 If you just think of a sine wave, just undulating up and down, up and down. The goal is to predict the exact tip-top peak of each of those arcs, and that's when you're going to train. And if you're like, okay, I think it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, no. You're listening to Barbell Logic, brought to you by Barbell Logic Online Coaching, where each week we take a systematic walk through strength training and the refining power of voluntary hardship. Welcome back to Barbell Logic. This is your producer, Trent. Today we're going to listen in on part two of a brief history of programming, covering Zatsiyorsky's two-factor model or dual-factor model. We're going to jump right into it, but if you haven't already, go back and listen to part one from Monday. And also, if you haven't heard it, I'd encourage you to go back to episode number 197. It's called SRA Revisited, Exploring the Fitness Fatigue Model. Give you a little bit of background on what we mean when we say fitness fatigue model before we get into all the history and the development of the model. So go check that episode out. And in the meantime, enjoy this one. So the SRA curve, the single-factor curve, the one-factor curve, they look just like. That's right. And you were going to ask a while ago, and you didn't get there because we moved on, does the single-factor curve look exactly like the center of the dual-factor curve when recovery crosses the homeostasis or the set point before training? That's right. Is the cumulative effect of the negative and positive two factors, and we average those two things out and say, this is what performance is, does it look like the normal supercompensation SRA graph? I think it does. I think the SRA thing happens, the one-factor thing happens, and I think it's fractal. Whatever level you look at this, once somebody's actually trained, it looks like this, whether it's the training session, the microcycle, the mesocycle, or the overall training cycle for the year or even the lifetime of the athlete, probably. Now one of the things I think that's really important about this that has been mentioned in our talking through programming and in our programming classes and the master classes and whatnot is that if you're on a, if people start talking about this idea of a novice versus intermediate versus advanced, the novices make progress every two days, every 48, 72 hours, intermediates every week-ish, and advanced every month-ish, right? What that means is that we hit PRs at however long that is, so it takes an intermediate a week to hit PRs, and it takes an advanced lifter a month plus to hit PRs, and my argument would be no, that's not actually true. What do you think? Well, a given PR. If you're strictly concerned with your 3x5 squat PR, just that thing, a novice can do it Monday, Wednesday, Friday, intermediate does it once a week, somebody else might be more advanced and it might take them 12 weeks to do it, but I think a given PR can take months and months. That's actually a good way to say it, but if we're talking about one rep maxes or a specific three rep max- You pick whatever it is. A repeatable PR, the more advanced you are, the longer it's going to take you to set that new PR. A best marathon time? Right, best marathon. You can't run a marathon and run an under three-hour long marathon, run it in, you know, in 258, and then two days later run it in 257. Nope. Or if you did that 258 wasn't that hard, when as hard as it should have been. Right. But we believe that the stress has to trend upwards. And I say trend, not every single workout has to be more stressful than the last one, but the trend has to go up. And so that means you're going to be getting all kinds of PRs all the time if you're doing rational programming that's accountable. Yeah, so even as an advanced lifter who's doing potentially a 12-week or 16-week long program, which is really one of the longer programs that you're ever going to see, that athlete is still probably going to hit some PRs every single week. It might be a weird thing, like Charity getting an 8x3 bench press PR. That's right. But she had done 8x3 before, and she said, okay, I've done 8x3 before, my best 8x3 was at 190, and this week I did it at 195. Or how about this? Maybe I've only done 7x3, and 8x3 is a PR just by virtue they've never even moved any reps. Right, or you did the exact same weight for a little more volume. It's a tonnage PR. But what we're looking for there are PRs. PRs are the driving metric for what we're trying to do when we continue to set PRs, whether that is as a novice where all the PRs are three sets of five, basically, or an intermediate where maybe some of those PRs are three by five, maybe they're five by five, maybe on Friday it's one by five. The goal is to continue to set PRs. It's about quantifiable metrics. And sometimes that also means that the quantifiable metric is a tonnage PR, is a volume PR. I tell you. The