33 Block periodization

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mauseri and we are finally going to do the block periodization episode today. So we have been doing a couple of episodes on the way to this particular episode. We've talked about the dose response adaptions. We talked about super compensation. In the past we talked a lot about fatigue accumulation. I'm just going to give a very quick overview of those three concepts before we jump in and then we're going to start talking about various different types of block predation that we've seen in different sports and then we're going to wrap up at the end by talking about some of the other rationales that we've kind of come into contact with the industry that don't really make any sense. So hopefully, really, to the structured episode and to keep me on track and stop me running too much. So I think we're getting a fatigue accumulation is a problem that we've mentioned in the past. What it means is that a particular sort of workout in the context of a training week involves so much volume or other damaging tabular exercise, which is super max mesentrics. So it's that when you come to do the next workout, you haven't fully recovered from that previous workout in terms of the muscle damage and related calcium ion accumulation mechanisms. Now, when that happens, you go into the next workout and you essentially carry with you that extra muscle damage over. So at some point, you're going to need to do some kind of delode or taper or just simply kind of go back to a sensible training program that doesn't involve excessive volume and in order to get back to a state where you're able to perform your maximum level. Very, very simple concept, but generally ignored. Now, an important implication of training with fatigue accumulation, if you have a cumulative fatigue, what that means is that you won't be able to stimulate the adaptions as effectively as if you had done the same workout in an unfatigue state. Now, that goes especially for the neural adaptions. Essentially, neural adaptions just will not happen if you have any kind of local muscular fatigue and as a result, you can have a little bit of supospinal sinus fatigue from the inflammatory response created by that muscle damage. So we want to avoid training while fatigue has accumulated because it will suppress the adaptions we're trying to get. Now, the reason I mention this in the context of block purification is because a lot of block purification models tend to have blocks in which very high volumes are being done at least once in the kind of sequence. As a result, it's a really important thing because those high volume blocks do not achieve anything like what they are intended to achieve, intended to achieve. So that's a fatigue accumulation and that's why fatigue accumulation is something we want to try and avoid. We've also mentioned recently about dose response of adaptions. And dose response of adaptions basically is that every adaption will have a specific dose response to the volume that's used in a given workout. So this is covered a lot in hypertrophy and basically we talk about how you do one set, two sets, three sets, you know, five sets, whatever in a workout and you'll get a progressively increasing amount of hypertrophy stimulus from that workout. Problem is it's not linear, it's non-linear and it tapers off. So basically your first set gives you a certain amount of hypertrophy stimulus. Your second set maybe gives you 40% of that and your third set maybe 20% of the first set. So by the time you get three sets you're up 160% of your first set. You're not really adding a lot more after that. A lot of people think, oh, just keep adding more sets and get more hypertrophy. Technically up to a point yes, but the limit does tend to kind of become practical around the sort of six to eight sets per workout and then you've got the T-accumulation. It's going to last, you know, kind of, or a fatigue, sorry, that's going to last several days. And if you try and cram in another workout before that recovery period has completed, then you'll be in the fatigue accumulation problem. So, but dose response with adaptions basically is telling you that you're not going to kind of get a lot to benefit from trying to cram an enormous amount of work for a particular adaption into one kind of block of time, like four, six week block of time. If you try and do your entire hypertrophy work for the year and four to six weeks, you're basically not really going to get very far. It's just going to be slightly better than if you sort of, you know, stuck with a more sensible training programme. If at all given that fatigue accumulation will be working against you. So that's dose response with adaptions and just say previously fatigue accumulation. And finally, we talked last week about super conversation. This is just one of those ideas that has kind of got out of hand in the sense that people look at the idea and don't try and dig beneath it to understand the physiological reality. Super conversation happens because the outcome tends to go down during very hard training blocks. If you're measuring strength or speed or power or whatever, you might see a drift downwards in a very, very high volume training block because of the fatigue accumulation that I was just mentioning. And if that happens, then what you'll also see is that during a taper or a D-load, you get a overshoot, you