 We're not in uncharted territory here, you know, we know we need to introduce a little periodization, right? A little volume on Monday, a little heavy on Friday. We get it. We know that. We do the midweek D-LOG for the people that are recovered. Our experience tells us that. But the troubleshooting steps are important because later on you're gonna have somebody with a 12 week block finding out what happened, what went wrong is like chasing electrical problems in a Jaguar. It's weird. 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 and welcome back to the MED Masterclass. Once again, I am your producer Trent, welcoming you to a bonus round of the MED Masterclass. We're calling this the prequel. We're gonna listen in to Scott Hamburg talk about what he's dubbed the MED Toolbox. And this is basically just a rational system of solving programming problems that arise during this whole MED process we've spent the last couple of months talking about. So, as you know, every lifter is going to run into problems with their programming during the process of training. Now, a lot of the problems that you run into as a novice are very common and the net experience of all the coaches that have led people through these problems in the past have given us a set of stock solutions to those problems. One example of that might be the three questions. Are you eating enough? Are you sleeping? Are you doing the things that are going to allow you to make strength adaptations so that the weight on the bar can keep going up? But as you get more and more advanced as a trainee, the reasons why you might be missing reps and training can be more complex and they are almost certainly more individual to you as a lifter. And so that requires the coach to have a troubleshooting mindset and a system for approaching problems. So what we're going to do today is we're going to listen in to Scott and one of the lectures he gave to his Barbell Coaching Academy class about MED programming and specifically developing a toolbox and a method for solving problems that you might run into. And then in the second half of this episode, Scott is going to go through some actual examples of missing reps in the squat and then how he would think through solving those problems based on the method that he's laid out here. So I hope you enjoy this bonus round. Let's get to it. MED masterclass, the prequel. All right, programming. When you talk about a few basics, we need to talk about a few basics right now. You know, we have observed. People who care have observed from time immemorial that there is such thing as the novice effect, right? If the newbie does anything, they get a whole lot better at it the next time. If that's they go run a 40 yard dash, come back tomorrow, their time will improve. They squat, they come back tomorrow and they're going to be stronger. Novice effect is very, very powerful. Someone, an untrained person, bops along at homeostasis. It doesn't take much to disrupt that homeostasis and put us into our stress recovery adaptation cycle. It doesn't take a lot of stress to disrupt the homeostasis for the novice. They recover very quickly because it didn't take very much stress. And then they display an adaptation very, very quickly. I've never tried this, but I suspect that it might be a six hour cycle for the first two or three sessions. You might have a guy squat at eight and he might come back at 2pm and get a PR. Don't know. But doesn't take a lot of, doesn't take a lot of stress to disrupt the homeostasis. And as a result, the novice effect exists. You know, almost any bolus of stress will enable the person to get a PR. Something that we almost never talk about is strength coaches, I think, take a lot of credit for, well, the gains that are made during the novice phase. The gains that are made during the novice phase are of course, in force production, for strength training or of course related to strength production. They get stronger, but they also get a lot better at performing the movement, right? So we, as coaches, we help them get better at performing the movement. And as a result, they're able to put more force against the ground and into the bar. And by golly, the lift does better. But then the third thing we often take credit for that happens in that sort of early novice effect, novice phase, is we, we started real conservative, like, oh, man, we put too much pressure on them. Like, oh, man, we put 200 pounds on that guy's squat. Well, yeah, maybe, but we may have started at 35 pounds lighter than it could have been as well. But that's OK. That's OK. So for the novice, the rate of adaptation and the increase of strength performance is very, very, very robust. And so we want to take advantage of that and prolong it as well as long as we can. We've all seen the graph, or maybe we haven't all seen it, but if you want to, you can go to that radical programing book and see the graph of athletic or strength performance and the rate of adaptation and how those things have those curves, one's an inverse of the other and how the training complexity has to go up over time as the strength performance gets closer to that individual's genetic potential. We've probably all seen that. And I think it's very useful and describes what happens beautifully. In that novice, in that novice phase, all kinds of things are happening. Everything's adapting. Tissues are growing. We're making more or making more ATP and ADP, putting more glycogen in ourselves, like metabolic changes take place, all kinds of stuff is happening. And we have found that if we pay attention to the novice effect in the strength recovery adaptation cycle thing that takes place, right? We remember Han Selye's paper about the strength recovery adaptation cycle. We apply stress, the organism, if it doesn't die will recover from that stress and then display an adaptation related to the stress. One of the classic illustrations we give is get some UV radiation, get some sun. Get a little pink, get a little sunburn, maybe get a real bad burn. But you recover from it and then your adaptation is you have a little more melanin in there, you have a little more resistance to UV radiation and you're not going to get as burned by the same stress the next time. And