023 Fatigue accumulation and what to do about it.

Welcome back everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode. Now Chris, you actually launched a new podcast this week and I kind of had this like inception moment where I was sitting there listening to it and you were doing this bit, you were doing the intro and I was kind of like this is weird hearing you do it. So maybe next time I'll get you to do it. But do you want to tell us all just what this new podcast? I know we touched on it last week, but if anyone's joining us again for the first time here, do you want to touch on the new podcast? Yeah, sure. So it's called high performance physiology. We're going to basically talk about how physiology connects plain athletic performance training. Obviously this podcast focuses on how physiology explains hypertrophy training and connects that with pre steroid aerobody building. But my new podcast with Rob Mauseri focuses on the athletic performance stuff. So there's a little bit of overlap in places or obviously mentioned hypertrophy for athletes, but the focus is going to be a much broader remit talking about neural adaptions, talking about tendon, stretch-wording cycle, proximal to distal sequencing, all of that stuff and hoping to just bring a little bit of new physiology or not new physiology, but physiology that people might not have realized is applicable into that space every week. And it's probably a little bit short to the moment we spend here in terms of time aiming for 35 minutes, 40 minutes, maybe tops, just to kind of capture an idea and bring that to people's awareness. I want to see how it goes. I mean, we recorded another episode on Friday, you know, and that would be about maximum strength when I finally managed to get that. There's definitely a gap between your technical abilities on respect to these things and mine, but we'll get it going and hopefully people will be able to benefit from that soon. Awesome. Yeah. So if you're a coach and you work with athletes or people have mixed goals and certainly not to be a podcast with jumping to and listening to as well and you've got one episode out so far, like you said. So we're doing the high-perch of your stuff and I've got a high-perch for you plan for you guys and the plan I'm going to discuss today is quite different what I've discussed in the past, maybe not the plan itself, but the context. Okay. So essentially bear with me, but what we've got is actually this is out of character completely, but a plan that was published much later than most of all the plans we talked about so far. In fact, it was published a year or two hours, born and I'm not going to give away exactly when that was, but it's certainly well and truly after Annabellex entered bodybuilding. So while I'm talking about this plan, well, he comes from an article written by bodybuilding named Gene Moisey. So here was a bodybuilder from the 50s and 60s, also like a bodybuilding author, axene, edifer, tributar, all that kind of stuff. And he shared, so this workout that he discussed was actually passed on to him by the 1950 Mr. America winner John Fubbotnik. I'm not sure if I'm saying his name correctly. It's not someone who I hear talked about a lot, but I think that's how you say it. So this plan itself is a prehistoric era plan, a plan in the 50s, but it was written down and published in a magazine much later than that. Now what's interesting about this plan is when John shared this with Gene. So Gene was a bodybuilder at the time and he was going to to John's gym. I think it was in California, somewhere like that. And Gene had explained that he'd hit a plateau. So he was already a competitive bodybuilder and apparently you know not be able to gain any new mass for a while. And John looked at the plan that he was following. And so at this point, this is kind of like a guess very early golden era. Yeah. So if Gene was competing 50s, 60s, you know, we're probably talking maybe 60s when he's visiting John here. Besides sort of say that's probably, you know, late 50s would be like cut off at the end of this silver era. And John looked at the plan that Gene was following and he said he's not progressing because he's doing too many sets. He's doing too many repetitions and he's doing too many days per week, too many workouts. So ultimately we've got this silver era guy looking at a golden era guy saying your volume is just excessive. And Gene talked about when he actually cut the volume and followed this plan, he started progressing again, which is interesting because this is not a low volume plan. But let me tell you the plan and we can talk about it. So for each set, there was about them. They said about a minute rest. Now they kind of said like some people need more, some people can do a little bit less. So obviously like there's a lot of individual variability here, okay? And also some like they started with the unilateral exercise. And that's when they said take a minute rest. I'm not sure if they maybe went a little bit longer in the unilateral exercises. But we begin with a concentration curl. And for each of these exercises, except for the, there's two exercises actually, they're a little bit different. But most of them, they're following a four set pyramid's gain. So it's a 10, 8, 6, and then a back-off set of 15. So concentration curl, we've got four sets, 10, 8, 6, 15. And the way they discussed it, at least the way Gene discussed it was, it was kind of like a couple of reps in reserve, maybe for those earlier sets. And they specifically mentioned that six was done with as much weight as you could handle. So I'm assuming sort of reading between the lines here, maybe a rep in reserve. So for each of these sets, true set of six and then that back-off set. Then we go into squats. Now the squats were done with an additional set. So there's five sets of squats and the reps here. So a 10, 8, 6, 10, 8, 6, 8. And then there was another set of six and then a set of 15. Was that to me sets? Like five or six sets. What was that? 10, 8, 6, 8, 6, 15, 6, 15. So I think that's correct there. So there was actually the reps, there was like a rep range that they gave for that, that's the squat. So it didn't follow that clear pyramid scheme that the other exercises followed. It's still descending repetitions and then a sending back up. So not a fully uniform plan, I guess, in the set new rep structure. Now the bench then followed the same as the squats. We've got five sets of bench during the descending and then a sending back up with the back-off set. And then we got dumbbell rows to forward our four set pyramids. So we got 10, 8, 6 and a back-off set of 15 behind the neck with four, the pyramid scheme. So 10, 8, 6 and a back-off set of 15. We've got two arm dumbbell extensions. So this is usually done like a French press. So you're seated, got the dumbbells behind your head. And again, our pyramid scheme of 10, 8, 6 and a back-off set of 15. And then machine cart raises. Now they didn't do this as a pyramid. And again, I suspect this is probably just due to load availability. But if four sets, 15 to 20, I imagine that probably couldn't go heavy enough to do load repetitions, which is usually the case with something like a calf raise. And then finally finished with a single set of crunches. Now they did suggest doing 30 to 50 repetitions of crunches. Again, I suspect this is probably a load issue. And it's interesting that that single sets, I mean, you can talk about this from a recovery standpoint, but theoretically you would think that a single set, even with higher repetitions like that, you could potentially just get away with that. Would you say from a recovery standpoint? I don't know. I mean, I guess so. I mean, obviously this workout plan is being done three times a week. So I think that just in general, the whole plan probably is pushing it a little bit in terms of recovery capacity. I mean, it's interesting that you said the context has been a downgrade in volume from what they were doing previously, which is probably, you know, kind of adds credibility to the story that it was, you know, kind of he wasn't progressing previously, because he was doing too much. Well, if he was doing a lot more than this, then definitely he was doing too much. But, you know, even so, I mean, if those early sets are done with reps and reserve, then actually, you know, a four set protocol three times a week isn't horrible if they're missing, you know, reps and reserve on some of those early sets. I only said that doing a final set of back off with 15 probably would have pushed them, you know, up to the limit. So I would say that in general, this program is quite nice if they would just take the last back off set off and just don't do it, you know, doing a, you know, kind of a 1086 is actually pretty nice, especially if those first, you know, that first set maybe has one or two reps in reserve and then the last set of six is to fail. That's pretty cool. I think that's a really nice protocol. The 15 other like other guards, 50, you know, 30 to 50 reps of crunches. I think to be honest, most people aren't going to be anywhere close to failure doing that anyway. So I think probably it's performative rather than actually productive. Yeah, wasting me the time. But in terms of exercise selection, this, this, there's some nice stuff here. It's nice to see dumbbell rows because, you know, that's, that's a pretty solid, a societal play movement