6 Day Texas Method

[Jason Donaldson]

Adam, I'm going to put this gently, and I mean it as light and not heat: I think no one has responded because there's so much wrong with your question at the level of fundamental principles.

Trying your proposal for yourself will get you answers in a short time. Then again, so would reading the blue book, or even carefully digesting much of the free material on the basics of the SS method available online.

Bonus hint: Note the specific derision that Rip pours on the "body parts" approach of Wieder-style bodybuilding, and why he does that.

[Adam Tomjack]

Adam, I'm going to put this gently

Thank you Jason, I appreciate your response. There's no need to be gentle, however. In fact, I was actually rather hoping that somebody would mock my stupidity and detail all the various ways in which I am wrong. At least then I would understand.

I own and have read both books, albeit not as carefully as an SSC would have. (SS 3rd ed, rev 3, PP 3rd ed, rev 1) Perhaps I am an idiot and am not remembering the paragraph that explains how my proposed schedule wouldn't work. While I'm pretty certain I AM an idiot, I'm also pretty sure that my questions are not directly addressed in the books. Deducing the answers also seems like a fairly non-trivial undertaking. I wonder if the topic would be appropriate for one of those papers that candidate SSCs used to have to write?

What it really comes down to is that, traditionally, while we rest between sets of an exercise, we take essentially zero rest between exercises. Thus we group excercises into workouts. But, what happens if we start playing with the amount of rest between exercises? I can imagine practical reasons for wanting to do that, similar to how some people prefer the four day split to the three day Texas method. I don't want to change anything else, just that one single variable. I don't think the books address this idea of rest between exercises in an obvious way. If it's possible to figure out the answers, I've been unable to do it.

Here's some of my thinking and some questions that I haven't been able to answer:

What precisely is overload? It seems there are two kinds of stress: overload stress and non-overload stress. An overload stress produces fatigue and triggers recovery and adaptation. A non-overload stress may also produce fatigue and triggers recovery, but not adaptation. Is that a correct way to look at it? What is the difference between the two? Is the difference volume, intensity, the combination of those in the form ou tonnage, or a combination that differs from tonnage?

It also seems like, in some situations at least, sub-overload stresses can accumulate over time to trigger an overload. How exactly does that work? For example, a typical NLP workout is not one single stress event. It's three exercises, of multiple sets, each with multiple reps. An NLP workout is 35 individual stress events. How do those 35 stresses combine to trigger overload and adaptation?

What is my body's stress-sensing/combining resolution, so to speak? At what point does it start to distinguish between individual stresses instead of grouping them together? For example, what if, after my squats, I take a couple hours to run an errand, and then finish my workout? Will that cause my workout to be only 80% effective, so I should add 4 lbs next time instead of 5? Or did I cross some threshold where my body would consider it as two separate sub-overload stresses, so I get no benefit at all? If that's the case, what's the threshold? One hour? Four? 24? Does it depend on my recovery window, which is a function of my state of advancement?

My understanding of advanced trainees is that they might spend a week or more doing hard workouts accumulating enough stress over time to trigger overload and then spend several more weeks of easier workouts as they recover. So, clearly stress accumulates over time. That would seem to indicate that an advanced trainee could replace hard, infrequent workouts and with easier, more frequent workouts during the overload weeks. Is that possible? If so, why wouldn't that work for a novice? And, at what point does it become possible? If it's not possible, then how is it that one would need days or weeks of accumulated stress, but that stress can only come in a few big pulses? Isn't the point of advanced programming that no single workout can be hard enough to trigger an overload? So why perform one big sub-overload workout when you could do two smaller workouts of the same total tonnage/volume/stress/whatever-it-is?

How discrete are the stages of the general adaptation syndrome? For example, suppose I do my Monday squats, and suppose that's enough stress to trigger adaptation. But then, before I finish adapting, I do my Tuesday deadlifts, which would by themselves be enough to trigger adaptation. Will that second stress interrupt the adaptation to the first stress and restart the process so that I never actually adapt? Or would they interleave (as long as I don't go overboard)? Since I'm in stage 2 on Tuesday, would I need that second workout to be a sub-overload stress to avoid interfering with recovery and adaptation?

