39 Organizing a training week

Hello, and welcome to the high performance physiology podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rod and I'm sorry. Both of us are pretty sleepy private today for different reasons. So we're going to try and backstay this and give you the best kind of attempt we can make. But yeah, probably going to be a short one this week. But we do have a request. So we'll kind of do our best to satisfy the request, which is how do we organize a training week if we have say practices and games and obviously also strength training sessions that we want to fit in. So the kind of question really here is getting at the problem of post workout fatigue and post training fatigue. And therefore if we want to get the best out of a practice session, if we want to perform the best in a game, if we also want to get the best out of strength training kind of workouts, how do we organize all of that across a training week and make sure that everything kind of gets the best possible treatment? Well, basically very, very quickly. I'm not going to do a full explanation of how post workout fatigue works, but very briefly, when we experience kind of any kind of calcium ion accumulation during a training session or strength training workout or anything like that. And that also includes aerobic exercise. This all falls into same category. And what's going to happen is that there is going to be a sequence of events afterwards that can then produce problems for future training sessions or future practices. So broadly speaking, what happens is that we get, as I say, the calcium ion accumulation in the workout, which is going to be linked to the level of muscle activation, duration of that level of muscle activation, and any kind of movements involving stretch, and all of that stuff is then going to, as I say, produce calcium ion accumulation. And that is going to cause excitation congestion coupling failure, which is kind of a trident junction damage mechanism. And so it's a tiny damage mechanism. It's not really like a really long lived process, but it is long lived enough to cause a post workout to effect. You have cell membrane damage for similar reasons. And you're going to have a temporary kind of disruption in the level of my frivolous sensitivity to calcium, which probably isn't a big deal for post workout period. So broadly speaking, we've got an excitation junction coupling failure mechanism, we've got cell membrane damage mechanism. And then off the back of that, we're also going to have a kind of my fibrillator damage mechanism, which is partly caused by the calcium ion accumulation leading to calpane production, which are proteases that damage to the myfibrils. And also, then there's going to be an inflammatory response, plidying all of that up, which is probably the bigger effect. That same inflammatory response is going to leak out into bloodstream, and it's going to produce super spinox in SVT effect, which is going to be global. So whereas the excitation junction coupling failure, cell membrane damage and myfibrillator damage are all going to be local to whatever tissue experience, that calcium ion accumulation, the inflammatory response that adds to the myfibrillator damage, but then leaks into bloodstream circulates and talks to the brain across the blood membrane barrier. That is going to be global. So it's going to affect every single muscle in the body. And then of course, it's worth being aware, especially in this context, that if we have any local muscular fatigue, whether that's temporary or whether it's, as in very temporary as in, I like sort of five minutes ago, or whether it's kind of transitary in the sense that it's supposed to work up to effect and form muscle damage, that will create a difference as far as the brain is concerned regarding the movement kind of coordination that we're engaging in. Now, a lot of people get very, very confused about how coordination and fatigue interact. It's actually relatively straightforward. Basically, the brain tries to use its best motor program from an unpatigated date. And it then obviously leads to a disrupted output because the muscle isn't doing what the brain thinks it should be doing for a given level of activation. If you have muscle damage, what's going to happen is that the muscle will produce less force for the same activation. But if the brain is trying to coordinate multiple muscles at the same time, and one of them is not producing the predicted level of force for a given activation, then you're going to end up with a different movement, even though the brain thinks that it's doing the best movement pattern they can possibly create. A lot of people think that the body works. It likes some kind of magical star trek type kind of engine whereby you can always know exactly what the output is going to be before it starts. It can't really do that. It has a history of what it thinks certain outputs going to be based on the relationship between activations and muscle forces in the past. If you now disrupt that with a fatigue effect, like muscle damage, you're going to get different force outputs for the same activation levels. And you're going to end up with a disrupted movement. You can't really fix that live. It brain can't really start adjusting activations around to make that kind of work normally. So basically, that is going to affect coordination. Okay. Why have I gone through all of that process? I've gone through all of that process to explain that. We've got disruptions from the point of view of stimuli that we are now going to want to apply in strength training workouts or in practice sessions. If we're going to strength training workout, chances are unless you're a power lift, a coordination isn't such a big deal, but motina, cumin levels are a big deal. And super spinal fatigue will stop that from hitting max levels. So if you're going into strength training workout and