in contract position, giving you, you know, really good lat, especially upper lat development. And like the behind the neck presses, gives you some really good middle delts. Fits really well with the bench press to round out your pressing sort of muscles. If you aren't try to dominant in a bench press, then having those dumbbell extensions for the, for the triceps really kind of gives you that perfect sort of three kind of, three for three on the pressing stuff. I always complain about the lack of decent pulling exercises, but, you know, I think here dumbbell rows is probably one of my favourites if you're just going to do one. And then really, there's not much else to say other than there's no hamstrings exercise. I mean, it's like, what is it with these guys and picking things? I don't want to do a stiff leg or anything of that nature when it would be so easy to add in. Yeah, I mean, I would have more exercise variety. You probably would have more exercise variety, but, you know, there's, there's some good coverage there. Yeah, I think if you were to, like if I was to write a beginner plan, it would look fairly similar to this plus hamstring exercise. And even some of the exercises would actually be, would be fairly similar. I would, you know, potentially sort of the bench I might use a machine or the dumbbell row, I'll still do a sagittal plan pull, but I'll use a machine. But effectively, the movements would be actually quite similar. And, you know, the calf raise would be just saying squat probably would, you know, make maybe I'd want to have a lead extension in there, but as an overall general more, I don't want to say big enough because obviously that's a different connotation. - It's a program for somebody who is bought themselves a power rack for their garage. And they've got some weights, but all they've got is the power rack the bench and like Bob and Dunbells. I mean, I'm describing my life for about 10 years in the past. You know, you obviously wouldn't be able to do machine car raises, but you can do, you know, you can make it work with a standing car phrase in the bar, but if you've got a block, you know, or if you need it to a Dunbell. Yeah. So you can do, you can do curls, you can do, use your incline bench to do, approach your curls, you can do obviously squat, bench press and Dunbell rows is very easy on a bench. And in the power rack, you can do behind the neck presses, although, you know, probably there are probably better to do a steep incline to be honest, but this feels like a problem that if not written for that purpose is like inspired by that kind of environment. Yeah. If somebody's writing a program like this now, and that's because they've got access to a few machines here and there and they're doing it to make a commercial gym, but the person who wrote this probably whilst training in the environment that I've just described, because it feels like that program, which makes sense if there's a silver area program. Yeah. And I don't know what his gym looks like. That's a good point. Like it could have just been an old school gym. They just had weights and squat racks and pull up bars. And that's not far away from this at all. Yeah. Yeah. Now, just for clarity in case anyone wants to know for sure, so my little dyslexic moment where I can work out the sets. So they're the sets of five. Yeah, I think you're reading. There was a turn and a six and a five. That's the, so it actually does follow the pyramid that you were looking for. Yes, we just had an additional set at it then. And that's what's fremer. I can count the four, but apparently 10 to five is my problem. But yes, still a little pyramid. Anything else worth mentioning about this? I do like it as a home workout. Obviously there's changes I would make. And like you said, the back off set. I mean, nothing. I had a question this week about back off sets. And someone's like, oh, you know, I love back off sets. What are they doing? What are they doing differently? And ultimately they're not doing anything differently. They're just doing the exact same thing that adding a little bit of activity. I have to say, you know, on paper initially, before you have a model of like the stimulating edge model, you know, on paper and, you know, initially you might go, well, it's just a really easy way of adding an extra bit of volume. But then when you look at the stimulating edge model, you realize you're creating a lot of extra fatigue. You're not really getting much more stimulus because you're on the kind of the flat part of the dose response curve by that point. And you know, you kind of like probably a bit tired already and then just fatigue mechanisms and stuff. So you're not really going to kind of benefit much, right? But you're creating a lot of tea. But then also, I think, you know, it's worth sort of suggesting to people that they just try and see what happens if they're doing a normal routine like a three set routine and they say, well, go if you're so interested in it, just pick a couple of exercises, put a back offset in and see what happens. My personal experience has been that I never get a sore, you know, as I do when I do back offsets. If I just, like I described to you that there's a part of the world that I sometimes go to, which sure remain nameless. And when I'm training there, it's really busy. The gyms are just absolutely packed out and you have to kind of get on a machine and own it for the period of time when you're training. Otherwise, people constantly be asking to kind of working with you or just like wanting to, you know, throw you off and, you know, kind of sit in your place. So you kind of like end up doing rest pause or drop set or back offsets or anything you can just to keep moving on the machine. Otherwise, you're going to get, you know, kind of evicted. And I'm always, always just so sore when I train in that way. And I think it's, it's from my, my personal experiences that it adds soreness and discomfort and muscle and that measure for tea without really giving me anything back in terms of, you know, kind of stimulus in terms of muscle growth. You know, I think, as I said earlier, when we were talking about the overall program, looking at the program set rep schemes, I would just take that back offset out and just don't do it. Everybody kind of looks at back offsets. Oh, they're just such an easy way to add a bit of extra volume. And I'm like, no, they're not, you're not getting much stimulating effect from them. And you're also just going to meet yourself sore and you're going to accumulate for tea because you're not going to get the recovery for the next workout in time. So, you know, it's just one of those things that feels like a good idea to be in with and I just think it doesn't make sense. Yeah, exactly. That 1086, I actually quite like that. Maybe like for me, when I use it with my own programs, I'm more likely to do like an 864 than a 1086, but I don't mind it because that 10, generally speaking, you're not going to need many warm upsets to do a set of 10th most exercises. Like, you know, do one, you feel pretty good. Most people are going to be generally okay to go into that set of 10, maybe one more warm up set and then do the set of 10. And it's a way, whereas, you know, if you were to start with a set of six or you start with, you know, lower repetitions, most people generally going to feel like they require more warm upsets to feel comfortable, feel like, you know, the coordination, the movement is good, it's your hers and go to that heavier load. So, using that 1086, it's almost like you're using that 10, almost like a warm up set for that 8 and that 6, but you're still decreasing the amount of repetitions. You're not causing this excessive, you know, unnecessary fatigue, then if you were just doing 10s, like it's kind of nice doing that descending reps game. - Okay. - I don't know what to say about that. Now, well, it's just, I think I'm becoming more and more sort of minimalist in terms of things like warm ups and I mean, really, when you look at the concepts that underpin warm ups, you realize that the way most people are doing them is nonsense again, you know. I mean, sure, if you need a warm up to do a set of squats because, I mean, I understand that, I mean, I've done that. You know, you need to just keep incrementally working right up to the work rate because otherwise, you just get squashed. But, you know, if you're talking about, say, a machine excise in a gym, then really, most of the benefits of an actual warm up as we understand the physiologically are coming from physically warming the muscle up, which is not going to happen on the excise itself, it's going to happen in whatever you did before that in your actual, you know, kind of aerobic excise warm up. And then secondly, it's going to come from the post activation tensionation effect, which is single reps with a high velocity and a high effort or high effort doesn't have to be five, I've lost it, but it usually is. So really, my kind of approach to warm ups is very different from most people's now anyway. Unless, as I say, you know, you're talking about technique, dominant excise like a bench press. Yeah, and obviously this is a multi joint. Most of these are, almost everything here is a compound lift. I mean, you've got a path in the curls, you're going to squat bench row. So those potentially would be those types of exercises that may benefit. Yeah, but even