 We're doing MED stuff, we're paying attention all the time to everything and we're building not just do we have just a toolbox where we know we can change sets of wraps, the weights on the bar, the frequency of the exercise selection. We also know what kind of flavors of things that we've been doing for each of these people. And then you start to build these sort of client avatars. 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 this is producer Trent and you're listening to the second episode with Scott Hamburg of the MED series and this episode is basically going to be a continuation of the discussion of the MED toolbox and how you use that toolbox to solve problems that you run into while trying to run your programming in a minimum effective dose style as detailed in the last several episodes. So Scott's going to kick off this lecture from his Barbell Coaching Academy class with some more in depth discussion on SRA and Zatziorsky's two factor model, the fitness fatigue model. And then he's going to transition into some intermediate and more advanced athletes and doing some more problem solving. In particular looking at how you determine what problem you're running into when you start missing reps or your bar speed starts slowing down and you're not sure what to do with your programming from there. So this is kind of a compilation of a bunch of different thoughts about MED programming, a catalog of some of the problems that you're going to encounter and some discussion of how you would think about solving those problems. So I hope you enjoy this, get your pens and pencils out and let's listen in to the MED Masterclass number 10 and MED toolbox number two. I wanted to say just a few more things about stress recovery adaptation that I neglected to say last time or didn't say as well as I wanted to have said. That stress recovery adaptation cycle that Hans Sellier tells us about tells us a lot that we need to know about programming and a couple of things that I didn't mention last time I think are important to note and you probably already have noted this is that the more advanced the athlete is, the longer it takes to do any of those things. The longer it takes to get the stress, the longer it takes to recover, the longer it takes to display the adaptation, a novice may be able to receive the stress and recover from it almost instantly maybe depending on how much of a novice they are. And then somebody that's very, very advanced may take them 12 weeks to accumulate enough stress in four weeks to dissipate it so that they can recover so they can display that adaptation. So the longer someone trains, the longer it takes to accumulate the stress, the longer it takes them to recover, the longer it takes them to display the adaptation. Of course, of course, but I don't think I said it in that way and it was important to do that I think. And then also, I did mention that the the adaptation is specific to the stress, remember? You know, you get some UV radiation, it doesn't make your marathon time better. It makes you more tan. The adaptation is specific to the stress. So we always have to keep that in mind. We always have to keep that in mind because that tells us a whole lot about exercise selection, right? Pause squats probably carry over better to the squat than the leg press does, right? Because there it's much more specific and it matches the movement much more, much more closely. So knowing that about that time horizon and knowing about that specificity and how it just it's not just, you know, tongue-in-cheek stuff about sunburns and marathon time. So it's also tells us a lot about about exercise selection is important to know. Traditionally, traditionally, programming for years and years and years followed this single factor theory of programming, you guys seen that thing? Single factor theory says that there's kind of one thing, there's one factor that contributes to athletic performance. And this was, this is really, this was followed, I think really up until kind of the late sixties and maybe even a little bit later in the U.S. That there was one single factor that limited athletic performance. So for example, it could be glycogen, right? It could be ATP. So you perform, you deplete all the glycogen and you're done. But then you recover and hopefully you supercompensate, now you can store more glycogen in yourselves and now you can perform more vigorously next time. And then we're, then as a consequence, if you believe in that single factor theory thing, then you end up timing all of your performances to try to make sure that you're at the maximum capacity for that single factor, whatever it could be. And maybe there could actually be more than one factor. They call it single factor theory because later, Zaciorski talks about a dual factor programming theory. We'll talk about that in a minute. But I think they're probably, I think it probably is true, the single factor theory, which is if you look at the diagrams regarding programming and like the practical programming thing, practical programming book, they kind of reflect a single factor. You know, you'll see the sawtooth curve of athletic performance, right? And you can actually refine some literature where people were talking about programming in the 60s and they were trying to time athletic events to hit a peak after a factor was replenished and before detraining occurred is when that factor, whatever that thing was, athletic performance, what is called an athletic performance, started to detrain. So they were timing things to hit an athletic peak. And again, some of those factors could be glycogen stores, ATP, one of the factors might be muscle pH. You know, if the muscle pH is too low, you got too much lactate in there, it just can't contract as hard. And so you have to clear that out and get the pH back to normal so that the muscles, you know, maximally effective again. This was the thing for a long time in the simple, some of the simple programming diagrams and some of our texts look like that. And I think that this is actually true on the micro scale or the short scale. You know, you do your heavy set of five and you wait three to five minutes, we're replenishing a few factors that limit our training in the urgent, in the urgent scale right now. You wait three to five minutes, clear some lactate out of the muscles, the pH goes back to normal, put some more glycogen back in those cells, put some more ATP replenish that ATP, now you're ready for another set of five. But long term, long term that doesn't tell us as much as we need it to tell us, I think. But for novices and even between