see a jump up in the adaption, sorry, not the adaption. I did that last time I was talking about it. You see a rebound in the outcome of your measuring, the speed, the power, the strength, whatever you're measuring. That is not happening because of a rebound in the actual adaption itself. The adaptions will happen during the training block. They were just disguised by the presence of fatigue. So your outcome measure is the one that you are seeing move around. The adaption is not. So really, there is no inherent kind of magic associated with super compensation. It's not actually a proper term. Super compensation is really, really a bad label for it. Really all it is is the fitness fatigue model. Well, fatigue is accumulated and it's preventing you from measuring the implications of your adaptions. The adaptions happen during the training block. It's just that the fatigue was there that stopped you from being able to see the implications of those in the external environment when you're measuring strength, power speed, whatever. Those are the three kind of really big topics that we've covered leading up to talking about block prioritization. I'm just going to also mention of course something that we've had in the background all the way through everything we talk about, which is that if you are creating adaptions, you do need to keep that stimulus going if you want to retain the adaptions. Now for neural adaptions, that tends to be relatively kind of the they tend to be very persistent. You don't need to keep going back and stimulate them quite so regularly. But for peripheral adaptions, you really do need to be keeping that going all the time, otherwise they will just simply go away. The atrophy or detraining effect of peripheral adaptions very fast. See what you can't do really in terms of block prioritization is do a block of training and do that sort of 46 week block of training on a peripheral adaption, whether that's local muscular endurance adaptions, in a case of metabolic blocks, whether that's hypertrophy, whether that's tendance stiffness, whatever it may be. You can't just do those and expect them to stay with you for the rest of the year. They won't. You have to keep the stimulus going all the time if you want to maintain those peripheral adaptions. That's probably one of the biggest problems that we all encounter today as we're going through specific models in the context of block prioritization. That's the physiology introduction. I haven't told the whole story there, I've just explained each individual component because we're about to dig into the story of block prioritization. Now, the narrative is probably a better way of thinking about it, the narrative around block prioritization. Before the podcast, we were just talking about how to organize this. We thought that maybe starting with the accumulation and intensification type block prioritization that you often see in power, the thing is probably the best start. Can you give us a quick description of what that tends to look like? Yes. Usually with that accumulation and intensification model, you're just going through a phase of higher volumes and usually higher reps in that, occasionally shorter rest periods, things like that. Then you just alternate that with phases where you do more intensity in terms of a higher percentage, usually one rep max, closer up that way, heavier loads, lower reps, and just less total volume. A lot of times, I'll just wave back and forth in between the two as the year goes on and then you might use some kind of peak before competition or something like that. Sure. We can straight away see that we're unlikely to have a problem with the loss of any peripheral adaptions because we are, well, that's not entirely true. Actually, let me come back to that demo. We're unlikely to see any loss in terms of the peripheral adaptions that we need for the power lifting sport because we are doing the same exercises the whole time, most of the time. We're continuing to, and we don't really lose the nearer adaptions that we gain in the intensification block when we go back to the accumulation block. It's just like doing the same kind of fundamentally, same kind of training all the time, just with different volumes. As you say, it's like the higher kind of rep ranges in the accumulation block. Is that fair? Yeah. Really then, what we're running into there is a problem with fatigue accumulation and a misunderstanding of the dose response with actions. The reason people are doing the accumulation blocks is they think that if they suddenly start doing five, six, seven, eight sets in a workout, that they'll suddenly get five, six, seven, eight times as much hypertrophy as they were in the intensification block. That's obviously just not true because this massively nonlinear effect and each additional set gives you such a smaller extra benefit. The accumulation isn't doing the hypertrophy benefits that people think it's doing. A lot of people just see the pump that they might get and go, "Hey, that's telling me that I'm growing," or they might just see a bit of muscle swelling because they're doing extra volume. Then they kind of mistake that for some kind of extra hypertrophy benefit. And then I guess really the other side is that with the fatigue accumulation problem is that that accumulation block is going to be done in a state of accumulative texture towards the end of it, probably we're starting to