with something like a leg press, you know, I'm not going to be doing monstrous numbers of warm ups sets, you know, I think. And if you make any of these machine excises like, you know, you say bench press, but if you were to move to a chest press again, the set would come from a different story. You know, I'm not doing, you know, ten sets of warm up for a chest press, which I probably would do for a bench press. Yeah, no, exactly right. No, I'm thinking more of a compound lift perspective. With that, yeah, we're in a freeway situation. So, you know, I think there's a complexity there, which is difficult to immediately kind of get to grips with unless you look at the physiology. And if anyone's curious about warm ups, we do have an entire podcast on warm ups and how we do them and what's happening physiologically. So I do recommend you listen to that. Now, what we're going to talk about today, specifically, is kind of this notion that Jean pointed to when he said that, hey, you know, John told me I was doing too much and I had to cut back on sets and reps and days and then I started progressing again. And ultimately, that's pointing to this concept of fatigue or more specifically fatigue accumulating. And that's what you want to touch on today, isn't it? Yeah. So the reason for talking about this is because there's a little bit of a, maybe a little bit of confusion, maybe a little bit of argumentation, but it's good. Again, like it's because people are trying to understand the core nature of this physiological concept. So I just want to understand what is happening in order to allow post-work out fatigue to accumulate. So very, very briefly, I'm just going to give a two minute intro to what we're actually describing. So fatigue is the objective external measurement. So when we measure fatigue, what we're saying is we're measuring reduction in strength as a result of a previous bar to exercise. So it's not an amorphous kind of thing like stress is. Fatigue is an objective measurement that we can record either in the gym or with a dynamometer or something like that. Now, the mechanisms of fatigue are then the physiological changes that cause that reduction in strength. Now, in the post-workout period, all of these post-workout fatigue mechanisms are caused by calcium ion accumulation either indirectly or directly during the workout. So we do a workout, we produce calcium ion accumulation, and that then causes sort of excitation and direction coupling failure as the kind of primary one that immediately caused that then lasts for a day or two after the workout, or longer if you do a really damaging workout. Off the back of that, calcium ion accumulation, you're also then going to get muscle damage. And then on the back of that, you're going to get an inflammatory response that causes supress spinal central nervous system T, which is a reduction in the ability to recruit motune. It's for a given level of effort. So you've got these, and now there's other stuff going on as well, but for the purpose of hypertrophy and the purposes of post-workout fatigue accumulation, we don't really need to talk about that. It's these are the primary three that you'll kind of, you need to get to grips with. Now, once you've got that basic framework, what you're going to see is that the fatigue mechanisms take a slightly different period of time to dissipate. So your excitation, contraction coupling failure is the one that sort of occurs most quickly during the workout itself and stays pretty high or pronounced for at least a day or so afterwards and then kind of drifts into that second day. You know, as I say, do an eccentric any workout, might say it drifting longer but poorly. speaking in the context of normal strength training, it's a 48-hour phenomenon, more or less. Now, that's really switching off the fiber after the activation point. So you can activate the fiber as much as you want, but if you've got the excitation interaction coupling failure in place, and essentially what's happening is that the two sides of the trady junction are not connecting and you're not going to get the inflow of calcium ions into the fiber at the same extent as you would do if you had that connection still in, you know, kind of it's in normal state. So it's stopping you from using the cross bridges in the way that you would normally do. And obviously that reduces the ability to produce force, which is what we then recognize as the fatigue mechanism. Secondly, you then got the muscle damage, which is the damage to the myfiberals. And when you damage that, obviously you can't actually connect the cross bridge formations, you know, either with the external parts of the muscle cell to the transmitter force, or you can't actually produce it in the first place because the myfiber was not working or they're gone because you've destroyed them, I mean, various possibilities. And again, again, reduces force creativity. And of course, with the supospinal fatigue through inflammatory response, oh no, sorry, in terms of muscle damage and its duration, this can really last as how long is a piece of strength. So you can create a tiny bit of it and go relatively quickly, or you can create a lot of it and it could actually, you know, sort of be so severe that cell takes a very, very long time to recover from. And really that's the modifiable part that we're going to be talking about as we talk about, you know, how long does fatigue take to repair? Well, if you really smash a muscle fiber to pieces with a lot of calcium and accumulation, the big inflammatory response and you really start dismantling internally, it can take up to four weeks to fully repair. Now generally we don't see things going on longer than that because ultimately if a fiber is in such a bad state that it's going to take four weeks to recover, it will go in the chronic diet and they'll grow a new fiber inside the old cell membrane. That's called regeneration. Now incidentally, that terminology is very fixed in sport science. We talk about regeneration, well, maybe not tonight, but it is in the physiology. Physiology refers to regeneration when you grow a new fiber inside an old fiber cell membrane because you've completely destroyed the old fiber. Relatively rare in voluntary strength training in humans can happen in certain voluntary exercise situations, but generally speaking, there's more common in road models and electrical stimulation, even in humans actually, you can get it with electrical stimulation, but that's for reasons or perhaps talk about another time. So really, you're kind of like anywhere between zero time and four weeks as you kind of recover a period of muscle damage to spend depending on what you have done. And then finally, you've got supospinal CNST, which is governed by the inflammatory response. The inflammatory response is governed by your muscle damage state. So it tends to be basically a little bit like a day or two faster to recover than whatever muscle damage you create. So if you create a five day worth of muscle damage recovery period, you're going to have say three or four days worth of the supospinal fatigue. And ultimately, the purpose of this is to just stop you from using those fibers while you are recovering. So the idea behind this mechanism of fatigue is to stop you from training fibers while they're in the processes of trying to repair themselves, or even in the case of even regenerate themselves. So there's, I think there's one study in eccentric only training in the biceps where they managed to get eight or nine days worth of supospinal CNST because they just smashed the muscle to bits or some of the fibers in the muscle to bits and they created a really, really long period of muscle damage. And of course, that meant that the brain was trying to stop you from using that muscle or that level of moat treatment equipment across any muscle really because it's a central phenomenon. So it's going to affect all your muscles while the muscles were in the process of repairing themselves. So those are the three mechanisms of fatigue that we're talking about. There are other post-workout fatigue mechanisms, but they really aren't important in the st. to the same extent that these three are. So what we're expecting to see after any strengthening workout is a period of time in which these three mechanisms are present. But as I say, excitation injection coupling failure will be the biggest one in the first day or so. After that muscle damage will be kind of taking over, it will be much more prominent. And the CNST will just lag the muscle damage by a day or two and they're on, you know, when I say lag, I mean, it will recover slightly faster than the muscle damage because it tends to be like the last bit of muscle damages out there on its own and the supersonic fatigue has kind of recovered a little bit faster than that. So that's the general shape of things. Does that kind of hang together for you to? Yeah. So the supersonic energy so that kind of knocks a day off on both ends then, doesn't it? Well, there is definitely a delay before it gets going. Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't say as a whole day at the beginning. Really, we're looking at the process by which the muscle damage is starting. As we've talked about before, muscle damage doesn't really get going until sort of the first few hours post workout. So you've got calcium and accumulation in the workout causing excitation injection coupling failure and other calcium and other activity mechanisms in the post workout period. You get a continued accumulation of calcium ions or a sustained accumulation of calcium ions. And that then causes the calpane kind of production, which then causes the damage to the myfibral. And that process of damaging the myfibral probably takes about 12 or so hours before it's really kind of got into a mature state. I would say supersonic fatigue is probably kicking in around about the eight to 12 hour more post workout, maybe something like that. And then it's going to carry on getting worse as the inflammatory process really gets going. I mean, we don't really see an inflammatory process inside the muscle until like four to six hours post workout after that. You're then going to start to see it moving into a bloodstream and then being detected by the brain. And that's when you get the supersonic energy effect. I wouldn't want to be super like dogmatic about the exact hours. These points, these things are happening because I have a very strong belief that the process self regulates according to the ultimate amount of damage that you're going to end up with. So if you create a massive amount of calcium and accumulation by doing, you know, something silly like tensets of nordics, then ultimately you're creating a situation where the amount of damage you're going to end up with is going to be really huge. And that amount of damage when you get to its maximum point is probably going to be about three days post workout because it's going to take all that time to do all of that degradation of the muscle tissue to the point when you reach your maximum amount of muscle damage. So I would say that you'd probably see a slower, longer sort of trajectory into your muscle damage and your max super spinal CNT, then you would do if you just did you know, once it's fairly with 10 max of a, you know, hamstrings curl on the machine, then you going to hit max damage probably within about 12 hours. The interesting thing is if you look at the rodent studies, when they do crazy, kind of workout analogs in rodent models where they're doing like, you know, 100 eccentric reps with maximum average costimulation, it takes like three or four days to get to the point where the maximum amount of damage has happened and then you start seeing my fribals just evaporating from the muscle tissue and it's just acting in myocin content of the fiber just disappears because you've got to the point where the fiber is now getting to the point where it's just degraded all of that protein and it's starting to throw it out. But that takes a lot longer to happen when you create a really, really damaging work out. I think people have got to get into the sort of after the mindset that the damage is happening in the workout itself and understand that it's a process and if you creating a process that's really damaging, it's going to take a lot longer to get, you know, to sort of finish than it would do if you're doing a much smaller damaging process. Some people got really confused when I sort of started to explain how muscle damage happens in the post workout period because they thought that because when we look in rodent models of really severe damage, it takes two or three days to get to the point where the really severe damage is kind of finished happening. People are like, well, how does that make sense? You know, if I'm doing a workout on a Monday, how can I possibly be repaired by Wednesday? It's like, well, because if you're creating less damage, it takes less time to actually get to peak damage point, you know? So it's like, imagine that you've got to go down a hill and if you're only going a short way down the hill, that only takes you 12 hours to get that way down the hill. If you're creating like three days worth of damage, it's going to take you three days to get to that point where you create three days worth of damage. It's like whatever signaling you start in the workout itself is then determining how long you go before you get to that peak damage point. More damage takes longer to actually produce in the post-workout period. Not before you even talk about recovery. You know, it's like how long does it take to actually create the damage, you know, based on the signaling that I started in the workout? Well, if you're creating a bigger amount of signaling in the workout, it's going to take a lot longer to actually happen. Yeah. The nice answer you talked about in some of the studies using eccentric only contractions and stacks of them and you said it could be like up to four weeks recovery and beyond that, the cell is going to die. Now, if you were talking like standard, concentric eccentric training that someone might do in a gym setting, what might be they kind of sealing as to how long a single workout the recovery for that might push out to? So we've got, I mean, the the infographic that I always use or is referred to in this to answer this question is is that one where I just did a linear kind of chart showing that there's a relatively strong linear relationship between the number of sets you do for a muscle in a workout and how long it takes to recover from that workout in terms of post-workout T. And broadly speaking, you know, we're looking at kind of it takes sort of about sort of 48 hours to recover from three sets to failure with a moderate load of a normal strengthening exercise like a leg press, probably 72 hours to recover from five sets. And if you kind of extrapolate that up and you look at the longest times that it's taken people to recover, you're probably looking about, you know, sort of 10 to 12 sets from muscle, you're going to take about a week to recover from that. So if you're doing a full-on, absolutely by the book, you know, pro split where you literally trying to, you know, you're doing all single joint exercises and you're just training individual muscles in each worker, you technically can do a kind of one muscle group per day, you know, and come back to the following week and you'll be doing a better job. about 10 to 12 sets, I think, to sort of see that working more or less as intended. Now obviously that doesn't take super spinal central nervous being to account, but as written, that's the purpose of it. Okay, so we're talking maybe, like you said, up to about a week or so. Now, something that I think most people aren't going to realize is that fatigue can accumulate. So we're not just talking about the fatigue within that single session, that it can actually have an additive effect across multiple sessions for the same muscle. Yeah, this is really where I think a lot of the science-based lifting community are very interested in this concept at the moment. And they're trying to figure out why it happens and how it happens and what's going on is fatigue, fibres-specific and if it's fibres-specific, how does that work? So yes, obviously, pretty much everything is muscle fibres-specific, but you've got to also bear in mind that when the brain is producing super spinal or experiencing super spinal central nervous system fatigue, it doesn't really know what you're doing in terms of the movement pattern and the muscle fibres that you're using for that pose, that's neuromclanical matching. All it knows is that it's experiencing a feeling as a result of the interleukins in the bloodstream that it's detecting across the blood-brain area, it's then producing a suppression of your ability to recruit motunits by reducing the maximum amount of central motorclan for the maximum tolerable perception of effort. So what it's really doing is just kind of saying, we're going to stop you from activating the top 10% of every single motunit in the body. That's all it's saying. In any movement you do. Now, as we all know, if you start changing things, so like taking the top 10% of the motunits you can recruit off in a squat is different from taking the top 10% off in a single leg press, or even a single leg knee extension. You're reducing the amount of muscle mass you're using, you're accessing more motunits, the super spinal fatigue is going to be less impactful. It's going to less impactful, it's exactly the same impactful. It's going to be a different number of motunits that you can't access, rather to your maximum level in the squat and it will be in a single leg knee extension simply because you're starting from different points in terms of access to motunits in those two exercises. But what we're seeing here then is that we've got a brain-driven effect which is relating to access to motunits and then a muscle fiber related effect which is relating to the excitation injection, coupling failure which is muscle fiber specific and the muscle damage of course, myophaboles being inside muscle fibers therefore muscle damage must also be muscle fiber specific. That's the context that we're looking at. If we're talking about accumulating fatigue then how does that happen? Basically, starting with the easy side of things, the super spinal symptom of system fatigue is a blanket like 5% 10% reduction in motunit current. If I use exactly the same exercise and movement pattern in multiple workouts then what you're going to find is that yes, in that particular instance my super spinal fatigue from generated from the muscle damage I created in the previous workout should overlap pretty well with the muscle fibers that I'm using again. Let's say I do some hamstrings exercise and I do a