012 Periodization

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mouseri. I'm going to talk about periodization today. So this is the long anticipated conversation we've been talking about this behind the scenes for about a week or two now. We're very excited to talk about this. It's been a lot of fun. So basically, periodization has some interesting features associated with it, especially around the terminology. I'm just going to do a quick comment on that before I jump in and talk about what the physiology behind the tool is. But first of all, I want to explain some of this terminology problem. So periodization historically meant doing periods of different types of training. So essentially, maybe a month or two doing one type of training and then you switch the program and do something different. And often those differences will be quite big. You might be switching completely from heavy strength training to power training to biometrics and there'll be large chunks of the year when you'd only be doing one type of training. So historically, that's kind of what the periodization idea was about. When sports science got hold of this periodization idea and started playing about with it, they tried to find something really simple to periodize and they picked on load or rep range. So they started periodizing from heavy loads and moderate loads and light loads and all that kind of thing in a hypertrophy context. Mainly, that was the kind of the idea. Now the problem with that is when they started structuring their workouts and their training programs, they said, well, okay, so maybe we do sort of linear periodization of loads. So we start with a really heavy load and we work our way to a light load or we do reverse periodization of that load and we do the opposite way around or whatever it may be, doesn't really matter. They said, okay, well, how does that then compare with maybe sort of undulating things? And so they maybe do a week of this and then a week of something else and then a week of a third thing. And then they say, well, what about daily undulating? How about if we change things and just go Monday, Wednesday, Friday and we do heavy loads on Monday and medium or moderate loads and Wednesday and then light loads on the Friday. And that was the point when things got a bit weird regarding terminology because that actually isn't any different from a training split. So now we've got two overlapping concepts because your training split really is kind of how you structure things across the week. If you do my exercises and you're saying, I'm going to do this exercise on Monday and this second exercise on Wednesday and third exercise on Friday, you wouldn't say that was periodization really. You'd say, that's my training split. I'm doing, you know, kind of up below or body parts split or whatever it may be, or just for body ABC. It doesn't really matter, but you would be talking about training split. So now we've got this problem because we've got an overlapping set of concepts whereby training split and periodization are now sharing some of the same territory, but only in this specific situation. And that's really, really interesting why that happens and how we can now get back to the place where we've got separate concepts separated from each other or split away from each other. But the issue here then is that periodization has kind of sort of grown to incorporate elements of the idea of training split. And that now makes it harder for us to talk about how it actually works. When we talk about periodization, we are kind of from an athletic point of view really kind of mainly thinking about the historical idea of doing blocks of different types of training over time, which will be aware that it does kind of also now these days incorporate an element of this training split concept. Now, I think one of the things we can do to get away from this problem and get back to a place where we've actually got separate words meaning separate things is to talk about the detraining problem that plagues any periodized routine because ultimately, and this is the thing that is largely ignored in any discussion periodization, if you train in a particular way and create set of adaptions and then change your training program and create a different set of adaptions, you're very likely going to find that your original set of adaptions that you created in the first training block are going to dissipate depending on what they are. Ultimately, most peripheral adaptions will dissipate if you leave them untrained for, you know, kind of more than a few days, certainly a week. So ultimately, any periodization routine that does one type of thing for say four or five weeks and then changes to a second thing is going to experience a detraining effect. Now, ultimately, if we wanted to, we could try and separate out the concepts of periodization from training splits by referring to the detraining problem because ultimately, if a quality is going to be lost through detraining or if an adaption is going to be lost through detraining, then ultimately, you could say, well, that is a periodization problem. If it's not going to be lost due to detraining because you've got a sufficiently short period of time, you could say that's actually a training split issue. So in other words, what that would mean is that if I was doing full body AB, that would be a training split, whereas if I'm doing full body ABC, that actually falls now into periodization because I'm getting to a scenario where I'm, unless I'm doing more