Short intro of my injury as it’s pertinent, but the question isn’t about rehab… After a ‘relatively serious’ lower back injury I had to stop squatting/deadlifting for a week, and then reintroduced it from light weights as per BBM-esque type rehab recommendations. I eventually started LP’ing my lifts back and before I could get to my previous strength, I earned myself a nagging hip pain that I have never had before and just couldn’t shake. All squatting hurt, so I took a few weeks off (I replaced it with more variations like trap bar DL for example). I’ve worked squatting back into my routine 1x a week and attempting to build strength on it again, so far so good. I’ve also been gaining weight very slowly as planned and my nutrition is on point. At no point did I ever stop working out and tried to provide somekind of stimulus at all time.
I know strength is specific. But I can’t shake the feeling of how it’s possible that I have lost SO MUCH strength. Pre-injury I was at ~400ish 1rm squat. Right now, 225 for a set of 5 feels embarrassingly and legitimately hard. It kind of felt like that after the back injury as well and before I had to take a break because of the hip I got to 275x5 which used to be “easy” but felt like almost a max. If it wasn’t for the hip injury I think that’s when I would have had to jump back into more advance programming on the squat again. Which is baffling considering I ended novice LP at higher than that, years ago!
When i look in the mirror, It doesn’t look like I lost muscle and I would almost dare say that I look as good as I ever have muscle wise. I know looks can be deceiving though, so did I lose alot of muscle, or is it really possible that I lost that much strength without losing muscle?
Assuming it’s possible that it’s just strength/technique adaptations… I’m currently focusing more on building muscle than specifically strength so I am OK if it’s just strength adaptations. But even if it’s just strength adaptations, can I really overload the muscle enough to stimulate hypertrophy, using weight and rep ranges that are WAY lower than the same muscle experienced before?
I’m going to take a stab at what happened and provide some insight to the best of my knowledge. I hope you’re feeling better now
It sounds like you tweaked your back and then took a week off. When you returned, you started an LP with very light weights- given that you only worked back up to 275 x 5. Then, you took another week off and didn’t squat. Couple this with some skill decay, possible fear around the squat, and maybe some programming issues and this seems somewhat likely.
I don’t think you’ve lost significant muscle mass unless you were bed ridden. That being said, it’s probably not possible to tell by just looking in the mirror in the short term. Still, I think this is not likely to be the culprit.
With respect to what we’d advise in a scenario like this:
Probably would not recommend taking a week off, but rather early reintroduction of movement(s) that you can tolerate as soon as possible- ideally not missing any training.
We emphatically would not recommend people go back to the LP, as it has many short comings as a program in the first place, is not autoregulated, and does not provide enough training stress to drive improvements in someone who’s not a beginner. Being able to add weight to the bar when starting from an artificially light weight does not represent progressive overload, for example.
Hypertrophy is somewhat load-independent, meaning that you can get similar hypertrophy responses from doing heavy sets of 5 and heavy sets of 30. Being able to lift more weight doesn’t make a difference with respect to driving the hypertrophy response.
You hit the nail on the head. That all happened within 6 months or so.
I do have a few of your pre-made routines for rehab and regular ones as well. So I have a good idea of how you guys do things. But between having only what I have at my home gym, scheduling, and other issues… I still stick with my own routine that is just inspired by your guys.
So if I understand correctly… When I go back to the lighter weights that are tolerable, you would have recommended I would have done volume much closer to what I used to do pre-injury or more, and possibly sacrifice even more intensity. In other words, still keep the focus on volume much more than intensity. So instead of lets say 225x5x3…do…210x5x5 (or more sets if tolerable?).
I completely understand the critique of why LP is a poor way of advancing past a certain point. But the only question I have is if LP volume was enough to drive adaptation to X weight in the first place, why wouldn’t it be enough to drive adaptation back to the same number the second time around. Especially considering I am working with a stronger base (more muscle than when a novice).
We would recommend continuing training immediately, if possible, using whatever modifications you need to do this. It would likely be higher volume- though this depends on context- which is reflected in our rehab templates, e.g. sets of 15 on week 1. We would not recommend sets of 5 to initiate the rehab setting unless you’re not really rehabbing anything.
Because you’re more trained now and better at recovering. The same relative training stress (e.g. every session on LP) tends to be less stressful than the last unless relative intensity changes, which only will happen a few times before LP stops altogether. Additionally, you get better at recovering from training the more trained you become. You’re not a novice anymore and even if you were, I couldn’t strongly recommend LP.