seated leg curl which is going to preference certain of the hamstrings muscles and certain parts of the hamstrings muscles compared to a lying leg curl or a 45 degree back extension. I've done my lying leg curl. I come back to the next workout and I do my seated leg curl. I come back to the following workout and I do exactly the same seated leg curl and I've got some super spinal sinus fatigue from the damage that I created still there because I maybe did six sets or whatever. I do six sets. I come back to the next workout and I've still got some damage present. I've still got some super spinal sinus T relating to that damage being present. When I do that exact same exercise again, what I should find is that the super spinal T stops me from using most of the damage fibers. If I did a lying leg curl it would be different fibers because I've actually now got a deficit of effects because I'm pneumoconic and comatting has changed which focus I'm now experiencing. So you're going to find that I experience different fibers. Now what you might find as a result of doing that is that some of the damage fibers that you created in your seat, some of the fibers that you damaged in your seat to let go might now fall into a category of being used because they're now outside of your bracket. So maybe there were some fibers that you trained in your seat to let go which only really got activated because there weren't that useful but they kind of did get triggered and still when you got really high. Now they're much more useful in your lying leg curl so they get used earlier in the sequence because of new and clinical matching. Now you're going to be training damage fibers. Does that make sense? Yeah. You've got this mismatch between what the brain is trying to do to protect you and what you're actually doing in terms of using those fibers. Yeah. So the super spinal C and S fatigue that's like you said that's just a generic reduction and so that could be on a totally different muscle, totally different exercise. Ingester happens in this scenario someone is training the same muscle with a different exercise. So that's a really interesting scenario and that's. I'm just using that as an illustration of the fact that they're not 100% lined up with each other. Yeah, but that has two different implications as well. I'm trying to think through what does that mean is someone's doing full body ABC compared to full body AAA. Where even AB actually? Yeah. Obviously we're taught this is in the context of volume being not being covered by that session but even in an AB that's feasible although you probably wouldn't be wanting to train that muscle again in an AB if you knew you were using volume that was going to be under covered. That's interesting. I'm going to have to think through that after this but continue on. Yeah. So the purpose of explaining that is just to show people that the super spinal C and S fatigue effect is a blanket effect that affects every muscle in the body and as a result you're going to get this mismatch between what the brain is trying to do or is being forced to do and what your intention is in terms of training that muscle. Also, if we look at the kind of fatigue mechanisms inside the muscle, excitation and contraction coupling failure is also designed to protect the muscle fiber and stop you from damaging it further. But and this is the really important but it is not perfect. So we've got some really nice data showing that if you stimulate the fiber electrically while it is experiencing excitation and contraction coupling failure, you still create some calcium ion accumulation. It's just not as fast as if it wasn't experiencing excitation and contraction coupling. So you still get calcium ion accumulation even though you're not really training the fiber effectively. So it's not a perfect protective mechanism the way that we would want it to be. So just to be clear, the reason that we have excitation and contraction coupling failure is to stop the fiber from producing crossbridge formations and using a lot of ATP and because using a lot of ATP in situations where you've got low glycogen inside the fiber could actually bring it down to zero and then the fiber will go into a chronic end I. So we're trying to avoid that happening and as a result, this mechanism of fatigue exists. But as I say, it's not perfect and it still allows calcium ion accumulation, which is the driver for the muscle damage processes inside the fibers. Even though we've got excitation and contraction coupling failure present, we're still not actually protecting the fibers 100%. So you can have that fatigue mechanism present and obviously if you've got that fatigue mechanism present, you're also going to have myfib of the damage present. And that is why you can have a damaged fiber and if you've got access to it via the brain, so if the brain isn't protecting it via supospinal fatigue, you can have a scenario where it will continue to accumulate extra calcium ions on top of the ones that you've already put in there and you'll make the damage worse than it already was. So I think there's this idea that if a fiber has experienced calcium amuletive fatigue, it's completely 100% switched off. And I think maybe I've been guilty of that simplification in the past, certainly not true. And as a result, you can't make it worse in terms of damage we can. You can make it worse because there is a leak of calcium ions into the fiber and that will then make the damage worse on top of what you've already got there. So that's really how you can get a damaged fiber. Now, the supospinal fatigue, as I pointed out earlier, is not going to match perfectly with the fibers that you've used so you will get a little bit of crossover damage crossover. You'll get a little bit of extra damage happening as a result of that problem, but you can also, as you see, because the supospinal fatigue recovers faster than the muscle damage itself does, you can get extra damage happening in that sort of precisely when you would probably be doing that workout again if you're doing it just slightly too soon. So if you're doing like we were describing, five or six sets and you really needed to do three or four to be able to recover in your sort of 48 hour window, then you're literally your supospinal fatigue might be just coming off, you know, kind of its peak point starting to dissipate back to zero. But your muscle damage hasn't repaired and then you've done below more calcium ions on top of your existing damage and you're now going to end up in a bigger hole in terms of the damage than you were previously. So hopefully this is starting to make some more sense to why we can actually accumulate fatigue on top of the fatigue we've already had in a previous workout. Something I'm finding interesting in this conversation is how much different splits could actually be affecting this. So if you then, so obviously we'd mentioned a moment ago for body ABC versus AB versus AAA, but then even if you, what you've just said there about, obviously, the supospinal sinus fatigue dropping off a little bit sooner than the muscle damage. So theoretically, one of the more protective splits in that scenario could be like an upper lower AA or AB AB, right? Because you're actually getting more supospinal sinus again for another workout. Yeah, but you're paying a cost of not being able to train the fibers to do that. So this is one of those situations where you have to keep all of the things in your head at the same time because as soon as you just go, okay, my focus now is on making sure I don't get any muscle damage. Definitely. Like the supospinal sinus fatigue and it's like, well, hang on a minute. If you could go back to the semi-the-side of the equation, it's like, well, no, I don't want supospinal sinus fatigue. to just kind of keep your volume a little bit lower than you think you do need. So I think there's this tendency that's been still carried over from the previous kind of norms that we had in the science-based lifting community where people were just doing silly volumes all the time. So I think people still want to kind of do what's the maximum volume that I can get away with. And I'm like just discount that back 25%. Just kind of take a set off wherever you think that number is because you'll find that you make sure you go into each successive workout with that lack of any kind of tea mechanism whatsoever. And then you're not in that interesting danger zone which is where super-spanophilic tea is backed off. And now you're in the position where you can actually more easily create an accumulation of damage. Yeah, that additional potential benefit from that one additional set is so, so, so minor at that point and yet the potential downside is especially if you're talking about going from say two to three or three to four or something like that. I mean, arguably if you're talking about going from one to, you know, yeah, there's that sort of extra 40% that you might get from that second set which is not insignificant, you know, but if you're talking about going from a seat. No one at that point is wondering, can we cover some additional set? Is there doing one set every 48 hours though? I find my age going from one set to two sets for an exercise does make a movie for difference, a dose of tea. Okay, I shouldn't say no one. Most people, I think if you're old and very fast twitch, then you will find that you will be in the space where