than say three sets, which case I'm in a fatigue problem, and then it probably doesn't really work. So ultimately, it kind of draws a line in the sand and says, if you've got a detraining problem, then that's a periodization question. If you don't have a detraining problem, a loss of adaptions problem, then it's probably a training split question. So you could actually draw quite a nice line in the sand as a result of separating these things out due to the detraining problem. As I say, in most discussions of periodization, the majority of commentators, writers, kind of thought leaders in this area generally just ignore it and just pretend it isn't happening because they're focusing on qualities like strength, speed, power. And they go, oh, my strength is going up and my speed is going up. So therefore, I can ignore the fact that my adaptions are being lost. I'm like, well, if you follow that timeline long enough, you'll find that you stop, stop actually making improvements because the adaptions are the things underpinning all of your, you know, kind of outcome improvements. You probably just got some dissipation of fatigue and maybe you're creating some other adaptions that are complementary. You're actually going to find that you don't get where you want to get to eventually because you start losing the foundation that you built in the previous training box. So that's really a problem with your face with periodization. And that's one of the reasons why I'm going to be quite critical about the use of it. And ultimately suggest that it's probably not a great idea. And he said that there are two interesting things that I need to note before I finish this physiology roundup bit. And that is firstly, we've got these twin concepts of phase potentiation and phase interference. Now, phase potentiation is really interesting because it's been shown to exist. What it means is that if you do want type of training for a short period of time, it has the potential to create an adaption that then helps you create other adaptions in the future. It really depends on the adaption. So it depends on the thing. Now, there's a lot of people who talk nonsense about this because they go, oh, well, in order to improve speed and power, you need to build strength first. That's nonsense. That is absolutely nonsense. Not just nonsense from a practical point of view. There's nonsense from a physiological point of view. She can't tell me what's happening. There's no mechanism there. It's just waving your hands in there. In contrast, if I say there's a really nice mechanistic explanation and actually there are studies that have shown this from an outcome point of view as well, if you improve MotuUnit recruitment with, say, heavy strength training, then when you then do say moderate loads afterwards, you will find that those moderate loads achieve greater hypertrophy than they will have done if you hadn't done the heavy strength training first to increase MotuUnit recruitment because higher recruitment allows access to more MotuUnit, strain more loss of fibers, get more muscle growth. So ultimately, there's a really nice concept of phase potentiation, which has been demonstrated in specific contexts and MotuUnit recruitment is probably the primary one that we can make use of. Do you want to really make a case for doing heavy strength training prior to doing plyometrics? You can make that case. I think it's a little bit more difficult, but you could argue that having a stiff attendant and then using plyometrics to pull that stiff attendant around, when you finally get to the point where your eccentric strength is big enough to pull that attendant around, you will store more elastic energy when you will therefore have a greater straight shortening cycle effect. But you do have to get to the point where the eccentric strength is big enough to pull that stiff attendant around. If you can't get to that point because the attendant is too stiff, then you won't actually get the benefit. So it kind of relies on a little bit of give and take between what the muscle is capable of doing, what the attendant is capable of doing. If that makes absolutely no sense to you as the listener, please go back and listen to our straight shortening cycle episode because the attendant will make a lot more sense. But that was just kind of for people who are really into this stuff, it's worth just thinking about what's happening with blocks of heavy strength training prior to plyometrics because potentially a phase potentiation effect could exist there. But again, you have to know what you're doing when it comes to how the straight shortening cycle effect works in the context of the sport that you are preparing athletes for. Now, the opposite side of the coin is then this thing called a phase interference effect. Phase interference is literally the opposite. Like if you do this type of thing before you do another type of thing, then you'll actually get a worse effect because you've created some kind of adaption which has a negative effect on your ability to stimulate opposite or different adaptions in the future. The only known case of this, and this is a very limited scenario, and the only known case of this is doing either balance training followed by speed and power training or the opposite doing speed and power training followed by balance training. If you do balance training before you do speed and power training, you won't actually get the benefits or all of the benefits from the speed and power training because, well, one of