about this, I think I forget which episode we had recently where the question about adaptive capacity of muscle versus tendon in people who are like using antibiotics steroids came up. [SPEAKER_01]: And there's been a lot of conversation around that of like do they tend to stimulate more rapid adaptation and muscles than tendons can tolerate and maybe as they're in impact on. [SPEAKER_01]: injury risk.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think that whole space is still a bit hazy, at least at least to me. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that it generally doesn't radically change how I would approach training for somebody in terms of like if they're tending to want to make massive jumps in their loading just because they're, you know, using, then that's generally ill-advised in most situations regardless, but I would recommend that to anybody, whether they're, you know, enhanced or not, I think.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, to me that's the logical end of this sort of question like when the muscles outpace the tendons or the other soft tissues like what's the predicted response. [SPEAKER_00]: And so from a macro standpoint, you look at the data on injury risk and people using antigenic antibiotics steroids in exercise. [SPEAKER_00]: to have higher injury rates and you're like, okay, is this mostly some sort of psychologically mediated thing where they're like, look, I'm on.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I got to push it heavier, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And so that kind of is the deciding factor or is that more of the result of a sort of mismatch here between the muscles getting much, much stronger faster than the tendons. [SPEAKER_00]: And the way I think about it, [SPEAKER_00]: always comes back to the race track for me, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Now, at the track, usually they're split up based on the performance of not all your vehicle, but you're driving skill, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: And so for example, I run the time trial on limited class, which means there's unlimited horsepower to weight ratio. [SPEAKER_00]: And you tend to have more advanced drivers in this class compared to TT5, which is one of the entry level groups, lower horsepower to weight ratio, [SPEAKER_00]: The point would be you take somebody from TT5 or somebody's brand new and you put them now in this race car and you put them on track. [SPEAKER_00]: The car is capable of a lot, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the muscle. [SPEAKER_00]: But the tendon maybe is the driver here and they're not as capable and then get themselves into trouble mainly because they're not used to look what can this car actually do. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that's reasonable. [SPEAKER_00]: There's been some hypotheses out there by various researchers that the antibiotics themselves have some sort of impact on the tendon, a deleterious impact. [SPEAKER_00]: That has not really been shown in humans.

[SPEAKER_00]: Only in some Petri dish data and some rodent models. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think the most likely explanation is that, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: the people just get stronger, which outpaces the sort of longer-term scale of the tendon adapting, and because they're highly motivated, otherwise, why would they be using this agents?

[SPEAKER_00]: It becomes a more likely outcome that they suffer in injury, which to me makes sense, but need more data on that before I feel confident in stamping it.

[SPEAKER_00]: That makes sense to you there. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, I like the analogies. [SPEAKER_00]: So that's the connective tissue. [SPEAKER_00]: It's the slowest of the fast adapting systems, sitting in a six to eight weeks behind the muscle, and it takes the brunt of any loading schedule that was written for the muscles clock. [SPEAKER_00]: The engine builds faster than the chassis.

[SPEAKER_00]: The same machinery that was running in the new lifter and the four-year lifter and the chassis on the experience lifter has just had years to catch up to the engine. [SPEAKER_00]: One more system before we get to the consequence of all this, which is the injury data. [SPEAKER_00]: The slowest one of all, the background process running underneath everything else is bone. [SPEAKER_00]: It's alive, cue the Frankenstein music. [SPEAKER_00]: Bone is a living tissue.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's constantly being broken down and rebuilt. [SPEAKER_00]: And what determines whether ends up denser or less dense is the load that you put on it that you expose it to habitually. [SPEAKER_00]: Heavy load placed in the right places in the right way makes the bone deposit more material there. [SPEAKER_00]: An absence of loading is an absence of the signal needed to keep the bone around.

[SPEAKER_00]: The same biological process is running at year one in your 10, [SPEAKER_00]: But the change that you can detect on a scan is small enough that no realistic training block produces a visible difference session to session, but the process still do in work. [SPEAKER_00]: As an example, the lift more trial, we talked about this on our direct line for our Boba Medicine plus subscribers.

[SPEAKER_00]: So this was done in 2018 by Watson and colleagues, eight months of twice weekly, heavy resistance training plus impact training. [SPEAKER_00]: They were lifting 85% of the 100 max for 5 sets of 5. [SPEAKER_00]: Now I know listeners are like, dude, you can't do 5 sets of 5 with 85% of your 100 max. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, if they were using a training max or if they were untrained, it's squishy, but nevertheless, it's heavy.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then you're like, well, what was the impact training? [SPEAKER_00]: Well, they were doing jumping pull-ups and when they landed from the jumping pull-up, they had straight legs. [SPEAKER_00]: And so what we think is that both of these things, the heavy resistance training and the landing on straight legs are just landing in general, that the stimulus on the bone is big enough to cause it to room model. [SPEAKER_00]: And this is sometimes called the osteogenic index.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, [SPEAKER_00]: These were women in their 60s and 70s. [SPEAKER_00]: They were lifting heavy. [SPEAKER_00]: The bone density on a scan rose by about 4% in the lumbar spine and about 2% at the hip joint compared to the control group.

[SPEAKER_00]: as far as why this matters and all of the standard medical advice for women losing bone density is look you got to take calcium and you should exercise but that exercise prescription is tends to be just walk on a treadmill but it's certainly it's not get under a heavy barbell and do some heavy lifting and in fact we had this post-go viral about you know osteoporosis and osteopenia protection and what I said was [SPEAKER_00]: earlier on in life, women in their 20s and 30s.

[SPEAKER_00]: That is their sort of prime window for building bone mineral density. [SPEAKER_00]: And that is the time where they should be training heavy. [SPEAKER_00]: Now look, if you miss that window, you should still be training heavy. [SPEAKER_00]: Lifting weights for bone mineral density to group. [SPEAKER_00]: in addition to other health adaptations. [SPEAKER_00]: But that is your primary window.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it would be better if you started then, and that's the time you're being advertised to do pilates and yoga and whatever, which are fine to do as long as you're also lifting weights. [SPEAKER_00]: Now people push back and they're like, are you saying that I'm because I missed the window, I shouldn't even try. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, well, no, that's not what I'm saying. [SPEAKER_00]: It's just that it would have been better if you started earlier.

[SPEAKER_00]: It would have been better if you started early. [SPEAKER_00]: And unfortunately, that advice is not making it into clinical practice. [SPEAKER_00]: Austin, are you seeing any change in that like, do your colleagues are a little different because they're more up on this stuff? [SPEAKER_00]: But what do you think about the broader sort of landscape and primary care? [SPEAKER_00]: Our women being told, officially, to lift heavy weights in practice?

[SPEAKER_01]: It's really hard for, that's such a very general sort of swath of clinical practice that for me to say confidently that trends are like meaningfully moving there, I don't know. [SPEAKER_01]: I would like to think so. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that, you know, younger clinicians, I suspect are more open to this. [SPEAKER_01]: It's just that a lot of the older clinicians are those who are unfamiliar with it or.

