Training response

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

In the podcast 322: November 2024, Dr. Austin Baraki mentions in simple terms 4 phenotypes of people and their response to training.

  1. Responding well to training and coping well with stress
  2. Responding well but coping poorly with stress
  3. Responding badly, but coping well with stress
  4. Responding badly to training and coping poorly with training stress

For group 4, what is your approach to training programming? More volume with less RPE? More training variability to spread out the tissue load? When you decide to increase the volume or increase the intensity in this type of people?

2

Great question, Dvito.

To clarify Dr. Baraki’s position (and mine) on these four general training responses, the designation is specific to a particular exercise intervention. In other words, someone who is a “number 4” to program X may be a “number 1” on a different program, with different environmental inputs, and so on.

If someone is responding poorly with training and is showing signs of poor recovery, I would likely interpret that as training stress that’s too high. There are many ways to lower training stress, such as reduced RPE, reduced volume, reduced relative intensity, and so on. Individual factors like goals, environment, preferences, and so on would guide management.

We talk about how-to interpret training plateaus and different management strategies in our Low Fatigue eBook.

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