see a tail off in the benefit of each workout that we're doing. But also essentially the first part of our intensification block is going to function as the D load or the taper. So we actually don't get very many neuro benefits from the first week or two of our intensification phase because we're still recovering from the accumulation phase. Yeah, like a lot of times people are using the accumulation intensification model with the idea that the lighter loads and higher reps on that are more recoverable and are going to be better on joints, tendons, ligaments, things like that. So they still kind of operate with that idea that heavier loads are what is going to be more damaging, harder to recover from, things like that, like more muscle damage, more stress on tendons and all those things. And so they think that waving in these blocks with lighter loads is somehow helping long term to alleviate that stress from more just consistent heavy loading. So that's a rational I've seen a lot. Okay, accumulation type blocks. Okay, I mean that's quite physiologically ignorant I think. So when you tap on this address that. So the thing is just kind of starting from the beginning, strength sports are not associated with a high incidence of tendon problems. With the exception that when anabolic are used, you can get tendon ruptures to much, much higher rate than you would get without them. In fact, some tendon ruptures simply just don't happen unless the kind of target population are actually the opposite of population are using anabolic in some way shape or form. So I think that's kind of a starting point is that the problem there is probably not the strength of the pork but potentially they kind of the high incidence of anabolic usage. But you can still get kind of some tendon issues. It's just they tend not to be associated with lifting heavy weights. They tend to be associated with lifting kind of lots of volume rather than kind of intensification. Bees sports that do involve high incidence of tendon kind of tendon. Not these for example tend to be things like long distance running where the kind of lifetime incidence of Achilles tendon opathy is something like kind of 30 to 40% of people who participate in the sport is off the charts. I mean like when you talk to somebody like all I'm worried about you know kind of tendons you know in my in my powerlifting spot, how many people do you know who had a tendon opathy or a tendon rupture from powerlifting? And they can probably name like one or two people I'm like okay, there's that half the people you know because if it's not half the people you know them. They mean they were really you know his every ruddy you know is got one. So yeah basically it's just and that's because really tendon damage is coming from volume. It's not really coming from kind of and the reason for that is because generally the problem is the strain of the tendon not stress. So we just kind of talk you were mentioning stress in a more kind of generic sense but I'm just going to use that to your science. So technically stress is the force per unit cross section area. It's not stress in the kind of biological sense. So why don't people think of it? No I know it's really really confusing. I think it's one of the reasons why tendon opathy and tendon research is going a little bit off the rails in some places. But basically yeah the tendon stress tends to obviously be higher when you lift heavy loads but tend strains don't climb to scale the same way. So you can get slightly greater strains when you have higher stresses but they're very nonlinear. So like even a vertical jump will get you very very large strains. So you don't need to have a heavy load and I'll just create a large tendon strain. That's really a myth that is being perpetuated by a group of tendon researchers who are really obsessed with trying to make strain the thing that generates the adaption is not. Stress is the thing that generates the tendon. And an option strain is something that is large not largely that's not fair. That is not linearly related with the stress. I think this is tendency doing okay I apply great stress are going to great strain will know I can just do a vertical jump and I have an enormous tendon strain. It just tend as a visco elastic their behaviors are not that predictable. So okay so yeah so joints is a kind of a separate issue. I think that you know if if people are lifting heavy loads and that is putting kind of a lot of pressure on a joint and they may appreciate not you know doing that all the time I can get that. So I think that there's probably an argument with saying if somebody wants to you know move between kind of very very heavy single dolls triples and sort of fours five sixes whatever like that I get that I totally get that. But I think that's a much more subtle difference than the one that you described there with accumulation and intensification. Yeah yeah and like you can do that you know you can move between heavy and lighter loads and just keep reps and reserve and you know keep it like just easier days where you're still getting coordination benefits and all those things. Totally totally I think so I think you know we're not throwing the idea of of kind of having heavier days and and slightly lighter days slightly lighter days. Not talking about jumping up to kind of 12 15 rep max is really. Yeah exactly. You can take in the model to that 12 15 reps. Yeah