everything that we do behaves that way. And by the way, it works in the opposite way. If the stresses go down, like if you start squatting, if you were squatting 405 for three sets of five and then you stop, your body will adapt to not needing not needing to generate and maintain all that tissue. It's very metabolically and resource expensive to keep all the muscle mass and bone density and glycogen stores and everything that it takes for a guy to be able to squat 405 for three sets of five. So if you're not doing that, the body will adapt to that decrease in stress. Recovery is very easy and reduce its metabolic needs to meet this new level of stress that it incurs, which is actually lower. And that's what happens in detraining. That's what detraining is. The thing works in the opposite direction as well. Strengths, recovery, adaptation. So we know that the novice effect takes place. We understand that. We understand the stress recovery, adaptation cycle, I think, don't we, chance. So knowing that those things happen, we're we're looking as a strength coach, as we look at a novice and they want us to help them get stronger and we can do anything that anything that we want, anything that we deemed appropriate to help them get stronger. And because the novice effect is so robust, anything that we do will help in the beginning, the classic illustrations. We can have them do body weight squats they could do. Maybe they could do 18 today. I don't know. Then they come back and they can do 25. But at some point that stops working. So what the heck do we do? What the heck do we do? And so, you know, if the minimum effective dose programming methodology works, we should be able to we should be able to justify our novice program. As the minimum effective thing that we could potentially do. That's pretty tough. Like the minimum thing would be the guy comes in his first session. He does one body weight squat. Would that be enough to disrupt homeostasis and make him stronger? Probably not for the normal guy. Certainly not like it. Not for an 18 year old, metabolically physiologically normal male. You know, for example, that wouldn't that wouldn't work. Squat the bar for a double. Well, that's that's probably not a good thing to do. Well, that's that's probably no. Well, why not? Like we could he could squat the bar today for a double and then he can come back and do it for two doubles next time. And then then so on. And then we could add a little bit of weight. All that would help. He would eventually get stronger because he would eventually get to 95 pounds for three sets of five, perhaps from starting with that. But it doesn't meet some criteria that Reynolds and I've come up with really, I call them Reynolds laws of programming. So we need the programming that we do. We want it to stress simplicity over complexity. One, we want it to be simple because we're respectful of their time. In their bodies, complex programming kind of can be hard on the body, too. Two, since we're training for strength, we always want the we want the bias to be putting weight on the bar. Sometimes we have to take weight off the bar to drive the volume up. But when we can, when we can, we put weight on the bar. We stress intensity over volume. Again, sometimes we're forced to reduce the intensity in a given session or even a given mezzo cycle in order to drive up the volume for that mezzo cycle in order to help that trainee get to PR. But it's all in service of putting more weight on the bar. So we always want to put more weight on if we can. And again, it's just economy over excess economy in all things. Economy and equipment, economy of time, economy, economy of skills. You know, I don't want them to have to learn a whole bunch of stuff if they can learn fewer things. You know, I don't want them to learn the power clean in week one. If learning to squat and deadlift will get them stronger. You know, so we want to be economical in all things. So if those three, if those three criteria are correct and I think they are, and even if they're not correct, they are the principles that Matt Reynolds uses and they are the principles that I use when selecting exercises and making programming decisions for athletes. And since those are the criteria we use, I think it pretty naturally. It pretty naturally leads us to the four big lifts three times a week. Well, with the a workout and the b workout, right? That we do in the nov in the novice linear progression. Because we want to be economical and we want it to be simple. We don't want to change exercises. We want we want exercises that our experience tells us leads to the long term development of the lifter. So I want them eventually to have a very, very heavy squat. I want them to be very, very heavy under the squat bar, want them to be very, very strong under the squat bar. So I wouldn't want to teach them something that wasn't that. And then we'll have them learn how to squat later. We want to start with the things that are important to us now because because the stress recovery adaptation cycle tells us that the stress has to be specific to the adaptation we want to see. If I want them to have a really strong squat, then I want the stress to be squat related. And I want it to map on as close to one to one as I can. And the best way to do that is just have them get stronger with the squat by squatting. So we can justify all the exercise selection in that way, I believe. Because we've already talked about another other at other times about the other exercise selection criteria about the longest range of effective range of motion using the most muscle mass at the most possible weight on the bar. So we've already figured out we want them to be strong with the squat press, bench press and deadlift. We already figured that out. So as a novice, we want them to start with that because it's economical and we know the stress recovery adaptation cycle dictates it. The next problem is like how much weight do you want them to use? And how many sets and reps maybe? And then what are the frequency? Those are the next things we have to kind of figure out. Again, we have to, frankly, maybe MED doesn't fit here because we still have to go from our experience. We have to go from our