Programming, Progressions and Personalities

In a world full of online coaches, athletes, clients and influencers what we currently have in the training landscape is the reality that there are a lot of people looking to help as well as people looking for help. It's really easy to put a program out there with little in the way of consideration and immediately people will be looking into it and training with it. The wild part is that it could be the dumbest program in the world and people will try to run it for months and months on end because Brosef Bicepticons(we won't ask about his drug recovery program) says it's the bomb diggity. The challenges in this dynamic are that a lot of the time people are buying a coaching personality instead of a solid program. In many cases the program is completely new and has never been done before. Which means that it has no history of successful implementation and that person is the guinea pig for it's maiden voyage. I'm not saying it won't work but what I am saying is that it's a roll of the dice instead of betting on a more sure approach.

When writing programming there are some general principles that help to keep progression occuring sustainably. One way to think about it is that it's like making a soup or chowder. The hotter/spicier that you make that soup the reality is that the fewer people will be able to consume it consistently. Instead what you run into is that there will be a few people who like that spicy soup but more and more people that can not/will not consume it on a regular basis. Instead when programming it becomes important to consider "What is Recoverable?" Is the program hard to recover from, easier to recover from, is it asking a lot from people energetically or are the movements not easily accessible.

The reality is when you write programming for the general population you become limited by the other factors in their life. A 40 hour per week job that may or may not be physically demanding or intensely stressful in other regards is a key consideration. If you are writing programming from someone who works construction or has many hours that they are physically working it may not be the best thing to prescribe high volumes of stressful and challenging to control movements. In those instances a lower volume and a more moderate intensity approach may give them more than trying to give them a firehose of stress to drink out of.

Some of the litmus tests of programming is (A) does it produce fruit? (B) is it repeatable for considerable periods of time? (C) are there issues with consistent strain associated with it?

If the program fundamentally doesn't work and doesn't assist physiological progression then we can wad it up and throw it in the trash. If it's not repeatable consistently then you can only use it in certain aspects of the year when other life factors make it useful. If there is considerable amounts of strain associated with the training then the reality is that there will be no long term engagement with it.

So by default training needs to be moderate or conservative enough in stressor so that progression can occur, the program can be run consistently and without considerable strain associated with it. Attempting to live with programming that requires to hire a brand new recovery team every time a new 3-4 month cycle shows up is going to be hard to keep on the rails. Generally speaking high intensity, high volume and high frequency programs are only useful for brief periods of time. Just like a spare tire that gets you from place to place so you can get a new more robust tire put on. If the training stressors are so unsustainable that you can only use them and live with them for 4-6 weeks at a time that is more of a filler than it is anything else.

Instead what you want to see is that there are both periods of higher and lower intensity. You also want to see periods that are higher and lower in volume. Now this may seem simple on the outside but consider that many programs are built off of static progressions. Sets and reps of 3-6 sets of 8-12 reps for months and months on end is highly problematic unless you are a complete novice. There should be some consistent movement in the progressions in order to increase the variability of the stressors as well as to allow recovery to occur. The higher and hotter you peg the stressors and the less variability you have of them the certainty of burnout becomes nearly guaranteed.

Why does all of this matter?

Because biological adaptation is a slow roll and sustainable programming and progressions matter if you are going to make progress consistently at that pace. The more you try to hustle progression the reality is that without enhanced recovery methods you will not make progress. Instead you will overtrain/under recover and burn out. The program will not be sustainable and you will not make the progress you wanted to in the timeline that you wanted.

Consider these very fundamental facts about this process.

2lbs of body fat loss is generally speaking the fastest you can make this progression happen without losing a bunch of muscle or counting water weight. So imagine how many pounds of fat you want to lose and then divide by 2. If you have 52lbs to lose then you have at the fastest 26 weeks to accomplish this. What this means is that you have to have a program that you will be able to keep doing for at least half a year! If you burn out in week 6, 10, 12 or 18, you don't reach your goals. You have to train for the whole time in order to get to your goals. Short term programs(4-6 weeks) on repeat here are a bad idea!!

Gaining muscle happens even slower than losing fat because you are literally gaining new tissue. Consider the fat loss timelines and then expect half of the progress in the same amount of time and that is if the individual is severely underweight to begin with. So once again if you fall off your training program because it's a bad plan to begin with then the reality is that you won't be able to keep doing it for the length of time that you need to stay engaged with training in order to reach your goals.

Ultimately, training with sustainable programming is what allows you to make progress. Bigger goals require more time, more work and more effort in order to reach them and not run into big physiological problems. The challenge becomes being patient enough, staying consistent with your training as well as making sure your nutrient intake is staying consistent as well. At some point along this continuum more stress is just more stress and it won't be the answer to the question of "how do I make more progress happen faster?" The answer is ultimately asking different questions. Instead of asking how hard, how fast and how much strain can I take in training? The bigger question is how do I train in a sustainable way to recover from the stressors of training so that I can function, feel and look better than I ever have?