A simple question about overloading and recovery

[Dastardly]

I have a really basic programming question here.

During strength (for us novices and intermediates) we lift a certain amount of weight for a certain number of sets, to act as a stimulus for our bodies to adapt for the next session in a couple days or at least the following week.

The carefully progressively load so we can finish our sets, and hopefully go up by an increment next time.

My question is about what happens when we either jump weights in too big of a gap or do too much volume. For example, the heavy/volume day for Texas method. A lot of people (inluding myself ) seemed to be able to hit a weight for 5x5 on monday, but be too fried to hit even the same weight on Friday let alone a PR.

In this situation the lifter probably chose a weight too large for the volume day. But I was wondering what actually occurs when this happens, when either too much weight or volume is done? Is the body literally overwhelmed unable to recover at all, making for a totally wasted training week. Or is the adaptation merely delayed? Like it might take another day or two, perhaps a light recovery session to capitalise on the stimulus from that initial heavy day?

[MazdaMatt]

you have a recovery day - wednesday.

I've never had any trouble hitting the 5x5 weight for friday. I was doing triples instead of a set of 5 and I was at 5x5@280 and 3@320 friday.

Do you perhaps eat more/better on the weekend and fail to keep up adequate eating through the week?

[Dastardly]

This is a broad question about recovery an adaptation. Just want to know if doing too much volume/load on a stimulus day actually prevents adaptation or mereley delays it in comparison to choosing more moderate weight jumps/volume.

I only gave TM as an example, this is just a general question about how programming works.

[MazdaMatt]

Programming to me can be summed up in this:
1. Do enough to generate a stimululous for growth.
2. Don't do enough to prevent full recovery for your next cycle. (or conversely, make your cycle long enough to be recovered)

So if you can't do a single set of 5 on friday for what you can do 5x5 on monday, you've broken one of those rules. It is not likely #1 because you've probably not regressed so badly in 4 days that you can no longer work with that weight. #2 could be caused by a) inadequate food or b) too much fucking work on Monday destroying your body or c) your cycle is too short and you can no longer work with a 1wk cycle

Any of this sound like bunk to you?

[LimieJosh]

In this situation the lifter probably chose a weight too large for the volume day.

No. If you can complete the day, then the load was appropriate. If it were too heavy then you wouldnt have been able to complete your reps. The problem in your scenario is what you do with the rest of your life in between completing monday's session and starting friday's i.e. sleep and food.

[gzt]

This is covered in the book, the section on the Texas Method, when it discusses your volume day interfering with the intensity day...

Anyway, my answer is that, as long as the weight on volume day is going up, don't worry about it. You're dealing with a load and volume that, for whatever reason, seems to take all week to recover from. Either that's the sort of load you need to advance and you can only do one heavy day per week or something about your recovery is suboptimal.

[MazdaMatt]

I'm still leaning towards more burgers.

Dast, in other news... how is your press coming along? Did you fix up the form and pop an extra 15lbs on that bar yet? :-)

[Greg C]

It might be possible to do so much volume that you don't recover in time for Friday's max effort set I guess, but it'd have to be a stimulus on the order of a huge-ass DL maybe. Probably not a concern for ~98% of the lifters out there anyways.

Dast, in other news... how is your press coming along? Did you fix up the form and pop an extra 15lbs on that bar yet? :-)

Nice.

[Dastardly]

Regarding pressing:

Getting my head under the bar sooner and to a greater extent required a significant deload. Its going to take me a long while to work up to the measly 40kg again, in all seriousness I cannot imagine getting to 60kg in any less than a whole nuther year. But we'll see.

[Dastardly]

Oh and regarding the subject of this thread:

This is not really about me. Im just trying to understand the basics of programming. If somebody who eats 8000kcal a day, 300g protein a fistful of vitamins and gets 10 hours of deep sleep yet fails to recover by the next time they were scheduled to lift a heavy weight. What has happened?

Is the body still in the process of recovery, would another day of rest or a "medium" enable the lifter to hit their scheduled heavy weight progression a couple days later. Or was the load/volume used for the initial stimulus day so great that it fucked the bodies ability to adapt to that event indefinetely. Making that entire week wasted time due to greedyness on the initial heavy day.

Again, this is not specifically about TM. It is a general broad programming question, I think it will in particular help me understand the starr system better. Especially when it involves more than 3 days per week or programming which stretches over more than one week.