sets, I think that the single factor theory idea is good enough. Let's talk about some of these factors, because we're supposed to talk about energy systems a little bit tonight anyway. I think these energy systems are related to these factors that drive training. And I think we're mostly interested in this ATP-phosphogen energy system. It's where you just turn ATP to ADP and you take one of those phosphate groups to drive muscular contraction. So we looked at that sliding filament theory of muscle contraction, where we robbed a phosphate group off of an ATP to drive that sort of weird rack and pinion ratcheting muscle contraction game. Well that's this energy system. It's really quick. You've got ATP in the mitochondria, you've got ATP ready to go right now, and you got maybe eight or ten seconds' worth of that. Well, that's good if you're doing a one rep max, if you're doing fives, probably not enough. And then beyond that, beyond that we could use the glycogen cycle where we're going to use the glycogen in our cells and in the muscle fibers to make a little more ATP and help us out. But that glycogen, we'll deplete that, we'll deplete that in maybe 20 to 30 seconds. And then beyond that, you start to get in the Krebs cycle, which I don't know that we care about too much, but we oxidize pyruvate out of glycolysis and kick off a couple of molecules, ATP and whatever. And then beyond that, it's the oxidative phosphorylation. That's that long, slow stuff. That's the aerobic phosphorylation. That's long, slow. Long, slow. That's your 5K, your 10K, whatever. The darn sure isn't, that's a 5. And then beyond that is sort of a fat metabolism, which is a little bit slower yet. And all these things are coming along and working concurrently, but the relative importance of each of them changes based on how intense the activity is and how long it lasts. But I think all of these, ATP availability is probably a super important factor, right? And so this tells these different metabolic pathways tell us a little bit about how long it takes to replenish that ATP and what sort of resources might be available to the athlete when they have to go do a max effort set, max effort single, max effort set, sets across, whatever. That doesn't tell us a whole lot about what to do with our programming nine weeks from now though. Later on, Zatsiyorsky came up with what he called his two-factor theory, where he describes in his book that it was a science and theory of strength training. I think that's the name of the book. He describes that we're always, as programmers, we're always trying to manage two things. The fatigue versus the athletic potential of the athlete, the athletic potential is X. At any given time, the athlete can do X, but they're always, almost always in a state of fatigue. It almost never goes away completely and they have an athletic potential at any given time of X, but what they can actually do, their actual performance is decreased by the amount of fatigue that's present in the athlete. Their true performance is the sum of the fatigue and the total potential. The more fatigue is present, the poorer their performance will be. I think this is an important insight and it seems very simple now, but maybe for the novice in LP in the very, very first days of their LP, maybe they can squat 135 for three by five on Monday and come in Wednesday and be entirely fresh with zero fatigue. That's possible, but late in the NLP, it's clear, and we talked about this last week that they come in on Monday, they squat pretty darn heavy on Wednesdays, a little bit heavier weight, but man, it seems a whole lot heavier than that. By Friday, they can't do it at all. They have not dissipated the fatigue that they accumulated over the first part of the week and their athletic performance on Friday is a sum of their total athletic potential plus the amount of fatigue, which is negative minus the fatigue, and sure enough they miss their sets on Friday. For the more advanced athlete, that fatigue accumulates over longer and longer and longer periods. They have more and more work capacity and they can withstand more and more and more and more stress until before the fatigue overwhelms them and they go into some sort of an overtraining stage and we want to avoid that. So for the short term, I think that the stress recovery, I'm sorry, I think for the single factor, things really important in between sets, you know, hey, rest three, five, eight minutes, it's heavy, you know, rest up, drink some orange juice, rest five to eight minutes, come back, get your sets in. One of the students asked a question here about advanced athletes like Charity, who Matt talked about in some of the previous MED episodes, and how someone like that could be setting PRs in multiple rep ranges from week to week, especially in the context of this dual-factor fitness fatigue theory. Well, well, it's just how much of the fatigue, how much fatigue is there. And then Charity can't chase PRs every session. She can't. Now, at the time in her training life that Reynolds was talking about, she could, you know, a 16, you know, four by four PR, a five by five PR, a weekly tonnage PR, and so on. But you can't always, always do that, particularly the more, you know, you can do all that stuff for a guy in LP. It's a five rep PR, a three by five PR, a weekly tonnage PR, everything. But those PRs get farther and farther apart, unfortunately, the more advanced they are. And so what I know, I know about that period that Reynolds was talking about, he was absolutely true. And, you know, the more advanced somebody gets, the more, hopefully, if you've programmed a right, the more work capacity they have. And so they still may be able to reach a five by five PRs in their tenth year of programming, tenth year of training, because they just have an enormous work capacity. But we always are walking the knife's edge between too much stress, which causes too much fatigue, and they're unable to recover. And we go into an overtraining, overtraining situation. So for the person in LP, it's pretty easy to see what's happening. For intermediates, it's also not too hard to see what's happening. They got volume day on Monday, let's say they're a four day split. They hit something heavy on Thursday. And then they got Friday, Saturday, Sunday off and then come back in. And you know, if you mess with that programming very much, you have them squat five by five on Monday, add five more pounds, have them squat five by five on Thursday, you'll see they probably can't do that. You probably can't do that. It's too much stress. It's too much stress because they