the things that balance training does is actually kind of limit our ability to produce motynic crew and motynic firing rates very, very rapidly. So the kind of the burst in firing rates that happened at the beginning of a very high velocity, high effort contraction, as in most kind of throwing and sort of sprinting directorities, that is actually impeded by the balance training adaptions. So essentially there's a corticospinal kind of inhibition effect that suppresses our ability to produce that sort of spike in motynic recruitment to motynic firing rates. So if you do that balance training, you start to find yourself becoming less explosive. Conversely, if you do speed and pow training in the world. and then you try and do balance training, you'll actually get the exact opposite effect. You'll find that your balance training is, again, not very effective because your brain has been trained to produce these blips of very, very high and moat and accruement and firing rates, which are problematic when it comes to balancing. Now, very, very quickly, without going into the physiology of all of that too deeply, the reason for that is that most people when they're balancing on things, what they'll find is that as they start to tilt too far in one direction, they'll throw themselves violently in the opposite direction and, of course, go past the equ- or sailing past the equilibrium point and fall off the thing that they're balancing on. And that's really what we're trying to get rid of when we're doing balance training is that, what if you look at somebody's really good at balancing? We'll notice that they sway very gently around the equilibrium point, their corrections of their loss of balance. It's not that they have another lose balance. They just very, very, very slowly and carefully correct any sort of movement deviation away from the equilibrium point. What most people would do on training balance is that they'll throw themselves violently through the equilibrium point and off the other side. And, of course, that is kind of how you lose balance really. You don't generally lose balance in the direction that you're sort of tipping in, you actually throw yourself off the opposite direction. And the people who learned to avoid doing that are the people who've developed that balance skill. The problem is, as I say, is exactly opposite to what you need if you want to be able to do this kind of speed and power type activities. We talk about the practices of that in maybe another time, but ultimately, for me, it's just, if the athlete needs to be able to do something that involves both balance and speed and power, they just have to tough it out and train both of those qualities and it's just gonna take longer than it would do otherwise. But if somebody isn't requiring a lot of balance type activity, then I just wouldn't throw any stabilization stuff at them. I mean, it's just really not simple. But that is just an example of the kind of thing that we can see it. There are scenarios in which you can have phase potentials benefiting subsequent kind of training blocks, but the majority of times that people talk about and they don't exist, you have to actually look for the mechanisms. And as I say, there's only really two known mechanisms in the literature regarding potentials. One of them's protein accruement. The other one is relating to the tens and strait shortening cycle effect. Regarding interference, there's only really this bidirectional one regarding sort of stability balance and then speed and power on the other side. Those are the only real phase sort of effects that happen in the context position. So it's a lot of talk about things like, oh, well, I need to do this type of training in order to then create a scenario where I can do another type of create an adaption light. We were just checking before the podcast, how there's a lot of people in bodybuilding at the moment who are saying, oh, you need to create things like kind of capillarization improvements in order to create future hypertrophy. And it's like, there is nothing in the literature that suggests that that is the case. There's nothing there to suggest that you need to do that. You don't need to create increases in buffering capacity or any other kind of fatigue resistance adaption in order to do future kind of adaptions in hypertrophy or psychomogeneous dynamite. There's nothing there really that the periodization can hang its hat on in that regard. So as I come to the end of this physiology section, I just kind of want to summarize and say, when I look at the periodization kind of popular literature, what I see mainly is people ignoring the detraining problem, making up stuff about phase potentiation that doesn't really exist. There is a little bit of phase potentiation conceptually in the literature and there is reason to believe in it. It's just very limited compared to what many people think that it does. And then really to add the third kind of idea is like, I think there's a lot of people who think that periodization is necessary because you can't train one thing or many things all at the same time. There's this idea that ultimately, if you want to get really good at one thing, you have to dedicate yourself to getting really good at one thing. You can't kind of continually train strength and speed and power and kind of straight shortening cycle and eccentric strength. And all of these things simultaneously, it's just too difficult to do because you need to do so much work to make any improvement on any one