Or, do I need both squats and deadlifts to trigger an overload, but by the time I do deadlifts on Tuesday, I've recovered enough from squats on Monday that the remaining squat fatigue, plus the new deadlift stress isn't enough to trigger overload? (Did I just conflate fatigue and stress in a way that doesn't work?)

PP points out that "the system is always in flux, with adaptation to numerous events that may act as stressors at various levels taking place all the time." And yet, the whole concept of lighter recovery workouts would seem to indicate that I my proposed schedule won't work.

Some analogies: As long as I don't overdraw my bank account, it doesn't really matter how I order or time my withdrawals and deposits. They interleave and the ending total is the same. On the other hand, a ratcheting socket wrench works differently. There is a minimum angle that I must turn the wrench to capture my progress. I have to turn it far enough forward before I can reverse it and try again. If I'm in a tight space so my back-and-forth motions are too small, I won't be able to loosen the bolt. But, if I can turn it through a big enough arc, the bolt will loosen. Do I really need to separate my stress and recovery periods like that to get a big enough separation between them to capture my progress, or will it all interleave nicely without interfering?

I feel like maybe there's an interesting question here around the idea of rest between exercises, but maybe I'm just stupid and ignorant. It would be nice, though, to be able to get strong while doing a more reasonably-sized workout every morning like Jocko or Rogan. But, maybe I just need to harden the fuck up. I guess I'll find out.

[Maybach]

You are thinking about some of these concepts with sufficient granularity that they are ceasing to become helpful. I am going to try to be exact here but let me start by addressing your main misconception: there is no "threshold" for stress. Anything which is a stressor will require the organism to adapt. The nature of strength training occasionally produces an illusion of "discreteness" in adaptations, because increases in force production must a) be large enough that they can be reliably controlled with the equipment available to you (i.e., how precisely can you control the weight on the bar) and b) be large enough that it rises above the "noise" of daily fluctuations in strength. If your press strength is .25 pounds stronger on Monday than on Friday, then producing a "physiological" increase of .25 pounds won't result in you being able to lift more weight. You must attempt to produce at least an increase of .5 pounds to ensure you can make the increase.

It is worth noting that well funded S+C facilities can actually address these, via both exact control over their athletes performance (i.e., Soviet weightlifting orphans raised in a compound) and technology to measure/produce exactly calibrated force production (i.e., measure bar speed). If you find yourself in this situation, you can dial in the stress much more exactly, and determine that basically any amount of stress will produce some adaptation.

What precisely is overload? It seems there are two kinds of stress: overload stress and non-overload stress. An overload stress produces fatigue and triggers recovery and adaptation. A non-overload stress may also produce fatigue and triggers recovery, but not adaptation. Is that a correct way to look at it? What is the difference between the two? Is the difference volume, intensity, the combination of those in the form ou tonnage, or a combination that differs from tonnage?

This is not the case. Everything in the environment, to some degree, is a stressor. All stressors must be adapted to. If something does not provoke an adaptation (an adaption meaning a change in the functioning of the system), it is either a) not a stressor (the system remains in equilibrium, and copes with the stressor functioning normally) or b) the organism dies, or suffers trauma.

The distinction we draw in strength training is whether a stressor is a strength training stress, or some other kind of stress. We seek to maximize the former while minimizing the latter. The latter can result in adaptations that, best case, are orthogonal to strength, and at worst, are actively harmful. Remember: adaptations are there to make the organism function, not to make your life good or easy. Not eating or sleeping is a stressor, and they both make you feel like shit.

If something is a stressor, but not a strength training stressor, it requires adaptive capacity to be consumed, and adaptive capacity is finite. If you lift 50% of your 5RM for a set of 20, your body has to adapt to that stress by adapting it's metabolism, not it's force production capacity, because it is already adapted to the task of lifting your 5RM.

