What Training Level?

[quikky]

You're only making my point.

The SRA cycle, based on training level dictates, the time frame.

You said you cannot compare the novice's day of training to the intermediate's week of training because those are different units of time, but that is exactly what you must do to compare them at all because those are the relative SRA cycles. They're not necessarily exactly that in the sense that a novice's SRA curve moves towards a week long over that entire phase and an intermediate's moves closer and closer to a month's worth of training and recovery per cycle, but the principle still stands: you have to compare the work done in a cycle not an arbitrary time frame like a day or a week.

Since we need to increase stress with training advancement, the only way we can objectively compare stress levels between routines is to use the same unit of time. Otherwise, you cannot determine whether there is indeed more stress.

Wrong. If you fail 320x3x5 on LP after doing 315x5x3 on Friday, you cannot just do 315x5x4 instead of 315x5x3 on Monday and then hit 320x5x3...because you're not going to be recovered enough, even if that extra set is enough stress to stimulate the adaption. If we didn't need more recovery we'd all still be doing LP's layout, but with more and more sets and still progressing, but we can't because we need more recovery when we do more work.

Eh, no.

Fatigue can be a big issue at the end of LP because the trainee is gradually getting a less and less robust training stimulus from the LP levels of stress, so the relative intensity is rising to a level that is not manageable for sustained training. You wouldn't do 315x5x4 the next workout not because doing 4 sets instead of 5 is too much - it isn't, but because you are working at an intensity that is not sustainable at that point. This is why transitioning to intermediate programming screws up a lot of people.

In this example, you would reduce the weight so that none of the reps are a grind, say down 10%, which would accomplish two things: make the intensity appropriate for sustainable training, and allow some of the excessive fatigue due to the excessive intensity to dissipate. However, you would also gradually increase the stress, and doing 4 sets 5 would be just fine if you managed the intensity correctly.

Also, "LP layout" is a bit ambiguous. Are we talking about it exactly as written, such as pulling once a week? Yeah, that's not optimal in my opinion. But, we can squat three times a week, and bench/press 3 times a week, and pull... Well pull more than once a week for most... And probably add more supplemental lifts.

I know it makes people's heads explode, but recovery from fatigue and stress from training are happening simultaneously, but at different levels , after the earliest stages of LP.

Fatigue is the byproduct of strength training not the stimuli for progress. Once you get past the novice stage you cause a ton of fatigue on any particular training day, but it isn't enough stress, but you cannot provide more stress that day because the fatigue prevents you from doing so without actually messing yourself up. So you wait until you recover some, but not fully, and then provide more stress.

I mean, yeah... Programming can essentially be summed up as the process of accumulating sufficient stress to drive adaptation while effectively managing fatigue.

The nuance that gets lots on people is that fatigue can be caused by too much stress, but also by insufficient stress, which increases the intensity to unsustainable levels. The key is understanding what's happening and manipulating the stress accordingly.

You also don't need more recovery as you advance, because your recovery capacity goes up. Advanced lifters can handle a ton more work in a week than novices and intermediates. They don't need longer recovery times, they need longer stress accumulation phases to disrupt homeostasis. An advanced block might be 8 weeks not because there's a ton of rest involved, but because it takes that much time to deliver an effective dose of stress to get stronger.

You point was understood, but you are making a wrong comparison. The comparison is the novice's day to the intermediate's week that matters because we are comparing events within their relative SRA curves, not some arbitrary time frame.

I don't see how it is the wrong comparison. Just like I don't see how you can compare stress levels without using the same time frame. Time itself is a critical component of the equation as it determines the amount of stress you are accumulating. I don't understand how we can just ignore time and hand wave and say "SRA cycle" so therefore time doesn't matter. Dose is time dependent.

[George Christiansen]

The SRA cycle is a gross oversimplification of what's happening in the body.

No it's not. It leaves out many of the biological details, but it is enough to go on to actually manage one's programming

We know that protein synthesis is sped up for 24-48 hours after lifting (mostly the first 24 hours), and this doesn't get longer for advanced athletes than for novices.