of these things that it's impossible to have a program that does everything all the time. So that's kind of how I see the periodization literature really planning out. But my job was really just to unpack the physiology so that's really what I've done. With that in mind then, Rob, obviously, based on what we've told about in the past, you don't really use a lot of periodization in your programs. But obviously, one of the things that coaches are really confused about, one of the things I'm really kind of unsure about in the moment is how to create programs that do involve as stimulating many different adaptions all at the same time. So can you give us some insight in how you're writing programs at the moment that allow you to improve speed and power and strength and all of those eccentric strength all at the same time within a single training week? - Yeah, definitely Chris. I mean, like you said, I've certainly got very far away from using periodization and specific models and all that. You should buy into it a lot. Maybe a decade ago and very far from that now, but I mean, the way that I go about writing training programs where I include everything is just by being aware that I don't actually need a ton of any one thing all the time to be driving a lot of adaptations, especially if someone's hitting the gym consistently and not missing sessions, stuff like that. So I think people would have gone so wrong as thinking that volume is some big driver of, I prefer to be even eccentric strength, stuff like that, thinking you need like four, five, six sets of an exercise or per muscle group in a session, or even for like, you know, super maximum eccentric to bring high volumes on stuff like that. And then if you weren't doing those volumes, you're just not gonna be making any improvements. You know, I'd see a lot of programs where people would come to me seeing what I think and it's like five sets of eight on a barbell back squat. And then, you know, tons of other work after, then of course they have different sessions through the week to then target this speed, you know, this and that, that they couldn't fit in the session 'cause they have this hypertrophy day, whatever it may be. So if I'm designing a program, really it's always just based around having the most minimal amount of everything. So we've talked a ton about, you know, jump works, speed works, stuff like that. Just a couple really high quality jumps, maybe three to five. Usually I notice people hit their max jump height in that amount of jumps, maybe though in the fifth one, even sometimes it's taper off a little bit. You cut it there, throws and you know, all kinds of velocity work like that. Same thing, just a few, you know, very brief sets, double reps, really high quality throws called there. And then with the max strength and the things that hypertrophy, you know, like I said, everyone's still believing you need a big, big volume to be driving growth. But one to three sets, you know, the most in a session, usually these days, two to three times a week, three being, you know, like with the upper end for most people, especially in season and stuff like that. So just a few sets getting close enough to failure for muscle growth, few sets of very low reps for strength. I mean, I personally have had no issues, you know, in quite a long time, driving strength up on the big lifts myself and with clients were just two working sets of like three to five reps. Maybe on something like a hip thrust, it's a more short position, you throw in three sets. But it's really just a super, super low volume. And people still try to, you know, argue around the fact that that's going to get you where you want to go. And I mean, maybe for some things, it'll be a little slower. But, you know, if you're doing like very minimal volumes, consistently, you're going to be driving those increases. And then with the centric stuff, you know, I've gotten, for a long time now, I've been using just a few reps or singles for one to two sets, the tail end of a session. And time and again, you know, things keep increasing. Everything keeps moving the way I wanted to. So it's just so, so minimal. And just relying on the frequency to do it. You know, when you do everything two, three times a week, all of a sudden this problem of volume becomes just a non-issue. Whereas, yeah, if you do it once a week, if you want to train once a week, you might need more sets to grow and to get stronger and, you know, what not. But all of a sudden, you do two to three sessions, even if they're brief. And you'll notice very easily you recover and everything trends up the way you want it. - Fantastic, so let's just kind of summarize that for people who've maybe not caught all of our previous episodes. I mean, it's a program that they're going to recognize if they've heard this before. We're basically, you're starting out with a couple of high velocity reps, whether they're jumps, throws, whatever it may be. Literally just, you know, a couple of repetitions of each of those movements, moving into some heavy strength training, you're doing kind of one to three sets, depending on the exercise, heavy loads, maybe rep and reserve. And then you're kind of finishing up with a couple of repetitions of a super maximal eccentric. So there's none of this kind of five by 12 Nordics that you know used to see in the literature. I mean, like. - Yeah. (laughing) - You said you took care of, you know, from multiple sets and reps, when you can't walk around. - Literally just a couple of