you've got a some super spinal scene fatigue effect from muscle damage and that could have been caused by practice, especially if the practice involves lots of running, then you might find that you can't actually hit max recruitment in that strength training session. So there'll be an interference effect from the practice session on your strength training workout from the recruitment point of view. Technically, that will also interfere a little bit with hypertrophy, not such a big deal because hypertrophy does have a little bit of a grey zone. You can get enough of it to make a difference, especially if we're not dog man natural bodybuilding or dog man athletic training. But it's worth being aware of that. If you have a really disruptive kind of muscle damaging effect from the day before, you probably don't want to be going into the gym and doing a strength training workout. And you know, other adaptions are going to be kind of largely affected in a similar kind of way, but to a lesser extent. The ones that are really hard are the high velocity ones. So if you do it again, muscle damaging practice, come in the gym the following day and you want to do jumps, you're not going to get a lot of value out of your jumps really because you're not going to be able to hit high levels of recruitment. And so you're not going to be able to really change either recruitment or firing rates or anything like that. So especially if you're using those jumps in a way that you think is going to be important for coordination. And then that will obviously create an issue the same way that, you know, kind of I described with coordination being affected by muscle damage. The reverse is definitely also true. If you're going to a practitioner, you want to improve your coordination and whatever sporting skill that you are there to practice. If you've done a strength training workout day before, you're going to have a problem with that because it will then disrupt, especially if, you know, we're talking about, say you've done a heavy leg work, some heavy leg exercises. And then you go into the gym, sorry, that wasn't the gym. And you go in the practice session, you start trying to practice the skill that involves the lower body, you have a problem. You know, I really developed that skill very well. The same thing applies if you were doing heavy body workout and you come in the following day and you're doing some kind of practice session that involves throwing, you're not going to get the most value out of your throw practice in that particular scenario. So ultimately, we've got to be aware, there is a bi-directional interference effect because of the fatigue we're experiencing. The main problem for sport is that coordination is going to be disrupted by any muscle damage present in the muscles that you're using. The main problem for strength training workouts is that any muscle damage that you created is going to have a whole body CNSD effect. It's then going to suppress your recruitment and your fine rates and all that kind of thing. So it's a little bit different when we're going from one direction to the other. With much more muscle specificity, when you're going from strength training workouts to the sports practice, the opposite direction is kind of much more global. So you can't really kind of map perfectly and go, oh, I'm fatigued and it's like a whole body. We'll go back to this kind of computer game character idea again of having like a whole body level of kind of, you know, sort of strength or speed or whatever. And it doesn't quite map perfectly in that way. It maps pretty well that way if you're talking about going from sports practice to strength training because it's a whole body level of recruitment issue, it doesn't really map perfectly back the other way because you kind of got this little bit of a get out clause where if you don't hit the muscles that are kind of being used for that that coordinated movement, which is probably pretty difficult to refer. But, you know, if you did miss that out, you wouldn't so much have an issue with your coordinated kind of movement. Therefore, you wouldn't have a practice with a problem with motor learning practice. Okay. So that's the physiological background. So Rob, how do you see that mapping into practice? You've got let's say, let's take a really straightforward example to work with. Let's say you've got two strength training sessions because that's how we generally program for athletes in the context and eye performance for geology method or two strength training workouts that you want to fit in per week. And you've also got a practice session somewhere in the week and maybe a game at the weekend. How would you start? Because four days, obviously, you're going to have some kind of overlap somewhere. You can't kind of fit, it's not like three sessions with a strength training kind of plan where you're talking to a natural bodybuilders and they're like, "Oh, I'll do three sessions a week and I have no kind of interference at all because I got 48 hours between every single session. We've got a problem here because we're going to have two days back to back. How would you go about starting to put that together?" Yeah, usually the way that I'll go about that is, I guess we're going to just take the example, we'll say it's on a practice on a Wednesday game on a Saturday, which is pretty common. So in that case, I'd take the strength training workout and do the first one on Monday. You have a day off before the practice session, assuming the practice session won't have any kind of huge impact on the strength training workout. The following day, then I would do the next session on a Thursday, day off on a Friday, and then have the game on the weekend. Usually, I mean, I've had a bunch of people that schedule actually works out really well. And then within the training session, they might have some more stretch position work, things like that. My taper back, they're just like a single set on those, goes to the game, especially if I need to. Knock off sets on any exercises really, that can really cause any fatigue, just kind of stay a little further from failure before the game and things like that. Practice, if you have a day in between, I don't usually worry as much about, if you have that full day off and your program is good, I really don't think it's because I'm going to issue, but you know, part of really make sure that someone's fresh, prior to the game, you know, I'll just knock things down a little bit, maybe a little bit further from failure than that, that I otherwise normally would. Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably the best way of doing it. I don't really see another way that's better. I mean, the only interference there that we've got is that when we come into the gym on the Thursday, we might have, if there's been running involved, it might be a little bit of residual muscle damage somewhere in the legs. There might be a little bit of therefore, global central nervous system fatigue, super spinal search, central nervous system fatigue. And that means that the high velocity exercises that we do at the beginning of the session on the Thursday might not actually move us very far forward, which is okay because the reality is that we're only programming a couple of reps of each of those things anyway. So it's just part of the warm-up really, so they're not really wasted time. And we've got the full session on the Monday where we're getting that kind of fresh state benefit, coming in and hitting those high velocity exercises. So we actually are still getting stimulus once per week for those high velocity adaptions, and they don't really dissipate. So we don't have the attribute problem we would have if we were missing strengthening sessions on the lower body, on the upper to the side. Yeah, so if we've got sort of some kind of lower body muscle damage from the running around on the on the Wednesday practice, and then we come into the general of Thursday, yeah, we might not have the absolute perfect set of responses to that strengthening workout, but the ones that are going to be affected by like detraining effects like muscle atrophy, we are going to be able to top up sufficiently to make that work. And I think that's the important thing. It's the best possible compromise I think of any possible compromise. We start missing around in the other direction, I'm going to find that you've got your strengthening workout before the kind of practice, for example, that's going to be really, really problematic from the sports coach's point of view, because you're not really going to be developing the motor skills that you want to develop in that practice session. The whole point is to get better your sport, then I think prioritizing the strengthening is the wrong answer. So I think having that Monday Thursday is brilliant, Monday slightly, maybe slightly more volume, maybe slightly more focused on the strengthening adaptions, but the Thursday is just keeping the, basically keeping the hypertrophy and if any self-emergence is still there as well, kind of keeping that going. I think that works really well, and that's a really good set. Yeah, I think where people get a little tripped up sometimes too, because I've had the question of change, the volume of the sessions through the week and things like that. It's like there's no reason you have to do the exact same thing each day. You know, like you said, you can do two or three sets on a Monday, when you know it's going to be more productive and you still have a day off and then you can knock down the later session. No problem. You don't have to repeat it like exactly the same. You know, just tweak it a little bit and then, you know, we've set a million times. People just, if they haven't listened, you know, maybe to the podcast a lot, they're not so familiar with the programming already. They're just doing way too much in general and then worried about, you know, worrying about how they're going to fit it all in. You just don't need to fit a million things and a million sets of all these different exercises and different, you know, different speedwork days and this and that throughout the week. You just do the two easy sessions and then it makes everything very, very simple. It's like, yeah, I mean, like I'm just to kind of, you know, pick up on that again. I imagine a lot of people would be trying to fit three or four strength training sessions in as well as their sport practice and their weekend game. And I'm most straight away, like just this is silly. This is not going to get you where you want to do that. It's just three or two sessions and then suddenly everything works. You know, I mean, if people were looking then to add in some cardio on top of that, then I think that's starting to become challenging. But what I would probably start with is, I mean, you've got to kind of start with an analysis of what you're trying to achieve with that cardio. I think that's the first point. And be aware that cross training exists. I mean, it's not, it's not a sense. I mean, a lot of sports coaches will be just like, oh, no, no, you need to run all the time. And I'm like, well, if you need to run all the time or you need to run just enough so that you've got like the level of running economy that you need for your sport, you know, if you're treating the running as a practice, then okay. But if you kind of running is good, then you can cut that right back and you can do cross-trainer type cardio, which will get you at the same place, but won't create all of the muscle damage in the process. And I think if you're able to use cross-trainer type kind of for cross-training for cardio and not create the muscle damage, then you could, if you wanted to, you could probably put in half an hour a day. And it's not really going to be a problem. I