one to go from one to two does make a difference. Which apparently is not 99% of TikTok. No, I come back in 25 years time and tell me how you feel. To go back to my split, I'm just quite more than that. I think most of these guys are kind of probably close to 30 years younger. Yeah, give it another decade on top of that. We'll be detecting it. To go back to the split though, that would then suggest like the broad of this split or the higher the rotation, the worse this could potentially be in terms of accumulation of fatigue. So if you think about a grocery or you think about an upper lower ABCD rotation, that to me sounds just off what we've talked about here is the worst possible options. Like if you're doing a grocery and you've got one muscle which is has a significant overlap with another muscle a couple days later and like you just mentioned with your mechanical matching, you could be having Yes, but yes, but you've got the same point that you also raised, which is that if you are training with something like a roast plate or an upper lower upper lower, you're creating so much super spinal scene as to take from everything every day that you go in the gym that you probably permanently suppressing that top level of recouping anyway. I don't it can see where you're going with this, but ultimately I think it's not necessarily going to be chained to one particular split, it's just going to be really looking at are you going into the next workout with all your super spinal team mostly recovered, but still with some damage lagging, that's the danger zone really, because that's the situation where you're going to find you are able to just go in and create a bigger problem on top of the one. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean even thinking now like so then upper lower, say you, I know you said get away from the split, but if you were doing upper lower ABCD, that second upper, you've had the day you've done upper lower day off, you go back to upper, potentially some of that super spinal scene as fatigue is gone, you now have this problem, like that's the worst case of you know, worse of both worlds where they've got potentially novel exercises or different exercises from the first upper where you've got different equipment. I think the novelty of exercise definitely does raise problems with that. Neumacadocamaching means you're not crossing over perfectly, and I think that is especially problematic when you're looking at very different exercises, like I mean I picked the hamstrings for a reason, because when you're looking at the difference between say 45 degree back extension versus any of the leg curls, you're literally talking about upper versus lower hamstring, and similarly if you're comparing lying leg curl with C to leg curl, you know on the one side you've got short head of the vice, it's more as working a lot on the other side, you know you've got maybe the long head and the semi-memmonos, it's working quite a lot. So you know you're going to find there's big differences in which motine order you see in the recruitment sort of. Yeah and so potentially something like the quads might be a little bit more safe guy because you're really familiar. Yeah totally different. Totally different. Totally different. That could be a problem again. Yeah no, that would be another great example of one that is kind of you know both regions can do both things, it's just that one has so much better leverage than the other in that context so you tend to get a different order of recruitment. So you know you might find that yeah you do you know you kind of narrow grip row, using very little of that, not very little, but using relatively little of that lower region of that except when you get to the top end of the motine, well you might pull some of those motines in, but then the opposite happens the other way around when you do a wigric pullner. So yeah you could find that you know you damaged some fires doing you know a kind of narrow grip row and then the next work that you do a wigric pulldown and immediately pretty much those fires are being used you know kind of as soon as you start the set and it's like that's a really bad outcome. I mean not really bad as in there are worse things but that wouldn't be a great situation to be in because I would think is no one really thinks about that when when people are talking about the lats I've never heard that conversation come up. You know obviously lats are a hot topic and everyone's like oh you know can you probably because I've not said it before I mean ultimately everything comes back to what the model that I've developed says so if I don't point to doubt it may not necessarily get talked about but yeah if you weren't sure if someone's saying well you may as well just chuck it you know do four sets of your schedule playing your own one day and do your frontal plane and you're going to pull down the other day like this is just another reason it's like hey it's just safe I'm not to do that. Well it's it's yeah it means it less likely to run into this particular problem that we're describing today. So let's keep going with the accumulation because I don't know if we've got any yet. No it is loads more to say so the next thing I wanted to just talk people through now we've established how the physiology works and why it's interesting and how you can accumulate the post-workupity I want to explain what the literature says and why it looks a little bit confusing when you first look at it. So very brief history lesson in terms of exercise science coverage on this topic. If you go back to the maybe 1990s and you look at the research that was being done you'll find that as most of the post-workupity literature is it's an eccentric only contractions trying to produce a lot of t because I want to create a big effect to study it works the same way it's just a bigger magnitude of effect. So they do these on I get ahead of myself it doesn't actually work the same way for reasons I'll explain well it does but it doesn't I'll explain. So you've got these studies in eccentric only contractions producing a lot to post-workup t and one of the questions that people were interested in answering was you know does post-workup t accumulate if I do a eccentric only workout on Monday and then I come back and I repeat that workout on Wednesday or Thursday and then I track the fatigue you know in both situations once where I you know just do the Monday workout and then watch how post-workup t comes back to baseline maybe takes a week and a half to come back to baseline and then I do another example where I have or another group of people and they train Monday and Thursday and again I just track the post-workup t watch it come back to baseline. Now if post-workup t is accumulating what you should find is that the Thursday workout causes a slower return to baseline from the Monday original workout if you starting the measurements from that point it should cause you a slower return to baseline compared to the Monday only workout does that make sense now they're basically just the fatigue should last longer you should find it takes you longer to get back to zero strength loss compared to just doing the Monday workout on its own now what happens is in most of these studies if not all of them what happened was that the Thursday workout called caused a little blip as in it did you know obviously create post-workup t effect very minor one but post-workup t from the first workout ultimately went back to baseline at same speed as it did without that for Thursday workout. Now if you drop down to like 50% of your maximum strength on the Tuesday after the Monday workout and you're back up at 100% again the following Friday a week on the following Friday like for we can half-late it then it didn't matter whether you did the Thursday workout or not you still got back to baseline or we can half after the Monday workout it didn't actually create any more post-workup t that's what kind of switched physiology researchers on to this idea that post-workup t mechanisms are protective they're stopping you from creating further problems now that's actually how all fatigue works all of the time and now fatigue physiology is kind of in that understanding more or less I mean you find some people somewhere that still believe that it's not you know most people most of the time working in a space kind of is except the idea that fatigue mechanisms are fundamentally protective all the time whether it's in the workout or post workout or in other but you know this was kind of something that really switched people on to this idea that post-workup t was stopping you from creating more of a problem and therefore you couldn't really accumulate post-workup t and that was kind of like one of those things that fatigue physiologist kind of went that's interesting but it doesn't really fit with our day-to-day experience and then they kind of left it and didn't think about it anymore later on the same kind of studies was sort of done relating to normal strength training so we've got two or three studies of these type now where one of them's concentric only contractions with a light load one of them is blood flow restriction with normal strength training otherwise just kind of concentric eccentric I think another one might be the same but broadly speaking they're not like purely vanilla but they're close enough for us to be able to work with these do show a very clear