experience. And our experience tells us that they need to do their 3x5s. The 3x5s, we've done barbell logic podcast about Y5s. There are videos on her whip channel about Y5s. Brand Carter has talked endlessly about 5s. The 5s are a wonderful balance, provide a wonderful balance between stress that drives hypertrophy, a balance between providing some conditioning effects and training pure force production. You know, one rep maxes. That ain't nothing but force production. And there's some conditioning effect there, but it's the most force production that you could potentially create in that given day. It would be a one rep max. If I had you do a 30 rep max squat, that's gonna have a big conditioning. You're gonna be testing your conditioning and some other metabolic traits that you would have more than your ability to produce force. So we've determined from our experience that the 5s are where we need to be, specifically the 3x5. One of the students pointed out that you're also likely to get form breakdown if you ask novices to do a lot of work at a very, very high level of force production, i.e. singles or doubles. Absolutely. It could be, let's say for example, a novice lifter could squat 3x5 at 135 for his very first session. There's a possibility that that gentleman could squat maybe doubles at 185, I don't know. Something like that, let's say. If we did eights, we would experience some fatigue and form breakdown in the novice. Our experience tells us that. We're having to go off our experience here when we set up a novice progression. But if we have them do doubles, they don't get enough practice. The lifter really needs a lot of practice at this point so that they have got in several thousand reps before it gets heavy and really tests their capabilities. And doing those heavier weights for lower reps doesn't provide them the hypertrophy that we need. So we wanna avoid the form breakdown and we also wanna pick a rep scheme that gives them the practice and we wanna give them a rep scheme and set scheme that drives hypertrophy. The underweight, both the underweight and the overweight lifter desperately, novice lifter, desperately need hypertrophy. The underweight lifter is underweight. You can look at them and you know they don't have the muscle mass they need to get where they need to go with their novice linear progression. The skinny 17 year old kid who's six foot one and weighs 155, it's patently obvious that that person doesn't have enough contractile tissue to do what they are capable of ultimately. The overweight lifter's in the same position. If they're not terribly strong, they just don't have the muscle mass. Just because they're large people doesn't mean that they're hiding muscle under there that we can't see. Now I will tell you that unless they're morbidly, desperately obese and have difficulty with body weight squats, they almost always will be a heavier squatter right off the bat than the underweight male. They do have more muscle mass just by virtue of getting up out of chairs and in and out of their automobile at 320 pounds of body weight or whatever. But we need to get that person's muscle mass up, up, up, up, up so that their body starts to recomposition. They could see more calories even at rest, et cetera. So that person needs the hypertrophy as well. So we know from our experience, our experience as coaches and trial and error and the people that came before us, that that three by five makes the best advantage of the hypertrophic effects that we need, the practice that the lifter needs, it doesn't overly fatigue them so that the form breaks down to the point that they don't do the lifts properly and they get, and they have a back tweak, for example, in the deadlift because we were asking them to do 12s. The novice linear progression adheres to Reynolds laws, the simplicity over complexity, the bias for intensity over volume and the seeking economy over excess. I wish I could tell you that there was another way to make sort of a minimum effective dose changes from couch to 5K, right? From the couch to a 405 squat. But the truth of it is there's a technique thing that we need to deal with and we need to get a head start on hypertrophy before the client really, really needs it and the three by fives are the best way to get there our experience and our strength forefathers tell us so. Let's talk a little bit about the hypertrophy problem. The novice that walks in and can squat 95 or three by five, a five foot eight, 131 pound guy, we can probably put 20 or 30 pounds on that person's squat with the muscle mass they have, right? As they get more practice with the lift, they'll become more effective at putting force against the ground and against the bar and they'll be able to take the tissues they have and more efficiently move the bar and they'll get PRs from that. Someone asked here if the first two weeks of training represent neurological adaptations instead of actual tissue adaptations like hypertrophy? Yes, I think that's right. But at some point we're at the limits of their contract, their ability to contract and produce force to close joints and open joints. And the only thing that we can do at that point is to put muscle mass on them. And I want to make sure that we are doing the work to drive hypertrophy before they have to have it. Underweight guys are going well in women both. They're going to make very good progress for a couple of weeks, maybe three weeks. They hit a wall. Mr. Adam and Bax, Bazums, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's because they did not start putting on body weight from day one. And so another reason we do the three by fives is to drive that hypertrophy from day one. We don't wait to have them eaten up their protein until it gets heavy. We have a start from day one. So we have to have the hypertrophy before we need it. And by the way, the novice effect tells us that that first pound of lean muscle mass they put on is the easiest one anyway. Let's go get it. Let's go get that thing. Let's not do singles. Let's not do doubles as a novice. Let's do three by five. Kind of beating that in the ground. So we've established, I think. Well, any questions about that? Do I make a good case for why we do it the way we do