absolutely. But you could do that within a week couldn't you I mean you could like have a heavy heavy heavy day and a slightly lighter than I mean that's that's totally. I mean that's a super popular just not so much periodization model programming model you know like a DUP daily on joining so then you just have. Like the typical daily underlating like kind of classic model no but if you just do a little bit different like a little bit of variation through the week I see people use. I mean like some sets of five of the couple reps and reserves sets of three with a couple reps and reserve and then something you know some other day things like that those work really well and they make sense but you know going like ultra high reps ultra low reps or like the classic model doesn't really make so much sense. I think the important thing is that we've got again some terminology problems because when you when we use like daily underlating periodization terminology strictly speaking I don't think it's appropriate to talk about periodization is something that happens inside of one training week. Yeah it's more the periodization they use is more of a linear model it's it's a program is a programming decision not to periodization decision. So I would say anything that you're doing inside of a single training week so if I decide like when we when Jake and I will kind of argue about the difference between full body a full body a B and full body ABC. You know or splitting that into up a lower or whatever you might want to do those are those are training program design questions because they're related to how you structure your split across the training week so training split or program decision relates to things they're going on the week. Technically therefore if I do you know daily underlating periodization I'm actually not talking about periodization at all and actually talking about trying to split design so it's one of those really annoying labels that's kind of gone outside of its area of actual kind of influence and it's now started to kind of chew up the training split conversation daily underlating periodization as a thing isn't a periodization conversation it's a training split conversation. And we're just choosing to do a and b as being slightly heavier and slightly light today so I don't think daily underlating conversation is a real periodization model. No no definitely definitely just daily enjoy programming is more the term we should use trainings I guess yeah there's some kind of trace yeah people think about split is being like a muscle kind of bias but you know loading rep ranges is just as valid an alteration as changing muscles. Yeah. Okay so that's accumulation and intensification now one of the periodization models I've seen most commonly in the exposure that I've had to elite sport is where coaches will want to do a focus on a particular training. So that's a particular quality and that requires them specific approach to training so there might be a block of strength training with relatively probably moderate loads and they'll be kind of doing a decent amount of all you're focusing on hypertrophy and that's then described as a hypertrophy block. Then after that there might be like a sort of power block where the focus then switches to a lot of power type exercises jump squats power cleans those kind of things and then finally there might be more of a speed and kind of reactive strength block whether there's a lot of high velocity stuff a lot of biometrics now this is extremely popular it's far more popular than I could probably persuade the listeners of this podcast to believe it really is it really is it's absolute nonsense and this is the bit where I'm running the risk of getting very ranty because just the physiological ignorance here is astounding and it all just comes back to the fact that you know it got very very popular. Decades and decades ago and then just stuck and now everybody you kind of works in that kind of area tends to kind of go into an existing facility and they find that everyone's already doing block position is very difficult to then tell them actually we're not going to do this anymore because then if something goes wrong or the athletes don't perform as well as they you know kind of were expected to perform or want to perform that everyone turns around looks at you and go well this is because you stopped us doing block position that's why it's. so it'll stop working. So this is really, really big downside. It's much more incentivized to just go, well, you guys have always been doing this. I just came in and carried on doing the same thing. You can't blame me if something goes wrong. So there's a really, really high incentive to just carry on doing the same nonsense. But it is nonsense and there's no reason to do it. It is mad. So this is me getting a little bit around to you. So just in terms of reverting back to the kind of points that I made, we're going to have particular accumulation problems with the heavy strength training block. If we're doing a lot of volume there, as tends to happen, even if that volume is non-stimulating. [LAUGHTER] Hard to take, but. Yeah, we were just looking at a program today, which we're probably going to end up doing a whole episode to review because we had a ton of volume in it, which was non-stimulating. So that's a clue, kind of an easter egg for people. If they want to go and track down that study, they can figure