Listening to the podcasts all the way through and the info is awesome. Makes a lot of sense. One question I had today when listening to the programming podcast “why running it out and getting fat is a bad idea”. In talking about recovery and how often times it’s not more recovery that’s needed (more rest, more food, etc), but actually more stress is needed to produce the stress, recovery, adaptation cycle. But my question is - how would you be able to tell whether it was a lack of recovery or a need for increased stress. I’m assuming a lack of recovery resources would look similar in that one started missing reps/sets.
Missing reps / sets doesn’t automatically imply a need for recovery, as it’s perfectly possible to load up a weight on the bar that you aren’t yet strong enough to handle, even in the most recovered state.
Again, we tend to focus less on the idea of “inadequate recovery” and more on dialing in the stress dose. Recovery capacity adapts over time, but if the stress dose is crazy (too much volume and/or intensity), the solution is usually to fix the dose of stress, not to take more days off and train less frequently so you can recover.
One general proxy is if you are consistently getting very sore after every workout, for example, then we’d probably try dialing back on the training volume a bit. If you’re grinding near-maximal sets on a regular basis, we’d probably dial back on the intensity a bit.
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Makes sense! Thank you!!