it? Basically, it's experience. Darn it. I wish we could say here's a double blind thing where we cloned a guy. We made two clones of Chris and we're gonna feed him the same food through an IV or through a stomach feeding tube and then train one with this methodology and that one with the methodology and we have 1,200 clone twin studies and this is what we found out, but we don't have that and we can't do that. One coach suggested that you might actually have responders at three sets of three, three sets of four, four sets of three, whatever, but practically you've got to draw the line somewhere. We have to draw the line somewhere. We have to jump in the deep end at some point and our experience with the people in our profession and what adhered to our methodology is probably in the hundreds of thousands of subjects at this point. And we know that the stress recovery adaptation cycle always works, but the novice effect is real and that we have real challenges in front of us with the novice lifter and those challenges are. Got to put lean muscle mass on them. They have to learn the technique and they need to see improvement. Quickly and that novice linear progression gives us that more than anything else that we've ever seen. So we've got the lifter doing the A workout and the B workout now. They're training three times a week. They're training, let's say Monday, Wednesday, Friday. The A workout is the squat press deadlift. The B workouts, the squat bench press deadlift and we watch them. We watch every rep. We cue them. We teach them where their midfoot is. We teach them how to stay on their midfoot. We teach them how to drive their hips so their knees extend first. We're getting those neuromuscular efficiencies because we're coaching them well and the weight goes on the bar, right? Because our program tells us that we wanna, we're stressing intensity over volume. The program is linear because the sets and reps stay the same. The weight goes on the bar so we know the volume always goes up. We never have to do a tonnage calculation because we know they always do three by fives and the weight went up. Okay, the tonnage went up. Good enough. We don't have to know how much the tonnage went up because we know it did and we don't have to do the math because we're only changing one variable. We're not periodizing. It's very flat. Well, it's not very flat. It's very linear. And then we start to see stuff happen. We start to see problems arise because it doesn't work forever. Doesn't work forever. A young man comes in. He squats three 75 on Monday. Three sets of five. We're proud of him. He comes in on Wednesday and he squats three 80 for three sets of five. We're still proud of him, but it was very difficult. It was slow. We waited eight minutes between our sets. When he finished his second set and it was really slow and you were a little bit worried about the third set, you told him to sit down on the bench next to you. We need to talk. Hey, listen, you could party out too much last night in a good bed. Like, say I play Call of Duty and shit again like this like you did last week. No, man, no. What'd you eat? Well, I went and he tells you what he ate. He ate well. He slept well. No, you made him wait eight minutes. You were there. Dang it. Well, he gets back under the bar for his third set and he completes them. Tough times, but he completes them. What comes in Friday? It comes on Friday and he put, where are we at now? We're at 385. We put 385 on there and he gets five. Rectum goes out on a stem like Mr. Crab's eye. You can see it's bad news. You're like, man, we're gonna wait 10 minutes. We're gonna wait 10 minutes. And he'd do like a maple sugar shooter. I'm not kidding. Cup of coffee, kick him in the sack. Little nose torque and he picked, he underacts the second one and he gets three. He gets three. He didn't get forward. He had no form breakdown. I mean, he stayed over his midfoot. He had good hip drive. He came out of the hole six inches and he pushed one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three and then he set it down. What happened? We have, we got a problem in front of us. We have to do programming. We're coaches. How do we deal with this? I have a four step approach. Step one, find the problem. Sounds easy right now. We'll probably look at some examples where the problem is harder to identify. But here he couldn't get his three sets of five. He bombed out on number three. I'm sorry, rep four. He completed rep three of set two. So that's our problem when your progression has failed at this point. We've got to troubleshoot it. Like what happened though? So that's the problem, but why? I know cause I have some experience. And I think you guys know cause you have experience. Let's pretend like we have no experience. We put our arm around him. And he's a high school kid. So he's named Cooper. They're all like Cooper, Hunter, Connor, Tyler, Tyler. That's all their names. Say, hey Tyler, Cooper, Connor. Listen Bubba, great effort. Stayed on your midfoot, good hip drive. It's just too much today. We're gonna go ahead and bench now. Help me unload the bar and onward and up. Or don't beat yourself up, great job. And then you bench and you deadlift. At the end of the session you say, hey listen, go home, crush those burgers. Want you to drink a big shake, get your protein, drink a gallon of milk. We're gonna come back in Monday. 