repetitions, yeah, exactly. Literally just a couple of repetitions of those super maximaling subjects. And that is a fantastic program because that is going to allow you to be improving your speed consistently over time. The heavy strength training, obviously, is getting some really good sets of adaptions, contribute to maximum strength, but also the recruitment potentially gains will spill over to the speed as well. And then the eccentric are obviously doing a whole bunch of, you know, different things relating to, you know, because of the passive tension relating to sarcomogenesis, maybe some other tight-tem-related adaptions, customers, that kind of thing. And of course, you know, [BLANK_AUDIO] unique neural adaptions that come with eccentric training too. So all of that, it just doesn't need periodizing. You can do it all the time. I mean one of the most common things I see especially in team sports is they'll have a block of eccentric training in the off season because they think that as the only time of the year they can fit it in because oh no no no no it's too difficult to do eccentric training in season because you know it interferes with the athlete's ability to play and I'm like yeah well it will do if you do five so it's done and then yeah but the issue is of course that detraining of eccentric adaptions is so fast is just it would literally will make your head's been looking at literature. I mean like there's there's a bunch of Nordic training programs that have been done in the literature and everything is gone after two weeks of stopping the the training program. It's just it's all gone. I mean so what's the point of putting those poor you know athletes through a month and five weeks six weeks worth of eccentric training was then miserable about and then like two or three weeks into season and it's all disappeared. You know the thing is that the stimulus once you remove the stimulus the adaptions go on and say you can't just say oh well I'm the athletes are doing a lot of activity on the pitch yes they are but that's not going to create the same adaptions as well. It's not the same activity. This is one of the reasons why I think my insistence that people drop down a level from things like strength speed power and drop down a level to the actual adaptions on the pin that changes the conversation completely because when you look at the actual specific adaption and I'm like we create the whole load of psychomyogenesis and now you want to stop doing the eccentric training I'm going to lose all that psychomyogenesis. It's a lot easier to have that conversation than it is to say well you know you create the eccentric strength and like well no we're keeping the eccentric strength well yes because most of it was you know neural it's like yeah yeah that stuff doesn't really disappear but you are losing the under kind of under the surface adaptions relating to the periphery so yeah super cool to hear that way that that program works and you're improving all of those qualities simultaneously as you say doing that to or maybe three times a week depending on what else the athlete has and what their you know priorities are in terms of development. One more thing then in terms of the phase potentiation I mentioned obviously motor unit accruement improvements can drive future adaptions especially in things like hypertrophy. So one of the things that a periodization advocate could say to you is like well how are you you know taking advantage of something like this motor unit accruement effect how are you incorporating motor unit accruement development into your programs at the moment if you're not doing this phase potentiation idea. Yeah and that's that's definitely a conversation I've had and I know you and I just talked for the podcast about one of my guys message me a similar question about related to jumps and the speedwork if he had done it for a while if he needed to do it for like a you know certain frequency in that and my answer was that if he had done it for a while the adaptions would hang around and he could just you know go with that and if he was a little bit time constraint. I want to writing a program the way that you know I go about using those motor accruement increases is just the warm-ups you know how they're doing that speedwork in the warm-up or like a brief-high sail things like that and you know that as long as it's in even every so often is going to give me all the recruitment increases that I want to then translate to you know improvements in hypertrophy improvements in max strength and all that and you know a lot of people like you said proponents of strict periodization I've asked with that and you know would argue that it's a reason for using things like phase undulating periodization stuff with that we weigh from higher reps to lower reps every few weeks if you work out and the reasoning is that you're going to be getting those recruitment increases in the lower up phases but if you use you know ISOs jumps whatever it may be even once a while and certainly consistently means in my opinion you're going to be getting more of those increases in recruitment and then still training the hypertrophy and the strength and the entire time so concurrently getting a much better increase in everything across the board if maybe every four weeks you're you're training something to improve your recruitment versus if you're just doing a briefly the beginning of a workout every time every week you know over time those things will likely add up not like I said in periods