 Welcome to Barbell Logic, Rewind. Welcome to the Barbell Logic podcast. I'm Scott Hamburg, and of course, you have Matt Reynolds with us today. We've been talking a lot about managing stress and training, but all of those episodes in the MED Toolbox episodes and the two-part deal we did on stress recovery adaptation, that's about the good stress. That's about the stress we want that we recover from that makes us stronger. This show, we're going to talk about the non-productive stress, the stresses that occur in our lives that affect our training. Well, that affect us and then that ultimately trickles down and affects our training. That's the stuff that we could all do without. We're going to talk about how we might train around that, and maybe we'll even get into how to deal with it just in general. This came from an email you got, Matt. I just looked, I didn't get this email. I don't know how much you want to say about the guy that's sending in. Yeah. So Jacob, who's developed a friendship, good guy, young, middle-aged guy, he's got a family, kids. He's actually a pastor of a church. And so I think most people know this about me. I was raised as a preacher's kid. And so there's a tremendous amount of unplanned, unproductive stress that hits people who are in that sort of ministry field or working with other people. Because you just never know when somebody's going to get sick, somebody's going to have a heart attack, somebody has a baby. And this guy is completely dedicated to strength training. He understands the value that it makes in his life and what it does for him as a husband and a dad and a pastor and a leader and all those sorts of things. But he keeps coming up with this, you know, I never know. And then I get a phone call at one o'clock in the morning and I've got to go be at a hospital and sit with somebody's mom or somebody's had a new baby or somebody, you know, just got diagnosed with cancer or whatever those things are. And I'm scheduled to squat and deadlift the next day. And I think everything's going to be fine. Or I even talked to my coach and say, hey, it looks like the next three weeks we can ramp up the loading on the block. The guy is out of novice progression. And, you know, he said, hey, I can see you ahead on the calendar and it looks like I can train hard for the next three to four weeks. And then you just get these random things that occur. And he's a good example to use because a guy like a pastor or a guy in that sort of situation of a police officer, a fireman, you just don't ever know when the stress when the, you know, the craft's going to hit the fan. Those are great guys to use as an example and probably deal with that more than the rest of us do, although we all deal with it. So the question is, how do you deal with it when it hits? And when the stress is nuts on a Tuesday and you're scheduled on Wednesday to squat and deadlift heavy, how do you handle those things? Those sort of unproductive stress days or nights or even things like, you know, we've mentioned things like, you know, having marital stress or strife that you don't expect or your kids' custom sort of stress or job stress that you didn't know was coming. How does that affect your training? And then how much do you let it affect your training versus how much do you just sort of dig in deep and do the best you can? And I think there's probably different answers for both different people and also different answers for different, how far along the novice intermediate advanced sort of spectrum you are makes a big difference as well. I don't know if there's kinds of stress, but it happens in two ways. One of them is Tuesday was awful, right? And then there's also just put mom in the nursing home and dad's sick too. In the next 18 months, two years, five years are gonna be awful, right? And there's kind of two different approaches that you would have to take. So let's talk about the short-term one first. Hey, got an offender bender today, had to stand on the side of the road for an hour and a half talking to the cops and watching the fireman sweep the glass up and blah, blah, blah, get towed. Tuesday sucked. Yep. I don't know that it matters too much about whether you're at LPE or if you're a more advanced athlete at that point. Tuesday night training's not gonna be any good. You should probably go ahead and do it. The time that you spend with a heavy borrow on your back, which might only be 17 seconds per set, you're probably not gonna be thinking about the car wreck for that 17 seconds. There's mindful meditation thing that happens when the weight's heavy, you know? So you say that you train to de-stress and it doesn't do that for me, partly at all. But for that time when you're in the gym and focused on that, at least you'll be able to leave that stuff behind for that time. But you're probably not gonna be able to move as much weight as you were scheduled to if you're a person in LPE. Yeah, so I