Which matters how? You will trigger protein synthesis multiple times as the SRA curve gets longer. You do not need an all of the stress that adds up to an overload event in order to stimulate protein synthesis. The threshold is actually pretty low.

But we aren't fully recovered in 24 hours even as novices..

Define fully recovered....which I also never used anyway, because I don't even know what that would mean.

You need to be recovered from fatigue enough to display a new PR because the fatigue may mask your increased strength even if you have the made the adaptations necessary to gain that strength. But just because you are no longer substantially fatigued from the last session or sessions doesn't mean that you have applied the stress with those sessions to improve strength.

There are other things happening beyond muscle growth. Maybe tendons, bones, nerves, blood vessels, who knows. But these are slower apparently, and don't involve large amounts of new protein synthesis. And this must be what takes longer for more-advanced lifters..

Everything takes longer as we advance. Applying the stress takes longer and recovering from it takes longer. And even though we do improve our recovery abilities as we advance, the stresses that need to be applied are so much higher that it almost becomes a moot point. Assuming that a novice and an advanced guy are similarly conditioned they are both going to be near equally fatigued from relative levels of work per session.

Since we need to increase stress with training advancement, the only way we can objectively compare stress levels between routines is to use the same unit of time. Otherwise, you cannot determine whether there is indeed more stress.

Time isn't the metric. Increased strength is. It is not hard to determine that it takes a novice much less than a more advanced lifter to build the same 1-2% increase. To get from 315 squat to a 320 squat as a novice takes 4725lbs of work (not counting how deadlifts and other things might contribute) , which happens to all be done in one day. An intermediate on HLM takes 12,000+lbs of work to make the same progress.

Not terribly hard to see which one is more work to me.

Eh, no.

Fatigue can be a big issue at the end of LP because the trainee is gradually getting a less and less robust training stimulus from the LP levels of stress, so the relative intensity is rising to a level that is not manageable for sustained training. You wouldn't do 315x5x4 the next workout not because doing 4 sets instead of 5 is too much - it isn't, but because you are working at an intensity that is not sustainable at that point. This is why transitioning to intermediate programming screws up a lot of people.

In this example, you would reduce the weight so that none of the reps are a grind, say down 10%, which would accomplish two things: make the intensity appropriate for sustainable training, and allow some of the excessive fatigue due to the excessive intensity to dissipate. However, you would also gradually increase the stress, and doing 4 sets 5 would be just fine if you managed the intensity correctly.

Also, "LP layout" is a bit ambiguous. Are we talking about it exactly as written, such as pulling once a week? Yeah, that's not optimal in my opinion. But, we can squat three times a week, and bench/press 3 times a week, and pull... Well pull more than once a week for most... And probably add more supplemental lifts.

Eh, no.

The LP layout is training MWF or TuThSt or whatever and getting new PR's every day you train a lift. You cannot do this even with your deload because you need more recovery....unless the only issue was systematic fatigue rather than not enough stress. But if the stall is from lack of stress and you add more of it, but you don't need more recovery, then you should still be able to squat on that schedule with continued PR's every session and as soon as you cannot it is because of under recovery. This is what happens when the light squat day happens: you add stress, but you also add recovery because they are not on or off buttons. They are happening together.

You now need two days off to recover from 3x5 at the work weight + 2-3x5 at 10-20% less. That is more work in a now longer SRA curve, but it is also more recovery.

An advanced block might be 8 weeks not because there's a ton of rest involved, but because it takes that much time to deliver an effective dose of stress to get stronger.

Managing fatigue is recovery and there is plenty of that going on during an 8 week block.

I don't see how it is the wrong comparison. Just like I don't see how you can compare stress levels without using the same time frame. Time itself is a critical component of the equation as it determines the amount of stress you are accumulating. I don't understand how we can just ignore time and hand wave and say "SRA cycle" so therefore time doesn't matter. Dose is time dependent.