haven't dissipated their stress from Monday. They can't do it on Thursday. And then you can stretch that out over a longer and longer time horizon from that intermediate that gets weekly PRs to an intermediate that gets monthly PRs to an advanced athlete that takes them 16 weeks or even two years. And you can see, and you can still see it, it all still seems to hold true. So we have to manage this stress because it takes stress to disrupt homeostasis stress recovery adaptation. But stress has to disrupt homeostasis to drive the recovery so that we get the adaptations. We have to manage that stress to do that and still achieve our athletic goals. So for us, we talk about stress all the time, fatigue and stress are related and they may in fact be a measure of the same thing. You get a stress and then 11 minutes later, you're fatigued, but they may be a measure of the same thing. I don't know. I'm not clear because we just like Sully says, we don't have a perfect way to measure that physiological stress imposed by a training session. So we talk about stress, which then in turn causes fatigue. So we're really talking about two sides of that same coin. And typically we use tonnage as our best measure to as our best measurement of that that training stress that we're using that we're imparting upon the trainee. But tonnage isn't perfect. It's not even close to perfect. It doesn't account for time under tension. It doesn't account for range of motion. It doesn't account for exercise selection. It doesn't account for time between bouts of stress. You know, okay. Oh, my weekly tonnage was 115,000 pounds. Okay. You know, what's the frequency? What does that mean? What are the rep schemes? Doesn't tell us about is it, oh, you got an enormous tonnage on three by fives, or was it five by 20s as a bodybuilder? Like it doesn't, it doesn't tell us a lot. It doesn't tell us everything we need to know. But if we can hold a certain number of things, a certain number of variables constant, the tonnage becomes very helpful. That's one of the advantages in the MED thing. We're only making just one or two changes at a time. So tonnage actually tells us more than it would as you jump from this template to that template, whatever. So knowing that this stress recovery adaptation thing occurs, that we have to manage this stress and the fatigue in order to get the athletic performance we want. And by the way, for somebody that's training someone who has an athletic performance coming up, knowing about Zatzior skis, knowing that there's an inverse relationship between the athletic performance and the amount of stress, or I'm sorry, the amount of fatigue present in the athlete, when you go to the MED, it is your job to have continually moved to put stress on the athlete, thereby increasing their total athletic potential over time, which they cannot realize because they are under stress. And then in the final days before the MED to allow the stress to dissipate, prevent them from detraining and have them perform at exactly the time that the stress is all gone. Detraining has not begun, and they can actually realize the maximum athletic potential available at that time. Dig it. Do I need to say it again? I'll say it again anyway, even though you guys not to know. A guy goes into a block of training, a 12-week block, and 4-10 is his best squat. It is our job to put stress upon that athlete so that over time, over the length of that block, his total athletic potential exceeds the 4-10 squat, or whatever it was I said, he's not able to reach it yet because he's tired. We're training the crap out of this guy over the length of this block, but in the last week of the week, maybe 10 days of the block, we allow the fatigue to dissipate. We have him do enough work to keep him from detraining. So at 9 a.m., on MED day, he can realize the new athletic potential that he has trained to over the entire course of the block, which will result in the ultimate gold standard measure of the effectiveness of arch programming, which is an actual intensity PR. Rich like Reynoldson, where he is trying to get charity to get these 5x5 PRs, these tonnage PRs, and so on. The only reason we want to do that is because we know that stress always must go up. And if they're getting 5x5 PRs, they're getting 3x5 PRs, we know that the stress is going up without having to actually calculate the tonnage. It just makes it easy for us. But it's all in the service of getting an actual intensity PR, hopefully for a more advanced athlete, a single. But I'll tell you, for someone by older people, I never have them do singles, triples. Very, very elderly people, some young, some females, they really, some guys really struggle being able to put up a balls out legit limit attempt single. And they have a much better chance at doing that with a triple. But depending on who that athlete is, the gold standard is an absolute full tilt boogie intensity PR. So that's what we're measuring against all the time. And we're using those Reynolds rules that we favor intensity over volume, simplicity over complexity in economy over excess, knowing that the stress always has to go up to make programming decisions and chase that thing, that PR, without, you know, so we have to drive the stress up using those rules. And we do that with the MED thing, the MED changes, and we make the fewest changes possible as it's scientific. You know, we don't want to change a bunch of variables. If we can change one variable, we can actually test if that variable worked or not. If we do 12 variables, we can't really figure out what the heck worked or didn't work. What sabotaged us and what helped. So the fewer things we can change, the more data we actually get. So in that respect, it's also economical. And I think it's ethical and responsible. It's ethical because it puts our client at less risk. If we take a program that we know that works, LP, which is where all the MED programming starts. If we take a program that we know works and then make one change that we came at rationally using rational principles, we have the best chance of giving them the success they want in minimizing the likelihood of injury. So I think it's an ethical responsibility to program this way, actually. I think it goes beyond, oh, it makes good sense. I think it's our responsibility to do this. So over time, any given programming that we've made or built is going to fail. And it fails because the stress is wrong. It's either too much stress is accumulated, there's too much fatigue accumulated for the lifter and they can't exhibit their athletic potential or there's not enough stress and we