out which one I'm talking about. Go and look at the training program and you'll be shocked to discover just how far away from failure the program sets were being done. So I'm not going to give any more details and that's probably how I'm going to review it. But you can have athletic training programs with strength training blocks that are just pretty much non-stimulating. So they're just garbage, basically. And so of course, that is a problem in terms of decommunition. Power and reactive strength, climatic blocks probably aren't going to cause much of an issue in that regard. But if you go in just doing an entire block, for example, on plyometrics, you could end up provoking tendon issues because in the plyometric block, your tendons are going to be bouncing around all over the place. We mentioned this in a previous podcast when we talked briefly about how there's a very popular trend at the moment in the fitness industry for plyometrics to be programmed with enormous numbers of repetitions, ground context, and with relatively low efforts. People thinking that that is kind of okay. Well, I can do this. It conditions my tendons. No, it doesn't. Heavy strength training will create the adaptions you're looking for in the tendons. Plyometrics will make the tendon behave in a more compliant way, which is going to kind of, okay, give you a stretch-warning cycle benefit, which is what they do. But really, the only if you do them relative to the high intensity. If you just kind of do a whole load of bouncing around, you're probably going to end up just creating a fatigue damage effect in the tendons, which is then very similar to what I was talking about with long distance runners. You're just going to accumulate the kind of damage that potentially leads to a tendinolthic. So in terms of plyometrics, probably not going to create a fatigue accumulation problem, but you might create a kind of fatigue damage problem in your tendons, which then could cause a tendinolthin in the future. So similar problem, same kind of idea. But really for me, the single biggest problem with this optimization approach is that you just lose all the adaptions from one face to the other. I mean, that's the thing that just enjoys the other thing. I mean, like all that hypertruer works, such as it is. I mean, let's assume that we're talking about a program that actually kind of works, rather than one of the silly programs that doesn't work. But you've got a whole load of strength training reps in your training block. And then you start doing power cleans and jump squats for kind of six weeks. By the time we get to the end of that six week block, you've lost a lot of the muscle growth that you're attained in that heavy strength training block, which is mad. And the reality is power training doesn't really do very much. I mean, it's literally just a motina accruement and answer and a coordination and answer in the specific power exercises that you're training. So unless you're a Olympic weightlifter, they're not really very much good for anything. And then of course, with the plyometrics, what you're pretty much going to lose with your peripheral adaptions apart from kind of a little bit of sarcomerogenesis and maybe some tightened adaptions in the muscles. I mean, I don't think it'll be very much else kind of kept from that point onwards. So it's a horrible, horrible, horrible way of training. This is, I'm trying to keep the lid on how much I feel about this because I could get really, really quiet. - But it is just so so bad. It's insane. Like you said, power training is not doing really anything at all. You know, I still get an argument with people that they think that this power block or just having power training in general in the program is going to give you all these impossible adaptations when you can just do maximum speed work. And maximum strength work and actually be like getting progress and making adaptations. So you do, yeah, like you said, you lose all the growth that you're going to get. If you got any of it, it was good enough to do that. And then you do weeks of power losing all your size. And then you do this plyometrics block that depending on the person, depending on where they are with their own stretch shortening cycle abilities, anyway, may or may not even be very necessary. You know, someone's relatively easy to do that. You know, balancing as a good stretch shortening cycle already. You don't even need that block at all. You know, I mean, chances are after doing, you know, five sets of 10 and eight sets of eight. And they're not going to be super bouncy. But, you know, it's just completely useless. And then you have these like, you know, like you said, they think that these benefits all year. They think that this giant hypertrophy block that they did, that, you know, they would think that a ton of muscle when it didn't, that is just hanging around. And that as long as you do some kind of training, it's stimulating it enough to keep it all. I've even seen, oh, I had to talk to somebody the other day. And their argument was that if you do enough volume for a muscle, you'll keep it, you know, they didn't mention recruitment. They didn't mention attention. So volume. Okay, you're triggered. Okay, so, let me be 100% clear that the bigger a muscle fiber is, the faster it shrinks. Okay, I'm going to say that again. The bigger a muscle fiber is, the faster it shrinks. We've got some really