011 Deloads and tapers

Hello and welcome to the high performance physiology podcast. I'm Chris Beardley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mauseri, as you can probably already hear. I'm definitely a little bit under the weather today, I'm struggling with an unpleasant bit of flu, but we will make it happen and we will talk about D loads today. If you've got time, perhaps we'll mention tapers, but we can always cover that in a separate episode. Essentially, when we're talking about D loads, first of all we have to recognize there are two different types of D loads, or two different occasions in which we will see D loads being programmed. Firstly, we'll see them actually being programmed in advance, so essentially a training conditioning coach will decide that the athletes are going to train quite hard for say four or five weeks, and then they're going to do a planned D load at the end of that period of high intensity or high volume training. Second type of D load or second occasion when you're going to see D loads is ultimately when we are naturally going through a training program, and either the coach or the athlete themselves realizes that things are not going well and they've started to accumulate some fatigue. And so they kind of, you know, in discussions, decide that they're going to take an easier week, you know, in the week is coming up, and that's kind of like an unplanned D load that's just being done in response to the state that the athlete finds themselves in. So there's kind of two situations. So ultimately, what I want to do is just talk about the idea of a planned D load and why it's not a great idea. Ultimately, just walk your physiology. Now, essentially in the, you know, kind of high-perturably bodybuilding space, it's already now relatively well recognized that if you're allowing fatigue to accumulate, and what's happening is that post workup fatigue is made up of, you know, mainly three components, although we will actually talk about the addition of a fourth. So the three main components are essentially excitation contraction coupling failure, muscle damage, my favorite damage and central nervous system T caused by the inflammation response to that muscle damage. So that's what we're used to talking about in the kind of high-perturably bodybuilding space. Now, in terms of the excitation contraction coupling failure and the muscle damage, both of those reduce single fiber mechanical tension, which reduces the stimulus that the muscle fibers that are so affected can achieve. So you're reducing their capacity to experience mechanical tension and produce a high-perturably stimulus. The CNS fatigue that's accompanying that reduces the level of motina accruement and stops as accessing as many muscle fibers. And again, that reduces the high-perturably stimulus, but also, you know, kind of is going to create some atrophy opportunity if it kind of continues on for too long, because essentially it means that there are fibers that aren't being trained at the top end of the motina pool in any scenario as long as that post workup fatigue as accumulated remains. So you can have this unpleasant situation where if you go too long with accumulated fatigue present, you're actually going to start to see atrophy at the top end of the motina pool, which is not great because those are pretty useful fibers, especially in the context athletic situations. Now, we're used to talking about that in, as I say, the bodybuilding context. What I want to do now is just introduce the adaptions that we have been describing in previous episodes that are useful for athletes. And why they are actually much more negatively affected than hypertrophy, because essentially with hypertrophy, yes, you're going to lose some mechanical tension at the top end of the motina pool. You're going to lose some muscle fiber activation at the top end of the motina pool, but you still can maintain or even create new hypertrophy in the fibers that you're still activating and still loading. Now, there is going to be some adaption occurring. The problem with the athletic scenario is that many of those adaptions don't have that same kind of gray area. It's very, very binary. Why are they hitting the necessary levels of accruement or firing rates or coordination pattern in order to trigger an adaption or not? And if we don't, we don't get the adaption. So let me just walk through those quickly. So essentially with athletic performance, we're interested in improvements in coordination, especially on sporting movements like maybe throwing or jumping or whatever. We're interested in motina accruement levels and increasing those levels over time, and we're interested in motina firing rates and increasing those over time, because that's a really critical speed adaption. Now peripherally, we've also got muscle fiber shorting velocity that's interesting as well, and I mentioned that in a moment. In terms of that, those post-workout T mechanisms, ultimately the CNS fatigue is going to stop us from reaching both high levels of recruitment and high levels of firing rates. And that's essentially going to stop us from triggering those adaptions at all. And that's really, really different from what we've just described in terms of hypertrophy. Because ultimately, when