can't disrupt homeostasis with it. So anytime we see a problem, we talked about the four steps, you see a problem, then it's a rep. They have a big grinder when you didn't expect it. A problem, we have to troubleshoot it. And it's going to be one of those things. Too much fatigue is present and they're not dissipating their fatigue or there's not been enough stress. That's pretty much it. And there are a couple of other things, we'll talk about it later. There's some form stuff and some other things that fall out of the outside of the scope of programming, really. But it's going to be stress related, either not enough or too darn much, duh. Any questions about this stuff so far? One student here asked if he had the steps for troubleshooting correct. So he had one, find the problem, two, troubleshoot, number three, figure out what you need to do, four, change the volume, frequency, et cetera. And five, wait and see what happens to the lifter after making those changes. Well, well, three, inventory our toolbox, select tool, four, figure out how to institute that. It could be volume, it could be frequency, it could be weight on the bar, it could be exercise selection. Figure out where we're going to insert that in the program. It's very easy to figure out where to insert it if it's somebody in LP. It's not so easy to figure out where to insert it if they have a 16-week block coming up on a big meet. And the last thing is we have to devise a way to figure out if it worked, but to watch. And our gold standard is the intensity, PR. But sometimes if you're in a big, long block, maybe you can't wait that long. So we'll talk about that here in a minute too. So we'll see some problems. And last week, we talked about a guy in the LP. I think we had Cooper and Cooter. The one guy was a big, strong guy. He wasn't going to stress. And the other guy probably was a little bit underweight, maybe, or maybe not as talented. He was not able to recover. And so we've already talked about that, but I wanted to kind of organize it a little better and not just put it in case studies. We'll talk about troubleshooting recovery issues first. We've already talked about what Friday in LP looks like when you see recovery issues. Somebody misses. Well, our big, strong guy missed, and so did our other guy. Well, we waited to see what would happen on Monday before we drew an ultimate conclusion about what happened. Our big, strong guy missed on Monday too. But our other guy didn't miss. Our other guy didn't miss. So that let us know that when he had some more recovery, he was able to forge ahead. So in that instance, we were able to just run a little test and figure out. But later on, we can't do that. So if you have a guy in a block, let's talk about blocks. Block periodization typically has an accumulation, a transmutation, and a realization phase. The accumulation phase might be a hypertrophy phase, maybe. People traditionally talked about the accumulation phase as a phase during which you accumulate stress or you accumulate work capacity. But I think the actual mechanism whereby the thing works is you're doing, you're putting on muscle mass. It's typically lower intensity, but higher volume because there's an inverse relationship. I mean, that's what it's got to be. And then the transmutation phase is when the hypertrophy stuff is over, that high volume stuff is over, but we have to reacclimate the athlete to move in heavier weights for lower reps. So we drive the intensity up and start peeling the volume off. One might say you're transmuting their work capacity into force production. But I think that's some sort of mystical thinking. I think we're just reacclimating them to moving higher intensity loads. Instead of moving 78% five by five squats, they're going to be moving 92% three by fives or something like that or 95% three by threes, things like that, transmutation. And then realization is when you start to let the fatigue dissipate and give the athlete an ability, the opportunity to realize the improvements that they've accumulated throughout the block. If you got on the interwebs and you look up blocks, you're going to see 8, 10, 11, 12, 16 weeks. But I think the block idea works even when we're thinking small. An intermediate on a four day split. He has an accumulation phase Monday at five by five. The transmutation is not that big of a deal for him. But then he has a realization of a five rep max or a three rep max or something like that on Thursday. So I think the block idea still holds for the early intermediate. We don't have to worry about transmutation so much because the weight's not so heavy that 20% means 100 pounds. So we want to troubleshoot these problems as they come up. We don't want to wait for realization phase to see there's a problem. So in accumulation phase, what do failures look like? Let me rephrase that. In accumulation phase, we should never have a failure. Five by five. Let's say a guy's an eight week. He's in an eight week block we wrote for the guy. He's a late intermediate, mid late intermediate, something like that. And he's going to do five by five squats in a 76, 78% range. He better not fail that. If he does, he's probably got scurvy or something. He needs to get a MRI, CAT scan or something. But sometimes the accumulation phase can be weeks and weeks. If we have on a client that is in a accumulation phase that takes weeks, we should have seen quite a bit of work from this person. And we should be looking for their bar speed. We should have some expectations of what the bar speed looks like. And if they start struggling with their bar speed, you'll know that the fatigue is accumulating more rapidly than you wanted it to. Charity says, accumulation phase, it ain't heavy, it's just work. And when you watch them, that's what it should look like. And that looks different for different people. Charity trains a lady named Louise. And her work is so slow, you would think that she was going to fail every rep. And then for other people, they're very explosive and it doesn't look like that. But it should look like work and not heavy. So you'd be watching bar speed. If you see the bar speed slow down unexpectedly in week two of accumulation, you know that the stress is not going away. For our purposes of this conversation, we're going to assume that they've answered their three questions 100% every time. They're eating, they're sleeping, and the weight is good. Someone asked here if we would be managing tonnage at this point. You don't have to because we do MED. If I tell you, hey, man, we're going to do four by four this week. And you do that for a couple of