385 will be there for you, no problem. You got it. He rests Saturday. He doesn't go out with, what are the girls' names now? You got Hunter and Cooper. Kylie, Kaitlyn, what are their names? I don't know. But he doesn't go out with her because she's a problem. And he goes to bed and he sleeps and he eats. He's rested and everything's good. He comes back in Monday. This time he completes two sets and he bombs out on number three of the third set. We're gonna identify the problem, same problem. Didn't finish the programming. LP had been working. The minimum effective dose to this point had been to put five more pounds on the bar. We go through our three questions. Did he rest between sets, yeah. Did he rest between sessions? Yeah, he rested two extra days. He only rested Thursday last week between the Wednesday and Friday. He had one day of rest. Now he's got two days of rest. But he got more work. But he got more done, didn't he? He told me he ate and I know he didn't go out with Kylie. He went to bed. So at this point he got more work done. So now we can do some troubleshooting. What's the problem? Well, one coach here argued that because we know that this trainee has rested, we know that their nutrition is good. So the recovery seems to be in check. So it must be a programming issue. And this coach suggested that this is the time where we'd go through the first MED change of introducing a midweek light day. Well, I don't know what's wrong yet. John, we don't know that. I mean, I think we're gonna get there, right? Through our experience, we know that. He got a little bit more work done through that extra day's rest. And if we had him on a four-day split, which is a traditional thing that people would do, we simulated a four-day split. I mean, he had two days. I think at this point for this gentleman, because he still failed Monday, I'm going to guess because he had the extra recovery. He swore to us he went to bed. He swore that he ate. How he weighs 240? We didn't say that. That we have not been implying enough stress to disrupt homeostasis and get the recovery towards the adaptation that we wanted, like Chris says. That's what I'm gonna guess. That's our troubleshooting step. I think that's the trouble. Wednesday wasn't heavy enough. Now, if we had maybe an older person or a more female person and we ran the same test at their weight, 275. We're from Lady 205 or 185 or whatever it is. And they came back Monday and they got it done. You know, hey, boy, I failed on Friday. I went 553. And then we rest Saturday and Sunday. They come back Monday and they get it. I think at that point, I think that's pretty clear. That's a recovery issue. You add one day of recovery. And I think we've troubleshooted that. Troubleshooted. Troubleshot, I think we found the problem. And I think we found the solution or the root cause. So for a very strong young man, I don't think it's quite as clear cut, but I do think it is a stress, a deficient stress-related problem. For an older person who comes back in on Monday and crushes it, I think it's clear. That one's pretty clear cut. So now we would go to step three, which is to look through our toolbox. Well, not to look through the toolbox, but step three would be what do we need to do to fix this problem that we identified in step one? Missing reps. Change the sets and reps. Change the weight. We could potentially change the frequency. We could have you squat more often next week. Or we could change exercise selection. I think those are the four things that we could potentially do. And then each of those have options within them. Sets and or reps can go up or they can go down. But we want the stress to go up. Now we don't count tonnage because he's been in three times five times an increasing weight. So we've never counted tonnage up until this point. But we know we want the stress to go up. So if we kept the weight the same and added reps or sets, if we kept it at three, we were like, okay, listen, Wednesday he squatted 380 for three sets of five, but that wasn't enough to get him to do three sets of five at 385. Well, let's have him do five by five at 380. That'd be more stress. Our experience just tells us he can't do that. If we want the stress to go up, and tonnage is really a proxy for this training stress for the strength athlete, tonnage would be the sets times the reps times the amount of weight on the bar. And we know that there's an inverse relationship between the total number of reps somebody does and the weight on the bar. If we're gonna do 100 reps, it's gonna have to be a whole lot lighter than if we do max doubles. So like Chris says, we need him to get more stress. We're probably, and he's already been operating at his limits. Remember, Wednesday was terrible. We feared for him, but he pulled through and then he failed on Friday and he failed on Monday. So we can't stay in this 383.85 area. We know that. So we're gonna reduce the weight, but the stress has to go up. Well, if we reduce the weight, we can have you squat more often. We already squat in three times a week. And we know, and we know that that extra day of recovery on the weekend sure did help his performance on Monday. I don't want him to, I don't think I want my guy here to do more frequency. And I don't wanna change, I don't see any reason to change the exercise selection. So I think that we're at sets and reps for him. Someone offered a solution here that you could increase the number of reps that this guy's doing, but spread them out by decreasing the frequency. So instead of having him squat three times a week, you could have him squat only on Monday and Thursday. Do two sets of three on Monday for the heavy day and do four sets of five or maybe five sets of five on Thursday for a volume day. Yeah, we could certainly do that. We could change the frequency like that because our man was on a three day session and we could put him in a four day split. We could do that. So he squats Monday and he squats Thursday instead of Monday, Wednesday, Friday. We could certainly do that. Might not be that idea. But we wanna do the minimum thing that we think would be effective in fixing the problem we identified in step one. And we'll remediate the trouble that we shot in step two. And I'll tell you Ben, as a matter of practicality, I might just go ahead and move into a four day split because it's easy to administer. It's super practical. The trainees typically love it at this juncture in their training, but I don't think that's the minimum effective thing that we could do. I think it's a good coaching decision because we're interested in simplicity over complexity and economy. And my experience tells me now, and apparently yours does too, that some volume on Monday and then going after his two triples or maybe even his big five or hell, maybe even, now remember Monday, he came back after his break on Monday and he got 385 for two by five and he got three on the last set. Remember, I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd probably put him on the four day split for practicality's purposes. On Thursday, I would have