we can't hit a maximum level of recruitment, we can't hit a maximum firing rate, the adaption simply isn't going to get stimulated. It doesn't get stimulated at 90% or 95% and it really gets stimulated at 100%. So kind of got to push the levels up to the maximum level trigger the adaption. Now, the interesting thing about coordination is that coordination is disrupted any time there is any peripheral fatigue. Essentially, the brain doesn't really understand that the muscle isn't producing the level of force that it should do for the same level of recruitment. The brain thinks in terms of recruitment. So it goes, "Okay, so if I activate this muscle by this quantity, then it should produce this force." Okay, yeah, but it doesn't because you've got this fatigue presence. So now, this is why when people, I mean, there's classic, most sprint coaches will relate to this. They'll see a sprint, they'll see an athlete arrive and they're running like their legs are jelly and they're like, "What did you do yesterday?" And it's clear that they've done something silly, they've gone and played another sport or done something they're not accustomed to doing. And the coordination patterns just completely, you know, out of the window. And it's because ultimately the brain doesn't think in terms of force production, it thinks it does activation. So, essentially, we can't improve our coordination any time we've got peripheral fatigue presence. We don't talk about this in bodybuilding context because it simply isn't that relevant, but it's very, very relevant in the context of athletic performance. So, this is one of those things that I get into trouble when I talk to sports coaches because they're like, "Oh, we need our athletes to be able to perform while they're fatigued." I'm like, "Good luck." Because that's not a possibility. You can't improve coordination in a fatigue state. It just isn't because the brain doesn't store different movement patterns for fatigue and un-fatigue situations. It only stores a single variation, which is its best variation for un-fatigue state. And then, essentially, it will just kind of wheel that out, even in a fatigue state. So, you just kind of get, you know, whatever adjustment occurs as a result of the fatigue being present. And that's why, even high performers, their mechanics are fantastic. They start getting fatigued and the mechanics break down. That is absolutely always going to happen. It's just the way that the brain treats things. We know this because of the way that the motor learning researchers looked at fatigue and un-fatigue learning situations. So, we've essentially got a whole bunch of other important adaptions that are not going to get triggered if we are training in a fatigue state. And that's essentially saying that if you need to plan a D-load, then all those weeks leading up to that D-load, none of those adaptions are getting stimulated. You know, so we're not really able to stimulate some of the key underpinning adaptions for maximum strength and also for maximum speed. Now, just on the muscle fiber shortening velocity, essentially, pretty much any fatigue mechanism is going to slow the muscle fiber down. Not every single fatigue mechanism reduces muscle fiber force, but pretty much all of them slow the fiber down. And so, ultimately, if we've got any of this post-workout fatigue present, that's going to slow the fibers down. We're not going to be able to reach very high levels of speed at the muscular level, and that's going to stop that adaption from happening as well. So, really, we've kind of got a full house when it comes to the kind of adaptions that we want for athletes being blunted or completely prevented from happening when we are training in a fatigue state. Essentially, you know, the period leading up to a D-load when we're actually planning to push volumes up to high level, because everyone's running around, you know, screaming with the idea that, you know, volume is what's driving the adaptions? I know it's not. The stimulus is driving the adaptions. Volume is just the dose applied to the stimulus, but of course, as we know from hypertrophy very well and almost certainly applies to most other adaptions, you kind of get a dose response that's non-linear within the session itself. So, you do a couple of really good stimulating kind of reps for any given adaption and fantastic. You've stimulated the adaption to occur. Now, you come back there so later and try and do it again. Trying to sort of cram enormous amount of stimulus into a single workout and then expecting to then do it again two or three days later. And for that fatigue that you've also created, not have a negative effect is delusional. You know, ultimately, the athletic scenario is very sensitive to the presence of post-doc athletics. We don't really want to be planning to accumulate so much fatigue that we need a D-load. So, ultimately, that's what I wanted to go through in terms of physiology. Essentially, what we're arguing or I'm arguing is that we shouldn't be planning to do a D-load. But, of course, it does also mean that if we recognize that something has gone slightly wrong with our kind of programming and the athlete that we're working with is starting to accumulate fatigue, then of course we would immediately