weeks, and then you get a PR. And then the PR starts slowing down. And they start looking grindy. I can open the spread between the volume and the intensity work and add another set. And have you do five by four? Well, you have to open the intensity spread up a lot. To make that the same tonnage a lot. So you don't have to worry about it. Like, yeah, I'm going to peel the weight off about 3% or something like that, let's say. Just for an example, on volume day. But I'm going to add a set. That's a lot more tonnage. I don't even have to do the math. Feel free to do the math to make while you've got your training wheels on. Feel free to do the math for a while. And then you won't need to do it anymore. We'll talk more about math here in a minute. Now, hell, let's stop into it right now. So Wendler famously has his one-rep max calculator. You take 3.3% and you multiply it times however many reps you did today. And then you should be able to get 100% plus that percentage for a one-rep max. See if you get five reps at 100 pounds. And you multiply that times 3.333%. Well, that means you should be able to hit 16.7% more for a single, a heavy single. 0.03333, yeah, 3.3%. So, and you'll find that there are relationships between what people can hit for triples, two triples, what they can hit for three fives, what they can hit for five fives. And it varies, you know, you add a set of fives and it's worth about 3%. That 3% thing seems to be a pretty good rule of thumb. It seems to be a pretty good rule of thumb. So you can do the math for a little while and these things will start to jump out at you. If a guy has a five-by-five to do, five-by-fives are by definition sub-maximal. Now you can hit a maximum five-by-five, you know? I mean, you can do that, but they probably, they shouldn't be. They just shouldn't be. You shouldn't just gas a guy out when he's doing accumulation work, whether that's just day one of Texas Method or the first three weeks of a 12-week block. It shouldn't just be all out. So if you see the bar speed slowing down, they're just not, they got too much fatigue present. How the hell are they gonna finish their block if they're gassed in week three and they got 12 weeks? Or if they're utterly and completely gassed even on Monday evening and they gotta come back Thursday. It's gonna be tough. But we're just watching the bar speed and it's slowed down. It's slowing down. It's probably too much stress. It's probably too much stress. If you see them struggling with intensity during accumulation phase, it's a problem too. So a four-day split, I almost would have everybody in a four-day split at this point. You're gonna deadlift for two sets of five and then you're gonna squat five by five, maybe. It's a whole bunch of work that day. Quite a bit of work. Well, if they're struggling with the heavies, they shouldn't be struggling with the heavy. They should not be struggling with their intensity work in accumulation phase. They shouldn't be doing it. Let me simplify it. You're gonna squat a heavy, you're in accumulation phase of some block. You squat a heavy set of five. Heck, it's probably 10% under your heaviest five you've ever done. And then you pull for three by five at 72%. Well, if they're slow, if they're slow on their heavy squats, they're tired. I mean, they came into the session tired, duh, right? It's all bar speed here. Or if they start failing on back-offs. Sometimes they can come in on their intensity work during accumulation phase. I'll have them come in and squat three pretty heavy. Or this may be transmutation, actually. Squat three, pretty darn heavy. And then they got some two sets of three or three sets of three after that for some back-offs. And they start, you see them fade on those. They're not even close to PRs. I mean, they're heavy, right? But they're not maximum effort things here. I mean, fatigue's clearly present. There's too much stress. Or too much fatigue. Maybe it's enough stress, but they haven't had an opportunity to recover enough. In the realization phase, well, they're actually getting PRs. It's gonna be missed reps, right? But how do you know it's not, how do you know it's not recovery? Well, if I have somebody that's not going to a meet and most people aren't going to a meet, at any given time, most people aren't going to a meet. So in the realization phase, I still have them go get their PRs on a four-day split. They get a squat PR this day, they get a bench press that other one, right? And I still have them have a secondary movement each day or maybe a couple. And if they're, and I keep those fairly heavy, and if they're struggling on those, I know that it was recovery that was the problem. So I will place tests in the programming to help me sniff out problems. I like to put in second slots on a single day. All right, Chris, you're gonna squat three by three, pretty heavy. You're gonna deadlift three by five, then I'm gonna have you squat four by two pause squats. Well, pause squats aren't gonna be that heavy. Not gonna be that heavy. I'll have him, I will have some pause squat history for this man and I can watch and see how he does with those pause squats to get an idea of how his recovery is going and how the fatigue is going. And I can, I want him to get his heavy work done. And so a more advanced person, if I can dial the stress up or down with that second movement of the day, that second squat movement of the day, I sure do like that. It's an awfully good place to put it. I like to put the back offs in there to see. I've got a guy, my training partner here on Tuesday, his old friend of mine, I've got him doing on his intensity day. He's actually on a four week program right now. I've got him building a little four week block. And on his intensity day for deadlift, I have him pull triples at a weight that I think is gonna feel the same to him, right? He pulls a five rep, it's deadlift, it's PDH, pretty damn heavy. And then I want his triples to feel the same. And if they're slower, then I know the stress is starting to gang up on him. I know that Rich is saying, how do you know what the weight's gonna be? The way you know what the weight is gonna be is because you've only made one change at a time. You've only made one at a time. So by the time you've got a guy in a four week block, you've made a lot of changes and you've seen him do a lot of stuff. And we only add one thing in that he's never done before or in a way that you've never had him do it before at a time. We rarely have somebody do something that's an unknown. I love laying the traps, putting the tests in there. Guys, you don't understand how crafty