Jonathon Sullivan MD PhD SSC: A Pedantic Rebuttal to Rippetoe

[mitchless]

If I understand what you are saying, it appears you are characterizing a PR strictly as relative to your own best performance.

I think that's a valid interpretation of what I wrote, but I'm not entirely sure it is what I meant. I find my own thinking more aligned with placing maintenance after advanced in the training curve. That statement was an attempt to predict objections to that line of thinking -- that is there is sufficiently large a difference between training and maintenance that they ought to be terminologically distinguished.

I'm still on the fence as to the best way to describe them. Whether Rip's distinction between training and maintenance is correct or whether Dr. Sullivan's objection that the term "training" still applies through what Rip calls "maintenance." As a result, I want to explore both approaches. Ultimately it is, as Dr. Sullivan notes, a quibble over terms.

At some point you have accept you can't do what you used to do. But quitting entirely by staying away from the gym when maybe you could at least get in there and go through the motions is just a mindset I can't line up with.

While I am young (I turn 40 tomorrow), I hope to keep this mindset until the end. But I observe that others do not. Competitive athletes may be a special case here -- they already are in so many other ways. I can't say whether the cause is total loss of interest, or failure to change mindset. I also observe that as age increases, the number of those pushing themselves decreases. That in itself becomes a point of demotivation, as there is a smaller and smaller population against which to judge yourself fairly. At some point, internal drive must overcome any external factors to continue.

For me, training at home, it is currently relative to my own best performance and to set an example for my children. Eventually, my boys will far surpass what I can do and it will only be about my own best performance (I hope!). At some point, circumstances will change and the drive to keep lifting that bar will have come entirely from within.

[Mark E. Hurling]

I also observe that as age increases, the number of those pushing themselves decreases. That in itself becomes a point of demotivation, as there is a smaller and smaller population against which to judge yourself fairly. At some point, internal drive must overcome any external factors to continue.

Heh. One of the reasons I started competing at age 62 was an interview with Gordon Santee nearly 10 years ago. He's few years older than I am and was asked what it was like to compete at his age. "My competition is injured or dead."

At any given meet I've been one of the oldest and now THE oldest guy there among a small handful of masters lifters. That's just the reality, as you said. So to get a wider group of the doddering population you need to go the powerlifting rankings site and enter your pertinent information. That is how you find the external sources of information to fire the internal drive to see if you can beat them or at least how high you can climb in the rankings. I have my work cut out for me in this respect. A guy just beat my last (and pretty lackluster) total by over 60 pounds. But given a better focus on my training and keeping me from getting the willies when I squat, I think I can better his total for 3rd place.

[Shiva Kaul]

I made a similar point in the Q&A forum: training could be the umbrella term and "maintenance" is another stage along the novice -> intermediate -> advanced progression. The curve, featured on the cover of Practical Programming, reaches an asymptote but eventually turns down.

An advanced lifter takes a long time to PR because the intended stress of their program takes a long time to apply. That's why they plan their entire training season in advance.

Rip's maintenance lifter takes a long time to PR because of unintended difficulties in aging. That's why the maintenance program seems even less scheduled than a novice program.

So, according to (my reading of) the article, advanced and maintenance programming are starkly different.

[Jonathon Sullivan]

Perhaps maintenance is just training where the slope of progressive overload is <= 0.

That is food for thought. Excellent.