you squat two by five at 390. Wouldn't worry about trying to pick up that triple. I wouldn't try to worry about adding two reps. I wouldn't worry about trying to get him to get my three by five on his last day of the week at 385. I wouldn't try to add those two reps because, remember, in our laws of programming that we prefer, we're trying to prefer intensity over volume. So at this week, at this juncture, I want him to get a PR and I want it to be an intensity PR more than a volume PR. The minimum effective thing to do here would be, he's been doing 15 reps on Monday. Get some more. Four by five would be 20. Sounds pretty good. Hell, that's a third more. Five more reps over 15 is a third more. That ain't nothing. Luckily, we have a lot of experience. We have friends with coaching experience we can call and we let it, we say, oh, hey, man, here's my guy. Connor Tyler Cooper, he came in here. This is what happened. And this is what I think the problem is. I think that the stress on Monday, I think the stress has not been enough to get the adaptation I want. And I want to go ahead and have him do two by fives on the last day of the week for a PR, total weight PR. And he needs more volume early in the week. Clearly, I think I want to do four by fives, more experienced coach mentor. What weight though? I know he can't do it at 380. We're probably going to have that guy in the 90% range of his 390. Maybe 88, maybe 87, particularly because this guy's young. Typically the stronger they are, the younger they are, and the more male they are, the bigger the intensity, the intensity spreads can be between the volume day and the intensity day. That's a good rule of thumb that my experience has told me and other people's experience has borne out. So I think we've gotten this guy, I think we've got this guy, I think we've got him moving. I think he's going to come in next week and he's going to give his two by fives at 390. He ain't going to love it, but I think he's going to get that done. I think he's going to get that done. And then he's going to squat something in the, what, 345 area, three, I don't know, what's 90% of 390, I'm going to do my math here. He's going to squat 350 for four by five on Monday. That's going to feel pretty good to him, actually, after what he did last week. And that's going to work for a little while. Now, in our other example, we had our older person. We had our older person or our female person or whatever, remember that failed on Friday, in set three, and then they rested up over the weekend. They came in the gut at Monday, crushed it. We identified the problem. Friday, they couldn't finish their sets. That's the problem. And by the way, not only did they not finish their sets, but they didn't finish them. Well, one of the reasons that somebody might not finish their sets and reps is because their form sucks. They got on their toes and they had to, they dumped the bar or they haven't learned to push hard and they failed because of psychological practice and toughness or something like that. But they gave genuine effort and their form held together and they still failed. And then they rested Saturday and Sunday. They came back Monday and they persevered. I've identified the problem. This, the sets and reps. But we troubleshot this earlier. We said, oh, okay. Well, we already ran a little experiment. They got an extra day of recovery and then they made it. Okay, there wasn't enough recovery in their Monday through Friday session to get them a win on Friday. So what do we need to do? Step three, what do we need to do? To set them up for success in the future and to remediate the problem we've troubleshot. What do we do? Increase sets and we can change the sets and reps. We can change the weight on the bar. We can change the frequency or we can change the exercise selection. That's it. Well, we have to do something in the service of giving them space to recover in the course of the week. Remember, we always want to prefer simplicity over complexity. We always want to prefer intensity over volume. We always want to prefer economy over excess. And then we know over time stress has to go up. So we don't want to deload everything to recover. We don't want to just like give them a deload week. Although that would probably work. If we gave them a deload week for the entire next week, they'd probably come back the week after that and charge ahead for a time. In the short term, for a time. So if we do reduce sets and reps, that could help. That would reduce the stress on the client. Do you want to reduce the stress on the client on Monday? Do you want to reduce it on Friday? I don't think so. I think we want to do it mid-week. Their recovery is near maximal on Monday because they've had the long weekend. Friday's just a stupid place to do it because if you reduce it on Friday, you waste Friday and you kind of waste Monday too. It almost has to be on Wednesday. And I frankly think that you could do any three of the four things that we can do to the programming will work on Wednesday. You could leave the weight up and reduce sets and reps. Sets and or reps. You could take weight off the bar and leave the sets and reps the same. Or you could reduce the frequency. You could just get rid of it. And I think all of those things would get you what you need here for our older client or a female client or whatever. Our underweight client, frankly, it could be an underweight guy. If Cooper's friend Cooter has the same skeleton, but he ain't 240 like our guy that squatted 385, but he's 185, he's 190. He's gonna perform like these older people and these ladies would, frankly. And giving him that mid-week deload would work nicely. So I think throwing the thing out ain't a bad idea. If there's somebody that needs practice, I would refrain from throwing it out. If there's somebody that needs practice, I would probably have them do two by five at something reasonably heavy, 85%, 80% reasonably heavy. If it was my, and so I'm evaluating these problems. I'm evaluating these problems. If Cooter is underweight, hell, I might even have him do three by fives or even three by eight at something fairly light to try to put some meat on his frame. But I think that we can make room, like you can't drive