pattern of post-workup t accumulating So in this case, you would do the Monday or, you know, say Monday Wednesday, Friday workouts. And you would see as long as they're doing excessive volumes, you would see a gradual progression of increasing strength loss over time. So not like we see with the centric-owney studies of the night, they're completely different animals. They're showing completely different things. The question then is, well, why do we see such completely different results? And the very simple answer is that muscle damage is caused by calciumine accumulation, which is essentially, and the problem of calciumine accumulation is heavily dependent on the oxidative capacity of the muscle fiber. So you can only really create accumulated damage or any kind of meaningful damage in fast-reached fibers. You just can't do it to the same extent in slow-reached fibers. So if you now go back understanding that, you go back to your eccentric-owney studies and the night, as you go. If I do a silly eccentric-owney workout on a Monday and I come back and measure strength loss on a Tuesday and I'm down, strength loss is 50% of lost half my strength, which is actually not uncommon in this kind of study. Then in that scenario, I'm pretty confident that I'm not accessing either through super-smile-off tea or excitation-induction company fare. I've pretty much lost excess to half the muscle, which is all of my fast-reached fibers. If I now try and do a workout on Thursday, I've not really created any further damage because I'm not really accessing most of the fast-reached fibers. There might be a tiny little bit of an effect, but it's not going to get picked up really in the grand scheme of things with the inter-indurgical differences. In contrast, if I create a 10% strength loss, I've still got 40% more fast-reached fibers to play with. You know, I've still got a lot of more damage I can create before things get to the point where it becomes unmanageable. So what I would say is that if you want to think about post-workup to accumulation as a thing in the context of normal strength training, you've basically got the ability to create continuous accumulating damage until you get to a 50% strength loss, at which point you won't get any further. So if you go back to those silly high volume programs of like, sort of five, ten years ago, yeah, you could just kind of throw volume at people until they accumulated so much fatigue that they were like at 50% strength loss. At which point, they were just bumple on baseline and not really a new baseline of strength and they just stay there and wouldn't really get to new worst. But you're not really training anything at that point because you're not really recruiting any meaningful amounts of high threshold motions and you're not really creating much mechanical tension in form of cross-bed formations because you've excitation and traction coupling failure and muscle damage. I'm basically the modality that you can still access at that point really are going to be the ones that have massive high levels that aren't going to hypertrophy. In any person that is meaningfully developed has a training history of a year or two years, absolutely. And actually, if you think about it, you are going to start experiencing atrophy now. There are not to how many times you go to the gym week because you're not actually mechanically doing this in this class. So in that scenario, you could accumulate damage up until that point. Exactly. And I understand how many work you have to take to get there. Yeah, exactly. And I would expect that that would then probably take about the maximum of four weeks to recover. Incidentally, if you look at new studies that have been done in the context of relatively another strength training programs, it kind of looks like you can do a fatigue debt calculation. If you do say, if you're recoverable volume per workout and three times a week program is say three sets. So if you know that you can do three sets, come back 40 or a thousand eight turn to three sets. And that's fine. And you're just making a progress. And then you introduce another set. You do four sets. And that creates an extra date. Maybe tips you over or you do four or five sets. And it tips you over to an extra day worth of recovery. I think you need, but you're not getting. You can basically numerically, more or less, just how to add those numbers up as you go four or a time. And that'll be the number of days you need to then de-load afterwards to get rid of that post-workout to you up to a point, obviously. Get to 28 and you can kind of call it a day. But so it's like you're doing a four week block of training and you go from three sets to four sets. You've now got three workouts per week with one extra day per workout. No, that's 12 days worth of post-workout to you and need to recover from when you finish that block of training. So if you do four weeks, four weeks, four weeks. Yeah. So you do a four week block with an extra set per workout. You know, you're getting an extra two sets per workout. You know, that tips you over to an extra day per workout that you're not taking. You can now add that on to your total time at the end of the you know, kind of training program and say, you know, this would work better actually if you want to do mathematically, better every other day because technically we are getting an extra rest day when we're doing three times a week. Yeah. But you basically you're getting you could do the calculation both ways. I mean, you're just at two days then a week. Yeah, you just add two days a week really. You kind of accumulate in two per week. So you get the end of your, that's eight days. So it's just a little bit over a week. Now, if you start going crazy and start adding more and you start, you're going to need to, you're going to find that you very quickly need two weeks or three weeks or whatever to recover from each time you do that. And some of the training programs I've seen where they're doing really high volumes, they're going to need the full four weeks and they never never take them. Let's actually talk through this again because people are probably packing themselves now being like, oh my gosh, what do I do if I've been doing super high volume. So, well, yeah, you can't get beyond that month though. So if you just drop, instead of taking a month off, so we need to give them some advice. That's what I was going to answer. That was what I was going to answer when I said that. If in doubt drop back to a maintenance level program, now you've got two options here. You can either, if you feel the problem is not horrendous, you can just drop back to a three times a week, either a b split for body a b or for body a, and you can do a single set three times a week for your chosen exercises. And just do that. If you're really worried, do two times a week. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk through that. So we know one set twice a week, even your reps and reserves is going to cause neck growth. So you're saying that you could drop right back to one set twice a week where you know that you're recovering. And so what you're going to do, you're still going to be causing some damage from that workout, but you're causing such a small amount of damage with a long enough recovery time. Did you actually sort of what, like biking into that excess recovery load that you've got. And so you're actually reducing that not as quickly as you would if you weren't doing anything. Yeah. But you're working through it over the next few weeks. Yeah. Yeah. So as I say, if I was not particularly worried, if I just thought I'd pushed it too hard, I would drop out to a single set three times a week. If I was actually very worried, I thought, well, not very worried. But if I knew I'd done it and there was very pronounced, then I would go to two times a week. But ultimately, you know, that would be far better than just taking a month off. I would never take a month off. I think that would make any sense. It's a very interesting concept because you do see even in the silver era, they used to talk a lot about in a lead up to those competitions. They would be doing high volumes using the high volume more as a cardio. And then it was pretty common to talk about taking one week, two weeks, sometimes even longer than that off after the competition. You know, they're obviously identifying whether they consciously knew what was happening or not in terms of damage accumulation or whatever. But they obviously knew that there was some benefit to taking that time off. And then even more recently, you know, that's a common even in, you know, undulating periodization in the Polk and World. There's a lot of people who talk about taking a week off each block. So you would do multiple phases back to back then at the end of say 12 weeks or 16 weeks, you would take an entire week off and just recover. In an ideal world, you just wouldn't need to do that. In an ideal world, you're programming volume that you know is recoverable and you're not accumulating volume. And even if you like in those scenarios at this game, you're potentially accumulating so much volume than that week isn't just simply not going to do it. So that's probably not the solution there. That's my concern. I think it would be best if people would just do the calculation. If people are doing a program where they're building up to really high levels of volume and then they're taking