This can be extended to other deviations from the rep ranges prescribed here. The more a stressor differs from a maximal force production event, the less it produces a force production adaptation, and the more it produces other adaptations. You have some leeway (i.e., a set of 5 is not exactly a maximal force production event, but it is close enough) but not an infinite amount. Jogging, for example, is not a force production stressor. Walking the normal amount you do each day is not a stressor *at all*

It also seems like, in some situations at least, sub-overload stresses can accumulate over time to trigger an overload. How exactly does that work? For example, a typical NLP workout is not one single stress event. It's three exercises, of multiple sets, each with multiple reps. An NLP workout is 35 individual stress events. How do those 35 stresses combine to trigger overload and adaptation?

What is my body's stress-sensing/combining resolution, so to speak? At what point does it start to distinguish between individual stresses instead of grouping them together? For example, what if, after my squats, I take a couple hours to run an errand, and then finish my workout? Will that cause my workout to be only 80% effective, so I should add 4 lbs next time instead of 5? Or did I cross some threshold where my body would consider it as two separate sub-overload stresses, so I get no benefit at all? If that's the case, what's the threshold? One hour? Four? 24? Does it depend on my recovery window, which is a function of my state of advancement?

The distinction between novice, intermediate, and advanced time frames is a purely theoretical one. It is as real as the concept of a "day" or a "week" is. It is a heuristic to organize your training: your body does not change it's mechanism of adapting to stressors. Thinking of "a workout" as an individual stress event rather than 35 individual stress events is an epistemological convenience. In the same way we think of "exposure to sunlight" as a stress and not as trillions of individual photon collisions with the skin. Brighter minds than you or I have made no headway in trying to parse these differences. It is a question of philosophy. A workout is a stressor: we do not need to get into "planck units" for stresses.

The structure of the workouts as outlined in SS and PP is purely logistical. Most people find a single workout in a day to be more manageable. As I indicated above, stress is not a "bucket" you need to fill up before it "spills over" into adaptation. Literally any increase in weight will be a stressor, because you have never lifted that weight before. So your body will adapt to it. It may be that doing your bench press in the evening instead of in the morning right after your squat makes it "easier" and therefore "less stressful", but it will still be stressful. Eventually, you will bench press a weight you never have before, and your body will say, dang, better get stronger for next time.

The "threshold" is called detraining. If you squat in the morning, and then don't do ANYTHING for a week, you body "forgets" the stress. This gets into the fuzzy nature of "time", from the point of view of your body. What happened a week ago is no longer "happening."

When does your body start detraining from a training stimulus? General answer is around three days. Could be more, could be less. This is why the "light day" is included in 3 day intermediate programs: it "bumps" the training curve back up, so your body doesn't "forget" the stress from Monday by Friday. This is why 4 day splits generally omit it, because you never separate a training stimulus by more than three or four days, and so do not require

My understanding of advanced trainees is that they might spend a week or more doing hard workouts accumulating enough stress over time to trigger overload and then spend several more weeks of easier workouts as they recover. So, clearly stress accumulates over time. That would seem to indicate that an advanced trainee could replace hard, infrequent workouts and with easier, more frequent workouts during the overload weeks. Is that possible? If so, why wouldn't that work for a novice? And, at what point does it become possible? If it's not possible, then how is it that one would need days or weeks of accumulated stress, but that stress can only come in a few big pulses? Isn't the point of advanced programming that no single workout can be hard enough to trigger an overload? So why perform one big sub-overload workout when you could do two smaller workouts of the same total tonnage/volume/stress/whatever-it-is?

This is exactly what is proposed in the 4 day split. Please reread the split routine section in Practical Programming, if you are legitimately asking if that is possible. The benefit is ENTIRELY logistical. The reason this isn't usually recommended is the logistical benefit is much smaller: novice workouts don't take that much time. You could rearrange the novice program to move your deadlifts to Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday while keeping your squats and presses on the MWF schedule. But realistically how much time does moving the deadlift save you? Twenty minutes? If you don't have a home gym this gets wiped out in extra commuting time.

