Quote Originally Posted by Austin Baraki View Post
I guess it’s unclear whether further discussion is going to be welcomed or not, but I thought I’d post some more definitive thoughts in an attempt to clarify a few things.

1) The "running it out" debate has been beaten to death. We avoid lowering training volume solely to facilitate continued load increases. While this approach maintains intensity, it detrains the work capacity that will be necessary to impart sufficient stress as an intermediate and beyond, and requires a substantial reset (and hence wasted time) to re-train this capacity in the intermediate phase.

2) For someone immediately coming off the LP, we all agree that stress needs to increase - but we tend to view that process differently. Perhaps the key points: for a novice, there is no significant difference between low volume and higher volume training for strength or hypertrophy outcomes, BUT the evidence is fairly clear that there is a dose-response effect for trained individuals - in other words: a higher dose gets more results. For this reason, we view the “minimum effective dose” as getting the “minimum possible results” - ultimately compromising the development of necessary long-term adaptations (like hypertrophy, as mentioned in the article) in exchange for grinding new all-out 5RMs as often as possible *right NOW*. Once the force production capacity of existing muscle mass is optimized via exposure to heavy loading at low volumes, the trainee will stall and require a reset to re-start the process.

3) I care FAR less about someone immediately using RPEs or immediately introducing more exercise variation, and think a HLM setup is completely reasonable, even without variants, as long as the volume/intensity dosing is appropriate. This means that while exposure to heavy loads is absolutely necessary, most training stress is accumulated in the 70-80% range, which is far more sustainable from a fatigue standpoint from my experience. I believe that even Andy Baker has echoed this sentiment elsewhere. Spending lots of time grinding in the 80-90% range is not sustainable and is excessively fatiguing (as anyone who has attempted this can attest to), therefore limiting the total amount of stress that can be handled by the trainee. This limits hypertrophy outcomes, which then limits ultimate strength potential in a post-novice trainee. We are also aware of no direct human evidence of significant “sarcoplasmic hypertrophy” or “non-contractile hypertrophy” preferentially occurring in any particular intensity range compared to another, as has been suggested.
Quote Originally Posted by Giri Kotte View Post
Coach Jordan, what would be an approximate method to describe better stress? What would be the factors to consider and what would be the order of preference in manipulating them to drive optimal progress?
Here is a link to Jordan's article published on this website, wherein he criticizes our TM program:

The Texas Method and 5/3/1 | Jordan Feigenbaum

Here is a link to Jordan's website: Forums - Forums

Discuss it there. My thoughts have already been expressed, and their site can use the traffic. We're glad to help with that, and again, best of luck to Barbell Medicine.