Squat Every Day, page 15
When you think “max squat”, the default image is a tomato-faced powerlifter straining under a bar and about one heartbeat from an aneurysm. How can you do that every day? You don’t. You can’t. That’s not what daily max means.
Get away from that image. It’s centered on aggression and intensity, which we don’t need. We need to move into a calmer, more tranquil mindset.
Think of a weight you can walk into the gym, right now, and lift for one rep with no question in your mind. No warmup, no psych-up, don’t even change clothes. What could you walk in there and hit right now?
That number will be a no-brainer lift, a weight you’d hit any day of the week no questions asked (scratching those days you’re injured or seriously sick, of course). The number is probably heavier than you’d expect ― probably well off your best performance, but not anything to sneeze at.
Let’s call this your daily minimum. If you walked into the gym every afternoon, seven days a week, and lifted your daily minimum, how hard would that be? Do nothing else; hit this weight and go home. Are you going to feel sore and beat up? Maybe a little, at first, but if you kept this up for a few weeks or longer, you’d never notice it.
That’s the central idea that makes this work. If the weight you’re lifting on the regular isn’t treated as a threat by your body’s coping systems, then you are avoiding most of the problems of ‘recovery’.
Hitting a daily minimum won’t do that. All the daily max does, then, is give you the option to tinker with the heaviest weight on the day. Specifically, the daily max method tests the maximum weight we can handle without getting mentally wound up.
These folks doing the insane Bulgarian-style programs aren’t grinding out absolute contest maxes every day. What they’re doing is better thought of as figuring out their best training weights through the process of training (as contrasted to writing them down beforehand, based on a best-guess in a spreadsheet). This combination of RPE feedback and a coach’s eye, adjusting the workout set by set, is known as autoregulatory training, or just autoregulation.
Autoregulation is an old idea, but the word has its origins in the Daily Adjustable Progressive Resistance Exercise (DAPRE) system developed by Ken Knight. DAPRE begins with three sets based off a predicted 6RM: 10 reps at 50% of the 6RM for set one, 6 reps at 75% for set two, and set three is max reps at the 6RM weight.
The weight used on the fourth set depends on the reps you get in the third set. Hitting 8 reps or more means adding 5kg. Hitting 4 reps or less means dropping 5kg, while anything from 5-7 leaves you at the same weight for that fourth set. The reps you complete on set four determine your 6RM for the next workout.
In Supertraining, Siff suggests a modification called Autoregulating Progressive Resistance Exercise (APRE), building on Knight’s original concept by adding both 3RM and 10RM versions. In all cases, the fourth adjusted-weight set determines the starting weight for the next workout.
That’s all autoregulation is: adjusting the next set based on the set you just did. You plan on the day, not in advance.
When John Broz has his lifters squat to a max, he’s there the whole time watching each set, getting a feel for the energy and motivation, how much is left in the tank. On a bad day, that lifter can take it easy. On a great day, he can knock out a PR.
What do you do if you don’t have coach there watching all your lifts? That’s where the RPE scale shines. Going by the RTS scale, you’ll want most of your reps to fall in the 8-9 range, leaving you with a reserve of 1-4 reps. A daily training max wouldn’t allow for second rep, but might still be 20-30 lbs shy of a genuine psyched-up max.
If you like percentages, then you’re looking at the 85-90% range, plus or minus a few percent depending on the lift and the person. The actual percentage will shift upwards as you get used to handling heavy things on the regular. Avoiding psyched-up grinders makes it really hard to get above 92-95% of a true context max ― and that’s exactly what we want.
It should go without saying that this is no kind of “max” you’re used to thinking about ― which is why I’d rather you think of this more in terms of a daily minimum. Once you have to start rolling dice and putting odds on the weight, it’s too heavy. The daily maximum is what you can do right now. Ask yourself “what’s the lightest heavy set I can hit today?” That’s where your head needs to be.
This is not to suggest that these workouts are “easy”. This is still good old fashioned hard work, and that’s how the magic of daily training happens. Work hard, and keep your eyes open for opportunities ― whether that means a PR or an opportunity for a light day.