mean, that's, that's the issue. The issue is when you start saying, on and on, I need to run multiple times per week. I'm like, well, now you've got a problem, because you're going to be creating muscle damage with that running. And then that's going to interfere with everything else that we're doing. So I think if there is a certain amount of running that people need to do, because they maybe haven't done a lot of running in the past and they've switched sports or whatever, then okay, that's a process you're going to have to go through to get to the point where your running economy is good. But once you've got that, I would put our maintenance one session a week, maybe do it after a workout, something like that, or after a practice session. Not a problem. Yeah, yeah, that would be easy to be the problem there. Wherever it needs to go. But the rest of the week can be low, low impact cardio, you know, kind of elliptical, whatever it is. I mean, whatever you can kind of make happen. I mean, cycling if you can't get an elliptical, but you get a cardio in that way. And I think that that problem then goes away. I think there's a lot of people still stuck on the idea that cardio is intrinsically interfering through some kind of magical mechanism that we wait for two years kind of playing around with, and it doesn't happen. It's literally just fatigue, and it's interfering in the exact same way that we described for stretching workouts and practice sessions interfering with each other. cardio is going to interfere in the same way. So if you keep your intensity down and you keep your low impact kind of to avoid the kind of stretching of the muscle fibers too much in the eccentric phase, then you're not going to have an issue. I don't think with the, with the interference effect. No. And I mean, clearly, like we talked about it before. There's plenty of runners now and even like pretty like high level marathoners and stuff like that that are tremendously jacked and that are natural. So it's like, you know, there's no, there's no real issue putting on muscle and keeping muscle with running. If you just manage it, that's the issue. That's the issue. That's the management. That's the key thing. So, so there we go. I mean, I think that's that's the that's the fatigue perspective. Now, I know before we came on the podcast, you were telling me about some really strange things. So the relate to the ideas about delayed potentiation. So I just go a very quick intro and reference to that. We've done a couple of podcasts on potentiation. We've thought we've got a one that's actually just literally entirely about potentiation. We've got another podcast. We did very recently on warm ups where we talked about potentiation. Basically, potentiation is anything that creates or a potentiation kind of our potentiating conditioning contraction is a technical terminologies conditioning contraction. But anything that you do exercise-wise, that produces a temporary improvement in performance is a is a potentiation effect and it's caused by a conditioning contraction. If it's immediate, then obviously it just generally tends to attract a terminology potentiation. If it's like still there or day or two later, then we would call that delayed potentiation. Whether delayed potentiation exists is extremely contentious. A lot of the time when you're looking at studies that appear to show a delayed potentiation effect, you can look at it and you're going, is that an adaption or is it actually a delayed potentiation? And the problem is that if you have an adaption that is temporary in the sense that it can dissipate and it's actually really difficult to tease a person. what's a temporary potentiation effect that is delayed and what is an adaption which has come and then dissipated again. So you stimulate the adaption, it's gone. I mean, on the neural side, we're kind of a bit luckier in that respect because you can't be the, or you don't tend to really see much dissipation of neural adaptions unless you immobilize a limb. So generally speaking, if you create an adaption on the neural side, you've got the adaption and it's probably going to still be there in three weeks time, you don't have to kind of worry too much about. So if you can roll out a kind of a neural adaption for that reason, then it tends to kind of push things more towards peripheral side. So on the peripheral side, if you've got a kind of a potentiation effect, it tends to be relatively kind of fast acting and fast dissipating, really, really difficult to kind of see those being still present these later. So from my perspective, the delayed potentiation literature is very mysterious and it's fascinating because I can't really see what actually explains it because anything on the neural side should be gone and anything on the peripheral side really shouldn't last that long. So really, for me, delayed potentiation is one of those kind of delayed onset muscle solundous problems. It's like, it shouldn't really, it doesn't get explained by the existing physiology that we are aware of. So it's really kind of interesting to see what it really is. And when somebody finally kind of cracks that puzzle, it'd be really interesting to kind of see what it's actually going on. But yeah, so let me kind of hand back over to you, Rob, and you can tell us some of the crazy things that people are kind of attributing to the potentiation with the idea that if you do this kind of train session prior to a game or whatever, then you could potentially perform better in the game by having done that delayed kind of potentiation, which obviously would take place in a training session most likely. Yeah, so the first one was specific to track and field and someone had sent this video to me and it was basically the idea that before the day before your track and field competition. So 24 hours, not 20. Yeah, you would, because delayed potentiation kind of sits in that 