tonnage, that's where I was going. Yeah. It's like if you're tracking the PRs, you don't have to track the tonnage. That's right. You can go back and look and like, you know, what's their biggest five by five? Well, you... Biggest five by five is two eighty five. Next time they do five by five, they did two ninety. Tonnage went up. Tonnage went up. Don't even have to calculate. You don't need a calculator. Or if they did four sets of five at two seventy five. And the next time they do five sets of five at two seventy five, the weight stays the same. But the volume went up. That's also still a tonnage PR. We know because they did more volume. Now, we come back to that MED. The basics of those MED principles, which is that we choose simplicity over complexity. We choose intensity over volume. We choose economy over excess, right? Those things are important. So we don't necessarily like tonnage PRs, volume PRs are not the first thing we're going to look at, but they are still like quantifiable metrics. So what we don't do is we don't look at RPEPRs. We don't look at one rep max calculator PRs. We don't care anything about the total number of sets and reps that you do. Oh, I did ten. I did. I did ten sets of ten instead of ten sets of nine. That doesn't matter unless the weight... It's not the full story. Yeah. Right. So there's specificity there. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to increase force production. So underlying all of this for us, at least, is the belief that we're going to have to do a little more work than we did before to disrupt homeostasis. And we're doing all of this in service of driving the performance up. And when you get to a late intermediate and an early advanced athlete, you're walking the razor's edge of fucking up this dual factor. Sure. The theory of programming. Sure. Although I still think the dual factor theory of programming is more forgiving than the single factor theory of programming. It is. The timing is so... All that matters in single factor is timing. So think about in single factor, if you just think of a sine wave, just undulating up and down, up and down. The goal is to predict the exact tip top peak of each of those arcs. We're going to train. And that's when you're going to train. And if you're like, okay, I think it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, no. It needs to be 5.53 p.m. Sure. On Wednesday. Right. And then on Friday, it might be a little bit later. Right. Or again, you had a little bit... You can't wait until Monday. Now it's going to be Sunday because we've got to get our intervals right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. It's weird. But I think it happens. It's far less forgiving. But I think it happens, though. Well, we could talk about that here in a minute. But the two-factor theory, you've already described what the two factors are. One of them is the performance. The other is the fatigue. I'm sorry. That's really the right... Your fitness or your absolute performance. Right. Your potential performance. Your theoretical capability. That's right. Capability. And then the fatigue... Minus the fatigue equals the current performance. Yep. So for example, today, Matt, you squatted, I don't remember what it was. It was a bunch of chains and weird shit. We had 365 plus 120 pounds of chain. So, let's say you did 485. Let's say you just squatted 45. Pretty tired. Right. Pretty fatigued. Pretty fatigued. And if we had to go put something on the bar and you had to go do a set of three right now, it would be less than that. Yes. Significantly. Because the performance, whatever you're capable of, all the fatigue you've undergone this morning would subtract from that. Correct. You had less fatigue this morning when you went in the gym than you do now. Right. I smashed my finger in the weight room. You smashed the crap out of it. It's so bad. It's purple right now because I dropped a chain I pinched in the carabiner. I've had two whiskeys tonight. I just smoked a pipe, right? It's nine o'clock at night. I haven't slept. Right. All of those things are there, right? But here's the thing. That two-factor model, that fitness fatigue model, is actually more forgiving for... So today is Saturday. I won't train tomorrow on Sunday. I will train on Monday. It allows you to program for training in the fatigue state. That's exactly right. You can still train before you hit the apex of a supercompensation. I don't have to be this fuzzy place above what homeostasis or... I don't have to wait until the baseline increases. So I can still be under fatigue. I can still train. And I can adapt training. And by the way, this is why templates don't work very well and why we coach our clients and program our clients at BLOC on at worst a week-by-week basis, right? So tomorrow morning will be Sunday. I'll sit down. I'll get an overview again of everybody's training for the week. And of course, I've coached them on the list