[SPEAKER_01]: those who have selection bias, meaning they tend to see people who maybe have had a bad experience, they're much less likely to counsel in that way. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I talk a lot about how a lot of our patient selection bias informs a lot of the advice we give and that's often actually a bad thing. [SPEAKER_01]: So like, you know, I'm not here to hate on orthopods or orthopedic surgeons, but they tend to see people who have musculoskeletal pain.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so our member like Win Pickleball was taking off, for example, in popularity, and, of course, you know, over-use syndromes happen when people who are under-prepared for the task start jumping in and get excited and play. [SPEAKER_01]: And then they go to the orthopedic surgeon because they have some shoulder pain or some knee pain, and then all these interviews in the media, after the orthopedic send.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's this horrible injurious activity and you shouldn't do it and it's like no like you're not seeing all the people who aren't going to the hospital for their heart attack or their diabetic imputation because they've gotten more active and weighing those things out is hard to do it's hard for you know if you're in a particular silo or niche to recognize that broader thing and it's also just hard in general to see things that don't happen.

[SPEAKER_01]: compared with things that do, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So if people are training and reducing the risk of osteoporosis and not having fractures, that's not something that I see in my day-to-day practice, for example, in the hospital, whereas the person who does have the osteoporotic fracture, I would. [SPEAKER_01]: And say they came in and they had a fracture and they did train, maybe I'm like, oh no, like it happened because you're training, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: So it's easy to draw those wrong conclusions. [SPEAKER_01]: Instead of relying on like much broader basis of data, and that's why disseminating this type of data, these messages can hopefully nudge practice in a more positive direction. [SPEAKER_01]: So I would definitely like to think that trends are encouraging there. [SPEAKER_01]: That still is going to have like a little bit of a drop off in terms of like, okay, so we have more people recommending it.

[SPEAKER_01]: What does that mean for uptake and like, and then once people uptake it. [SPEAKER_01]: What does that mean for like long-term uptake in consistency and then what does that mean for like outcomes?

[SPEAKER_01]: So there's like a view of like a waterfall type effect of like you need more people counseling to lead to more people uptaking to lead to more people staying consistent to ultimately impact the things that we care about in terms of outcomes and that's just really hard for people to you know observe or determine based on vibes or they're like day-to-day practice compared with like much larger data sets. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Now that's exactly right.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we know that doctors generally speak in primary care are not counseling folks on exercise that's relatively rare. [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe one in 10. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: I suspect that very few of those recommendations involve the specific prescription to lift heavy weights, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: And to the extent that lands, I suspect that the uptake also may be a little less on average there because there's this sort of popular narrative that lifting heavy is more dangerous. [SPEAKER_00]: And so, at all those steps, there are problems, and yeah, I suspect it's just relatively low.

[SPEAKER_00]: Alright, well, that covers the four systems, neural muscle tendon bone, same machinery in the trained and untrained lift, or I think we can reject that part of the claim for the NI framework. [SPEAKER_00]: It's just the room that's left to adapt, is what's different.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the consequence of getting that wrong, which pops up when we talk about injuries. [SPEAKER_00]: The NAA frameworks progression model says that novices should add weight every session because their biology supports it. [SPEAKER_00]: The injury data, though, tells us a different story. [SPEAKER_00]: And the mechanism is the connective tissue lag that we just talked about. [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, let's zoom out for a second, just to make sure that we're not no seabowing anybody.

[SPEAKER_00]: Resistance training lifting weights has one of the lowest injury rates of any physical activity. [SPEAKER_00]: It's about two to four injuries per thousand participation hours across bodybuilding, powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, crossfit, et cetera. [SPEAKER_00]: And most gym injuries aren't actual catastrophes. [SPEAKER_00]: They're overuse presentation. [SPEAKER_00]: So it's not an acute. [SPEAKER_00]: I ruptured a pack, I broke a bone, whatever, snap the tendon.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's more like I've got some tendon opathy. [SPEAKER_00]: For example, muscle strains, nagging aches that develop over two to three weeks because the training load climbed faster than the tissue could adapt. [SPEAKER_00]: Also, the average symptom duration for resistance training injuries is less than two weeks on average. [SPEAKER_00]: Most people can come back from this relatively quickly, which speaks against discarnations, torn ligaments, et cetera.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lifting is in absolute terms relatively safe. [SPEAKER_00]: But compared to running, it's even safer. [SPEAKER_00]: Recreational running has an injury risk of about [SPEAKER_00]: If anyone in your life is using injury risk as a reason for you to not lift or for them to not lift, and it's not really evidence-based. [SPEAKER_00]: So let's compare newer trainees to older trainees and see if there's a sort of gap there in the injury prevalence data.

[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the best comparisons actually comes from CrossFit data. [SPEAKER_00]: This is from Prado in Gonzalo's in 2020. [SPEAKER_00]: These people are doing roughly the same movements with the same equipment in the same environment, same general programming approach, novice Crossfitters in the first eight weeks had an average injury rate of nine and a half injuries per thousand training hours.

[SPEAKER_00]: Experienced CrossFit participants doing roughly the same training had 0.74 to 3.3 injuries per 1,000 participation hours. [SPEAKER_00]: We see the same signal in Olympic weight lifting where more advanced lifters actually have less injuries than newer lifters. [SPEAKER_00]: A factor of 3 to 10 in the same sport that when this CrossFit data set, the movements didn't really change. [SPEAKER_00]: It's just the person's preparation for those movements and their experience did.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, yeah, this observational is not randomized. [SPEAKER_00]: The people who stuck with CrossFit long enough to be experienced trainees are the same people whose bodies sort of tolerated it, little survivorship bias there. [SPEAKER_00]: The gap is real, and the mechanism we're about to walk through is consistent with it, but part of the gap, again, is a survivorship bias.

[SPEAKER_00]: tissue capacity as we talked about before in this podcast kind of behaves like a check in account balance. [SPEAKER_00]: A training session is a withdrawal. [SPEAKER_00]: If you got $1,000 in your account, an attempted withdrawal of 1,200 produces a sort of overdraft fee. [SPEAKER_00]: That's the injury. [SPEAKER_00]: We pain, soreness, it doesn't resolve or even a structural problem. [SPEAKER_00]: The balance isn't fixed, it grows with consistent training.

[SPEAKER_00]: And any withdrawal that exceeds the current balance produces a problem, regardless of how the withdrawal was made. [SPEAKER_00]: A novice might have a thousand dollars in their account, but the experience trainee has ten thousand. [SPEAKER_00]: The same training session might overdraw the novice and barely even show up for the experience trainee.

[SPEAKER_00]: The mechanism is similar to what we talked about with antibiotics steroids, but what this means for early training injuries, a loading schedule that prescribes session to session weight additions because the training is, quote, still in the novice phase is imposing a muscle pace schedule on top of a connective tissue pace problem. [SPEAKER_00]: So Austin, walk us through the console.

[SPEAKER_00]: the new lifter, their full months into their to resistance training, they've got some knee pain. [SPEAKER_00]: They come in convinced that the program failed them. [SPEAKER_00]: What does that conversation actually look like? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, after an assessment of their symptoms, if I am also convinced that this is likely a case of Patel or Tendonopathy, I'm trying to get a sense of a few things.