and awesome the tests are. The second slot in a day, it's fantastic. Novelists and early intermediates can't do it, but if you've got somebody that's on a four week program or beyond that, second slots in a day are great for that back off for somebody that is an early intermediate, just like you talked about there, Rich, those are great ways to test and see how they're doing. The other thing is communication. You know, if you've got somebody that you can trust, and by the way, you can't trust them until they've done it a year. They just don't know. They're not liars, they're not bad people. They don't know. They need to be telling you how their last warmups are. You know, if your last warmup feels like the first of your work sets, you know, if you guys have been doing this for a long time, you know, every now and then you'll get under one and you do that last warmup, you're like, oh no. The novice always says that. The early intermediate always says that. We've got some guys been doing this for three and a half years and you've seen him train with a fever and he says, boy, that last warmup was a bear. That means something. He's not recovered. He's not recovered. Communicate with these people. Does it feel too heavy? Like the other day I squatted 315, which should not be heavy. It crushed my guts out. I have no idea what is wrong. But my coach would need to know that. We also need to be paying attention to their psychology too. Are they starting to hate training? Are they getting depressed? Are they skipping accessories that they never would have skipped before? They bagging it early? Yeah, I didn't do my dips today. But it's a guy that does his dips. Or they miss some sessions and they are not a guy that misses sessions. They're probably, their fatigue is probably up there. Need to watch those things. We got to talk to them and we got to ask questions and we've got to look at their behavior too. Sometimes they don't know. Yeah, sometimes they don't even know. They just know, like, I don't feel like doing it. Well, if they were fresh, they'd feel 4% more like doing it, you know? One coach here described how recently in training he had hit a PR bench and then was supposed to do some relatively light deadlifts after that. And after racking a really tough PR on the bench and then doing four reps on his first deadlift set, he just bagged it and just felt like he was too fatigued to keep lifting without potentially hurting something. Again, the guy in L.P. is always gonna say that. But Fred's got some experience and he's pulled PRs and knows that that feels worse than any PR he's ever pulled. And, you know, it may be time to bag that one. I don't wanna give a client permission to do that but my long-term clients who I trust and I know are hardy people and the vigorous trainers, you know, I'll tell them, you know, you have my permission to peel 5% to 8% off of these at any given time. And I give that permission to certain clients but not all of them. But the main signs really are gonna be, you know, bar speed, bar speed, bar speed, missed reps, of course. Leaving out work, leaving out work. They're peeling off. They're not doing their dips. They're not doing their stuff, you know. They're not doing their accessory work. And then of course you need to be asking them too. You need to be asking them. Another student mentioned here that his intuitive response to taking a lifter that's missing reps and his bar speed is slowing down significantly is to decrease the intensity and try to ramp it back up over the next couple of weeks to see if he can get the lifter back on track. So he asked what Scott's thought process would be in getting a lifter back on track if you're starting to observe slow bar speeds, maybe even missed reps. And the lifter is also answering yes to all of the three questions that he's doing all the things he needs to do on the recovery side. Well, it depends. But, you know, tonnage is our general measure, right? Right. So we know we need the tonnage to go down and give them an opportunity to recover. And, you know, you can make tonnage go down all kinds of ways. Frequency, sets and reps, wait on the bar. Older people, I tend to try to make sets and reps go down. Very, very, very strong people. I might peel a set off and make the weight go down quite a bit. If I have a very, very strong guy that has three or four squat slots a week, right? Cause I like to have them squat twice. Remember? I might get rid of those second squats. I might pull him down to two slots a week from three or from four. It just depends. The older and more female they are, the more likely I am to leave the weight high and leave the frequency alone. So I would pull probably sets and reps off. The younger and stronger and more male they are, the more likely I am to reduce the frequency for a moment and pull a little weight off. And we should have gotten, now we do the MED thing, right? Now we make notes on people. Here, let me see. Here are my programming notes for my clients. Everybody has at least one note card. Some have a lot. We will have learned something about deloading these people at the end of LP. We did something with their Wednesday at the end of LP. What worked? What didn't work? That's a step five or a little troubleshooting thing. What worked? Right? Oh, I peeled off 20% and I took him down to two by five and it worked for three weeks. Okay, that's a win. I peeled 8% off and left him at three by five. It worked. All right, that's a win. We're doing MED stuff. We're paying attention all the time to everything. And we're building not just that we have just a toolbox where we know we can change sets of reps, the weights on the bar, the frequency of the exercise selection, we also know what kind of flavors of things that we've been doing for each of these people. And you get to know them and you get to know them. And then you start to build these sort of client avatars, right? Okay, here's a really good approach for paramount apostle ladies. Here's a really good approach for my college freshmen, freshman guys, you know, I said freshmen's, I hate that. My college freshmen, so you start to, after you make enough of those notes, you'll see, you know, there aren't any snowflakes, there aren't really, you'll start to see that. I have a 20, I trained a 26 year old guy for quite a while who, his LP ended at 140 pounds, just wanted a squat. Five foot 10, two 10, body weight, 140 pound squat. Programming like I would an elderly lady. Right, so you start to kind of figure out what to do with these deloads based on athletic ability and so on, you know. So there's a continuum. There