and technique all week every single day. But now I'm going to sit down tomorrow morning and I'm going to say, okay, I can now see a trend coming where I can look at a calendar view of my client and go, okay, my client was... They were struggling a little bit two weeks ago. Last week, they struggled a lot. I have got to back off on the amount of stress that they're getting this week in order to let them dissipate some of that fatigue so that that net effect of the positives and negatives becomes a net positive because what you start to see is a net negative. And by the way, that's not all bad, right? Having a net negative effect for a short period of time is what the Strength and Addition World calls overreaching. If it can be recovered from and adapted to, it's what we call overreaching. I didn't invent this term. And if the fatigue is so great that it cannot be recovered from, we can never get back above baseline without a complete reset. That's what true over-training is. And true over-training doesn't happen very often with strength athletes. Now, it will happen with crossfitters. It will happen with marathon runners with distance sort of people. But in weightlifting, it doesn't happen that often. So, Zadsiorski says that the immediate training effect of a workout is, one, a gain in fitness prompted by the workout. Obviously, right? And two, fatigue. The negative. Okay, there's your two factors. And then he says, after one workout, an athlete's preparedness, one, ameliorates due to fitness gain. They got stronger. They got better. And then he says, but... It deteriorates. It deteriorates because of the fatigue. That's exactly right. And so there's a curve associated with that. And the shape and length of that curve is going to change due to the... The magnitude. The fitness of the athlete, the magnitude of the workout, and the advancement of their training age. Sure. Now, that's me and not Zadsiorski. And then the magnitude itself of the actual both... Like, what is the magnitude of the net positive effect of the workout and what is the magnitude of the negative effect of the workout? Right. So if you do a workout and one day after the workout, on a scale of one to ten, one day after the workout, the negative is a nine. And the positive is a five. You're at a negative four. You're going to have to get a whole lot more tired before you get a little bit stronger. That's right. And then the next day, your fatigue is not a nine anymore. My fatigue is a five. But your fitness improvement or the positive effect is also a five. So on day two, maybe it's a net zero. And on day three, now my fatigue is only a two or two and a half. And my positive effect is still a five. So now I'm at a positive three or positive two and a half. That's the idea. It's the net between the two factors that matters. And that's what has to be constantly managed by both the coach and the athlete. The coach can manage that pretty well when it comes to only training. Right. But the thing we have to understand is that the magnitude of the negative effect post training isn't just from the training. It's also from the lack of sleep. It's from the too much alcohol. It's from the fight with the wife. That's why we always harp on eating. That's exactly right. That's why it's from the night. I didn't get enough because you can control your food. Sometimes you can't control the stress at work or the stress at home. Right. Those things can't always be controlled. But you know what? You can stick a protein shake in your mouth. Now, he throws out, Zacy Worski in this article throws, or it's out of this excerpt from the book, throws out something here that's, I think a little arbitrary, but it illustrates the thing. He says that the depth of the fatigue is going to be about three times the magnitude of the gain in strength. And he also says that the strength gain will last three times longer than the fatigue did. Right. That's exactly right. Now, we know that's a guess, right? That's a guess. Let's be honest. Let's be logical. But it gives us an idea, though. Right. What he's saying is that the effect of the fatigue, the effect of the gain, the gain will last three times longer than the fatigue did. Yep. Now, again, we don't actually know. Maybe it's two times longer. But what we know is that the positive effect from the training, if the training was appropriate, is going to be low in magnitude, but long in duration. And the fatigue is going to be high in magnitude, but short in duration. So we have to get through the high-magnitude fatigue and recover. And that's why we do things like after hard workouts, it's real important to sleep, take an extra nap, eat extra food, eat your groceries, don't fight with your wife, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And even, and even, and by the way, this is what you want to, you want a religious connotation here. You ever heard terms like, you know, you give me a hard time for being