[SPEAKER_01]: Really, what is the nature of the stimulus that they were trying to apply? [SPEAKER_01]: And then, what is their kind of recovery tolerant situation look like? [SPEAKER_01]: So the first would be what's their prior injury history look like, because a lot of times the main risk factor for having an injury is like having a prior history of that same injury.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then, as far as characterizing the stimulus and getting a sense of what is their training look like, [SPEAKER_01]: the main things that I want to know is what is the frequency of loading, what is the volume of loading compared with what they were used to beforehand, what is the intensity of that loading, and then what is the nature of it in terms of a specificity versus like variety.

[SPEAKER_01]: because those are several of the levers that I'm going to manipulate to help dig them out of this hole from a rehab standpoint. [SPEAKER_01]: So most of the time when I see this, it's somebody who is using either inappropriately high intensity, inappropriately high training volume for their prior level of fitness when they started out on this.

[SPEAKER_01]: and they are often using too much specificity, meaning the exercises that they're doing are too similar over time, which is another kind of hallmark of developing over use syndromes instead of having more moderate training volume, more variable intensity, some high, some medium, some low, and then having a broader base of their exercise variation, at least while you're trying to prepare [SPEAKER_01]: yourself for a phase of higher specificity.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this is why, for example, in our own training, we tend to maintain, I would say, moderate to in certain periods of time, high training volume. [SPEAKER_01]: We have a moderate amount of training specificity that when it increases, for example, it's only for a relatively brief period of time leading into a competition. [SPEAKER_01]: And then it backs off again, kind of after that. [SPEAKER_01]: So we are not doing, for example, exclusively squat bench press deadlift.

[SPEAKER_01]: you know, three times a week year round or something like that. [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot more variation. [SPEAKER_01]: Even within those main movements, they are varied in other ways. [SPEAKER_01]: There's unilateral work. [SPEAKER_01]: There's you know, movement in other odd ways that are not characteristic for, you know, competitive powerlifting, for example, doing other sorts of, quote unquote athletic type movements and activities, doing conditioning, things like that too.

[SPEAKER_01]: Bill the robust base of physical capacity to tolerate a lot of things that we can then choose to apply more specifically kind of at any point along the way. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's kind of the nature of the conversation is like, what is your prior base of fitness? [SPEAKER_01]: What are you trying to do? [SPEAKER_01]: Right, and then how can I manipulate those levers to kind of dig you back out of that whole?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I just think when you have this sort of rigid progression model that is kind of put forth by again a very literal interpretation of this NIA framework. [SPEAKER_00]: not to do it. [SPEAKER_00]: Can't stop it. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: And we know that the muscle related adaptations outpace the connective tissue ones. [SPEAKER_00]: To me, this is a predictable response. [SPEAKER_00]: And so the question then is, well, are there unique advantages?

[SPEAKER_00]: for that pacing. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think some people feel like, well, look, it's prescriptive. [SPEAKER_00]: I know exactly what to do. [SPEAKER_00]: Every time I go in the gym, I don't have to think about it, right? [SPEAKER_00]: That's one thing. [SPEAKER_00]: And I see that because, again, people, maybe they want to turn the brain off and just go exercise, they don't want to, you know, dig into the programming weeds too much.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're not, they don't want to engage in this nursery. [SPEAKER_00]: I get that. [SPEAKER_00]: the other person is like convinced this works better. [SPEAKER_00]: And so like the first one I have a problem with because I can work around that, the second one is, I don't know, more, it's harder to deal with because you have to convince somebody that look just adding the weight, particularly before the adaptations that we need have have shown up have come online.

[SPEAKER_00]: That is actually working worse for you. [SPEAKER_00]: It's not making you stronger. [SPEAKER_00]: You're just moving the goal post because the thing got harder. [SPEAKER_00]: And oh, by the way, you're setting yourself up for this potential injury risk. [SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't need to be there because again, it's not working better for you from the adaptations that you're chasing. [SPEAKER_00]: That's, and I suspect in your experience, that's also been harder to deal with.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: I have little to add. [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's reflective of our experience collectively. [SPEAKER_00]: I welcome back to the Barbell Medicine podcast now before we get into what to actually do with all of this. [SPEAKER_00]: There's one more piece of the framework that needs to get out of the way and that's fatigue. [SPEAKER_00]: Ask any coach why advanced lifters need different programming and the answer is almost always something about fatigue management.

[SPEAKER_00]: The problem with that answer is that fatigue is at least four different things and the framework is treating them as one thing. [SPEAKER_00]: So the four different things that people are calling fatigue. [SPEAKER_00]: This is a taxonomy that comes from Ednoka, Indisha Toe, and 2016, and a 2023 study by Barron's updated the terminology. [SPEAKER_00]: So four different buckets here, if you will. [SPEAKER_00]: First one is performance fatigability.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is what you can measure on the bar. [SPEAKER_00]: Bar, speed, the weight on it, how much the bar speed drops turn to set. [SPEAKER_00]: The force output declining during a sustained contraction, you can measure. [SPEAKER_00]: all of this. [SPEAKER_00]: You can also think about this as the engine in your car, the hardware. [SPEAKER_00]: How much power can you produce? [SPEAKER_00]: All right. [SPEAKER_00]: Second bucket here is perceived fatigue ability.

[SPEAKER_00]: What the set feels like to lifters could do the same workout. [SPEAKER_00]: One feels destroyed. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the other one feels fine. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a different thing from what the bar is doing. [SPEAKER_00]: This is really the driver of the car. [SPEAKER_00]: You think about again, you're on track, the car, and it's motor and transmission and gearing.

[SPEAKER_00]: As you know, a particular top speed, but the driver, what they're [SPEAKER_00]: I hear the rumble of the engine. [SPEAKER_00]: I hear the chassis making noise. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to push it, right? [SPEAKER_00]: That is the signal that the driver is getting and responding to, okay? [SPEAKER_00]: So that's the second bucket. [SPEAKER_00]: The third is called trait or state fatigue. [SPEAKER_00]: This is what the lift or individual walks into the gym carrying.

[SPEAKER_00]: I feel beat up this week. [SPEAKER_00]: And that exists independent of any specific set, sort of background tiredness, if you will. [SPEAKER_00]: And the fourth is recovery state. [SPEAKER_00]: This is really the inverse of the first three the first three described fatigue from different angles, whether it's at the, you know, a structural level, whether it's from the individual level right and what they're responding to this last one is mainly like.

[SPEAKER_00]: are the tissues able to adapt right now. [SPEAKER_00]: Whether the body is currently positioned to turn a training stimulus into an adaptation and whether the same session will deepen the sort of deficit put them into a hole. [SPEAKER_00]: Why this matters? [SPEAKER_00]: These four different things do not always move together. [SPEAKER_00]: A liftor can sleep poorly, they're anxious about a one rep max of 10, they are a little hung over whatever the perceived fatigability is high.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the actual lift, a one rep max, only takes a few seconds. [SPEAKER_00]: So the perceived fatig doesn't have to limit what the bar does, people have PR under these situations. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, just got to get it together for a few seconds, right? [SPEAKER_00]: The liftor feels have a liftor can, you know, lift a normal one rep max and do it well.