are some people that talk about exercise sensitivity. I don't really like this talk because I think it's kind of, I think the nomenclature's bad, but young, virile people are very sensitive to training. They do a little training and they get a whole lot stronger. Young people, young, very virile people, older, more febrile people require an enormous amount of training to get just a little bit of a response. They're very, they're very immune to training and there's a whole continuum between those two kinds of people and our approaches will have to fall somewhere on the continuum. But you gotta, you gotta peg that person. You gotta figure out where are they on the continuum? Is this person quite, you know, they have robust responses to training or not? And then once you kind of pin them down somewhere on that continuum, then you can start making more and more informed choices. That's another reason why we have to start with LP. You gotta start somewhere so you can figure out who the heck you're dealing with. And you know, people, I'll get a new client and they'll bring in their book. Well, let me bring, I'll bring in my training log. Guys, I'm not gonna say it's no help, but you know, typically what they've been doing is just absurd. It's not pinned to any objective measures. They're just like doing stuff in space and then praying for PRs at some point and they get them, you know. Everybody, if you do a bunch of work and things just kind of generally get heavier, you'll get stronger, but it doesn't necessarily tell me about what I need to do next when I look at some 16-week template that they did that they pulled off the internet and I don't know. So we talked about, we've talked about insufficient recovery, how we would detect that. We talked about that. We're trying to troubleshoot what the heck is going on. Man, we've talked about that. And the signs really are typically gonna be bar speed. So you gotta have a keen eye. You gotta be paying attention to these people's reps. And you can't just sell them templates because you can't see their bar speed. You don't know what they're doing. We're looking for missed reps in certain arenas. You're looking to see if they're leaving out work that they normally wouldn't leave out and they're not doing their dips. And we were communicating with the people and none of those four things, those signs can be neglected. But the other reason people might screw up is the stress has not been sufficient in their programming. Stress has not disrupted homeostasis in order to get them to recover and show the adaptation we wanted them to show. And the main reason, the main way you're gonna see that, unfortunately, is late in the block. Even if it's Texas method, it's gonna be Thursday before, you know, is they're gonna miss PRs. When I add the second squat slot in a given day, like let's say I have a guy squat five by five, no. I wouldn't have him to have a second slot squat on a 25 rep day. He's gonna squat two triples at, I don't know, 375. And then he pulls something pretty heavy for some volume. And then I might have him do pause squats. I love to have him do pause squats for that second deal. Having to do pause squats like four doubles at probably not too terribly heavy. 295, because this is the first time I've ever had him do it. This is the first time I've ever had him do it. It's just additional stress. It's probably gonna help. The first squats he did in the day, fairly heavy, that got him on the ropes a little bit, that'll make these squats that are just almost a hundred pounds lighter. Some pretty efficient, pretty effective stress. But then the next time they do it, you're gonna add quite a bit of weight. You're gonna add 10 pounds, 15 pounds or whatever on those pause squats or something like that. And if you just don't see any of those accessories slowing down, you don't see the heavy, there's not enough stress. Yeah, and then they'll actually start struggling. They'll start to detrain and then they'll struggle in the subsequent weeks. If it's a long block and it's not heavy enough in their first weeks, they'll struggle two or three weeks later because they've detrained. It's not a great situation to be in. But if you're doing the MED thing, the stress always should have been going up. The insufficient stress problem should be avoided. You're almost never taking away. You're almost always adding with the MED thing. So we're looking for those missing those intensity PRs. It's people in those long, long blocks. They'll really struggle on like trips and two by threes and three by five and transmutation. Those should be submaximal, but they'll have some earring in difficult ones there in that transmutation phase. And I would say that somebody that's in like a two week Texas method sort of variant, you should probably program that so that there are some like two by three, three by five tests mid phase there so you can see it. So I will often in transmutation for their heavy work and in their PR weeks, even program those as AMRAPs. Maybe I expect a guy to get four or five by five. I'll write in four or five for an AMRAP. If he gets a triple, it's not demoralizing for him because he didn't get what I programmed, but I darn sure learn something. And then if he gets six or seven, I know something too. So I really like to put AMRAPs in wherever I can on heavy work to give them an opportunity to sort of self-regulate and to figure out where the stress, how the stress levels are. In transmutation phase, if I tell a guy on his heavy day that he's gonna get, or I think he's gonna get a triple or something like that or two triples and I have him, I might even bump it to five. Let's see if he can get them. But I'll put tests in there just to see where they're at. But most of the time, it's not gonna be insufficient stress, except when you got a guy in a week-long program who's getting PRs every week, and then you find out he needs a little more stress, you'll add more work in there. But he's only got four training sessions in the week. And then you add a little more in there. Well, the week, he can only do so much work in a week before he cannot recover. So you have to lengthen his cycle, his training cycle, you have to lengthen it. Instead of getting PRs once a week, you're gonna have to move him to every 10 days, every 14. I just moved him to 14. Now, the stress in a given week for him in the beginning, when he moves from one week to two weeks, will be less than it was. His tonnage for the week at the end of his Texas Method period, let's say it was 100,000 pounds, I don't know, big strong dude, 100,000 pounds. Well, when I move him