a Calvinist and people talk all the time about Calvinists is that you believe like a Calvinist, but you live like an Arminian. Right. Which means like you live like a free will person. So I, so I actually think the training is kind of similar. So you believe like we understand that there's two factors going on here, but you live like a super compensation is the thing. Right. So what you do is you make sure you got plenty of food, plenty of protein, plenty of carbs, plenty of salt, plenty of creatine, plenty of rest and you try to super compensate, even though we know that there are things that are more complicated going on at a physiological level than just basic super compensation like substrates. That's yours. He tells us there are six training effects here. We have acute effects that happen immediately, intermediate effects, the cumulative effects. These are the, these are the effects that the advanced athlete are looking for, the ones that take a while to accumulate over a number of training sessions or even seasons of training and then there are delayed effects. Those seem to be, those can be good and bad. Do your meet on Saturday, Sunday night, Monday morning, wrecked. Partial effects, the changes produced by a single training session and a movement and then residual effects. And we have to program to manage all of those things. So right here at the end of this chapter, this is the good stuff. He gives us, he has four little bullet points here. Let me turn on my light so I can read these. He's got dark. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to read it straight out. In order to induce the adaptation, the following are required. One, an exercise overload must be applied. Overload has to happen, right? Yep. Two, the exercises and training protocol must be specific corresponding to main sport exercise. Okay, so if we're trying to get stronger, the idea is intensity has to go up, force production has to go up, right? If you're running, the length of the run has to go up or the time has to go down. That's exactly right. So like we don't run if we're trying to throw a shot put. Yep. That's specificity. Three, both exercises and training load, intensity and volume, should vary over time periods when the same exercise with the same training load is employed over a long period of time, performance gains decrease. Right. It's accommodation takes place. That's right. Four, training programs must be adjusted individually to each athlete. Remember that all people are different. Now let's go back to talk about three here for just a second. He says that when the same training load is employed over a long period of time, performance gains decrease. So there's a corollary to that. Of course. If the loads increase, the performance increases. That's right. Now if it increases too much, you damage the person. They can't recover. We overreached and we're over trained. That's right. But three is important. And there are two sides of the number three coin there. Yeah, look, if you've never squatted 275 for three sets of five and you squat 275 for three sets of five, it will disrupt homeostasis. Your body will recover. And the idea that it's, what's happening here is it's not that your body is super compensating. It's that it's adapting to 275 for three sets of five. If the next time you come in and squat, you squat 275 for three sets of five again. It might not disrupt homeostasis at all. It probably still will a little bit and you'll adapt a little better. But eventually you can't adapt to 275 for three sets of five anymore. You're not going to still get a training effect out of the deal because you're completely adapted to it. And you act like everybody that's listening to this is like, well, duh. But how many of you guys know the guy that sits down and he's like, hey, as long as I can do 275 for 10 on the bench press, I'm good. Or 22 or whatever it is, right? They have this number and they go down. And they literally every time they go to the gym, they lay down and they do the same way for the same number reps because their idea is maintenance. And we've already discussed maintenance is a myth. It doesn't really work. C, Satsi Orsky's law number three. So here's the money shot. To plan training programs, coaches use simple models that are based only on the most essential features. These models are known as generalized theories of training. Boom. It's like he knew what he was talking about. It's like he got a whole bunch of people strong one time. He's in a simple model based on the least number of variables making minimum effective dose changes. Yeah. We were talking about this crap and you're like, oh, it seems like he said something about it before Keely did. And we went and pulled it up. And I've read this and you've read it, it was longer for you than it was for me ago. Sure. And when I saw that, I was like, you know, that's what we've been talking about. So I don't know if I got a little