of time we might be short on time stuff like that if you need to remove them those adaptions are going to hang around you're not going to lose them for a long time I know we said previous episode maybe six 12 months things like that those will just hang around so just don't have to worry about losing them and like I said in my opinion a better effect when you're just hitting them more often anyway yeah absolutely I mean that's the two key points isn't I mean firstly you're you're actually doing those things all the time I mean your whole workout is constructed to maximize recruitment you've got high velocity stuff straight away you know potentially maybe you've got an ISO in there as well depending on the athlete and what they need either moving into heavy strength training and you're doing that with mainly heavier loads the most other people are training with most of the time because the you know the rep range you're working you're starting to lower so again that's emphasising that recruitment so you're pretty much doing your kind of recruitment phase pretty much all the time and the second thing as you say you don't really need because it's a neural adaption and it sticks around on like the peripheral ones which disappear you know by the time you get home from the gym you know the kind of the recruitment stuff it sticks around it's a neural adaption it doesn't cost does anything to keep it I mean this is one of the things that people get confused about they're like all well you know does speed dissipate really quickly if I stop training for speed and I'm well not really it actually tends to go up yeah you drain it goes sometimes yeah because the fiber type shifts that you've kind of reversed you tend to see an improvement is because because most of speed is neural and so we keep neural adaptions because the brain doesn't really have a constraint in the same way that the the body does it's like the body wants to hear rid of anything metabolically expensive whereas the brain is just storing data and it's like doesn't really cost us very much to do that so ultimately we tend to keep most family or adaptions you know pretty much indefinitely although you know you tend to see a little bit of a sort of a detraining effect after a very long period of time months but it's not anything like the peripheral life would be pretty hard if you lost those because you just you can't do it anymore what would be you know terrible is if I mean honestly people sometimes I think that people just kind of switch their brains off when they talk about this kind of stuff because it's like you know on the one hand they know that if they learn to ride a bike when they're a kid they can spend 10 20 years not riding a bicycle and then come back and get on the bicycle and okay there's that moment of kind of wobbliness when you first you know kind of pedal it but within 10 seconds it's like oh this is what riding a bicycle yeah your brain has literally just kept that information for decades without using it and it suddenly brings it back out again magically manages to make it work perfectly it's like and then they'll turn around you and go oh I'm not sure of neural adaptions stick around I'm like are you even listening to yourself you know it's just so obviously true that you know we just don't lose that stuff but anyway cool so that was basically everything that we wanted to say I think about how periodization is really not something that is that makes a lot of sense anymore or whatever it has but physiologically it's not something I think we should be you know kind of doing as a you know a standard way of programming but I know you've been diligently collecting all kinds of silliness of what other people have been saying about prioritization so give us some of the most egregious examples but obviously don't name any names because I don't want to embarrass anybody but you know give us give us some really egregious examples I mean I saw we just talked about it before the podcast just now and I saw a really odd one that had it was a sequence so as you know I guess the goal was sequencing things and some certain fashion to have some kind of better outcome I just wouldn't get it on paper it was not sure what that could be but it had 10 second ecentrics to failure followed by a rest pause protocol and these were in blocks so the first one as I believe four or five weeks for so I was able to second same with the third so it was 10 second ecentrics to failure for multiple sets I'm gonna rest pause protocol and then complexes afterwards and the complex training was also not really one I had mean before it was slowly centric paired with I think it was a super max after that and it was you know again there's all kinds of wacky prioritization and that was one of the wilder ones I've seen lately that's actually really interesting for me to kind of comment on from a physiological point of view pairing my pairing the physiology that I understand with an observation of you know human psychology because when somebody says oh we're going to do you know some kind of focus on these endric phases in the first block followed by rest pause in the second block followed by complexes and third block and other complexes that you describe probably don't fit this observation perfectly but bear with me a moment that first block really what is it doing differently from say a normal strength training program by doing by doing 10 second ecentrics what is that doing differently well really the only thing it's doing differently is