a week off and they just magically think that this week is going to kind of fix all of the things that they've been doing wrong. It's not in most cases. It's not a one size fits all. You need to look at it and you need to go how much over my recovery have I gone and how many times have I done that? And you just keep adding numbers up until you get to about 28. If you had to 28, you're going to need four weeks and after that is four weeks. It's just not going to get any bigger than that. And realistically, practically speaking, I'd say most people listening to this is it had been a Q&A for T. They're either going to be in that 28 day vote because they've just been doing it forever. And this hardly any point in me calculating it is if you know you've been over the volume for as long as you can remember, just work off 28. Or they've just been doing it probably as like a structured kind of periodization within a phase. And then they should be able to calculate that relatively easily based off the last few weeks. Yeah. And I think it's interesting that this actually feeds into another anecdotal observation that people make because I would say that I get messages from people and the majority of them who are describing their own personal experiences they'll message me saying thanks for you know pushing this more low volume approach to strength training. I've started doing it and I've had really great results. Thank you. And you get the same kind of messages. I mean it's like you know it's everybody's saying yeah but there is a minority of people who say you know I switched from my high volume training program and I started doing what you recommend and I gave up after three or four weeks because it wasn't working and I looked like I was really small in the mirror. And like well there's two things going on here. Firstly you're not going to see any gains if you're in that kind of recovery phase because you're still dealing with all the fatigue that you've accumulated that's stopping you from actually stimulating any results. Secondly your muscle swelling has just completely evaporated. You just lost all your inches. You know what on that point the more common feedback I hear in that category is actually people saying I've swapped over to this. I've got stronger but I've lost all my stronger. Yeah I know. And I got smaller in the first month of doing it. Well you're telling me what the answer is already. Yeah. If you tell me that you got stronger but you look smaller And you know, you don't see like, you're making any new games. It's like, well, you've just told me what the explanation is. - Yeah. (laughs) And for anyone listening to this and says, well, then I would just keep doing the high volume stays swollen so I look more jacked. - That's a long time. - Exactly, that's gonna get you this far and then you're not gonna be resting you further beyond that. - Yeah. It's the same thing when I tried to explain to people how a creative team works and they're like, you know, oh, well, if it makes me bigger, I'm gonna keep doing it. I'm like, it made you bigger once. And it's a one time effect. - Yes. - But you don't have to keep doing it to stay that little bit bigger. - Yeah, yeah. - So, it's not gonna, it's not gonna, you know, kind of have any continued beneficial effects. It's just a one thing. - Is there anything else we need to say? I'm just thinking it's true. And I think hopefully that's given people enough to at least evaluate where they're at at this point in time. I would say one thing I find interesting about it is then thinking about how do you apply this two programming? So, you know, one way that I've sort of thought about this is well, what can we do? There's two things that come to mind for me. So, the first and most obvious one is, okay, well, then like you mentioned before, let's back off volume, one level below what we think the limit is. And so, A, that should mean that we're not gonna be accumulating fatigue. And B, it should mean that if someone is joining that or starting to do that, and they have had accumulated fatigue, over time, they're just gonna chip away that accumulated fatigue because we programmed them below that level. That's kind of what I tend to prefer to do. The other way would be ramping up volume three out of phase, not to the point that you're trying to get to overreaching or whatever, but to the point that you're starting off with lower volume over the first couple of weeks, that's still above maintenance or at maintenance, but then using that as an opportunity to allow any fatigue to dissipate that may have occurred. - Yeah, I mean, I think the physiology supports a number of programming strategies. I think the first thing that is probably might prefer and way of doing is to kind of just like, just give your volumes a haircut, just take the top level off and don't go into that zone. And I mean, when we're looking at fatigue and recovery day, till we aren't always using moderate loads of kind of to failure with stretch, not always all the way to failure, but many of the sets taken to failure with kind of stretch position exercises. So use some heavier loading, use liver rep and reserve, don't always do stretch position exercises. You might find that you can actually push into that four or five set territory and stir recover. You might, I don't know, I mean, it's gonna vary. I mean, I mentioned, you know, my own experience being older is that you do find that recovery is slower and that's something we're probably gonna follow up with a podcast on next week is talk about, you know, the effects of all of training and older people and why it's actually an interesting problem to look at and this conversation today will feature heavily in that in that podcast 'cause it's gonna all be about that recovery issue. So, you know, my preference is just to go down that route of just sort of sort of diving it back a little bit and avoiding that danger zone. Yeah, where Super Sponof Teague is going away. - One final point I wanna make from a practical standpoint is, and this is, I've changed my opinion on this over the last couple years because of these conversations of accumulating for tea. So I had a client who would go away on a holiday, something like that. Typically what I used to do was try to find what's the best, what's the, how can we replicate what they have been doing as well as possible? - Yeah, so okay, what a crypt and you have access to. Okay, we're gonna change exercises, we're gonna use the dumbbells you can do, we're gonna use isometric, whatever. And we'll try to get those, you know, three sessions in a week for the two weeks away, whatever. Now what I do is I will see, is there a way that I can program you enough that's gonna be maintenance? But I'll actually let you go all the way back to maintenance. So if there was any fatigue accumulated, it's gonna dissipate. - Yeah. - 'Cause you're not letting - Do you do it again as it's gonna work out? - Yes, exactly, we're just, we're being opportunistic. That's all we're doing in that situation. - Yeah. - And for me as well, like I do that too, and I love it because I go away, and it's like, I don't even need to think about the gym, but for me, I do five days, yeah. I'll do one workout, every five days for body, that'll be about maintenance workout. And it's, you know, there's no sort of mental load of where am I gonna find another gym, have to worry about it, whatever. It's a great opportunity just to, even if you, like I love training, but even for me, it's just a nice mental reprieve. And there's no anxiety of, oh my God, I'm gonna actually feel you, what's gonna happen? It's like, no, no, no, this is actually a potential benefit, you know? Like it actually leaves you into the. - It's interesting how people definitely think that I scare manga regarding fatigue and atrophy. It's like, well ultimately, you got to understand the nature of the problem before you can, you know, present appropriate solutions to it. Just denying the existence of the problem means that you don't know what mistakes you're making. You know, so you have to understand the nature of the problem first, which is what I've been trying to get people to do. Understand the nature of the atrophy issue, understand the nature of the fatigue issue, and then once you've understood those things, there are hundreds of different ways that you can program and as you've described opportunities, opportunities situations, you can take advantage of. Within that framework of possibilities, when you know where the barriers are to the problem, you know? And as you said, one workout every five days or two workouts a week or however you want to structure it, you know, it's absolutely fine for preventing atrophy from being an issue and also to make sure that fatigue doesn't accumulate. I mean, there's those kind of holiday of vacation situations are usable for that purpose, I think. No, it's a good way to see it. Okay, guys, hopefully you've learned something. There's even if you feel a little bit less anxious when you go away because honestly, I don't know that you can. So I get messages like almost every day being like, I'm going away for two weeks. What do I do? I'm feeling like, honestly, I'm feeling anxious and I'm going to atrophy, it's playing in my mind. And hopefully this leaves sex away a little bit of that anxiety if nothing else. Anyway, thank you for joining us all and I do hope you'll join us again next week.