don't disagree with you. When I say I train to de-stress, I'm really actually talking about long-term stress often. So I've noticed if I'm in a period of time right now as I've talked about where my dad is still in hospice and still just in his decline and just crazy sort of long periods of business stress that occur. And so training helps me de-stress in those sort of long times of heightened stress. However, I have noticed in my own life when I have a specific, very high period of stress for a day or two that Tuesday is awful, that Tuesday night is awful, whatever it is, I will often, regardless of whether it's me or one of my clients, I will sometimes push the day back, push the workout back 24 hours, especially if the stress has caused a tremendous decrease in the amount of sleep or rest that I've received. Man, if I don't get my sleep in, if I get two hours of sleep, I mean, I can't do anything. And so I often encourage my clients and I do the same. I look at entire training weeks often. If I'm scheduled to train on Wednesday and I don't and I train on Thursday like it's a failure, it's not a failure. If I'm scheduled to train three times that week and I train three times that week and it was supposed to be Monday, Wednesday, Friday and instead it's Monday, Thursday, Saturday, then I don't think you lose anything. So I think if that's a possibility, I think that's a perfectly fine way to handle it. If the stress is tremendous. Now, the gamble that you take is if Tuesday is really crappy and so you push your training, you're like, I can't train Tuesday night or I can't train Wednesday morning. So I'm gonna take 24 hours off and just push it back. Wednesday might also be crappy, just as crappy or worse. And so that's the danger there and pushing it back 24 hours is then that one day of high stress turns into two days or three days or four days of high stress and now you didn't train. And so that's why I look at it as a week. I've done the same with clients that are firemen, police, doctors, nurses who work these really strange schedules, right, that they don't ever know and they're 48 hours on and 72 hours off and sometimes they get called in. Could you do a job like that? No, no. But I mean, it's, you know, again, it's one of those deals where I think that it would kill me. Over time, I don't think almost nobody talks about it, right? Like it's been one of those things where often the report back is, well, like you're just not doing the program, find a better way and like, well, but you can't because that's your job. And so you got to figure out how to still train. And so the answer is, is that you train in those periods when I have somebody that's got one of those really weird weekly schedules and they don't work Monday through Friday for 40 or 45 hours a week, then we just say, look, here's the training that you need to get done this week. I'm gonna set you up on a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday schedule. But if it doesn't occur on those days, it doesn't matter to me as long as all of this work actually gets done in the period of the week. I'm not a big fan of combining workouts, especially if you're on a four-day split. I do see that sometimes. We'll be like, I just fell behind. And so I did all of Wednesday and all of Thursday's workouts on Friday. Like, well, that's a lot of work. And so everything suffers. So I would rather push it back 24 hours first. And then you make no modifications to the program. And if you push it back 24 hours, if we do it your way, which I also think is perfectly acceptable, which is you just get in there and do it anyway, then I think you have to look at, okay, well, I may need to make some modifications to the workout to reduce stress a little bit. If it's late in LP, they probably can't go out there and just do it anyway. That's what they're gonna do, some max effort set of five for their last set of squats. And they probably can't do it. And when I say that, for me, sometimes the pressure I put on myself to train can become an additional stress. Oh, yeah. And I don't want the fact that I need to train to weigh on me. Yeah, that's really, you gotta walk a fine line there. You gotta be pretty introspective. You know, I say, well, am I using that as an excuse to screw up, right? You know, am I using the stress in my life as an excuse to screw up? And am I using the fact that training itself is stressful as an excuse to screw up? And, you know, during that business sale, kind of about a first third of the way through that, sale of my business last fall, man, my training just wasn't going very well. And I was too damn stupid to know it was all these arguments about, you know, the biggest deal of my life that was going on during the day that were affecting the training. Then the fact that the training wasn't going well was making my life worse too. Yeah, so for me at that point, just kind of being kind to myself and