I was going to post this in the Facebook group but my thoughts spiralled and I though this would be a better place, just for future reference would you like these sorts of questions in the group?
I’ve been reading and listening to a bunch of your stuff on programming and one thing I’ve struggled with is divorcing stress from difficulty, would a more appropriate descriptor of stress in the context of strength training be that which disrupts homeostasis? Assuming this is true would it then be correct to say that the skill in programming is finding the balance of volume and intensity to generate enough stress to disrupt homeostasis while keeping fatigue at a level that can be recovered from between workouts, swing too much in either direction of volume or intensity and you could generate too much fatigue to recover from while not generating enough stress to facilitate an adaptation?
Assuming the above isn’t complete nonsense world it be possible to answer the following?
-Do novel exercises require less volume and intensity to generate stress? If so does this mean there is some merit in the bro science of changing up exercises to ‘confuse’ muscles even if the reasoning is incorrect?
-With enough information can the calculation of what is required to generate enough stress be as specific as Desired Stress=Volume.Intensity with of tolerance of say +/-5%? Is so does optimal programming for an individual come down to personal preference e.g if a person preferred more singles @8 you would programme more of these or would optimal training mean doing what is required over what is preferred?
I hope this comes across as intended in my quest to become educated and not questioning of your methods. Thanks for all the awesome content.
Either place works for questions, so I’ll leave it to you
I don’t think I would describe training stimulus, training stress, or fitness adaptations in terms of homeostasis at all.
The skill in programming is to find the correct stimulus to drive the appropriate type and amount of stress to produce the desired fitness adaptation.
Novel exercises tend to generate more fatigue for a given stimulus. As far as whether changing exercises would produce more fitness adaptations, that would depend on what fitness adaptations you were seeking. For strength, the exercise selection tends to be limited due to specificity and many exercises have transference to each other, which reduces how novel the exercise is. For hypertrophy, adding more fatigue may be counter productive, as this may outstrip resources to grow new muscle. This is one of the reasons why much of the hypertrophy response is seen a few weeks into a program.
-With enough information can the calculation of what is required to generate enough stress be as specific as Desired Stress=Volume.Intensity with of tolerance of say +/-5%?{/quote]
No.
s so does optimal programming for an individual come down to personal preference e.g if a person preferred more singles @8 you would programme more of these or would optimal training mean doing what is required over what is preferred?
Individual preferences and responses are always important for programming.
So for a hypertrophy response you need to have adapted enough (gotten stronger?) that a given weight no longer produces so much fatigue that resources are taken away from muscle building but provides enough stress to stimulate muscle growth?
Would it be a correct assumption that after the above depends on your level of specificity e.g if you train to be a power lifter you would still get a hypertrophy response but not as much as if you trained specifically for hypertrophy? The inverse would then be true of training specifically for hypertrophy rather than strength? I would guess there is more overlap and spectrum of training if your goals are to get stronger and/or jacked in a general sense?
Given what you said about hypertrophy response is this why we use auto regulation so that we’re training at weights and volume that will facilitate the growth of new muscle as opposed to simply recovering from fatigue?
Improved force production isn’t really the adaptation that would signal increased growth potential. I would just be measuring increased muscle size.
I think most strength and conditioning programs generate hypertrophy, but probably less than if they didn’t have to “compromise” training by doing all the high fatigue strength work. I think that nearly all resistance training will improve force production in the manner being trained, which is an improvement in strength by definition- though not necessarily and improvement in 1RM.
