BBM Crew,
I have been listening, and relistening, to your podcast episodes regarding programming. From my understanding of the episodes, you feel it is the lack of stress (stress being volume) which causes a lifter to ‘fail’ at the end of LP. My overly simple question is could you not simply move from 3x5 to 4x5 and continue to see progress?
The intensity would still be too high if you continued to attempt to increase the weight every workout. You have to increase the volume and modulate the intensity.
So, let’s say you reset with a 10% decrease
That could work, for a short amount of time. You get used to that and the training-effect would diminish. So then you decrease with 10% again and go for 5x5? Yes, you could do that. But again I would expect that the training effect from that intervention would last you even shorter than the jump from 3x5 to 4x5.
You might not even be able to gain the 10% decrease back.
The stress wil be high but not productive.
To make the training productive again, you’d need a more rigorous intervention in your training plan. (variation in exercises, frequency, rep ranges, volume, …)
I don’t know if I’m the best person to answer you, but to keep it simple you can’t just continually increase weight/intensity forever. Some other variables have to be changed because the current volume level isn’t enough to drive progress, but any more intensity would be too much.
Volume is the main driver of hypertrophy, and hypertrophy is the main driver of strength increases. You go from doing nothing to 3x5 on LP, and that’s an increase in volume and therefore results in hypertrophy. Shortly 3x5 at maximum intensity isn’t enough volume to drive further hypertrophy, and you have to do something else.
Maybe? But what’s the point? Is there any real benefit in doing a 10% deload, adding an extra set, was wasting weeks of time building back up just to potentially add another fahve or two to your lifts? Especially since you’re never in your life going to train that way again? Why not just move on to a program that will have you doing and learning things that you will use the rest of your career? People get so stuck on SS and feeling like they have to milk every last pound out of it. It’s simply not true.
Your question seems to assume that tissue growth and refinement of neurological factors for “strength” can continue to scale up at 2.5-5# every 48 hours. And that simply tinkering with single-session stress-dose will bring about that ideal rate of improvement. That’s simply not the case. Humans don’t scale up in size or strength like that.
I think the question “what causes a lifter to fail at the end of LP…too much or too little stress?” is the wrong question. You’re simply dealing with an organism that can no longer demonstrate an appreciable strength increase in 48 hours.
^
That said, I think simply taking the average time to new, arbitrary PRs and calling it an “SRA cycle” is silly…and a corrupt “SRA model” can itself can lead to really bone-headed programming decisions. Behold TM.