say, well, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna move something reasonably heavy around a couple of times a week or when I can, was I think the best option for me. I wasn't gonna make any progress after July of 2018. What gonna happen? Yeah, so let's split that up a little bit. So that time period, if we're talking about this acute level of like one day or two days of stress, you can often just either push back the workout 24 hours. If you think that that one or two days of stress is going to end at one or two days. Right. And if you think it's gonna last for three or four or the better part of a week, then you're gonna have to modify the programming a little bit to either do less volume or do less intensity. I mean, look, your body doesn't really understand the difference in stress. It doesn't know what is productive stress and non-productive stress. What we're doing when we go in the weight room is we're actually stressing our bodies. And the goal there is to make that stress almost entirely physical so that you get this physical adaptive response to it. But your body sort of has these responses that it gives to stress in general. And so whether that is a really hard set of squats or whether that was a fight with your wife last night, you've got these things that occur in your body systemically, it doesn't really understand the difference. So while the adaptation will be specific. The fight with the wife is worse than a heavy set of squats. Of course it is. Way worse. As a matter of fact, it's the worst, right? Especially if you actually have a really good relationship with your wife. If you have a bad relationship with your wife, maybe you're just used to fighting with your wife, right? I know for both you and I, we don't fight with our wives very often. And so maybe we should LP that and just get more and more acclimated. So that the fights don't affect us as much. They could get worse and worse. Okay, let's use a slightly different example. As business owners, I have had to have in the last decade of my life as a business owner more awkward and comfortable conversations. If you're not a business owner, there's no way you have awkward conversations as often as we do. Unless you're a pastor or something in that field as well, right? Yeah, you gotta come out and tell somebody that their kid just got killed in a car accident. That's certainly one of those as well. But here's what I found. Really awkward, you know, uncomfortable conversations, crucial conversations don't affect me as negatively now as they did 10 years ago. Because I've sort of LP'd that. I just have to have those more often. You have a callous on your empathy. Well, I mean. No. Right. I've just had to learn how to deal with that sort of unproductive stress. If I have to, you know, if we have to fire an employee or we just have some sort of like business drama, I just, or you just have to have whatever the awkward conversation that would just wreck you. By the way, the other thing that's done for me is it's made it so that I am constantly pushing to deal with it as quickly as possible. Because what really wrecks me is the cancer of the anxiety of the fallout of that conversation. So I would rather just have the conversation. It's never as bad as the anxiety of what is to come. Yeah, that was the worst part about that business. I couldn't tell my employees until after I think it was December 14th. So I had all this stuff going on that I knew that we were going to have to have one of these difficult conversations and it was just hanging out there and I couldn't kill it. And it was just there every day. Terrible. Yeah. So that's kind of how we handle the acute stuff. And by the way, I would say I would default to for the acute stuff that occurs just one day. It's a bad conversation or a fight with your wife or the bad Tuesday. If you were a novice, I would try to get in and still get your work done because that's what you're doing in LP as well as you can. If you don't, you're going to have to repeat that session. You understand what I'm saying? Like you're on a linear progression. If you're on a linear progression where you're supposed to be doing three sets of five and increasing five pounds, that's why I would default to a push it back 24 hours so that you can still increase five pounds and do your three sets of five as a novice. Whereas if I'm an intermediate or advanced, I would default probably more to making actual individual programming changes on that day to reduce the stress of the actual workout a little bit by either decreasing the intensity or decreasing the volume so that the total stress on my body is not as much as it was planned to be because there's more stress on my body having nothing to do with the weight training that I'm going to have to deal with. Does that make sense? Yeah, for the intermediate, that's pretty easy to do. Normally just means you scrub the accessories. Yeah, that's the first place I lose. The first