implement a D-load of some description and we can talk about exactly what kind of shape those D-loads might look like. But, you know, for now, that's what I wanted to say. Rob, over to you. Can you give us a little bit of a steer in terms of how would you respond in terms of D-loading and athlete if you recognized that they had already kind of managed to accumulate some fatigue? Whether that was because of your programming, whether that was because of me, else they were doing in their sport, but you recognized that they're kind of starting to flag a little bit. What would you do at that particular point? Yeah, Chris, so I think the best thing to do is obviously you just said don't plan a D-load. I can't remember the last time that I planned one week through months and events. It's just not, not something I would ever do at this point. But if I'm monitoring, say, jump heights with, you know, jump to the beginning of a session or kind of sprinting, doing sprint work, things like that, monitoring the speeds there, as soon as I see those start to drop off from more than a couple sessions in a row, you know, at that point, I'll figure out there maybe I've done something or more likely they're just volume of work outside. The gym has gotten too high and I get it back, something off a little bit. So usually at that point, I think the easiest route is just going down to one or two, usually two, preferably maintenance type workouts a week. And the way I would do that is just, you know, same thing as usual, full body, generally not changing exercises or anything like that too much. And just backing down to a minimum of one to two sets and then low reps and staying just a little farther, maybe even the normal from failure. So if I have a client who's saying, you know, doing two reps in reserve on most of the strength work stuff like that, maybe one to two reps reserve on hypertrophy things and those, that's sort of training, maybe back them down to like three or four reps, shy of failure on the strength work, two to three reps on the hypertrophy work. You're still getting a little bit of everything, you know, certainly enough for maintenance and you do those two workouts in a week and then, you know, assess the following week. How well that has worked if the jump height comes back to normal, sprint speeds come back to normal, cool, you know, that's done as a job. And most of the time, honestly, that will do it unless someone is pretty deep in like a competitive season or just doing, you know, way, way too much outside of the gym. And yeah, but really, you just got to monitor things pretty well and don't want more than a few sessions. Yeah, let's talk about that monitoring because you've kind of dropped a really important point there with this idea of monitoring using jump height or or even sprint speed. I mean, ultimately, you know, in athletic context, strengthening initiative coaches are already quite familiar with using vertical jump height as a measurement of readiness and in the weather fatigue is accumulating, but let's just now explain physiologically why that is so useful, you know, compared to say just watching progressive overload happen, for example. Ultimately, well, I think most people forget is that when you've got a fast movement and they say, you know, comparing that with a sort of heavy strength training movement, both cases, you've kind of got maximum levels of recruitment as far as that person is capable of achieving them. I mean, reality is it's probably like 90% or 85 or something like that, but it doesn't really matter. 100% for them. So they've kind of got like both high levels of recruitment. In the case of the slow movement, basically, all of the fibers in the muscle are contributing relatively similarly, relative to them, they're cross-sectional areas. So when we compare the force production of say a slow-teach fiber or a fast-reach fiber, that pretty similar relative to the, I mean, there's 10% here or there, but I mean, they're really not that different. I think people generally think they're much more different than they are. They're really not. You know, not a threshold of money when it's fibers and that, slow-teach fibers don't produce much force when they, they definitely don't. So if you can literally compare a fiber with another fiber, they would compare quite different force, different, produce quite different force, but simply because they're different sizes. Yeah, they're different sizes. Yeah. If you kind of relative to size, they're actually producing pretty much the same amount to force. Yeah. So that's kind of where I think you're right. I think that's where people get confused. They forget that you've got to normalize the force production of the fiber to the size to get an idea of what it's contributing. So we've got an absolute ton of these low threshold motineat muscle fibers when you sort of group them all together, they're actually contributing pretty meaningfully to the performance of that particular exercise. If you then go to the high velocity movement, what's really interesting here is that you got a whole load of fibers that are shortening and not producing any force. I think this, sometimes this blows people's minds when they hear this. I'm like, no, the fiber has a maximum shortening