[SPEAKER_00]: Conversely, if a lifter's overreached, they've been doing a really high training load sort of program, the muscles contract on machinery or the engine in the car is subtly impaired. [SPEAKER_00]: They want to lift more, they want to lift faster, they want to do more, whatever, but they can't, because there's something at the structural level that's problematic. [SPEAKER_00]: They feel fine, but they lift poorly overall.

[SPEAKER_00]: Both patterns are predicted by this framework and they look like contradictions only if you treat fatigue as one thing, but it's not. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the framework typically claims that experience lifters can tolerate more, recover faster, or experience fatigue qualitatively differently compared to novices or untrain lifters. [SPEAKER_00]: As if those are biological facts. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the data doesn't really support that either.

[SPEAKER_00]: What experienced lifters have is a calibrated reference distribution for effort. [SPEAKER_00]: They know what hard feels like because they've been there enough times. [SPEAKER_00]: There's actually some really interesting neuphysiology here about your brain basically sends a carbon copy of what they perceive the effort to be downstream and your body sort of calibrates that's pretty interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: And it's more refined in advanced lifters.

[SPEAKER_00]: So RP, how it actually works. [SPEAKER_00]: RPE in resistance training is typically anchored to repetitions in reserve, meaning how many more reps the liftor could have done. [SPEAKER_00]: This is particularly true of multi rep sets, so like I said a five, six, something like that, whereas doing a one rep sort of effort single at RP eight, we usually anchor that to other things rather than just how many more reps. [SPEAKER_00]: can you do?

[SPEAKER_00]: You can use that but we use a different proxy. [SPEAKER_00]: The problem is that reps and reserve depends on knowing what failure feels like and that knowledge is built by kind of going to failure before paying attention and calibrating that against an actual outcome. [SPEAKER_00]: So two lifters who both report RP9 on a set of eight may have very different actual proximity to failure.

[SPEAKER_00]: for a trained individual RP9 might be reasonably close to a true one repetition and reserve set. [SPEAKER_00]: But for an untrained individual on a three rep max RP9 might be three to five reps from failure. [SPEAKER_00]: If the novices never genuinely failed, there's been some head-to-head literature here which I think is interesting.

[SPEAKER_00]: Halperon in 2022 did a scoping review, lifters of all experienced levels, under-predict reps to failure by two to five reps on average with only a tendency toward improved accuracy and more experienced trainees. [SPEAKER_00]: But at 2025, head to head study on the back squat in a Smith machine found no statistically significant difference in repetitions and reserve accuracy between trained and untrained groups. [SPEAKER_00]: how to square this.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think you can say that the training status effect on repetition and reserve accuracy, RPE accuracy is relatively small and inconsistent. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't really care about the two to five reps on average difference to be clear, particularly in a new individual, especially because I know it's gonna get better over time. [SPEAKER_00]: This is a skill with exposure deliberately to things that are closer to failure, maybe true failure on average, people are going to get better.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, I'm kind of fine with that. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, Austin, what do you think about the argument for not using RPE and beginners because they're [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I feel like, I don't know, this is a conversation that's been battered back and forth for many years now. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not something that raises a great deal of concern for us, I think, especially when we take a very long-term perspective on people's training career.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think about this all the time, when we get questions from people who say, for example, like I went on vacation and I had to shift my training schedule by a week is what should I do when I get back? [SPEAKER_01]: If let's assume that you're going to continue training over the long term, five years from now, is this decision going to have a meaningful impact on where you end up at that time point, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And this is contrasted with lots of other examples in other areas where such decisions may, in fact, have big enough impacts, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, [SPEAKER_01]: If you end up choosing to do a D-load every other week, you know, in perpetuity.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, yeah, you're going to probably end up in a different spot because you're training like half the time that you would otherwise, or if you choose to control your lipids earlier in life compared with not, that is going to lead to more likely different outcomes like a decade from now.

[SPEAKER_01]: This type of a thing, whether or not you choose to use RPE, [SPEAKER_01]: whether just purely as a descriptive thing or whether you choose to develop that skill early on in your training or not.

[SPEAKER_01]: Again, at the five-year time point in your training, at the ten-year time point in your training, not something where I'm terribly concerned about whether you are like not quite accurate enough to within two reps versus three or four reps early on in your first, you know, three months of training or six months of training or something like that.

[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, like the magnitude of impact over the long time frame of training, the outcomes that we really care about are not likely to be meaningful impacted.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so given that it is a skill, given that this sort of will call it an inter-interoception, which is a fancy way of having this internal sense of your physiologic state, and your proximity to failure, how hard you're trying, [SPEAKER_01]: how much more room you have to go, that's something that everybody needs to figure out one way or another.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is foolish and you will not find successful long-term lifters who ignore that internal sense and just say, well, the paper says I have to lift this weight so this weight is going to get lifted and then they like fail reps all the time because they ignored those sorts of signals. [SPEAKER_01]: So learning what those signals feel like and recognizing them correlating them with your actual performance if you can do that collaboratively with a coach even better.

[SPEAKER_01]: But the idea that you're too inexperienced to even try to start, like paying attention to these things early on, it's just kicking a can down the road that doesn't need to be kicked down the road for like no meaningful benefit and in fact just delaying the inevitable in that sense.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, again, I think this goes back to this very rigidly held and I framework that, you know, the weight on the bar, the load that you're lifting is so critical that if you miss it, even slightly, your cooked, your results zero. [SPEAKER_00]: And that is definitely not the case. [SPEAKER_00]: Even if we accepted this idea that, [SPEAKER_00]: people who are new to training, if they used RPE and reps and reserve only to select the load that they're going to be way off, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Two to five reps and reserve off each single time. [SPEAKER_00]: Oh my gosh. [SPEAKER_00]: Critical crazy. [SPEAKER_00]: I still don't care. [SPEAKER_00]: their close enough, especially for health purposes, might they get a slightly reduced increase in strength for three months? [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe. [SPEAKER_00]: Sure. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll say that six months. [SPEAKER_00]: Sure. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll even be charitable six months. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't care.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: When I care about in the first six months of training, did somebody get bit by the fitness bug and now it's part of their lifestyle, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Are they enjoying it? [SPEAKER_00]: Do they stay injury free? [SPEAKER_00]: And are they setting themselves up for a long-term success? [SPEAKER_00]: means building a cardiovascular fitness base.

[SPEAKER_00]: It means exposing themselves sampling different exercises and different setups so they kind of get a sense of, I do like this. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't like this release right now. [SPEAKER_00]: And then ultimately being well suited for the rest of the training career, which hopefully lasts for decades and decades and decades. [SPEAKER_00]: What happens in the first six months? [SPEAKER_00]: In any sport, [SPEAKER_00]: is almost irrelevant outside of like did the person like it?

[SPEAKER_00]: Did they show some like predilection towards this, which requires some sampling, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And did they not get hurt? [SPEAKER_00]: And so they kind of burned out too soon. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you said that before, but I feel like it just bear some repeating here. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, agree. [SPEAKER_00]: All right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, to me, the clearest training status difference in acute recovery in newer lifters compared to more experienced lifters is the repeated bout effect. [SPEAKER_00]: First time that you do a new exercise, you get sore four days afterwards, but the second time, a little less, a third time, less still. [SPEAKER_00]: We think that roughly after two to six weeks of consistent training.