thing I'm going to do is lose accessories. If you're going to squat and deadlift and then you've got some stuff coming after that, whatever the heck that may be, don't do that stuff. Don't do that. And then you put all your equipment back up, go in the house, it's the end of it. So that's acute. Let's talk about that long term. And actually, this is a good example we're talking about you. That process of selling your business was about a three month process. Is that right? That's right. In that ballpark? Oh God, it was probably more like closer to four. But yeah. So you've got this long period of heightened stress. I mean, here's the I'm sorry part. If you're a novice going through LP, it's just not going to work very well for you. No, you still should do it. I mean, it's still it's, I'm not going to tell you to just not train during that time period, but recognize that it will end faster. Yeah, it's a challenge, right? Like if you're underweight, your LP is going to end faster. If you're older, it's going to end faster. If you have a terribly stressful job, it's going to end faster. If you work nights, it's going to end faster. That all of these things are just challenges to the organism and they all serve to shorten LP. That's why, you know, it's perfect when it's an 18 year old who doesn't cook. It doesn't have a job, doesn't have to cook for themselves. That's why they go the farthest, you know. That's right. It's on the college meal plan. He's going to eat like nine chicken breasts every lunch. Speaking of stress, a friend and client Kirk, if you guys have watched any. Tall Kirk, tall Kirk. Ninth foot tall Kirk. Yeah. Why isn't Kirk in the NBA right now? Let's talk about that. Well, he has trouble with just, you know, walking and stuff. But do you know that there's an actual, I think it's 20% one in five of all guys as tall as Kirk in Kirk's age demographic right now in the United States are in the NBA, 20% of them. He has a one in five shot. Right. Yeah, he didn't make the cut. Yeah, he didn't make the cut. I'm going to guess that Kirk would just say the NBA is degenerate and he doesn't want to participate. And I think he's probably right. If you guys watch any of the meets that are on live streamed on YouTube, Kirk, he's super tall. Like he's in danger of breaking the lights out when he does the overhead press. I mean, I'm not even kidding. Like they have to move on a 10 foot ceiling. They have to move the platform over so he doesn't hit the light fixtures. He's a paramedic. So we've had a really difficult time, you know, getting him as strong as he could be because of his schedule. And even when we work around the schedule because he works these weird, you know, 24s and 48s and I don't even know what it all is. It doesn't seem to have any sort of real pattern that I can discern. He might have one session where he has a couple of people die on him. And it's too hard. But back to the meal plan thing, he's also in the Naval Reserves and he's getting ready to be a station in Guantanamo for nine months. He's gonna have regular sleep in cafeteria food and nothing to do but train. So Kirk come Christmas is gonna be a different person because all of that other stress is gonna be gone. Sure. So excited for him. Yeah, and the interesting is what we should be doing in basic training. Once you're out of basic training, you're sort of an officer in the armed forces. You often can make the choice to train my face off and eat my face off and get really, really strong. And when these 18 year old kids are in basic, they don't do that with them. They run their asses off at 145. They run them into the ground. You could just be creating monsters but another story for another day. So for you when you're selling your business over the course of four months or when you know you've got a long period of high stress, that's when you have to make adjustments to programming. You have to. And as a novice, as an LP, if you're an LP, it may be that adjustment is you do a two-day LP instead of a three-day LP. Love that. So that's probably the easiest change to make an LP. That would most likely lengthen the LP, the how long you could continue to make linear progression. And by the way, the nice thing about linear progression is it's not very stressful as far as the programming itself. Like you know what you're doing on the next session, like you never really have to worry too much about, oh, I've got to hit this huge thing or what am I going to do? Or it's like, look, it's just, it's the programming you figure out in the first two days, right? It's just, that's the deal. But when you are out of LP and you're intermediate and the further down that spectrum you are closer to advanced, I think if our listeners get nothing else out of this podcast, here's what I found over the past 20 years. When you're in periods of very high stress for a long time, you got to go in the gym and have fun. Dude, you've got to enjoy it. And