So there’s your plan: go hit a daily minimum and come home. After you’ve done that for a month, start tinkering with a daily max. This should translate to an RPE of no more than 8 or 9. When RPEs stay low and all your reps have snap, you can keep working up. When difficulty takes a jump, you’re done. It’s that simple.
What can you hit today, right now, without getting too excited? Some days that will be a weight that shocks you. Other days you’ll leave it at the baseline and call it done.
7
The Longtails Strategy
“The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.”
―Arthur Schopenhauer
Harnessing the Power of Overtraining
By now it’s clear that we can make some tweaks to our ideas on training for strength. Your body is a complex adaptive system, which means there is a fundamental limit to the kind of detail we can see in it. You don’t get better by focusing on molecular signals or stuff happening inside living cells. More importantly, we can’t really predict how it’s going to behave in the future, at least not in response to any of these specifics. You don’t see better results by working out according to inflexible schedules and precision-engineered lists of exercises. You need to plan, but the plan needs to include flexibility.
It might help if you think of your body as more like a garden than a factory.60 If you try to manage your garden like a factory, you probably aren’t getting much of a crop. Gardens require tending rather than intrusive management. You pick the kinds of plants you grow, and pull out weeds, and make sure that light and water and even temperature are suitable for your flora. Contrast that to actual management, the belief that somebody has to be there overseeing and guiding every aspect of the process lest it collapse into itself.
Tending a garden means guiding along processes which, for their intended purposes, are far smarter than you could ever be. Respect the garden’s nature as an organic, fluid, adaptable system and it will flourish. Your job is to guide the ship, so to speak, to provide direction.
That’s how we need to envision the entire process of training for self-improvement, whether that means strength, muscle mass, or improving body composition to look better.
Greek Gods and Bell Curves
Every time I come across someone discussing the idea of “optimal” in a biological system, I giggle on the inside. There is no such thing. In biological systems, stability is change. “Optimal” is a space of possibilities rather than a single spot you can point at and call “ideal”.
I brought this up not to confuse you but to argue against rampant detail-thinking. There’s no point in focusing our attentions down in the basement, on biomolecules and even cellular-level activity, if your goal is finding more productive methods of training. The gap is too large, our tools too imprecise.
We can tell ourselves neat little stories about causes and effects, but ultimately that’s all they are: stories. Biology Is Not Like That.
My ideas on this topic had been brewing a long time as I researched this book. Many things finally clicked into place when I was pointed to Nassim Taleb’s exploration of uncertainty in volatile environments, his book The Black Swan. A black swan is an event that appears unlikely in the extreme, at least according to our forecasting methods, but actually has a substantial probability of occurrence. Taleb argues that our statistical methods can’t capture the risk of catastrophic events in certain types of systems. But since we’re so invested in our belief that we can analyze and predict, we’re blinded to the reality and black swans ― the 9/11s, the Hurricane Katrinas, the global financial meltdowns ― blindside us.61
Key to Taleb’s story is the power-law distribution. Normal, orderly, regular events distribute themselves across the familiar Bell curve. Likelihoods cluster around the bulging hump of the average, and wild deviations, out in the tails, are unlikely in the extreme. But many real systems, Taleb argues, don’t play so well with the expectation of regularity.
The weather, the stock market, even earthquakes, all tend towards volatility, meaning that they’re prone to wild swings. The appearance of regularity for the last hundred or even the last thousand years is no indicator that you won’t see a catastrophic upset tomorrow. Regularity is an illusion created by the method.
These volatile patterns follow power-law distributions. A majority of events will cluster around the “ordinary” value, but a power-law distribution also comes with a “long tail”, wherein the probability of the abnormal, the unpredictable, and the wildly, dangerously unlikely are dramatically increased. The long tail is where black swans happen.
The application to exercise hit me immediately. Typical training thought treats our bodies as orderly, regular and ― crucially ― predictable. Think about it. Program design means training 2-4 days a week with a precise list of exercises and sets and reps. Periodization means train in precisely-planned training cycles, or even the more basic “linear progress” of adding small increments of weight every week. Even the hysteria over picture-perfect technique, which leads to endless over-analysis and form-checking, reflects the belief there is some Platonic ideal of “perfect form” which we must measure our movements against.