confirmation bias there. Sure. But my experience bears that out. Yeah, me too. I would love for our listeners, if somebody knows of something that's pre-1995, so we know Zatsi Orsky did this, maybe something that you've seen, maybe a translate from Russian into English that discusses this two-factor theory, this dual-factor fitness fatigue theory, pre-1995 we would love to see it and here it will certainly give you a shout out on the podcast. We'd love to read it, send it to us at what, where we want to send it at. We'll send it to questions at barbellhashbylogic.com and we'll give you a shout out. And in the subject line, put two-factor theory, something like that. And we'd love to see anything that's pre-1995 and probably anything that's pre-1995 is liable to have been originally written in Russian and then since translated, which would be great. We'd love to see that. Yeah. I would love to see there has to be something in those old Soviet sports reviews. That would be great. By the way, I would love those. So if you're out there and you can get your hands on some old Soviet sports reviews or old strength and health magazines, I'd get a handful of those. Guys, we would love those. Man, we'll make it worth your time if you can find some of those things for us. Somebody hook us up with Jan Todd. She probably knows the definitive answer like when the first time. Yeah, that's probably Trish Todd's wife. So Terry died earlier this year and he was kind of the historian that's left and she's a... Is she the one that runs the museum at the University of Texas? I believe so. Yeah. Yeah. So this stuff matters. So it'd be interesting to know who the first group of people were that started thinking about this idea of fitness fatigue. I don't believe it's in Musseltown, USA about the York guys. The York guys are pretty smart. I mean, we're talking about Bill Starr and Suggs and Bednarsky and these guys who really thought about programming and knew what they were doing, but I don't know that they really thought about what was the thing that they were adapting to here in the western side. I suspect that if you're doing explosive stuff like shot, you know, shot or the Olympic lifts that the single-factor theory could take you farther in those sort of explosive movements than it could the brutally slow stuff. Sure. Yeah, it would be very hard to throw a shot. If you were going to throw a shot anywhere near a PR distance, fatigue would need to be almost completely, if not completely dissipated. Yeah. And you would need to be in this sort of super comp... Everybody's had those days, right, where you've gone to the gym and you, for whatever reason, you just feel great. You feel like... Not full in your belly, but you feel full like in your muscle bellies and you feel strong and you feel everything feels tight and like you're explosive. Matt loves to feel that bloat. I love the bloat. I love that bloat. Does anybody ever program someone to throw the shot to put the shot? Does anybody ever program it and be like, throw it halfway today? No, of course not. I mean, they always go all the way. Right. And by the way, I think... I don't know if I've said this. And they don't throw a light shot either. They always throw the same shot. The same shot. Right. Always, right? So, Bondarchuk was the guy that did this. Anatoly Bondarchuk, Anatoly, I think. Bondarchuk is the guy that really invented block training, which is what Louis calls conjugate, which is not actually what conjugate is, but it's conjugate training. Block-styled training was invented by Bondarchuk, who was the strength coach and throwing coach for the Soviet team. He was the guy that figured out how to use block training in both the weight room and throwing shot in order to get maximum output out of their shot putters. Right. And so, he was the guy that did that. And they never threw... They didn't throw heavier shots and lighter shots. They threw the shot. And then what they did was they got really, really strong in the weight room and really, really explosive and did things like lots of power cleans, lots of bench presses. I mean, heavy, dude. I'm talking about all those guys could bench press over 600 pounds on the international team for the Soviets. Like that... You think about how many guys in the United States right now can bench press 600 pounds raw? I don't know. It's probably less than 10. Yeah. It's... It may be less than five. It's gross. It's low, right? And so, those guys did that. It's really interesting. Yeah. So, I think with those explosive movements, when you're throwing the same shot every time and you're throwing it all out in the clean and the snatch of the same way, you either hit them or you don't. Like, it's all out. The weight's different, but it's all out. Yeah, yeah. That the one-factor theory matters more. Right? So, I really think that this is fractal. Right? They need to come in and be fresh enough to hit their max effort