recovery. You can't push a string. We have to make room for it. But I think that we can drop the stuff out. We can completely drop the frequency down. We can drop the sets of reps. We can drop the weight. Any of those things could, would potentially work for the people that need to have room made for recovery in the mid-week. Ben's suggestion for the four-day split for our, for Cooper would also work here. If we moved them to a four-day split, it would be changing the frequency. And it would add a recovery day in here. And it would also serve our underweight or older or our female lifter that has failed because of recovery problems. So, I think we found our problem. I think we troubleshot and found a root cause of the problem, which is our step two. We've looked at our toolbox, as we call them the MED toolbox episodes, sets and reps, exercise selection, weight on the bar, frequency. We selected a tool and we applied it. That's our step four. And our step five is a watch and see. We're not in uncharted territory here, you know? We're not in uncharted territory. We can see this stuff and we know we need to introduce a little periodization, right? A little volume on Monday, a little heavy on Friday. We get it. We know that. We do the mid-week de-load for the people that aren't recovered. Our experience tells us that. But the troubleshooting steps are important because later on you're gonna have somebody with a 12-week block, finding out what happened, what went wrong is like chasing electrical problems in a Jaguar. It's weird. And you have to conscientiously pick through the thing to find out what the problem was. You have to conscientiously look at every set and rep and all the exercise selection to troubleshoot the problem. You have to look in your toolbox and select a fix, which has to be applied probably over multiple, multiple weeks and multiple sessions and multiple slots. And then you have to watch and see because you might not have fixed it. We want to have fixed it, of course. We wanna watch and see. You know, we got Cooper squatting four by five on Monday for 350. We're gonna go ahead and put him on the four-day split because it just, by golly, it just makes it easier for everybody's life. Maybe that's not a minimum effective dose change. Maybe it's not, but I think it's a good management. We'll set him up for future success by doing that. And then we watch and see if he hits his two by five at 390. My gosh, I bet he does it. So we'll be validated in that. So we'll be validated in it. And we can watch Cooter do the same with his, we just moved him to a four-day split or maybe we just deloaded him on Wednesday and see if he has success. And then that's, you know, that gives us feedback on what we've done. And then we watch for the next set of problems and then we apply the steps again. We've introduced periodization for our lifters. All their sessions, their sessions are no longer all alike. The intensity and the rep schemes wave, they vary. That's periodization. That's periodization. So troubleshooting is already much more difficult. Identifying the problems a little more difficult. And then troubleshooting, that problem, finding root cause is already much more difficult. At the end of LP, his figure's gonna look like he doesn't finish his three by fives or in his dead lift, he doesn't finish his heavy five. By the way, anybody that listens to the future is gonna say, well, in the four days split and then what about his press? We're just talking about squats, okay? The decision to go to a four day split might have changed based on his progress in the dead lift or his pressing motions. That might have driven some other frequency decisions that we made. But we're just talking about the squat here. But now that we have periodization, well, back to that. In LP, failure only looks like one thing. They don't finish their three by fives or they don't finish their five in the dead lift. It only looks like one thing, fine. Well, now we have two or three different kinds of sessions now. You've got volume on Monday. You get a weird midweek maybe. Two by five at 80%, two by five at 75%. I don't know, three by five at 70%. I don't know, something deloaded in the middle of the week. Something. And then Friday is just heavy. Well, nobody's ever gonna fail on Wednesday. If they do, they probably got a brain injury and they need something more than you have. But you're gonna have guys, particularly Cooper and Cooter, that fail on their volume day. That's, we identify a problem. Failure to complete their four by five on volume day. Failure to complete their five by five on volume day. Failure to complete their six by four on volume day. Whatever hell it is at that time. That's one problem. Seems pretty easy. We've pointed right to the failure. That's fine. Well, the other one would be, oh, we've been having them do two by fives on Friday. Well, he bombed out at four or five. It worked for exactly three weeks. He went from three ninety at two by five to four or five at two by five. Well, when we do the troubleshooting, those are entirely different animals. Those are different animals. And then as such, when we go through a toolbox, they require different tools and different testing to find out if we did the right thing. And until you get to, once you get a bunch of experience, you do all this just automatically and you don't have to do the testing. We always check our results and make sure it works for the client as they move into the future. But let's talk a little bit about our troubleshooting thing. Let's say Cooper misses four by fives at three sixty five. At three sixty five. He's put 15 pounds on his Friday PR. And by the way, Monday's a volume PR. When he does three by five at three fifty, I'm sorry, four by five at three fifty, the first time we moved Cooper to four by fives on Monday, that was a volume PR. So he's hitting two PRs a week on his squat. A volume one and an intensity one. Well, he bombs out at four by five at three, what did I say, three sixty five. He got four oh five for two by five on Friday. It was hard, but it's gonna be hard. And then he comes in on Monday, four by five doesn't make it. One coach suggested at this point that you could start changing the sets and