creating a ton of calcium and relative tea yeah for sure that's all really really doing differently I mean I mean this it this things that is not doing very well it won't really do recruitment increases very well you know there's there's stuff that is not very good at in that respect because you're not producing real max efforts which is very difficult to do in any eccentric context I mean not really going to see much kind of benefit on the on the on the recruitment side The second thing rest pause that, in contrast, is going to be hammering a metabolite relativity. Now there's a limit to what you can really do with adaptions regarding metabolite relativity. So just to be clear, calcium and relativity, the adaptions that we, there are multiple adaptions to that, but they all kind of underpin the repeat about effect. So they're quite kind of robust at the beginning, they're kind of p-truoid away pretty quickly after that. Metabolite relativity, adaptions, there's a whole bunch of stuff there, but most of it is really buffering capacity. And you can get a little bit of a reduction in super spinal CNS fatigue as a result of training that, but again, it's kind of relatively limited. Thirdly, complex as well, that's starting to push into cardiovascular territory. So what's really interesting for me, when I kind of, as a, as like, as a like a historian of sports science or, or, or, or, or strength training in the public domain, if you like, what's interesting we've been looking at this is that all of this stuff really is focusing on fatigue mechanisms. It's not focusing on the adaptions that contribute sporting performance. Yeah, I think this is really an interesting observation. Somebody could actually do a PhD if they want to, I think, in the way in which strength training variables are perceived by practitioners is actually fundamentally incorrect because most of the time what strength training, training practitioners are doing is manipulating fatigue-related adaptions or fatigue-related variables and not actually manipulating adaptions that contribute to athletic performance like recruitment, firing rate, and, you know, kind of, I don't know, maybe Titan and customers and whatever else you want to throw into that bucket. You know, ultimately, those are all the interesting things from a sports point of view. And there's a lot more tenderness, tenderness, you know, kind of behaviors. But ultimately, most of this stuff that you're describing here is just manipulating fatigue kind of types and therefore the resistance to those fatigue types is going to occur due to the adaptions that are unique to each of those fatigue mechanisms. And that's really, really interesting. I mean, probably people are listening right now going, "What are you talking about? Why is this interesting?" I find this interesting, okay. I find this interesting because it's basically a laser focus on fatigue and different types of fatigue generation because a lot of, indeed, even high-perture researchers today still believe that fatigue mechanisms are responsible for stimulating hypertrophy, for example, and a lot of other, I mean, kind of, researchers and practitioners think that fatigue mechanisms are responsible for stimulating all kinds of weird stuff. The only thing that fatigue mechanisms will ever stimulate is adaption to those fatigue mechanisms. That's all that can ever do. So, but just looking at this, almost, you know, just fascinating to see how people are still trapped in this zone whereby somehow if they do something weird with fatigue that can create some kind of unique adaption that's going to help them and it's just not. And you could think that a program like that, like if you're the one who's had that program thrust upon you, the program is doing something because each phase is going to be miserable in a different way. And you'd be terrible in a different way, but you'd like, well, don't make progress as you went through. You know, phase one, you'd get better from start to finish, phase two, you'd get better from start to finish at that exact, you know, little training protocol you were doing. But it wouldn't be giving you any underlying adaptations that are going to improve your performance. So, really, at the end of the day, you'll have done not very much, you'll feel individually need to block, like you've made a substantial amount of progress, and it's kind of the same thing when you just periodize exercise selection all the time and use different movements. You just bring one in, get really good at it for a bit, don't really make much significant change, bring another in, get really good at it for a bit, don't really make much significant change. And then you do that over and over, and you'll feel like you're getting really good, you're getting, you know, a little better than a million things, but you're not changing, like you said, the things that really matter for athletic performance. Yeah, absolutely, no, that's a really good way of putting it. I think that's, I think that's ultimately the issue. It's this idea that, you know, just doing new things all the time is somehow going to be better than grinding away at the, you know, the important stuff, which is obviously, you know, not true. Do you have any other example that you want to share with us of periodization that you think has allowed? Yeah. One thing you just mentioned, just when you said, just mentioned tendon stiffness, I've seen quite a bit on using specifically periods of slow eccentric and that other, the beginning of a long-term