[SPEAKER_00]: An untrained lifters recovery from a given session starts to look like what a trained lifter is able to recover from. [SPEAKER_00]: The novice recovery in any meaningful biological sense lasts about six weeks. [SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of like they're under recovery. [SPEAKER_00]: Basically because the stuff is so new to them.

[SPEAKER_00]: After that, it's the same recovery physiology that runs in the train lifter as running in the new lifter, attenuated only by the absolute loads that they're handling and the lifters calibration of what hard means. [SPEAKER_00]: So that's also changing. [SPEAKER_00]: All of this is to say, [SPEAKER_00]: It's not unusual for a newer trainee to appear to have worse recovery when they're exposed to maybe a lower training load.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's because everything's novel to them, right? [SPEAKER_00]: But as they are exposed repeatedly, this becomes less. [SPEAKER_00]: And so it starts to converge. [SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately, I think this is just a short period of time to get what happens in the first few months is irrelevant unless you get injured because of a aggressive progression strategy [SPEAKER_00]: the through line of the novice intermediate advance framework.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I would just add one thing here that this is not purely a matter of how well trained somebody is in general, but you could take a very highly trained, you know, even elite power lifter. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, hey, let's take yourself. [SPEAKER_01]: And you've been training very high specificity for a while, maybe preparing for a meet, and then have you pivot and you do a training week.

[SPEAKER_01]: where your lower body training is all like barbell reverse lunges and your upper body some you know you include some trunk work and you do a bunch of you know GHD sit-ups [SPEAKER_01]: You are going to be very, very sore from both of those things because they are very foreign to you. [SPEAKER_01]: Big-time eccentric component to those movements. [SPEAKER_01]: You're going to have quite a lot of soreness that's going to feel a lot like, oh, am I a novice?

[SPEAKER_01]: Or am I a beginner? [SPEAKER_01]: Am I untrained? [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, yeah, on those movements you are, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So that's kind of supporting the point that these things are operating all the time or not operating. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not just a generalized change in people's capacity, but rather there is some degree of specificity to that repeated artifact. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and most of that should be stated is in the periphery.

[SPEAKER_00]: The sort of experience of the soreness with these novel exercises is mostly the periphery. [SPEAKER_00]: What I mean by that is at the level of the muscle, right? [SPEAKER_00]: You're getting more muscular damage. [SPEAKER_00]: And so like you're engine again instead of normally producing 500 horsepower, well now it's only able to do 400 horsepower.

[SPEAKER_00]: Just because the muscle or in this case, the motor itself has some structural damage. [SPEAKER_00]: But people talk about this other type of fatigue, not of the periphery, but at the level of the brain, the sort of CNS fatigue. [SPEAKER_00]: My CNS is fried. [SPEAKER_00]: It's sort of claimed that advanced lifters are limited by accumulated central nervous system fatigue CNS fatigue. [SPEAKER_00]: And therefore require categorically different programming approaches.

[SPEAKER_00]: This has been tested directly by scare about in colleagues in 2018. [SPEAKER_00]: They designed a study to find out where the fatigue from a hard training session actually lies. [SPEAKER_00]: So here's a set up. [SPEAKER_00]: Trained men, they did 10 sets of five back squats at 80% of their one-rette max, that's a lot. [SPEAKER_00]: A session that most people include in your two host here would call heart. [SPEAKER_00]: The researchers used two tools to localize the fatigue.

[SPEAKER_00]: The first tool stimulates the nerve in the leg directly with electricity to test the muscles response by passing the brain. [SPEAKER_00]: The second uses a magnetic pulse over the head to test whether the motor cortex in the brain, as a part of the brain that drives a voluntary movement, is putting out the signal [SPEAKER_00]: Comparing those two, before and after the session, tells you whether the fatigue is in the muscle or in the brain.

[SPEAKER_00]: What they found was that the session produced fatigue that took up to 72 hours to fully resolve real fatigue. [SPEAKER_00]: That's not really in dispute. [SPEAKER_00]: The muscle is what showed the fatigue. [SPEAKER_00]: The brain did not. [SPEAKER_00]: The motor cortex was firing the same way after the session as before. [SPEAKER_00]: The fatigue was peripheral, meaning in the muscle and the connective tissue, not central. [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, this was a single session.

[SPEAKER_00]: So short term, these are entrained men, small sample size. [SPEAKER_00]: But the study did show that a single hard squat session doesn't produce measurable sort of brain fatigue in the window where lifters claim to be fried. [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't rule out a chronic CNS adaptation building up over months. [SPEAKER_00]: That's a different question in the data on that is pretty much absent at this time.

[SPEAKER_00]: But within session detail that kind of goes against another popular claim, lower load sets taken to failure produce more discomfort, more perceived fatigue, and more heart rate variability suppression, and more acute force loss than heavy low rep work performed further away from failure.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like doing 12 rep max compared to three reps at RP 7 or 8. [SPEAKER_00]: So for many trained lifters doing the sets of three is less acutely fatiguing than doing three sets of 12 to failure. [SPEAKER_00]: So the next time that someone tells you they need to drop the heavy work because their CNS is fried. [SPEAKER_00]: The data says the high rep set you just watch them grind through actually hit them harder.

[SPEAKER_00]: Austin the CNS fatigue framing has some real traction in the lifting community. [SPEAKER_00]: How do you handle somebody that you're talking to who's convinced they need an extended deal load because their CNS is fried? [SPEAKER_01]: I would definitely want to know what they mean by that, like, what do they actually experiencing and what are all the potential variables that could be impacting that?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, how is their sleep and nutrition and again, what are they trying to do in the gym compared with their, you know, level of, level of fitness? [SPEAKER_01]: Is there a more wholesale overhaul of the program that might be appropriate? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, are they routinely training? [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, they're average training session, you know, is a, you know, ten singles at near a one rep max level effort or is it sets of, you know, five.

[SPEAKER_01]: I've had some, I'm like thinking of a consult, you know, calls that I've done with folks and some of them who have sent me training programs where. [SPEAKER_01]: in a given session they're doing anywhere from like, you know, sometimes eight upwards of 10 or more exercises and each exercise itself, they're doing four to six sets. [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like that is a massive amount of work to be doing procession and to be training, say, you know, four to six times a week.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I'm just like, I just have to pull the reins on you for a bit. [SPEAKER_01]: And then we need to kind of [SPEAKER_01]: What are you actually trying to accomplish here and align the program more with your goals because a lot of times people who are training in that fashion don't really have very particular goals because if you did it wouldn't take you very long to notice that the program you're doing is not getting you closer to those goals.

[SPEAKER_01]: So widely distributed in terms of the variety of exercises, the super high volume, the high recovery requirements, things like that. [SPEAKER_01]: So really, it's just characterizing, like what is the person experiencing, what can I modify? [SPEAKER_01]: And then what is the goal that we're trying to work towards? [SPEAKER_01]: And just trying to bring those things into a little bit better alignment. [SPEAKER_01]: It's very unlikely that they need an extended d-load.