to a two-week program, his tonnage is gonna go down for a week. Maybe a lot, it might go down 30%, but he's gonna get 140,000 pounds of tonnage over the course of two weeks now. So they're really not apples and apples. But when you move a guy from an eight-week program to a 12-week program, you are in the danger of potentially having that person detrain because the stress, you take the stress down too much early in the new 12-week cycle. That's about the only time I see it when they get insufficient stress. Are in those periods right after you determine when you need to lengthen their cycle. There are things that will confound our efforts that we have to be paying attention to. Form problems will confound our efforts. If somebody misses reps or grinds, but their squats are on their toes, their deadlift, they're not setting their back and they're failing to lock out reps and stuff, that's not programming. It's, yeah, it's form. So the form has to be right. The form has to be right. And that's not programming related. So it's time to unload a little bit, fix that form. By the way, you can put their squat back in LP and have them box squat and work on that and everything else is periodized over 72 weeks if you want, right? You can move one lift back to the kindergarten if you want to, you don't have to move it all back but fix that form because you can, one of the reasons why we had to be sticklers for form is because it's the only way we can be consistent. If the depth isn't the same every time, we never know what the hell it was they did. If the bar's in different places on their back, we never know what it was they did. Of course the mechanics have to be right too so they can do max effort against the floor and against the bar, but the form has to be right. So we, bar speed is wrong. If the bar speed's all spooky because of the form then that's not programming, clearly. And we've talked at length about the three questions. They gotta be eating and all that, of course. Toughness too, you have to have run them through LP in such a way that they understand what it is like to move max effort work. I don't want to grind the person to powder despite what all the people who hate me and the internet say. But I want to, when the weight is light and the stakes are low, I want to put them under loads that they don't think they can complete and I want to coach them through that and I want to show them how to grind against a heavy deadlift. I don't want to break their spine. I don't want to break their will. I want to show them what they're capable of. And if they cannot grind, then you cannot program for them. If they never show you what an RPE 10 is, you'll never know what an eight is. If they never show you what a 100% is, you can never program 77% for them. They have to demonstrate that they can do that. They also have to demonstrate that they want it. And I'll tell you right now, guys, I do not want a squat PR. I do not have it in me. I don't fucking want it. I'm impossible to program the squat for right now. I am not interested in bending over and touching my ribs on my femur, crapping my pants and doing six by fives and all that stuff and doing it for 18 weeks to get a squat PR. Not interested. Well, I'm impossible to program for in that respect. They have to want it. It's you got to be paying, I mean, you guys know, I mean, we're dealing with customers here and you've got to pay attention to that because if they don't want it and they don't know how to grind, you can't do a thing for them. There's one other thing that we'll see in these PR attempts that it's programming adjacent. It's actually programming, but it's a little, it's more than just stress and it's more than just recovery management. When you test a PR, you're not testing the rep, you're testing the weakness, right? So if you have a hard time locking out your bench press, that's the part, you don't care about the first four inches off your chest. Boom, you throw it off your chest. You're worried about that last chunk. That's the problem you have. Or if you're slow off the floor, you know, some guys, you know, a deadlift to just be JB welded down and it's inexplicable. But if they can get it, if they can get it two inches off the ground, they can lock it out. There's some guys like that. There's some guys, if they can get it, oh, if they can get it to their kneecap, they can lock it out. So also in the programming, when we see these PR attempts, we have to start identifying specific weaknesses in these various lifts and then start programming to remediate those things. That's not stress management. That's not recovery management. That's tailoring the accessory work and the supplement work to the specific deficiencies of the lifter. And I'm not in having somebody do a bunch of face pulls and a bunch of wackadoo shit. My, we're gonna use the stress recovery adaptation principle to pick the supplements that we're gonna use to remediate this stuff. I want the remedial work to look as much like the main lift as possible. So I'm gonna have them do a lot of truncated range of motion work that's identical, but you get the point. We're having trouble locking out the press. That guy's gonna do a whole lot of dips. He's gonna do a whole lot of LTEs. He's gonna do a lot of slingshot bench presses for his press lockout or he's gonna do a lot of board presses for his press lockout. He's gonna do actual press lockouts where he pushes, where he racket an inch over his hair and he just does that last four inches of the press real heavy. So that's the other thing that we need to be looking for in these failures. Are they failing because of an inherent weakness in a particular lift for a particular client? All right, well that wraps up another MED episode with Scott. As always, I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you learned something from it that you can apply to your own programming. If you have any more questions about this stuff that wasn't covered in the MED episodes, you can email Matt and Scott at questions at barbell-logic.com and they will answer those questions on a future Thursday Q&A episode. In the meantime, go to iTunes and leave us a review, let us know what you think about what we're doing here at Barbell Logic and if you haven't already, go to barbell-logic.com and sign up for the Friday 5 newsletter because there is a lot of interesting content there about programming, about nutrition, about the mental side of lifting that will be sure to increase your knowledge and your understanding of strength training and everything that it encompasses. All right guys, we will see you in a few days.