that's the thing that I saw with you that you struggle with some in the beginning and you were able to sort of figure out halfway through that, hey, I can't go in and do things that I don't like in the gym while I'm also dealing with this enormous life stress. And that means that it's okay to go in the gym. If you've gone through LP, if you're not a novice anymore, if you're at least an intermediate, it's okay to have periods of time where you go in the gym and exercise and not train. It's okay. Yeah, and it's not that. Because we need it. It's not that the intermediate has earned that right. It's that the novice can actually, even though they're under a great deal of stress they can probably still go in the gym and actually do themselves some good. But if I'm at the point where I have to pull three sets of five deadlifts at four, 10, which is heavy for me, had to fire three people. Yeah, that's probably not going to happen. We all have those time periods where we don't want to train. Like we just feel like I feel achy or cold or like I'm just busy or stressed or whatever. And I don't really want to go to the gym and train. But if you're dreading, like it feels and sounds like torment to go to the gym. Go in most of my experiences that 90% of the time that I don't want to go train and I go train and I start warming up, I start to enjoy the training. But 10% of the time I go in the gym and I hate it worse and worse and worse. And that's the time when either A, I don't train or B, I completely scrap the workout and I just go and have fun and just develop the habit. And for me, because I'm old and I used to be really strong and now I'm just decently strong. If I chase a number, then I put additional stress on myself. And so for me, that's where I've started to fall to. That might be one of those days where I do lighter weight, higher volume, for lack of a better term, get that old school Arnold Schwarzenegger pump going, feel better and walk out of the gym and go, like, okay, I did something. I got a good pump. I got my blood pumping. You know, I get some of that dopamine, some of that dorphin rush and I feel better. And it helps. That's what I mean when I say it helps me get rid of stress and I think that's perfectly okay to do that in certain periods of time. I had several sessions during that sale period where I'd unrack about the third warmup. That feels like the first or the heaviest five I've ever done. Yeah, yep. And again, I've done enough and that I've kind of calibrated and I know what's hard and what's not. And a guy in LP doesn't, sorry. But when I have one of those days, it's awful. But so we've already said, if you're in LP putting off your training for 24 hours, might not be a bad idea. If you're gonna have some chronic stress going on, two day a week in LP is a mighty fine idea. And then if you're not in LP, scrubbing, throwing out your accessories, that's always a quick and easy way to get rid of a little of that stress. You know, one of the things about stress too, by the way, is when you're under stress, you're normally more pinched for time too. Sure. So if you scrub those accessories, that's a big help. And then for the intermediates, I have a lot of luck. I have a lot of good luck with the one lift a day. If they're gonna have chronic stress, I have a lot of good luck with that. I even have people that get PRs, particularly on the deadlift on one lift a day. So one lift a day, I mean, that's exactly what it sounds like, right? You're gonna train four days a week. You're gonna squat one day and that's all you're gonna do. You're gonna bench press one day. That's the only thing you're gonna do. You're gonna deadlift one day and that's it. And then you're gonna press one day and that's it. So four days a week, you're gonna go in and do no more than maybe three work sets and split. That's it. That's right. Perfectly fine. Perfectly fine. It'll help prevent you from detraining. Like I said, for the deadlift, I often see guys that get PRs there for reps. And then the flip side of this is, is if you're in a time of chronic stress, but you have a day that's pretty decent, it's very easy to add a second lift on that for one lift a day. That's right. So if you're like, if it's squat day and everything's going pretty good, you can do your three sets of five squats, your five fives or wherever you're at in your life. And then you can go ahead and deadlift or row or add a little something on the end of that if you can tolerate it that day. Yep. Is there anything else that you would do, a blanket recommendation we could make for an intermediate? No, I think that's, again, I would tend to default on the left end of that spectrum of being novice intermediate, early intermediate those places. I would tend to try to stay heavy and I would reduce volume and frequency first or I say frequency with a one lift a day program, you're training nearly every day, you're training four days a week, five