[SPEAKER_01]: Very few people in strength training in particular need extended d-loads. [SPEAKER_01]: I would say there are some folks, maybe in the ultra-indurance realm, we've talked about this recently, issues with low energy availability to the extent that somebody believes reds is a thing. [SPEAKER_01]: There's obviously there's been some recent controversy around that, although I think it's a justifiable thing to be concerned about in a lot of folks.

[SPEAKER_01]: Those might need a little bit of a longer kind of back off period and, you know, health, focusing on health instead of they're training, but in strength training, [SPEAKER_01]: It's very unlikely that somebody needs like months long d-load or something like that. [SPEAKER_01]: They might need to back off for a week or two or something like that.

[SPEAKER_01]: But even then, there's probably a better formulation of training that can be set up that they would tolerate much better and is likely to be better aligned with their goals. [SPEAKER_01]: If they think they need that much work for hypertrophy, they probably don't. [SPEAKER_01]: If they think they need that much work for strength, they almost certainly don't. [SPEAKER_01]: And so then it's a matter of like aligning those things.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, ultimately this doesn't really matter, even if you do accept the NIA framework, if you're an obvious intermediate advance, it's all the same. [SPEAKER_00]: Which kind of big as a question, why do we have the framework in the first place? [SPEAKER_00]: The one more thing we're talking about because the NIA framework leans on it heavily for justifying volume and training load escalation across categories, MRV, maximum recoverable volume.

[SPEAKER_00]: The idea is that each lifter has a specific number of working sets per week, per muscle group that they can recover from, and that program should be built around that number. [SPEAKER_00]: To me, MRV may be useful as coaching shorthand. [SPEAKER_00]: It's never been validated as a number that you can use, or you can measure for an individual lifters, more this abstract concept.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it's sensitive to sleep, nutrition, life stress, exercise selection, the cumulative load history of the past several weeks, whatever the lifters MRV is this month, it's probably gonna be different at the next month, so like, what's the point? [SPEAKER_00]: It's not stable enough to anchor any sort of prescription.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now advanced lifters, experienced lifters do tend to tolerate more absolute volume and training load, but the relationship isn't linear and it's confounded by the fact that advanced lifters, experienced lifters also need more relative stimulus to adapt. [SPEAKER_00]: Their floor and their ceiling, if you will, rise together.

[SPEAKER_00]: useful as language maybe for auto-regulation and maybe useful for coaching shorthand, but I don't really think this is like a way to separate people into novices, intermediates, or advanced, and I also don't think it's like worth trying to identify again because like it's gonna change even next week, next month, or whatever, and also I think it's a little limited. [SPEAKER_00]: Max recoverable volume.

[SPEAKER_00]: I could get behind maybe Max recoverable training load, but again, how would you identify it? [SPEAKER_00]: That's just one factor in training load. [SPEAKER_00]: I think training load is more important than just volume. [SPEAKER_00]: So that clears out the main fatigue claims that the NIA framework leans on now what I actually do with all of this. [SPEAKER_00]: The replacement for the NIA framework isn't a different set of categories.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's really more of a different orientation towards exercise prescription and programming. [SPEAKER_00]: driven by what the individual actually demonstrates rather than proactive driven by what a category implies should be happening. [SPEAKER_00]: And the rest of this is what that looks like at each phase in a training career. [SPEAKER_00]: So we've talked about this a number of times on the podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things we like to do, as far as generating reactive approach within a given training session is using the warmup for what it's telling you. [SPEAKER_00]: To me, this is one of the most reliable within session signals, a weight that you've performed regularly enough that it's feel sort of well calibrated at your current training level.

[SPEAKER_00]: So for example, my last warmup on a squat, when I'm working with relatively heavy weights, [SPEAKER_00]: is usually 4505, right? [SPEAKER_00]: If it's for singles, it's going to be heavier than that usually 550, but for multi-repped sets, it's usually 4505. [SPEAKER_00]: If the set moves noticeably faster than I expect, it requires less effort than usual, feels light in a way that kind of makes sense to me.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think my performance potential that days a little higher, so I can add a little bit of weight. [SPEAKER_00]: on the other. [SPEAKER_00]: And if it feels slower, harder, or off in a way that also feels meaningful to me, I'm like, my performance potential today is not quite what I would hope it would be. [SPEAKER_00]: So adding weight would be a bad idea. [SPEAKER_00]: I probably need to actually take weight off the bar.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then if it feels about the same, maybe I even need to repeat a set. [SPEAKER_00]: I think that when things feel lighter to me, what I'm interpreting that is strength is either declared itself. [SPEAKER_00]: Or that this is just noise, right? [SPEAKER_00]: I'm picking up noise, but I also, again, I expect my performance to vary day to day. [SPEAKER_00]: That's human performance in a nutshell.

[SPEAKER_00]: If it feels heavier, I think that doesn't mean I think my strength is going down. [SPEAKER_00]: It just means, again, I'm within that sort of performance variability. [SPEAKER_00]: But the logic is the same at your one as it is at your 10. [SPEAKER_00]: The only thing that changes is the size of the increments, the weight on the bar, and the frequency at which maybe these things show up. [SPEAKER_00]: Does that make sense to you, Austin?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that reflects my experience as well. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that, you know, our like near maximum efforts have been, you know, essentially near maximum at each stage of our training career and there were indicators. [SPEAKER_01]: There were, there were signs on the way. [SPEAKER_01]: It was towards toward towards that effort, but you're right that, you know, I can remember.

[SPEAKER_01]: Anybody who's been at this long enough, let's say that you are in a place where you've used like pound plates, for example, in the gym. [SPEAKER_01]: The first time that you decide that you're gonna skip 95 pounds or skip 185 pounds, and suddenly your increment goes from 135 to 225. [SPEAKER_01]: That feels like a big deal.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's like quarter plate jumps, and you're like, I can skip that and jump from 225 to 315, or they become a bigger and bigger deal, the bigger of jumps, I know that you and I historically, [SPEAKER_01]: You have made some gargantuan jumps before, or at least what felt like it at the time. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's really the thing that's changing, but fundamentally the underlying biology and all that is the same over that period of time, I think. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, agreed.

[SPEAKER_00]: All right. [SPEAKER_00]: Next part, what counts is a genuine stall. [SPEAKER_00]: Uh, because to me, it's worth investigating if somebody's really stall, um, we call it maybe a lack of demonstrable improvement in a priority lift over three to four weeks with consistent training adequate sleep, adequate nutrition and manageable life stress all in place. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the window for this detection scales in both directions.

[SPEAKER_00]: If somebody with less training history, it's generally shorter window, more training history is a longer window, but how do [SPEAKER_00]: You have to measure it against a recent anchor, right? [SPEAKER_00]: The best performance may be in the past six to eight weeks. [SPEAKER_00]: Not a lifetime best. [SPEAKER_00]: Like my lifetime best deadlift right now, 748 pounds, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And if I looked at my training right now, oh my god, my deadlift is terrible.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, well, actually it's going up over the past 60 weeks or so. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a good sign, but I'm still not back at my peak level performance, because I'm not really prioritizing it. [SPEAKER_00]: So you have to use a recent anchor. [SPEAKER_00]: That's the thing, one.

