We’ve covered strength and some of the limitations on our bodies regarding our joints and how they move. We also concluded that in order to get the most bang for your buck in the gym you have to use big movements that mimic your daily activities like squatting, pressing overhead and picking stuff up. The next question is, well what is the proper way to do those movements? The short answer, is the models for the lifts in Starting Strength. I like the way Rippetoe analysed the human body and came up with his models for the lifts. It’s not the only way, and you certainly don’t have to low bar squat or do the Press 2.0. But it does serve to be the most basic and most easy to teach to anyone and get them below parallel within 10 minutes. I don’t know of any other system developed in such detail yet. So my bias for beginners is to start with the forms and learn them how Rippetoe teaches in his books.
Stress Recovery Adaptation
adaptation, noun
– the action or process of changing something, or of being changed, to suit a new purpose or situation
The whole purpose of our training is to get stronger. But how exactly does it happen? Adaptation. Adaptation to the movement you’re doing. Let’s use two extreme examples and bring them halfway back to a mean.
If you squatted only Mondays, your physiological system as a whole would undergo some stress to which your body would respond. There’s no exact science to this period but smarter and older coaches over the decades realised it’s roughly a couple days. Let’s say 48hrs. During that time you start off as weaker right after the stress, then as you eat and sleep properly your body sets into motion a lot of processes that adapt to the stress you just put it through. After a while, roughly 48hrs, your body is fully adapted to the stress and able to withstand the same stress again. But since you only stressed it once, that adaptation becomes moot the longer you wait to stress it again. If you come back next Monday, you might actually only be able to lift the previous Monday’s weight. The time between the first stress and the second was too long. Your legs might hurt too the next day because of the lack of stimulation. Now this is all theory and of course there’s nuance to it. Over the span of 10yrs, if you squatted just once a week, you could probably get decently strong but that’s a lot of wasted time with suboptimal programming and adaptation.
The other extreme is “going heavy” every day of the week. You might be able to do this as a beginner for a week or two but you will soon overwhelm your recoverability. Likely stressing your body into overtraining quickly. The adaptation cycle takes time. You need time to sleep, time to eat, and time for your body to go through its physiological processes to adapt to the stresses you imposed on it.
The mean between the two is spacing the workouts evenly more or less and making sure to give enough time to stress your body (the workout), and to adapt to that stress(sleep and nutrition). When you come back for the next session you have to stress it just a little bit more so that you can trigger the adaptation process again. And the cycle continues. As you progress through the weeks and months of working out let’s say three times a week, there will come a time when this is too much as well. The weight you will be lifting will be so heavy and taxing that your body will start to need multiple days to adapt which could span to five or six days instead. Because humans live on a seven day week cycle we start to program the workouts at this point on a weekly basis. One big stress, a recovery workout (which is lighter), and a stress that is a bit less than the big stress earlier the week but heavy enough to prevent you from detraining until the next bout of stress. With this method of constructing your workouts with the adaptation in mind you can program your training to make progress for years and years.
With all this said, can you make progress like this doing movements other than using barbells? Probably. I just don’t have the experience or knowledge of actually doing it to give a definitive answer. I have my opinions on it, but we’re not concerned with those machines or movements here so it’s a waste of pages to write about it.
Measuring Progress (How you’re adapting)
You’ll find lots of different opinions on the internet about what progress means. Here we focus on strength first and the other aspects of training like abs, bigger arms etc second. Our measurement of progress will be the weight on the bar over time. Secondly it will be new rep PRs(personal records) and after that anything that applies to your life in your context. That could be losing fat, choosing better foods, getting rid of habits, getting bigger arms etc.
Playing devil’s advocate, the amount by which the weight goes up, for how long, and until it can’t anymore is not important if it doesn’t align with your goals. What is important is consistency. There are programs that I run with clients in a linear fashion to get them strong quickly of course, but that’s based on what they want and their goals. If strength is your goal, then we’re gonna push the weights gradually for a period of time. If general fitness is your goal we might start that way but change it up with less increases in weight and more rep based stuff. There are camps in the fitness industry pushing really hard for one method over the other but if you’re not happy there is no point. The take home point here is that if you look at your training log and go back a month or two you should be better than that time. Whether it’s weight on the bar, more reps, less fat, whatever the measurement is it needs to change over time. I can’t count the times I’ve seen “trainers” in the gyms “training” people who are still fat and out of shape after 6 months or even a year later.
Conclusion
Adaptation doesn’t just work to better us. It can also make us weak and fat. If you sit on your couch all the time eating and gaining weight you’re adapting to that lifestyle. Getting weak is essentially an adaptation to the lack of stress on the body. If you make sure to document your training and program it as to make sure you adapt and improve by whatever metric you use you will get better and better as time passes at whatever you’re doing.
It’s important that you can look back and see the progress.