velocity. When you go off the end of that, it doesn't do anything. So essentially, if you look at slow-teach fibers, they've got a maximum shortening velocity of maybe around about half a fiber length per second, which is really slow. You've got to look at sort of the type to A fibers, there may be a putc 3 or 4 fiber lengths per second. And you've got type 2x, 5 or 6 fiber lengths per second. So there's like a 12-fold difference between like the sort of slowest and the fastest, there's massive differences. So ultimately, in a vertical jump, you've only really got half the muscle, but it's capable of contributing to the actual movement itself. So if you now kind of think about that, okay, so what does that mean? It means that if I've got a, let's say, I've started to accumulate some fatigue and 5% of my muscle fibers out of the 100% that we're interested in, maybe 5% of my muscle fibers have now kind of got a severe amount of damage or their recruitment levels drops so that they're not able to be even activated. Well, that means I've now got 5% in a, say, I'm testing a 3-whip max or a 5-whip max pack squat. I've got like 5% less over my 100%, so I'm going to see a 5% drop, okay. Maybe I'm going to notice that, maybe I'm not going to notice that, no, maybe that's within the noise I don't know. If I now look at my vertical jump, I've got 5% over 50% now. Big difference. I'm going to notice a 10% drop, you know, that's really huge. So that's really all it is when people go, oh, well, why are we using high velocity movements to test? I mean, is it just because it's, you know, kind of easy to track with high velocity being so much easier to simply do in practice? Well, yes, that's true, but the reality is it's different because you're going to see a massive effect of the fatigue in a high velocity movement because you're only using half the flyers in the muscle. Yeah, much more meaningful data. Much more meaningful. So I think really, you know, we've talked before and you've explained before how you're programming these sort of jumps and other high velocity movements at the beginning of every workout. And this is such a great opportunity to test naturally for readiness. And the fantastic thing is, when the athlete is doing those movements every single session, it becomes a really good habit and they start doing it in the same way and it becomes much more controllable. One of the things that I think people get, you know, wrong is where they, like, they only do high velocity movements, like in particular, sort of periods of the year, like, "Oh, we're doing straight blocks now, and then we're doing speed blocks later." And then they're like, "Oh, so how can I test readiness and, like, put a speed movement in?" Yeah, which is a job, man. I mean, it's just so easy to just keep it in there all the time, and I mean, there's other reasons why we do that, anyway, which we'll get on to when we talk about prioritization. But, yeah, so fantastic. So, are you just programming mainly counter-moving jumps as your kind of main readiness test? I mean, most of the time, especially lately, just because, you know, everyone can do them. Super accessible. A lot of the people I work with have, like, the over-jump, like, four things for testing jump heights and stuff like that, so they don't even necessarily look at camera setup and, like, all these things. So you just have, like, all these really simple ways to do just an easy counter-moving jump test. You know, quite a few guys that have, we're doing sprint work and stuff like that. Like, also mounted on the sprint speed, but the jump is probably the easiest one that I have the most people do. Just so accessible, especially with just, like, low equipment availability. Totally. Absolutely. It makes, I think it makes the most sense to do that. So, really, ultimately, what we've kind of got to is that, you know, de-loads aren't something that we would ever program simply because, you know, we don't want to be in a situation where we're expecting a de-load to be necessary. But equally, we've, you know, very ready to, you know, kind of start on a de-load. If we notice that, something's gone wrong and the athlete is starting to accumulate at the T. So, if we now, kind of, just look at the idea of tapers, since we've kind of got plenty of time, in a taper situation, we're basically saying that we've got to get the athletes in a scenario where they're totally and utterly ready for the competition that's coming up. Now, physiologically, there's just another couple of interesting things to note here, because ultimately, this relies on the detraining of adaptions. Now, it's quite popular to claim that, you know where I'm going with this, don't you? It's quite popular to claim that things like speed, which is not actually an adaption itself, as we've explained in the earlier episodes, you can't really talk about speed or strength detraining, because it's meaningless idea. It's the adaptions that underpin those that are detraining. The adaptions that underpin speed don't really detrain very quickly. Ultimately, neural adaptions stick around pretty much indefinitely, at least on the scale that we're talking about. I mean, there's data showing recruitment, for example, doesn't really detrain over six months without