The other way that a 4 day split saves time is by eliminating extra volume. Like I mention above (and in my previous post), the light day of a 3 day intermediate program is best thought of as "non stimulative." It's role is to "grease the groove": basically to practice the movement so you remember how to do it come Friday. It's been observed that a 5 day gap between stimulative squat sessions is a bit too long. But 3 days isn't. So you eliminate the light day, because you are squatting "heavy" more uniformly. There is no such volume that can be eliminated from the novice program: every day and every workout is "stimulative"

Again, there is no "overload/sub overload" workout. You appear to have invented this concept yourself.

You appear to have misunderstood the reason your proposed schedule will not work. It will not work because it doesn't "accumulate" enough stress on a single day. It doesn't work because it is basically identical to the 4 day split, but includes vestigial light sets from the 3 day intermediate programs whose ONLY utility is to "bridge" the very long recovery window between Monday and Friday, which does not exist in a split routine, so is effectively junk volume. A waste of time. This is a strict downgrade on the 4 day split. This would be like a novice doing "light squats" on Tuesday so they don't "detrain" between Monday and Wednesday. I know you think it does more than this. It doesn't.

We don't think your program won't work. We just think it's excessively baroque, and will become obnoxious in excess of it's effectiveness.

Some analogies: As long as I don't overdraw my bank account, it doesn't really matter how I order or time my withdrawals and deposits. They interleave and the ending total is the same. On the other hand, a ratcheting socket wrench works differently. There is a minimum angle that I must turn the wrench to capture my progress. I have to turn it far enough forward before I can reverse it and try again. If I'm in a tight space so my back-and-forth motions are too small, I won't be able to loosen the bolt. But, if I can turn it through a big enough arc, the bolt will loosen. Do I really need to separate my stress and recovery periods like that to get a big enough separation between them to capture my progress, or will it all interleave nicely without interfering?

You have monthly expenses. There is a hole at the bottom of your bank account, and the money is always flowing out. If you want your balance to go up, you have to put money in faster than it comes out, and you can only store so much money in a garbage bag under your mattress.

The other side of this is that while you are encouraged to make frequent deposits at the bank, you do not demand your employer cut you a check at the end of every hour, right? More efficient to take fewer trips to the bank.

I feel like maybe there's an interesting question here around the idea of rest between exercises, but maybe I'm just stupid and ignorant. It would be nice, though, to be able to get strong while doing a more reasonably-sized workout every morning like Jocko or Rogan. But, maybe I just need to harden the fuck up. I guess I'll find out.

Rest between sets increases stress, but it is not a force production stress, and so does not produce a force production adaptation.

The interaction between conventional fitness rhetoric about "putting in the work" and the model proposed by SS and PP has caused you to invent a strange new concept that is giving you some trouble. Put this out of your mind.

If your workouts are getting too long, do a 4 day split. This will shorten your workouts. You probably do need the light squat day on a 3 day split. You probably do not on a 4 day split. This is why those two programs differ.

I think that doing an active recovery light squat in between volume day and intensity day does in fact help me feel better on intensity day, it certainly feels that way, but I have yet to train without the light squat workout so I can't say for sure

The desire to do a shorter manageable workout and the desire "feel good" doing extra volume are incompatible. Pick one.

You admit you haven't actually tried a 4 day split (or even a 3 day split without a light squat day. I question how you actually know if the light squat day is making you feel better, because you have nothing to compare it to. This is less reliable than most feelings) but are convinced a 6 day split would be better. Why? If you want to know what to expect, we have told you what is most common. If you think you will observe something different, you will have to actually provide some observations that controvert common observations.

In any case, if you need to add volume to a program, do not wholesale slap it in there. Try the program, if it needs more volume add it.

[Adam Tomjack]

Wow. Thanks for your reply. I really appreciate that. I especially like your explanation of how some stresses require finite recovery resources for non-strength adaptations. That really clarified that point in my mind.

However, I think you might have misunderstood something about my proposal. I'm not the original poster who was talking about a 6-day split for the Texas method, with added volume. Adding volume to the Texas method does indeed seem silly, but I also think the volume issue obscures a simpler and much more interesting question: If you take the NLP and simply shift the deadlifts and presses into the rest days so that there are no rest days, will it still work? So, my proposal is not intended to be an intermediate program, nor is there extra junk volume beyond the standand NLP. (At least, I don't think so.)