[SPEAKER_00]: to you have to compare like to like, whether it's an estimated one rep max from sets performed with the same rep range, same RPE target, that can be useful, whether it's a rep max set, whether it's a single rupt something. [SPEAKER_00]: You just can't compare like, well, I did 10 reps at RP7, what I rated RP7, and this is my estimated one rep max, and this is a single rep at RP8. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm just comparing them [SPEAKER_00]: And those are really two different tasks here.

[SPEAKER_00]: So one way to also do this is at the beginning and end of each block. [SPEAKER_00]: So usually up the way I program in a lot of our templates program is that the first week of a new training program if you were to switch programs is an introduction week. [SPEAKER_00]: And so new movements. [SPEAKER_00]: I usually have people do ascending sets. [SPEAKER_00]: So let's say the first exercise of the back squat. [SPEAKER_00]: for reps at RP-6, for reps at RP-7, for reps at RP-8.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's all you do, sort of a calibration thing. [SPEAKER_00]: How strong are you? [SPEAKER_00]: What's the ballpark that you're in, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Kind of sets your sort of expectations as far as your current performance level. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, eight weeks later, the end of the block, let's say it when eight weeks long, I'm gonna have you do four reps at six, four reps at seven, four reps at eight. [SPEAKER_00]: I get you get to sort of compare at the beginning of the end.

[SPEAKER_00]: Did we see demonstrable improvements basically a test with relatively low low stakes here? [SPEAKER_00]: So that's one way that I approach some of our programming here. [SPEAKER_00]: Now Austin, I want you to walk us through this consult to wrap this up. [SPEAKER_00]: A trainee shows up. [SPEAKER_00]: Squat hasn't moved in four weeks. [SPEAKER_00]: Sleep's been bad. [SPEAKER_00]: Work's been bad. [SPEAKER_00]: He wants to know if the program is broken or if he needs more volume.

[SPEAKER_00]: What do you do? [SPEAKER_01]: take a detailed history and get a sense of what are the sources of biggest concern for the person and basically trying to identify the targets that I can realistically intervene on. [SPEAKER_01]: So much of this as with many of these sort of scenarios and these are pretty common consults that I'll do through, you know, people will contact us at Barbell Medicine for for consults. [SPEAKER_01]: They'll do them with me.

[SPEAKER_01]: They'll, I know they've done some with you some of our other coaches as well to provide some guidance in this area. [SPEAKER_01]: And really getting a sense of what are their goals and priorities, what are their expectations and what sort of modifications are they willing to make?

[SPEAKER_01]: So I know that I'm starting out kind of speaking in generalities, but and that's mainly because I've seen so many of these consults with so many different actual management strategies that have ended up being appropriate for the person. [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes they do need a bit of a deal out. [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes they do ultimately need a little bit more training volume, but only once we're able to get some of these other.

[SPEAKER_01]: variables like life variables kind of in in line and sometimes they actually have a medical issue that has a risen and that they were not tracking like maybe you actually need to get some like labs done or some some form of testing maybe something else is going on and this is kind of the initial declaration of you know something pathologic that's happening not the most common outcome but certainly something that I'm like very attuned to in the way that I think about things when I'm listening to somebody.

[SPEAKER_01]: So really aligning their expectations with the way we're setting up the training program in the short term and then looking for like what I would call red flags red flags being things that need more radical changes and management more of a substantial pullback in training more of a substantial change in there. [SPEAKER_01]: nutrition or or medical evaluation.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it's really difficult to pin down like a very specific strategy here because these things can look so different. [SPEAKER_01]: But what is what is that? [SPEAKER_01]: How does that sound to you compared with your experience or like where do you see these contents typically going in practice?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately the way you've kind of worked through this systematically is first identify and like, okay, look, this is your experience, you validate it, right, you build a rapport and then you're kind of looking for a modifiable levers, whether it's a reversible medical cause, right, or something that's declared itself like you mentioned, or in this case the environment is not ripe for games, right, haven't slept, works bad, stress is high, whatever you're like, okay, well, any, are these things modifiable right now?

[SPEAKER_00]: Right, because ultimately what you are perceiving here or what you're interpreting is that the training load may or may not be appropriate. [SPEAKER_00]: I just don't know because it is being wrecked by the environment, which that training load is being applied. [SPEAKER_00]: And so if we cannot change the environment, then the training load has to change is probably not going to be more volume though.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, not into, yeah, which I think is a simple answer, but yeah, ultimately, after you establish the relationship, look for other causes that are unrelated to either training load or environment, then you can address the training load and whether it should go up or down is more of a function of like what happens when the stuff is resolved.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if it can't resolve, then it's like, well, you only have really one choice, and that's going to be to decrease it temporarily. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, a great temporary pullback and then kind of recalibrating the program beyond that for the person's tolerance and what they're able to do.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes I make an argument for like an even bigger pivot and I'm like, let's have you consider just like taking a few weeks and the horror of like what if we just like didn't touch a barbell for a little bit of time and found some other activities that you might not have so much like prior psychological anchoring to. [SPEAKER_01]: something totally different, something that you might actually just like enjoy. [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe something it's like outside.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know. [SPEAKER_01]: And finding some other things to play with because again, my argument is, do you think that let's say we did this for two weeks or four weeks? [SPEAKER_01]: then fast forward five years. [SPEAKER_01]: Are you going to be at a certain point five years for not to be like, if only I hadn't done that two week pivot five years ago, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And so finding ways to dig people out of this hole in the short term so that we can recalibrate, you could do a lot of things in the near term and still end up in a really good place over the long term. [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, almost anything is an option.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, I think how this ties into this sort of NA framework, novice intermediate advanced is that when people are talking about a stall, we have to also make sure that it's not a problem with the sort of detection window or observation window, right? [SPEAKER_00]: The reason why that framework I think resonates with so many people is because that's their lived experience.

[SPEAKER_00]: They got much stronger when they first started compared to later on in their training career and they're like, well, look, something fundamentally different was happening there. [SPEAKER_00]: And what I think is their experience scene is just that the detection window, [SPEAKER_00]: for these adaptations was much, much shorter. [SPEAKER_00]: And so it showed up more regularly, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And that's what they, and the signal to noise ratio was also smaller.

[SPEAKER_00]: But as you get more and more trained, the detection went of the observation when it has to be longer. [SPEAKER_00]: Your signal to noise ratio is also higher, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Your five to 10% swing and strength performance day today is now much larger and absolute terms. [SPEAKER_00]: And so there's a lot more noise there. [SPEAKER_00]: But I think overall, we can reject each one of the novice intermediate and advanced claims. [SPEAKER_00]: one.

[SPEAKER_00]: The first claim was that, look, there's different rates at which these underlying adaptive processes are functioning. [SPEAKER_00]: I do not think that's true. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think the muscle protein synthesis rates are really changing that much. [SPEAKER_00]: The connective tissue synthesis rates, all of these sort of things are still running at the same rate. [SPEAKER_00]: They're just bigger difference between where you're at currently and you're sort of sealing.

[SPEAKER_00]: to I do not think that these rates are different, and so therefore I do not think that they require different progression models. [SPEAKER_00]: I think that progression should be reactive to what the person is actually doing. [SPEAKER_00]: You can address that within a session using the warm upsets, for example, also retrospectively. [SPEAKER_00]: After the end of a training block to see how the progression actually went, but it should still be reactive.