training. So, I mean, it's really, really long period of time if we'd have to worry about, you know, neural adaptions, and speed is mostly neural adaptions. So, when you go and look at the detraining literature, and you actually find that speed as an outcome, which I don't like talking about the idea of speed detraining, but if you measure speed during a detraining period, it doesn't reduce very much. In fact, often goes up, because, in the context of the detraining, we're actually seeing a shift in fiber types towards faster phenotypes away from the slower ones. So, we get a type 2A to type 2X shift, which is the opposite of what we normally see during strength training. So, ultimately, when people think about tapers, you ought to go, "What adaption am I most likely to lose?" So, Rob, what adaption am I most likely to lose? Ah, hypertrophy. There we go. It's going to be almost very quick. That's the one that I'm worried about. I actually saw camera dentists as well, but it's kind of wrapped into the same thing. So, yeah, basically muscle mass is the one that I'm going to worry about. So, when I'm structuring a taper, I'm not worried about letting the athlete, you know, kind of slack a little bit on the speed stuff, although, you know, I probably would keep most of it in any way, because it doesn't really create very much fatigue. What I am going to worry about quite a lot. is then you know potentially losing some muscle mass. And I think that's really really different from the way most coaches program tapers because they think in terms of outcomes. They go how can I keep my athlete speed? How can I keep my athlete's strength? I'm like no, don't think like that. Drop down a level and go how can I keep the adaption? Well how do we know how quickly the adaptions detrain? Well there's loads of data showing you how. So yeah Rob talk to us a little bit about how you would kind of I mean would your tapers look more or less like your D-load or is there a difference? I mean they do actually look very similar and it's a it's a good time to actually tackle this a little bit because I had a question on Instagram the other day from a guy who's got judo nationals in three weeks. I'm not a guy that I personally coach but we chat occasionally and he had asked like what kind of modifications I would make in just the last couple weeks leading into the comp to you know make the most out of the the competition. So basically all I suggested was making sure that he maintained muscle mass and what I would do are important muscles for judo you know so like the hip musculature so I told him to keep in just two sets of heavy hip thrust the back musculature so I told him to keep in a couple sets of heavy chin-ups he doesn't train in a gym with a ton of equipment at least it seems to me so just heavy chin-ups pull-ups just a bit of heavy pressing and then some stuff for quads and hamstrings. Just one to two sets each twice a week is what I told him and you know I figure if you're training a lot of judo very intense I mean you're gonna be getting you know plenty of core work you know plenty of arms involved things like that in a lot of the actual judo training so just really to take you off keeping like the kind of bare minimum maximum strength slash hypertrophy work in there so he just doesn't lose any muscle size by the time the camp comes totally totally and I mean from a literature point of view I honestly think you know they could do single sets and they'd be absolutely fine yeah obviously people kind of like oh well I'm okay I can do two fine they can do two but you know I think you know in that scenario where interestingly when I have talked with strengthening his knee coaches working with athletes at the highest levels in sports that require a lot of speed they often do like slightly longer tapers a couple of weeks rather than just kind of a couple of days or a week or whatever and I think that there is actually a lot to sense in that I think that especially on the speed and any kind of fatigue really does impair movement velocity I mean it's less relevant for judo but for something like you know yeah sprinting something like that I'd be really keen to see a longer kind of taper and bring it down to two strength training sessions a week of single sets and probably a rep who deserve you know even even though it's heavy a load I'd still want a rep who deserve on those I think that could be really cool more time for those fiber time shifts to go back the way you are kind of really make sure that the fire times are in the right direction make sure that we've got you know no fatigue really lingering around because you know especially in in sort of events where you want to be absolutely getting to your maximum level of speed and that's critical for performance of the event I think I'd be really sort of happy with that slightly longer deal because ultimately sorry deal taper because ultimately essentially the same thing you know really I don't think we're losing anything by having that yeah well constructed taper with those slightly lower volumes maybe an extra rep and reserve here or there it doesn't really are losing anything in that in that situation um sure we're not going quite as quickly in the direction of the adaptions that we might be seeking but honestly