I get that you don't understand, but that doesn't make anything I've written hand wavy. You just don't get it. Time matters in the sense that the same overall workload spread out enough does nothing and the reverse causes overtraining, but the appropriate spread in the SRA cycle of the individual lifter, not a day or a week or anything else.

[quikky]

Time isn't the metric. Increased strength is. It is not hard to determine that it takes a novice much less than a more advanced lifter to build the same 1-2% increase. To get from 315 squat to a 320 squat as a novice takes 4725lbs of work (not counting how deadlifts and other things might contribute) , which happens to all be done in one day. An intermediate on HLM takes 12,000+lbs of work to make the same progress.

Not terribly hard to see which one is more work to me.[/QUOTE]

Right. It takes more stress for an intermediate to create the same level of adaptation as a novice. And how do you know it is more stress without time being in the equation?

Can I do 12,000lb of work over the course of 4 weeks and make progress?

Eh, no.

The LP layout is training MWF or TuThSt or whatever and getting new PR's every day you train a lift. You cannot do this even with your deload because you need more recovery....unless the only issue was systematic fatigue rather than not enough stress. But if the stall is from lack of stress and you add more of it, but you don't need more recovery, then you should still be able to squat on that schedule with continued PR's every session and as soon as you cannot it is because of under recovery. This is what happens when the light squat day happens: you add stress, but you also add recovery because they are not on or off buttons. They are happening together.

As your SRA cycle gets longer, so does the stress per unit of time. It has to. A longer SRA cycle means is that it takes longer to PR, because more stress is needed, not because you simply need to recover longer.

Session to session intensity obviously has to be tweaked to not exceed recovery capacity, but you are still exposing yourself to a higher level of stress. Would you squat 4x5 with the same weight 3 times a week right after LP? No. You could squat 4x5, followed by a lighter 3x5, followed by somewhat lighter 4x5. The total amount of stress within a training week would be higher than on the novice LP. Or you could do 1 heavy single, followed by 4x5, followed by 4x4 paused squats, followed by 4x8 squats. Again, the amount of stress over a training week would be higher.

As you progressed, you might do 5x5, 4x5, 5x5, then 6x5, 4x5, 5x6, etc. Again, the amount of stress would be going up over a training week. And as this is going up, so is your work capacity. A more advanced lifter can handle far more work in a week than a novice or intermediate. The recovery is better, but even more stress is needed.

You now need two days off to recover from 3x5 at the work weight + 2-3x5 at 10-20% less. That is more work in a now longer SRA curve, but it is also more recovery.

So going from 3x5x2 in a 48 hour period is less work than 3x5 + 2x5@80%? And why is recovery from 3x5 suddenly an issue?

Managing fatigue is recovery and there is plenty of that going on during an 8 week block.

In the context of training, fatigue is generated from the training stress, which must be appropriate. Recovery is your ability to deal with the generated fatigue, which includes things like diet, sleep, stress levels, etc. You can have an appropriate level of fatigue from training, but compromised recovery. And similarly, you can have perfect recovery capacity, but excessive fatigue from an inappropriate level of training stress.

So managing fatigue is not recovery, it is applying an appropriate level of stress for your training status, i.e. your programming, while allowing for optimal recovery, i.e. your diet, sleep, etc.

I get that you don't understand, but that doesn't make anything I've written hand wavy. You just don't get it. Time matters in the sense that the same overall workload spread out enough does nothing and the reverse causes overtraining, but the appropriate spread in the SRA cycle of the individual lifter, not a day or a week or anything else.

Uh... So you're saying that time matters only in the sense that it controls whether the stress you are imparting is anything from useless, to excessive? Because you're saying exactly what I'm saying, which is that stress over a unit of time is what ultimately determines whether the stress is higher or lower...

[ChasingCurls69]

If the unit of time doesn't matter and only the SRA cycle length does, why do we have to go from 4700lbs in our SRA cycle to 12000lbs? Why not just do 1 extra rep and go up to 5000lbs in a week?