So we see here, the endurance guy doesn't actually try to perform his/her "event" during training. And as we've been over before, never use exceptions to create rules. Nor would the average marathon athletes body stand up to doing 26.2 miles every week, unless they were some freak of nature. You can't run around at your +10% strength level 24/7. If we're talking about peak level strength, that requires priming the body, and peaking. Of course, someone will bitch that "that's marathon running!" but I don't care. It's amazing how those same ranges keep popping up in regards to elite athletic performance. You know what percentage of 26.2 miles that is? About 85%. Not one time does this have the athlete actually performing at the level of the competition he/she is preparing for. Maintenance is easy, but often times guys find that just working for maintenance, actually gets them stronger. Maintaining your base level of strength is very easy and only requires you only get in the gym and do SOME work. So as I wrote, you trained hard.for nothing. Makes me want to slap my forehead and say "I coulda had a V8!" Does this make ANY sense? You trained so hard that you failed to allow recovery, then you kept training through that, just to get back to where you were BEFORE you got stupid. He's happy that he's simply back to where he was before training went to shit. So the lifter that is all happy because he's "squatting X amount, again" really made NO PROGRESS. The body will eventually regulate and recover, but you'll flat line back out to where your BASE was before. I've heard some guys say "well I trained back out of it." Sure I get that. If you find yourself regressing (this is really just being in a state of fatigue) and you continue to train hard to work your way out of that hole, you're really just digging a deeper hole into recovery. What most fail to understand is, this is your body finding equilibrium in that whole fatigue/recovery/supercompensation paradigm. So I found a better way - a way that allowed me to not train as hard and still get STRONGER. I tried to play that game and eventually realized it didn't work for me. Just know that very few athletes can get away with maxing out on the same exercises week in, week out. When I was younger I made this mistake and I paid the price. The biggest reason why most dedicated guys FAIL to get STRONGER (or don't get strong as quickly as they'd like) is because they train too hard.Īnd this might work for a few weeks, but then the ACHES and PAINS set in, their strength starts going backwards and they sometimes end up INJURED. To borrow again from the interview with Mikhail and also a quote from Andy Bolton. The weeks preceding that however, are all in the 60's, 70's, and 80's.
This is the reason why in my peaking cycles you do end up in the 90%+ range for a few weeks. I made a point to mention guys I know, that train super heavy all the time and will tell you "that's how you get strong". If your training is so hard, and ran at such high percentages that you rarely allow supercompensation to take place, then basically you're literally working hard for nothing. Basically, managing your degree of stress and recovery is what allows you to have supercompensation (get stronger), and that's really what "progress" is. In part 1 of base building I addressed the issues of fatigue and supercompensation.