nice data showing that the rate of muscle loss decreases over time. And you can look at this in a mobilization. You can look at this in animal models of detraining. You can look at it in a whole variety of situations. Basically, the fastest rate of muscle loss is immediately finishing your strength training program. And it tapers downwards. It's an absolutely repeatable finding across multiple areas of literature. There is no reason to believe that just because you've done, you know, a whole load of strength training and got to it a given size that you're going to keep that muscle size for unknown reasons. Every study we've got measuring the rate of loss of muscle growth once the stimulus is removed. It shows that it's exponentially decreasing over time. So you get the biggest rate of loss initially and it's gradually just tapers to some kind of plateau. I don't know what else to say. I don't know where people get these ideas from. I guess that it may be an animalics issue. People go, "Oh, well, I never seem to see any muscle loss when I stop training." I'm like, "Are you using any animalics?" - Well, it's a little bit of a thing. - Yeah. - Yeah. (laughs) It's like, you know, it just does the problem with this kind of a point in time that we're in. People get very upset with me. I said, well, why are you using anecdotes from today when you can just look back pre-1950 and get all the anecdotes you want and all those anecdotes will be completely valid because there wasn't any animal at usage. So just go and look at what people were doing back then. And there's none of this nonsense that's going on today. It's just very, very easy to check. - You know, one of the things with that typical black style, that's probably worth mentioning would be another thing that you see people do sometimes early on is like blocks of eccentric training. - I was literally gonna mention this. I was literally, this is again, this is one of the things I see and they go, I'm gonna do an eccentric. The rationale I believe is because they don't want to do their eccentric training in season because it's really different from the program at the same time as doing matches and practices and all the other stuff. And I'm sympathetic to the problem. I'm not sympathetic to the solution because it's garbage. eccentric adaptions, especially at the peripheral level, just tend to evaporate once you stop doing any kind of training. But with very tiny amounts, you can keep it going. So I'm like, they go like, "Oh, I'm gonna do this eccentric training block for like four weeks in the office and I'm going to congratulations. You've basically done nothing on anything else because the amount of fatigue you've created is obliterated your possibility of doing anything. Besides the dose response of adaptions on eccentric training is so flat that basically once you've done like two sets, three sets, you pretty much not be anything else from that anyway." So all that work you did was basically really misguided and then when you stopped doing it and started going into season two week later, it was all gone. And we could literally just done like a single or, you know, kind of two or three reps of Nordics and reverse Nordics once, twice a week and you'd been pretty much good for the whole year. But you know, you had to go into a periodization model because you thought that was better. I'm like, "Oh my word." And people were like, I know when we had talked about this sort of previous episode a long time ago, you do that block of eccentric training. And I mean, a lot of times people are still using larger compound exercises, you know, like a squat with eccentric hooks and things like that. And you see these massive gains in the initial, you know, a few sets with that program. - Oh sure, yeah, cool. And I think that that is giving you, yeah, for the rationale, that that is giving you much higher ceiling to then express strength later on. But obviously they're not realizing that it's just getting more coordinated in that eccentric phase really. So you see the giant boost in the beginning and then if you would keep doing it with tape or off, believe done three, four weeks. And so you think, oh, I made all these massive gains and all these adaptations, would nothing much really happen to that point? - No, if they're choosing an unstable or large compound exercise. complicated, more to joint exercise over something like an audit curl or a seated leg curl with two legs and one leg to try and lift the weight and lower it essentially with one leg. Those more simple exercises, more stability, you're going to hit that coordination ceiling a lot earlier. If they go down the squat route or the RDL route or whatever RDL is not a hamstring's exercise anyway, but it would be good to have that route anyway. This has just been the pure coordination for weeks and weeks and weeks and that is even more nonsense than what we were just talking about in general terms. I mean, what I was just talking about was assuming the adaptions were actually happening. If you go down the route of a complex highly coordinated exercise, they're probably not happening anyway. I see that one very commonly in team sports like soccer and rugby and that kind of thing where they want to try and somehow get all the benefits of their easy training in the off season period so that they don't have to program more complex, not complex, more difficult programming in season. They want