Hello, do you guys think that it is useful to increase stress in an absolute manner as the mesocycle is nearing a deload? What I mean by this
If we have a mesocycle that is 6 weeks long + 1 week of deloading, a standard protocol, would it make sense to walk out of most week 1 workouts thinking “Yeah, perhaps I had 5-10 extra lbs on that top set” and “Those back offs were not really hard, maybe I could’ve done a few more” and walking away from week 6 workouts thinking “That’s all I had. I’m totally gassed out”
Achieving this by Increasing relative effort, weight on the bar, volume or some combination of those (with some common sense, not doing 10x10 lol)
My logic is that being a bit more conservative in the beginning can be easier psychologically - Knowing that there’s room to progress and building some momentum for later weeks
But “not leaving anything on the table” in those last 1-2 weeks, because we are deloading anyways maybe it could be useful to push limits a bit further than usual
I think that this is an interesting topic, I’ve seen people do this unintentionally as well. Curious what do you think, thanks. (I’ve listened to progressive loading podcast so I’m aware that “heavier” may not necessarily be better, it just might be different, so there’s that)