What I'm attempting amounts to a brain hack. It's entirely logistical, like the 4-day split for intermediate programming. Cutting my workouts in half allows me to fit them into a convenient spot in my daily schedule, and doing it every day makes it easier to build the habit. I'm certainly not taking workout advice from Jocko, but I do like his routine of working out every single morning. It's pleasing, like a cup of coffee every morning vs three cups three times per week. My level of fatigue should be more even throughout the week. I do have a home gym, so number of workouts is not a logistical concern. If it doesn't actually make me strong, however, then my only hope is to toughen up, and I'll make the sacrifices necessary to do that.

It comes down to two fundamental questions:

1) Assuming weekly volume is held constant, does recovery require rest days with no heavy lifting?

2) Does adaptation require weekly volume to be bunched up in time or can it be spread out?

At least one person has argued that it won't work, but I don't fully understand stress/recovery/adaptation deeply enough to answer my questions from first principles, so I'm doing the experiment.

My thinking is that if it doesn't work, it must either be because I won't be able to get recovered, or else I will fail to trigger sufficient adaptation. (Or, there's a third another thing I haven't thought of.)

I don't think I've added any junk volume. Given that it's the same intensities and volumes as a traditional NLP, if it fails to allow for recovery, then somehow I must be interrupting and/or resetting my recovery with ill-timed workouts. In other words, will Tuesday's deadlifts sabotage my recovery from Monday's squats? And then Wednesday squats torpedo recovering from Tuesday deadlifts, so that I never actually get recovered from anything? If that's the case, I expect to get very tired very soon. But, I don't think that's how things work, or cavemen would have had more trouble surviving.

Most of my previous post is speculation about ways my alternate NLP might fail to trigger adaptation. The overload/sub-overload stuff seems to be implied by something from Practical Programming, Ch. 2, under Understanding Overtraining: "Overload represents the magnitude of the stress required to disrupt physiological equilibrium and induce an adaptation." That seems to imply to me there would be underload stresses that don't disrupt equilibrium, but maybe I'm reading too much into that sentence from the book. On the other hand, the blue book points out that, if I'm completely untrained, riding a bike will increase my bench press ... for a time. Then it will stop working. It is a stress, but no longer causes adaptation. Your comment about non-stimulative volume also seems to suggest that may be a problem for me. But the light day of an intermediate program is also at a lower intensity, so maybe that's why it's non-stimulative? I certainly intend my volume to stimulate adaptation because I'm adding 5 lbs each time, but what I intend and what I actually accomplish may not coincide.

My concern is that moving my Monday deadlifts to the Tuesday rest day might mean that I don't get enough stress on Monday to trigger an appreciable adaptation. But, by Tuesday I will have partially recovered from the squats so that adding in the deadlift stress also won't cause adaptation. If that's the case, then I expect to quickly start failing reps as I add weight, despite feeling good and sufficiently recovered.

I know that in some situations, driving an adaptation requires multiple stress events over time as no single workout can be stressful enough to do the job. But, I still don't really know why. I don't understand the calculus behind combining stresses. I don't even know all the variables that would go into the formula. There's weight on the bar and volume. Detraining over time probably factors in. What about state of fatigue, or state of recovery from previous stresses, which are also functions of time? Is closeness to maximum genetic potential important? Other things? As a result, I couldn't even tell you precisely why the NLP requires 3x5 instead of 1x1, so there's no hope I can explain why it will or won't work to shift my deadlifts to my off-days.

I don't even really understand how volume and intensity interact. For example, suppose my 1RM is 500. In that case, I would probably have the strength to move 505 for a quarter rep, but not a full rep (and maybe I can't budge 510). Is that because I run out of gas before I finish the rep at 505? So then I train at maybe 410x5x5 until I get to 420x5x5, which builds the endurance to finish the full rep at 505, which then causes a strength adaptation allowing me to get 510 for a quarter rep. And repeat. Is that how that works? Or is it not so clear cut?