reps with the goal of increasing the total volume. Mike could, what is the purpose of the Monday session? How does it fit in our little, our tiny little five day block, periodized block here with an accumulation phase and a realization phase, that's all it has. The purpose of the volume day is simply to accumulate enough stress to drive more strength adaptation. But here's the thing, do we really care? Do we really care about Monday quaw Monday? Little Latin for you. Do we really care about Monday for the sake of Monday? It's in the service of Friday, right? It's in the service of the intensity day. The stress has to go up, but he couldn't get it on Monday. I really don't care about Monday in terms of Monday itself. Monday's just in service of him getting the PR on Friday. That's what I care about. So if I just make a decision that only gives him some sort of nominal success on Monday, Friday may suffer, right? So Chris, if we went to six by three and he gets 18, but he puts five pounds on, he's actually gonna miss two, he's gonna be down two reps at three 70. And so we actually can't, that's 740 pounds and he's gonna get 16 reps with an extra five pounds. We're gonna be net down wherever that math is. 650 pounds of tonnage. And I think he's gonna hurt him on Friday. So I don't really care about like PRs for Monday. Monday's in the service of Friday. So we got to get the stress in. So we found the problem, he failed on Monday. Now we have to troubleshoot it, like what's going on and what's going on? It's too much under the specific sets and rep scheme. It's too much for him to get it done. That's what's going on. Another coach suggested here that you could add more sets to the week, but at a lower percentage weight than the existing sets on the volume day. So if you're doing volume at say 90% of your intensity day, you could add another set or two to the volume day at less than 90%. I think you can do that. And my preferred way to do that, particularly for an older person, particularly for an obese person, would be to introduce that additional set you're talking about, Fred, or two sets as the back off on Friday. So he does intensity work on Friday. And then his back offs, I consider it as the first part of his volume week work for the following cycle. So that's certainly something you could do too. But I think for our robust young man, Cooper, who plays football and who's very, very strong, I think Chris's takes some weight off the bar because there is an inverse relationship between the weight on the bar and the number of sets and reps we can do. We have to take weight off. If we want him to do more volume on Monday, take some more weight off, might go down as low as 80%, 78%, who knows. And then he'll get 25 reps, the tonnage would certainly go up that way. If it was a different kind of person that wasn't some 18, 19 year old tight end, adding that work midweek, or adding it as a back off, I think both of those things would be very useful. If you added it in the midweek, low and behold, sure looks like some sort of an HLM, where the volume waves or maybe like a classic Texas method or maybe it looks like that. I think Texas method and HLM are basically the same thing. The order that the H and the L and the M come in, I don't know how much that matters, you know? Would it work as an MLH, an LHM? Yeah, I think so. I think so. But it just rolls, it rolls. So if you look at, you say it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday or it's Wednesday, Friday, Monday, you know? I don't know that the order that those come in makes an enormous amount of difference. I think for individual people with individual work schedules and individual dietary habits, the order that the M and the L and the H all come in could make a difference. But by and large, I don't know that it makes a big difference. But if you're on the four-day split, driving that volume up even more Monday by taking a little weight off and having those sets seem to work. And at this point, you're probably gonna start to see multiple failure points, right? It's gonna be five-by-five on Monday and that two-by-five score is gonna be real damn heavy on Friday and he may bomb out on Friday in which case I don't really care. It's fine. You know, you're gonna do attempt four-ten for two-by-five and you get five of them and you fail on the second set. Fine. Fine, it's awesome. At that point, I'd probably just drop it off. But you can see what's happening. In our, in Cooter, our underweight guy, he's probably not gonna fail on Monday with that volume work. He's probably not gonna fail on that. He's probably gonna fail Friday. He's probably gonna fail Friday on this intensity stuff. That's probably where his problem is gonna be. We troubleshoot it. Well, heck, he's deloaded in the middle of the week. He's got plenty of recovery here. Well, now he's like Cooper was. He failed on Friday and he's got plenty of time to recover. His Wednesday's very light or we moved into a four-day split has been suggested. Either way, he should be rested for Friday. So now he's right where Cooper was in the very beginning of our conversation and Monday is not stressful enough. And so now we start making those minimum effective changes to Cooter that we made to Cooper three weeks ago or four weeks ago. When we talk next week, we can talk about actually identifying those problems. Like not all missed reps are the same. And do you actually want your lifter to miss the rep? Do we want to catch them, not catch them physically, but do we want to anticipate their failures and give them relief before they occur? How we might anticipate the failures? You know, what are the clues that you might see that a failure is coming? And we'll talk about some of those things. All right, well, that's a wrap on another MED masterclass. Thanks again for listening to Barbell Logic. As always, you can send Matt and Scott questions about this stuff or really any aspect of training at questions at barbell-logic.com. And while you're thinking about that question, go to iTunes or your podcast provider of choice and leave his review. Tell us what you think about the show and maybe your review will make it into another Thursday Q&A. All right, we will see you in a few days.