at that point you know hopefully we've already got all the adaptions that we should be seeking I mean there's a difference between and just so people 100% clear what I'm saying there there's a difference between um because ultimately what I'm saying here is that the de-load itself isn't the problem so I think this is just an important thing for me to just emphasize when people say to me oh yeah but you said that de-loads and tapers are okay and you can just do them and there's no problem with doing them there isn't it's the what happened before it that made you need the de-load that was the problem so if you're programming a de-load that means that you are deliberately going into a very fatigued state the search that you need the de-load that's the problem the de-load itself is actually pretty good trading honestly yeah it's the bad programmers it's the bad program first that was the reason we needed the de-load or the program de-load this is the reason why I'm kind of um you know saying to people you shouldn't be de-loading um actually tapering before a competition uh honestly with you know two sessions a week with you know sensible uh kind of programming we could actually make some small improvements still um so you can have a really long taper if it's constructed properly I think yeah and then like you just said you'll be constantly improving even if it's just very minimally versus you run yourself into the ground and then not only do you maybe not perform well you might even move backwards you know slightly in that time totally because ultimately if um if we're in that period of uh especially in the first part of the tape or the first part of the de-load where the fatigue is accumulating uh sorry how's accumulated and is now starting to dissipate um we're actually still in a state where that fatigue is causing us problems I mean that's what a lot of people don't realize the problem with fatigue accumulation um ultimately the way fatigue accumulation works is broadly numerical so um up to a point so basically the way I tell people is um you can kind of get an idea of roughly what kind of numbers of sets are you know possible to recover from I mean obviously this doesn't work if you've got a ton of extra kind of aerobic stuff in sports practice and that's why athletes can't really do this but in a bodybuilding context if somebody comes to me and goes oh I've been doing this particular training program and I was doing you know five sets three times a week for this muscle group I'm like okay how long have you been doing that for yes yeah because yeah yeah exactly because what I can do is I can go through and I go that's an excess because really recoverable is about three sets three times a week so I can go through and I can go okay three sets three times week is recoverable and you've been doing five sets that means I've got two extra sets per week which is kind of maybe you know one and a half days of recovery requirement per workout and you've been doing that for say you know I don't know 10 workouts I've got 10 times that one and a half days of recovery um that's like you know sort of 15 days worth of recovery I've now got to plan on you having that's a two week the load period or two week taper for which most of that taper you're not going to be getting great results because you're gonna be letting that be accumulation kind of you know dissipate so the thing about dealers themselves is the actual training in them can be good if you've got minimal you know accumulative tea but if they're off the back of a really long period of time when you were you know deep in a recovery kind of haul and ultimately they're not so good because you can't stimulate a muscle or car stimulate adaptions if the you know the stimulus can't be reached so it just wanted to clarify there why I'm kind of sounding like I don't think taper already load is problematic because in itself it's not it's the bit that happens before it's the problem and I think you know probably on the line of tapers worth mentioning where people go so so wrong with them because I mean I see a lot of bad ones I mean even in like the context of you know just powerlifting as a support where coaches are programming tapers and you would obviously coaching powerlifters if you're a powerlifter you would know that muscle size was important and still you know the way a lot of people do a taper for powerlifting is they'll keep in the main lifts and they'll remove any of the more like targeted accessory work once in a little reps they'll go from you know lower reps up to you know sets of like 12 to 15 because it feels lighter and easier and then instead of you know tapering and clearing the fatigue anything like that you just you know kind of fuck yourself and then wonder why your meat day is not so good and I've I've talked to track athletes whose coaches have done similar things which was crazy to me a collegiate track sprinter who I work with now she'd said that her coach would have them do you know sets of 12 and things like that with lighter weights go sort of a competition and things like that and I just I couldn't wrap my head around it the the tapers that I've seen that I thought were the worst were when a strength training program was being done I think it was in the context