48 hour window. So you wouldn't need to actually do it the day before this is 20 hours. It would be, it was in the video described as a day before, day before bench pressing heavy to, you know, the logic was prime the nervous system. And then that would improve your performance in sprinting. So, so the idea would be that there's a competition, a sprinting kind of meet on the on the Saturday, and they would mention here on the Friday in order to do something to the nervous system. Yes, correct. So this falls into the classic trap, which is that there isn't, and there isn't a potentiation mechanism that includes the central nervous system. Because anything that uses central nervous system to make it better is an adaption, not a temporary potentiation. So, rephrasing that, what they're suggesting is that there is some kind of adaption that can be stimulated by bench pressing that will help sprinting. When you say it like that, it sounds mad. It does. Because there really isn't any potentiation that works through the, through the CNS. It's all adaptive. So, yeah, I think that's just one of those kind of, those kind of ideas that probably has, has, has kind of acquired a little bit too much strength for its kind of capacity to deliver. Well, you said it's definitely coming out of that old idea. That potentiation was something happening in the nervous system. Because that's, yeah, it's really difficult to get rid of that. People are, yeah, people are really obsessed with this idea that you can, you can prime or potentially tour and insert vocabulary of your choice here. You know, the CNS and it'll somehow, you know, do something. And it doesn't, the literature doesn't really support it. The literature has, you know, kind of adaptions happening in the CNS. And that's, that's fantastic. Yeah, we can do that. But, you know, temporary stuff, not so much. It tends to kind of stick once it arrives. So, yeah. That's, that's a wild one, nice. Amel. Yeah, the other one, and this one wasn't, wasn't as, as bad, honestly. And it was just, you know, this, this guy's own perspective on what has led to his best performances. Specifically, this was in, in powerlifting and in squatting. But the idea was that, you know, he always does 20 to 60 minutes of cardio the day before his best squats, which, you know, we're just talking a little bit about cardio. Obviously, the, the effect, the negative effects coming from cardio would be any, you know, postwork at fatigue that comes from it. So you could definitely do some cardio. And if you didn't do too much of it and you did something like an elliptical or a bike or something like that, you wouldn't have to worry about it. But, you know, the way it was phrased probably wasn't great because the idea that you are somehow getting like a benefit from the cardio the day before is, is not happening. And especially if you did something where you went overboard and you did, if you go, okay, I can do cardio the day before this, and then you go and run, well, that's, yeah, that could be very good. Not great to start here. See? So I just got to specify the, the type and the, the duration and the intensity, you know, not go too crazy. And certainly not have the idea that the cardio itself is giving you some kind of like performance boosts the following day. So yeah, I don't have any, any huge problem with doing cardio the day before if you want to do a little bit, but I would not go thinking that it has anything to do with why you're, you're lifting well. No, I mean, as I say, the delayed potential literature is, is very contentious. Mechanisms are not obvious. In fact, they're absent. We just don't have a mechanism really. And in, in the data that we do have suggested it's more kind of explosive type exercise, like kind of jumps and stuff like that that would create the beneficial effect if one exists. So yeah, I, it's a long way away from, from kind of 20 to 60 minutes of cardio. But yeah, I kind of agree with everything you said. I mean, it's like there's, if people are accustomed to doing 20 to 60 minutes of cardio, then there's no reason not to do it. If that's something that they do all the time anyway, I mean, it isn't really going to have a negative effect. I would just kind of add that if they're not used to doing that. And obviously there are some powerlifting kind of competitors who are not accustomed to doing that kind of cardio every day. I wouldn't suddenly introduce it, expecting it to have a positive effect because it's probably going to have the opposite effect. Yeah, definitely first time around. So introduce it like a long way out and leave it in. And it'll be all right. But if you just suddenly decide to get this wild idea to start doing cardio for the first time in 20 years, the day before your powerlifting me, it's probably going to end badly for you. So yeah, I think it's population dependent as well. But yeah, but yeah, ultimately delayed potentiation really mysterious. Don't really have a mechanism. Let's choose not hugely convincing. I don't think that we've definitely got something happening. It's potentially contaminated by the potential for adaptions to be occurring and potentially then dissipating again afterwards. But yeah, not really something I would worry too much about, worry much more about managing the managing the fatigue and that will get us most away there. But we've done, we've done an episode on tapering. I mean, we don't need to kind of put too much into this. It brings easy. It's exactly the same kind of concept, but just kind of rearranged in a slightly different way. Cool. Well, that's hopefully been a useful episode. Is there anything else you wanted to add before we finish today? I think that said, that was kind of the two wacky ones I've been sent. You do seem to get the crazy ones being sent to you. Cool. So we'll stop there. Hopefully that was useful. We will be back next week with a different topic.