days a week, maybe even six days a week, but you're just doing very low volume per day. But I would tend to stay heavy and as you get more advanced, especially if once you've been really, really strong, I think my experience has shown that it tends to be better to reduce the intensity and up the volume a little bit to not put the pressure on yourself to chase the numbers in those times of chronic stress. And, you know, again, we'll probably end up with 25, 30 emails out of this episode about specifics. Like, hey, love the podcast. This is my specific answer and man, it's everybody's different. I talked to a friend last night, a longtime friend who's pre-retired and he's retired from his first job and basically a commercial airline pilot for the most part where he literally flies private eight days on and then eight days off. And then the eight days that he's off, he owns a gym, he's like, I can train and in my eight days on, I'm staying at hotels. And there's just no opportunity to go to a gym. What should I do? I said, well, then one week you train and one week you exercise and one week you train and one week you exercise. I mean, what else are you gonna do? And I travel all the time right now. And I've tried to, 2019, I'm trying to cut back some of my travel schedule, but I'm in hotels all the time. Certainly a lot of times I travel and my travel is I'm at a gym and so I can train because I'm there teaching a seminar. But if I'm there in hotels, I absolutely think there's value in going down to the hotel gym and knocking out some dumbbells and knocking out some kettlebell swings and walking on the treadmill for 10 minutes because for me, it's about habit and the way it makes me feel. And often I'm stressed anyway when I'm on a business trip just. And what else are you gonna do? What else are you gonna do at the goddamn hotel anyway? Like it's just, you're gonna go to the bar and drink is what you're gonna do. And so like you can go to the bar and drink or you can go down to the gym and you can knock it out. And those hotel workouts take 30 minutes and I feel good. So yeah. So this guy is like, hey, eight days in a row, I can't really train and then eight days I can do anything I wanna do and I can train really hard. And he says, what do I do? And I'm kind of strawman. I don't know if this is what he said, but oftentimes people, they think that there is an optimal answer that they're gonna get. They think that there's something that can actually be done. And the truth is everything that happens in the world is reality. And there's nothing that you can do about reality most of the time. And so we've got this thing in the modern world that's gonna scientific management, this Taylorism thing where we think that everything can be completely optimized, that there's no situation that's not amendable. And life is in fact, not that. Your life is what it is. You're gonna bury your parents. If you stay married forever, one of you is gonna bury the other one. Like stuff ain't good. And there's nothing we can do about it when those things happen. It really can't even be managed. We just have to do the best we can. Because the truth of it is, is that we train to live. We don't live to train. So be kind to yourself when that stuff happens. Don't apply the stuff you learned in business school to it. And try to be a person. Comes back and certainly don't wanna make it a sort of trite thing, but it comes back to the reason we do these voluntary hardship sort of things. There are times we choose voluntary hardship so that when hardship is involuntary thrown upon us, we're better prepared to handle the thing. Right? Yeah, that's a good point because a lot of people, if you haven't been through LP, there's no way you're gonna have a car wreck and then squat. Right? But, you know, so people that, you know, we're lucky enough to have put ourselves in a situation where we're trying to figure out how to stress ourselves more. And a lot of people, when the bad things happen, they collapse. That's right. That's right. That's really what we're doing with voluntary hardship is we're trying to train our bodies to better handle stress. That's really what we're doing. And that means that, and so in periods of time where stress is outside stress is relatively low, I can choose to force my body to go through hard things and higher stress in order to recover so that when stress is high, my body is better able to then handle that stress. Well, we've talked about this for a very long time, although I could go on. I'm gonna have to do a show about empathy. I don't wanna do a show about empathy. Oh, yeah. It's gonna be... I don't think you and I are the right guys to do a show about empathy. I am absolutely the right guy to do about it. Are you? Yes, I am. Okay. But that's been another Barbiologic podcast. If you have any questions, save those and ask a friend. Ask a friend. We'll answer your questions. We like them. Talk to you soon.