perhaps a powerlifting or perhaps maybe it was strong management like that but it was in the context of a strength sport and the athletes were training you know with heavy loads relatively close to failure you know before the tapers started and then all they did was they kept exactly the same lifts and they just did exactly the same number of reps but they dropped the weight in half and I'm like yeah obviously you could have sat on sofa you could have sat on the sofa and not done anything because that's basically the benefit you're getting they're training so far away from failure it's literally pointless even being in the gym at that point I'm like honestly that is nuts I can't get my head around how little you would have to understand about physiology to program like that is is really quite astounding to me it's kind of similar to what we said about like people programming power training for the last few weeks leading into something where you do like you know 40% for low reps miles from failure and you get really good at whatever it is you're testing there you do it doesn't do anything honestly there's mad so yeah I think the yeah just coming back to that powerlifting example that you go because I think a lot of people are going to be interested in that so you mentioned that they're keeping the main lifts in and again let me just kind of note on that that's because people think that things like coordinating and neural other neural options are going to dissipate. So they have to keep the main lift in because that's the, you know, that's the, it's like, no, that's not going to go away. You can, you can kind of just take a, you know, if you need to take a rest on that, you can take a rest on that. Then they're taking out all of those assistance exercises that have been building the muscle mass that supports those lifts. Yeah. Well, the idea that's not going to go away in a week or two weeks. In the idea that hypertrophy doesn't dissipate within two weeks, I'm like, okay, and then you wonder why your squat was, you know, 15, 20 pounds down midday and you say, oh, you know, it was a quarter quad back peak or something like that. Well, really it's just because you lost muscle. You just didn't have to lose enough to be meaningful on that time period. Absolutely. It really is a hypertrophy cycle emergency problem. So I think really it's the same thing that we would do for any other athlete is drop the work back down to two sessions a week, you know, sort of single sets, maybe a rep and reserve. And then, you know, as regards the main lifts, I think really I would be focusing on practice. I'd be like, you know, hit your openers. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Openers about it is if I'm programming someone the weekend, you know, me, that's about as heavy as I'll go, you know, quite a bit from failure and then just making sure I keep the actual work. Like you said, the built that muscle in the program. Yeah. I mean, really for me, it'd be like, I want you to be bored of your openers, but we get to be bored of everything you've done by the time we get to the camp. So yeah. So that would just hopefully that's useful for people that, you know, thinking about how to apply the physiology to tapers in several different situations. Also, you know, as I say, a de-load in the tape we're going to look very, very, very similar. May as I say, very, very minimal differences just around things like we've just been describing with, you know, powerlifting and needing to build confidence with the, with the openers. But, you know, other than that, they're really going to be very similar. So I mean, you just gave us some examples of things that you've seen that are silly. To finish off, have you seen anything else that is silly in tapers and de-loading? Oh, man. I mean, there's always so much fun around. I guess I've seen another one. I guess in, you know, the context of powerlifting would be, and this one I haven't seen as much of quite a while, but people that are more conjugate proponents, doing things like instead of the regular competition done lift, prior to a comp doing something like, you know, block pole or rack pole, things like that, doing something that is not the main lift, and also at the same time, you know, dropping off accessories and things like that. I've seen that in more instances than I would like. And it just makes absolutely no sense. When it's in a low bar squat, they do like, you know, like a safety bar pause squat in the last session. There are some random ways that I cannot ever fathom. It doesn't matter. Very strange. Very strange. There are certainly some very strange things going around with tapers. I think, you know, it's one of those kind of very superstitious sort of things where people want to kind of do things that they've done in the past and then accumulate beliefs around it. But ultimately, that is tapers, dealers. I think we've covered that pretty well. We will continue this in the same line next week by talking about periodization. So as we were talking about that before, I think that's probably going to be one of our most controversial episodes that we do. So I'm looking forward to doing that one. So yes, we will be here next week. Thank you all for joining us and happy new year. Happy new year.