program or like somewhere in the middle, undulating phases where you use them or don't, with the idea that slow eccentric are going to preferentially increase tendon stiffness. And some people even said just general tendon adaptations more than just regular strength training or plios and that and you know, like what I'd seen it was applied that you needed to do like slow tempo slow eccentric to be getting like tendon training quote unquote, you know, with the idea that like if you're training muscles, somehow you're not training tendons. So yeah, again, adaptations wise, didn't make any sense. Well, I know we talked a lot about tendons before, but maybe we're going into why slow eccentric are not some kind of magic thing for tendon adaptations. Yeah. So this is definitely something that presses my buttons. So basically, the reason that this phrase tendon adaptations is flying around is because there's a group of tendon researchers who are making the case completely and correctly in my view that all tendon adaptions are stimulated by tendon strain, which is tendon lengthening. That is easy to prove that it's not true. If they would literally just do, you know, step outside of their immediate zone of literature and look at some of the other studies in tendon and muscle tendon dynamics and then immediately see that it's absolutely impossible for that to be the case. And I've made that, you know, kind of argument before very simply, if you do a really kind of explosive, heavy strength training exercise, say for example, you're doing a fire at max, the tendon won't move around. It literally will not move around. It will stay pretty much static. Now, that heavy strength training exercise will stimulate a massive increase in tendons stiffness. So if somebody's saying, "Oh, tendon strain is the thing that drives all tendon abtions," I'm like, "Five hit max has proved you wrong." Next question. And that, unfortunately, there's a whole group of tendon researchers running around ignoring that very fundamental observation. Now there are other tendon researchers who have read those kind of studies and they know that that's kind of how tendons behave in heavy strength training exercises and they don't agree. They think that ultimately tendons have two separate abtions. They can increase in stiffness and they can increase in size. And ultimately tendons, stiffness increases is literally just a function of the force production. That's what we call tendons stress. Don't kind of run around with the idea that that means the same thing as stress in a psychological situation or stress in metabolic situation. It's literally just force per unit cross-experience. You just call it force. So the tendon trunements of certain force, even if it doesn't move at all, even if it doesn't stretch at all, that tendon force will then stimulate tendon stiffness as options. Now that's it. So, ultimately, a slow eccentric, if it involves the same muscle force as a heavy strength training exercise, they will do exactly the same thing, an isometric, do exactly the same thing. The law basically just do exactly the same thing. It's just how much force the tendon transmit. So in the programs that, you know, you're writing Rob, ultimately your heavy strength training exercise will do that tendons depression option as well if not better than pretty much anything else that anybody is doing, you know, to increase tendons depression. And certainly a slow eccentric isn't going to do anything any different. And size adaptation is, you know, sort of whether you want that or not is kind of open to debate. Most of the time that happens due to repeated lengthening as you'll see most of the time tendons increase in size during long distance running because ultimately repeated strains over a very long period of time, a large duration of strains obviously as well because of the high volume of running impacts, you're going to get an increase in size. Is that helpful debate table? Is it something that we want for athletic performance? Not really. So, ultimately, tendon adaptations we can just retire that terminology and say it's not important, tendons stiffness is the one we want to focus on. And that's literally just how much force does the tendon transmit. You can get that from our metrics or heavy strength training. The idea of needing slow eccentric is completely nonsense and it's just totally ignoring what the literature says about tendon physiology. But as I say, the reason it's happening is because there's some weirdness in the tendon kind of research community in the same way that there's weirdness in the hypertrophy community where there's groups of hypertrophy researchers who literally just read their own kind of 10, 12, 15 studies that have been done in their own area, they don't read anything outside of that and therefore don't actually understand how hypertrophy works. But yes, so you press my buttons there so you go, you go along, you go along. Cool, I think that's pretty much everything that we want to do today. Thanks again Rob for being on this call with me. It's always great to get your perspectives and show people how programs or really good programs can be written. Hopefully this sort of episode continues well for people on from a previous one on kind of the detraining effects of various adaptions. We will be back next week with as yet on the side of the episode because we haven't talked about it. Thank you Rob. figured out yet. So thank you again all of you for being with us. We will see you again next time.