stuff. Sure. So, you could sneak by and do a really great job with the single-factor theory approach with those explosive movements for a very long time, I think. Right. But when you start... It would only apply to those explosive movements. Right. And usually, I think what those guys would do is they would come in and they would do their shot putting. Like, in the morning, when they were fresh, and then in the afternoons, they would do their weight training because it didn't matter if they weren't quite as fresh. Like, if they were fatigued a little bit from the shot... Where's the shot way? I don't even know. I think it's 16 pounds. It's not... I think it's a kilo version, too. I'm embarrassed that I... I don't even know. But it's... I believe in the U.S. it's 16 pounds. Yeah. So, you know, that's not going to... that's not going to screw up their deadlift, you know? No. And they're not... And that's the other thing is that you see this all the time. I saw this in high school track and field that, you know, the warm-up for the track and field team was to, you know, to take a mile, run a mile. Right. And so you get all these kids and they run a mile and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, why are the guys away in 285 running a mile? Like, well, because they're doing the warm-ups with the track and field team. Like, stop. Right. They're throwing shot. They should never run a mile, because the guys... Fuck no, it's not. Team exercise is those motherfuckers should be eating while everybody else is throwing shot. Or while everybody else is running their mile. You get that ending girl that weighs 205 that throws the shot. And then they go out there, they make those kids throw a shot, sometimes a hundred times in a session. Yeah. And you go and you look at these Soviets, like, those guys are throwing shot. They're throwing 18 reps on the shot. They're throwing 12 reps on the shot. And then they're going in and they're lifting. I always thought the best... I can't fathom a more fun college experience as a college athlete than being a shot putter. Can you imagine? It's weight... Like, even the kicker gets creamed every now and then. Yeah. And then you're doing two days... Even the kicker still has... Right, he still has to go to all the practices. Right. So shot put, you literally go out there and you throw the shot, you know, 20 times or whatever. And you do that probably not even seven days a week. You're probably doing it four or five days a week. And the rest of the time you just train as heavy as balls. And then you eat a bunch of protein. You get to go to that, you know, that athlete cafeteria that's got all the chicken breast and all the food in it. You get to eat and sleep and get massage and throw shot and lift weights and take PE classes. Take PE, D100. Right. That's a pretty sweet gig. Yeah, that's kind of what we do. That's kind of what we do. Hey, that is from Vladimir Zatski where he's 1997 theory and practice of strength training. Science and practice of strength training. Yeah. Strength training. 95. And SIF, SIF Super Training was written in 93 originally. And again, my addition, SIF references at Seorsky, but obviously he wouldn't have been able to do so in 93. So somebody has an original 93 version of Super Training. I'd be interesting to see what it says. See if that's in the index. Or see if you can find us. I mean, look, I'll see you. I'll see you some free swag or something cool. If you can find us some pre-1995 discussions from anybody about this two-factor theory, dual-factor theory, fitness fatigue theory, all those being the same sort of thing would be really cool. I suspect it's out there. So this is pages 10 through 15, what we just went over. I hope this was helpful to you guys. Hope it spurred your curiosity on to maybe go dig into some of the stuff for yourself and see what the heck is going on because there have been Titans before us all. That's another Barbell Logic podcast. Send your questions and your citations of earlier dual-factor work to questions at barbell-logic.com and send your questions about this or anything else we've talked about or anything else you're curious about to that same email address and we'll cover that stuff on an upcoming question-and-answer podcast. Those come out Saturdays. If you guys listen on YouTube, if you're one of the hardcore people that got to the end of this on YouTube, thank you. And then put in the comments to tell people to leave it running in the background even if they're not going to listen to it all, but leave it running in the background. Let's push that watch time up. That would be helpful. Helps us with that algorithm. You bet. And go out to iTunes and give us a five-star review. And write us a write us a little review. Those are helpful. People look at those and they seem to be driving the traffic. So thanks to all of you that have already done that. We will talk to you in just a few days. Bye. Thanks, everybody.