[SPEAKER_00]: What is the person doing what's their performance potential? [SPEAKER_00]: Let's match the load, the weight selection, everything else to what the individual is actually showing you in real life. [SPEAKER_00]: And then claim three. [SPEAKER_00]: that the program design should different be different, fundamentally different between novices intermediate and advanced. [SPEAKER_00]: I do not think that's true, either.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think generally programming heuristics are what they are. [SPEAKER_00]: And so how the formulation and the dose changes is specific to the individual and is not informed by classifying somebody as novice intermediate advanced. [SPEAKER_00]: and so I can reject the NIF framework and push even further to say you shouldn't use it prescriptively, which is my real problem with it.

[SPEAKER_00]: If the framework was just, you get, you know, faster gains earlier on, slower gains later on, we wouldn't make this episode. [SPEAKER_00]: But that's not how people are using it in practice. [SPEAKER_00]: They're using it for progression models and prescriptive stuff for programming. [SPEAKER_00]: I think both of those things should be stopped. [SPEAKER_00]: Austin, anything you want to add to this

[SPEAKER_01]: I think you put a button on it nicely, and I look forward to never having to make this argument again. [SPEAKER_00]: So that's the case against the novice intermediate advanced framework. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's where the practical work starts. [SPEAKER_00]: Here's what we want you to walk away with. [SPEAKER_00]: The framework gets the observation right, but the conclusion wrong. [SPEAKER_00]: Beginners do gain quickly. [SPEAKER_00]: Advanced lifters do gain slowly.

[SPEAKER_00]: That part really is in dispute. [SPEAKER_00]: What's wrong is the inference that the rate difference reflects categorically different biology that has to be programmed differently. [SPEAKER_00]: The same for adaptive systems are running at year one and at year 10.

[SPEAKER_00]: what changes across a training career is the absolute size of each gain, the band of noise within the measurement, and how long you've got to watch your results before you know whether the work just done is showing up. [SPEAKER_00]: Now those four systems are running on four different time scales, and that's the structural reason new lifters get hurt three to ten times more often than experience lifters in the same sport.

[SPEAKER_00]: Their muscles and nervous systems are responding on a faster [SPEAKER_00]: then they're tenons and bones. [SPEAKER_00]: So a loading schedule built around the muscles pace tends to overrun the connective tissue underneath it. [SPEAKER_00]: The frameworks prescription that novices should ad-weight every session because their biology quotes a port set is the same loading schedule that turns into peteler tenonopathy four months in.

[SPEAKER_00]: And most of the cultural language around fatigue, the CNS fried claims and the max recoverable volume as a number of claims, doesn't survive contact with the data. [SPEAKER_00]: Fatigue is at least four dissociable phenomena. [SPEAKER_00]: The same recovery physiology runs in the new lifter and in the train lifter once the first few weeks of the repeated bout effect resolve. [SPEAKER_00]: And RPE is a calibration skill, rather than a property that emerges from training years.

[SPEAKER_00]: A single hard squat session, as best as the data can tell us right now, doesn't fry your motor cortex. [SPEAKER_00]: which brings us to what to actually do when you're not getting results. [SPEAKER_00]: The environment comes first. [SPEAKER_00]: That means sleep, nutrition, and life stress, and if any of those are off, the move is to fix the input before you change anything with the program. [SPEAKER_00]: You can't fix them.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, then you should adjust the program down because you're not in a good place to train as hard as you want to right now. [SPEAKER_00]: If the environment is intact and the numbers are still flatlining, the question is whether you're carrying too much fatigue or you're not enough training stress. [SPEAKER_00]: Too much fatigue tends to look like constant soreness, a session RPE that's a constantly above eight and motivation that's drifting down.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the first move there is to drop a set or two on each exercise for a few training days and to see what happens to performance. [SPEAKER_00]: Two little stress looks like the opposite. [SPEAKER_00]: The soreness has gone, your session RPE is consistently below six, and the weight on the bar still flat.

[SPEAKER_00]: First move there is to check your exercise selection to make sure specific enough to how you're evaluating strength, and then to consider raising the average intensity, and potentially raising volume. [SPEAKER_00]: The training plateau action plan walks through this whole sequence with specific decision points, and it's free by the way. [SPEAKER_00]: A genuine stall is worth investigating, but it's got to be defined by load and environment, not necessarily the calendar.

[SPEAKER_00]: The within-session diagnostic is the reference warm-up set that we talked about earlier. [SPEAKER_00]: The across-block diagnostic is a three to four-week trend, meaning you're estimated to one-remax against a recent anchor. [SPEAKER_00]: None of those rules change with training history. [SPEAKER_00]: What changes is the size of the increment that clears the noise and how long you have to wait to see it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if the categories describe a measurement window, more cleanly than they describe biology, the most program hopping is a response to a fictional transition. [SPEAKER_00]: Your training didn't stop working because the program got mismatched to a new physiology. [SPEAKER_00]: Your gain stop clearing the session to session detection threshold, and switching programs is solving a measurement problem with the training intervention.

[SPEAKER_00]: Two different problems and conflating them is where the NI framework does its most consistent damage. [SPEAKER_00]: question to chew on before next week. [SPEAKER_00]: If you've ever had a conversation about low testosterone with the doctor or with the friend, did anyone ask about body fat, about sleep, about the signal coming down the chain that tells the testes what to do, or did the conversation start an end at a number on a lab report?

[SPEAKER_00]: Next week, we get into the drivers. [SPEAKER_00]: The actual reason a man's testosterone ends up where it is, which almost always lives upstream of the testes themselves. [SPEAKER_00]: The aromatase loop and the inflammatory cytokines from excess body fat are the pieces of the story most readers have probably already run across, but there's a third piece that almost nobody appreciates, and it sits at the very top of the HPG access.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a hormone you've probably heard about in the context of appetite, [SPEAKER_00]: except the appetite story doesn't really hold up, the way it's been sold. [SPEAKER_00]: The rule for or that hormone that does hold up tells you why an individual with obesity, while their hypothalamus stops sending the signal this testies need to do their job. [SPEAKER_00]: The hormone is left in, and most clinicians have never connected it to low testosterone at all.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's where we'll be at next week. [SPEAKER_00]: Everything we covered today, the four system model, the IPF data, and the warm-up diagnostic comes from work we've been pulling together for our broader progressive loading project. [SPEAKER_00]: The three-part article series is on barbell medicine.com with all of the citations. [SPEAKER_00]: The training plateau action plan is the diagnostic walked through step by step, and it's a free resource also on our website.

[SPEAKER_00]: Plus we have the barbell medicine programs and one-on-one coaching are there when the answer needs to be more tailored to the individual. [SPEAKER_00]: Leave us a five star rating and a review. [SPEAKER_00]: It's the single best thing that you can do so that we can keep bringing you all the latest nuance and health and fitness. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Dr. Jordan Faganbaum. [SPEAKER_00]: That's Dr. Austin Baraki.

[SPEAKER_00]: We'll catch you next week and every week right here on the Marvel Medicine podcast.