to try and avoid doing the eccentric season like what you can't. You're going to have to find a way to make it work. I'm sympathetic to the problem. I'm not sympathetic to their solution. There we are with that. Hopefully we're starting to paint a relatively clear picture here. I'm not going to propose that we do kind of pre-well for time. I would propose instead of describing the high performance physiology method yet another time, there's plenty of episodes and we've gone through that, probably eventually do a whole episode on it just to have a pillar episode about it. Let's talk about a few other rationales that people have proposed for periodization because you told me a really cool one just before we started which was about the idea of advanced alifters more variety because of faster accommodation. They just, you know, they get used to a program so they need frequent variations in the program through periodization to allow them to continue progressing so we can dig into that one. I'm I word. Yeah, so the idea that people adapt to a program is nonsense. It's not a thing. So adaptions or adaptions, they happen in response to specific stimuli. There is no kind of whole person level kind of adaption happening to a specific program. It's like, no, if you do a strength training set and you hit certain proximity to failure, you are going to stimulate hypertrophy in the muscle that you've just loaded. Do you need to do 17 sets to make that happen if you're kind of an advanced lift? No, you can do it with the same number of sets that beginner can do it with. The issue is you'll just get a lot smaller response because you've already maxed out the growth of most of those fibers. The same thing applies, you know, pretty much to every other adaption. You don't need to throw more volume at the problem. The reality is something like tendon stiffness. I would argue that there's probably a ceiling that's related to load, not volume. So if you want to create an increase in tenderness stiffness and you've been using the same kind of actual absolute load as your fiber at max for the last six months, chances are, no matter how many fiber at max as you do at this point, you're not going to get any closer to a higher level of tendon stiffness. You could start doing side-heavy loads or you could get a stronger out of it. I'm starting using a heavier fiber at max. The thing is tendon stiffness is about the absolute load that tenderness and experiencing is not a percentage of warmer at max or anything like that. So, you know, I think there's, there's, the specific stimuli that create specific adaptions and never change, just because someone's advanced. There's still exactly the same thing they were previously. It's a crazy, crazy idea that kind of, you know, ultimately just doesn't pay any attention to how busy other do you work. So it's just this whole mythology about how, you know, humans respond to training and that it just isn't true. Yeah, there's no basis for that. And like, obviously, you know, you and I know and we would love for people to realize that the more advanced you are, the longer you need to do something like you shouldn't be, you know, switching things often, doing any of that. Anyway, if you're advanced, yeah, sure, you can progress if you implement a new lift, you know, might slow down relatively quickly, very quickly, and then a couple of sessions. If at that point you switch that lift, yeah, you just did a bunch of coordination, nothing really happened. You got to keep it going to be getting any hypertrophy out of it. You said to be getting any tendons stiffness, any of those things. So when you're advanced, you just need to do the same thing. Over and over for you. This is a really, really important point because what we're saying is like, you're beginning now, okay, fine, they're going to have a longer coordination phase. So they're going to go for a longer period of time before they start to see the, you know, slight slowdown. But after that point, they will get a lot of peripheral adaptions and they'll continue to get some neurodaptions in terms of motina accruement gains. So the strength gains will kind of have that enormously fast bit at the beginning where they're doing the coordination and then have a long kind of gradual increase, which is really motivating. And they're getting some really solid gains there. The advanced person is going to do the same kind of thing. As you said, they're going to get a very fast coordination phase. They're going to do burn through that in a couple of sessions because they're capable of learning very quickly. They're very familiar with all the other extraneous bits and pieces that go into actually doing the exercise. You know, so they move forward quickly. And then they hit this plateau bit, which is the slow grind phase, which the beginning would go through. But for them, it's an even slower grind. So it looks like a plateau. And as you say, temptation is starting, oh, well, no, we're just going to do something else. Well, at that point, you're basically just to circus kind of performer because you're just learning a new trick and then doing a new trick and then a new trick and then a new trick. There's no kind of actual physiological adaptions that you're looking for going on underneath the surface. You have to just grind through a much, much longer period of time with exactly the same stuff. Arguably, you know, we should be