Upper Limits on Recovery / Over-training (Natural)

[LiftingToLiveToNinety]

I wasn't sure the correct forum in which to post this because inputs from Rip / Jordan / Andy would be great. However, Jordan's forum is probably the most appropriate, despite my lack of 25 posts.

I know you all appreciate shorter posts, so I'm going to do my best to be concise (while acknowledging likely failure). That being said, I wanted to see if you had an opinion (based on theory or observed behavior / anecdotes) on the upper limits of strength/muscle gain for a non-novice. Jordan's most recent 5/3/1 vs TM article was partially why I wanted to answer this (the other reason is that I recently came into some unexpected vacation time). My thought process goes something like what follows:

A given natural intermediate (let's say me) has caloric and sleep maintenance requirements of C and S, for simplicity let's call this 2200 calories and 8 hours of sleep per day. Now, I want to improve my strength and get more muscular so I decide on a intermediate method to increase my lifts, let's say the Texas Method (TM). However, in order to progress, I have to consume some amount of extra calories and possibly sleep more often. I want to run TM for three months, and in order to do that, I need to add ~300 calories and ~1 hour of sleep. (I recognize that likely I would need more than 300 calories after 2.5 months than I would on day 1 of starting TM, but I wanted to keep it relatively simple so I'm just picking a reasonable value).

So basically, I need to add 2100 calories and 7 hours of sleep to C and S each week in order to recover enough from TM and increase the weight on the bar for intensity day by 5 pounds, which gets to my primary question.

If I eat and sleep more (lets say 600 calories and 2 hours of sleep more instead of +300/+1), I think we can agree I am going to be able to recover from TM in order to keep increasing weight on the bar but I will have "generated" excess recovery. If strength building an equation that looks something like:

Stress + Recovery = + Strength + Mass aka
Stress + Food + Sleep + Time = + Strength + Mass

Then the only variable I can't control is Time (I can add more Stress in the form of Frequency, Volume, Intensity).

From Jordan's article, I think we can agree that I could do LESS than TM (e.g. 5/3/1) and still gain some strength and mass (albeit sub-optimally) but I want to know if I could do MORE than the typical intermediate program (even if it's for a short period of time).

TLDR

My primary concern is to avoid injury via. over-training, while optimizing strength and mass gains given virtually no other restrictions as a natural lifter.

To take it to extremes, let's say I have 2-4 weeks of uninterrupted vacation with virtually no requirements on my time or money. Could I wake up at 8am on Monday, eat food, work out, then go to sleep at noon, wake up and eat food, then work out, repeat for four weeks and make significantly better than weekly progress (even as an intermediate)?. Some kind of extreme like 8000 calories and 16 hours of sleep per day where the only thing I do when I'm awake is work out or eat. Could I do novice progression during this time period? Could I do something even better? If I were a novice, could I do 3x5 +5lbs every day instead of every other day? The only limit on the equation is actual physical Time. Do any of you have experience with this and if so, what were the observed results?

Not sure if it matters but:

30 / M / USA
H: 5' 9"
BW: 210lbs
Est. USSF 1RMs: 440, 190, 500

Thank you for your time.

P.S.: Jordan, if you feel this would be more appropriate in the Ask Rip section, I can re-post it there.

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

To take it to extremes, let's say I have 2-4 weeks of uninterrupted vacation with virtually no requirements on my time or money. Could I wake up at 8am on Monday, eat food, work out, then go to sleep at noon, wake up and eat food, then work out, repeat for four weeks and make significantly better than weekly progress (even as an intermediate)?. Some kind of extreme like 8000 calories and 16 hours of sleep per day where the only thing I do when I'm awake is work out or eat. Could I do novice progression during this time period? Could I do something even better? If I were a novice, could I do 3x5 +5lbs every day instead of every other day? The only limit on the equation is actual physical Time. Do any of you have experience with this and if so, what were the observed results?

This actually has a really easy answer- no, you can't apply advanced level stress to a person who is not at that level of training and expect to get the maximum result from training. Training stress, recovery, and adaptation is significantly more complicated than sleep and cals, but I would expect progression to be faster/more robust while on vacation.