Please discuss the content in another thread, so that I can post it into multiple comments in sequence. The character limit doesn’t allow me to put it into a single comment.
Disclaimer: This is not a transcript, just my notes. While I did copy some sentences verbatim, I paraphrased many others. I might have misinterpreted what was being said, and in some cases I did not quite understand the argument (I left a note in those parts).
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IEFJ_90vGE
Part 1: Why harder does not equal better
Stress
Stress is a phenomenon that results in a decreased level of performance. That decrease can be very transient - it can last minutes, hours, days. For example, when you do one rep at RPE 8 (meaning that you leave 2 reps in the tank), for some amount of time you will be unable to repeat that at the same RPE. But a couple minutes later you might be able to.
Stress can be productive or non-productive. Productive stress is any training stress that creates the desired outcomes. From a strength training perspective, it would improve either hypertrophy (the cross sectional area of a muscle) or increase strength trough some other means, like skill improvement, neuromuscular improvement, etc. Stronger, bigger, or both.
Non-productive stress is by definition one that doesn’t contribute to the desired outcomes. This depends on what the goal is - if you want endurance and your training doesn’t produce improved endurance, that is non-productive stress because it’s non-specific to your sport. There is a lot of training you could do that doesn’t improve your performance in your sport specifically. An example of non-productive stress would be lighting yourself on fire - it’s very stressful, but doesn’t improve your performance. As a more salient example, if you do a very heavy, bone-on-bone 5 sets of 5 effort, it might not contribute to your 1RM as well as different type of rep, set or intensity scheme.
Similar to the spectrum of specificity, there is a spectrum of productiveness of stress. This also depends on individual response to training variables, training history, expectations and psychology, etc. Not all stress is as productive as another stress. There are differences in how the human organism responds to certain kinds of stress even if they are rather similar. An example would be a 5RM (which is 86% of a 1RM) and a set of 5 at 80% - the 5RM is more stressful, but it’s not necessarily a productive stress. And if it’s not productive, what is the point of exposing yourself to that? Harder isn’t always better, heavier isn’t always better, but by the same token, lighter isn’t always better either - it’s nuanced.
Sensitivity vs resistance
[0:07:10]
A concept most people will be familiar with is insulin resistance, when your cells don’t respond quite as well to a given concentration of insulin and so you need a higher amount of insulin to overcome that resistance. This is what ends up happening in conditions like type 2 diabetes, when you need to be given exogenous insulin, or be given treatment that artificially sensitises you to insulin, which will make you more sensitive to the insulin you already have.
Sensitivity and resistance talks about the robustness of the physiologic response to a given stimulus. If we have two people, one who is very lean and metabolically healthy, the other who is an end-stage type 2 diabetic, then the first person’s cells will respond very robustly to a small dose of insulin, but the next person’s cells will not respond to that dose of insulin and will need either artificial means of sensitising them or a much higher dose of insulin.
As another analogy, if you walk into a room and somebody is wearing way too much perfume, then all you can smell is the perfume. You are very sensitive to the perfume at that point, because you haven’t smelled it before and it’s new. However, 20 minutes later, you stop smelling it, because you de-sensitised yourself to it. That’s like developing insulin resistance in a very short period of time. The only way you can smell the perfume again is either adding more perfume or leaving the room to smell something different (which would re-sensitise you to the perfume) and then coming back.
If you’re seeing a new exercise or a new rep/set scheme for the first time, it can be very stressful, meaning that it will cause a more prolonged and robust dip in performance. However, it doesn’t mean that it has to be really hard, it can be something that you have never seen before. It is a physiologic stressor insofar as it provokes a physiologic response. You should divorce the ideas of something being hard vs something being stressful.
The first time you exposed to something, it is very stressful. The next time it’s less stressful. This is an example of the repeated bout effect (your ability to better tolerate a given stimulus). The second time, it is easier to recover from than the first time, regardless of whether the weight is heavier - this is because the exercise and rep/set scheme is not new anymore and your performance is better. The relative loading might be the same, but now you’re better at tolerating that stress, meaning that the same sort of input is less stressful. At some point, if you keep repeating the same workouts, even with more weight, you’re not imparting enough stress to drive the stress-recovery-adaptation. If the workouts stay the same over time, they cause a smaller disruption of homeostasis and you get a smaller adaptation. You need to re-sensitise yourself to the stress - you can add more perfume to the room (add more stress, usually by adding more volume), or you could leave the room to smell something different (exercise variation or novel changes to the rep/set scheme). If all you’ve ever done is fahves, and you switch to sets of tens, that’s a new stress for you, even if the exercises stay the same, and you’ll be more sore and get a longer dip in performance.
During SSLP, when you do a reset and take 10% off the bar, you get a small de-training effect which re-sensitises you to the training stress. This will work for a couple weeks, but the main reason that the program stopped working is that you’ve been seeing the same exercises, the same sets and reps, the same relative intensity for weeks and you’ve become really good at tolerating it. The stress is not enough to drive the adaptation. This does NOT mean that the workout is not hard. Being on fire is also very hard, it’s just not useful.
Recovery and adaptation
[0:16:30]
In contrast to stress, which caused a decrease in performance for some time period, recovery is when your performance returns to the baseline level it was at prior to the stress. This may take minutes, hours, days, or weeks. If you’re doing sets across, you have an intra-workout stress that you recover from to perform the next set. Stress is dynamic, in that it can have an effect for a variable length of time, which is also impacted by how sensitive you are to that stressor. The organism is constantly responding to the stressor and is constantly in a state of recovery as well. We sometimes give recovery discrete time periods when discussing things, but that’s not really how the body works - it’s constantly responding to the composite of stressors that it’s receiving and recovering from them and it doesn’t see a calendar. Having discrete periods of time where you’re expecting a stress-recovery-adaptation to occur in full is a faulty way of looking at programming.
An overload event is effectively a productive stress that’s been applied to a person and that’s been recovered from and subsequently adapted to. However, there is no discrete overload event you could measure and put on a calendar. You can’t say that if you’re a “novice” then your overload event is one day and you can adapt 48 hours later, because every training session you’re accumulating stress that has not been completely recovered and adapted to. You never completely realize the totality of all the stress and recovery in one single adaptation until much later. The last few sessions of a successful novice progression is effectively the summation of accumulated training stress.
The decay of certain physical adaptations is faster for a novice than somebody who has been training for a longer amount of time. If a novice stops training, he won’t suddenly get so much stronger from all that previously accumulated stress - he hasn’t been training long enough to have enough of accumulated stress to peak. It’s more likely that the novice’s strength will decay, whereas somebody who has been training longer and has a bigger base of stress built up will likely peak and get stronger after a week of lighter training.