making sure that consistency of exercise, consistency of kind of loading, consistency of everything that we're doing in order to trigger specific adaptions should be much, much greater in the advanced person comparison with the beginning. Because, you know, the beginner is kind of able to get a long way relatively quickly. So even if even accounting for the fact that a coordination block takes longer. So if you like to say, okay, the coordination block takes four weeks and the beginning takes two weeks, the advanced person. Okay. I'm going faster by two weeks than the advanced state. But then I've been left that coordination block. Block is not the right word phase. I've moved through that phase of kind of training. And now, as a beginner, within four weeks, I can actually create a decent chunk of periphery. There's eight weeks. I'm definitely saying no to small physiological adaptions at the muscular level. To get the same magnitude, which is probably impossible, to get the same magnitude of physiological adaptions at the muscular level, the advanced person will probably have to train for two years. Yeah, probably even, actually, probably even impossible to be honest. No, it's just like once you've like, in kind of two months, the beginner can have extraordinary amount of peripheral adaptions that the advanced person wouldn't probably need, yeah, two years to obtain. That's just because the rate is slow. It's not because anything changes. It's just because you're dealing with very, very tiny changes in comparison with much larger ones, the able stimulating as a beginner, because you have the capacity to grow more fibers, you have the capacity to move kind of the needle a lot further on things like tennis to this. So, yeah, fantastic point. The advanced lift, the probably does, the advanced athlete probably does need to just stick with the same thing for a longer period of time, which is ultimately what we are trying to give people with the high performance physiology method, which is a way to do everything all the time. So that's kind of why we developed it. That is the alternative to block purification. To do kind of blocks of specific things and forget the stuff that is important for the athlete, do everything every session, just do a little bit of it. And that will absolutely create the stimuli necessary for all of the adaptions you're looking for, as long as fatigue is not accumulating in the background from other silly stuff that you might be persuaded to do. Cool. So, do you have any other comments on block purification before we finish today, Rob? I think that's probably it. I mean, there's, I'm sure there's other things we can mention, but I think we covered it pretty well. And I think that final idea of the more advanced you yet, just no longer you have to do things, is just one of the things people should really just take home and stick with, it's funny enough, you'll get supports like powerlifting and bodybuilding, like the athletes that are actually natural. They do the same thing all the time, they never change it. They make hardly any changes and they get tremendously strong and jacked. And then you will get all these people who are changing things all the time. And you know, you and I were talking about a program will go over, but you'll get someone who's like a national level athlete and they've done all these different things forever. I mean, I've worked with an example, was a national team volleyball player who I've never done a turn up because she was just doing all these different programs over and over. I'm going to get people who are trying to feel athletes, they squat 120 kilograms and they're not. Absolutely. And any time getting anywhere with your strength training, because you just, you know, use different periodization models and switch it up all the time. And you just got to stick it out and it wants boring, but progress, progress at the end of the day is not boring, you know, and a year when you've actually made some changes versus just kind of doing a million different things over and over, you'll enjoy it then when you're a better athlete. Yeah, look back on it and be like, you know, that's a serious achievement. I mean, and it's, you know, it's interesting to see that if you go back to Silver era bodybuilding Jake gives examples all the time, you know, he mentioned one recently. I forget the exact name, but there was a guy who started out over at pressing and just kept doing the same I've had pressing program for like, and this huge number is by the time finished. And this is just nothing changing. And it's like, I think a lot of people think that they need to put enormous amounts of time, effort and energy into making a program as complicated as possible. And that's not what they need to do. They need to put the energy into understanding how physiology actually works and then create a simple program that respects how physiology works. I mean, that's how it is, I think. But the problem is, you know, that doesn't tend to kind of get the eyeballs that people want when they post the unsensual media. And then like, yeah, you can have a day. Good stuff. So that was the block periodization episode that followed on from the previous episodes that we've been talking about. So if you haven't listened to our episodes on those response with options and super conversation, please do go back and listen to those. We will come back next week with another topic.