Your body is the outcome of a few million years (at least) of mammalian musculo-skeletal evolution. No mathematical model, no matter how rigorous and how well it explains the situation we observe, is going to “know better” than your body about how it moves.
Earlier on when I criticized the idea of diminishing returns, which leads to misleading abstractions like saying that four sets is “most of” your gains from a workout, this is what I had in mind. We create a structure to “explain” and then confuse our construct for reality.
Typical programming can fail for similar reasons. We’re trying to out-think a system that is at once extremely complicated and extremely simple. When it comes to predicting how we respond ― particularly with advanced lifters ― there seems to be little pattern. You can build up a head of steam, train great for a few weeks, and then fall into an inexplicable rut.
I always found this confusing. After all, isn’t the whole point of exercise science to figure out these regularities and build programs around them? It seems like the formalized understanding of academia doesn’t much resemble what’s actually happening.
It’s only a problem when you presume an orderly and predictable body in the first place. Complex systems don’t have obvious regularities or neat chains of cause and effect. This is why we can’t predict the future of the stock market, why weather forecasts always fall apart more than a few days in advance.
At the same time, complex systems do have structure, of a sort, although it is not the type of regularity that you pull into pieces and plug into a spreadsheet. What we get is rather a case for relaxing and letting things go as they please.
Complex systems have no gradual, smooth changes. What we get instead are sharp phase transitions and abrupt jumps, what Malcolm Gladwell called tipping points in his book of the same name. In evolutionary history, this meant mass extinctions and sudden explosions of new organisms. It means economic booms and stock market collapses. It means liquid at 211 degrees and gas at 212.
You can make what seems like a big change and see no real difference. Meanwhile small, seemingly irrelevant things echo, amplify, and suddenly boil over into an unexpected mess. Living organisms share these features, and that makes large-scale predictions from micro-level events all but impossible. What we take to be important, as ‘more data’, really isn’t; and likewise, things that escape our attention prove to be the deal-makers (or breakers).
Exercise science isn’t alone in this, of course. The undercurrents of order and control run deep in the modern world. We’re under the impression that science, and the analytical, objectifying mindset implied behind science, can establish all truths if we just look hard enough. Friedrich Nietzsche called this the Apollonian tendency. The analytic mindset gives rise to an appearance of order, and that order is necessary for control. The entire enterprise is predicated on our need to be in charge.
That works for physics, maybe chemistry and a few other assorted domains, but Biology Is Not Like That. Biology is squishy and it exists in a state of flux. The toolkit of ideas and concepts that thrives in physics is not going to get us far here.
In the arena of human performance, this is an illusion. We do not have the kind of knowledge required to make training into a ‘managed’ process, guided by the well-crafted plans of Those Who Know Best.
But Matt, you say, aren’t we trying to stimulate our bodies into an unnatural state of strength and muscle mass? Doesn’t that require some initiative and a plan? Yes, it does. As we have all experienced, our bodies won’t, on their own accord, add tens of pounds of muscle or develop the capacity to squat multiples of their own weight. Improved performance requires stimulus, and that stimulus can be (and should be) informed by scientific findings.
The key phrase there is ‘informed by’. We can and should draw on science in order to help figure out what may or may not be a good idea. This is not synonymous with using science as an all-encompassing account of productive training, however, nor is it meant to imply that illusions of the Apollonian mind are in any way useful.
As tellers-of-stories, we will find our stories whether they exist or not. Your body, however, doesn’t care about any of that. In other words, don’t worry about the details. You can’t manage them, and, contrary to popular opinion, this isn’t even a problem. It bothers the hell out of the Apollonian thinker, but your body can function just fine without active management by science.
Your training (and eating) gains no benefit from over-analysis and detail-fixation. Good enough isn’t just good enough – it’s all there is.
The Longtails Strategy
Interestingly enough, thanks to the chaos that is a living system, the mediocrity of “optimal” isn’t always good enough to trigger the changes we want. Apollonian thinking tempts us to look at extremes ― say HIT-style intensity or Arnold’s volume ― and conclude that a compromise at the middle ground is the best choice. Analysis moves us towards safe middle-grounds.
I think the middle ground is probably how things will appear if you look over the long run. But I also think that we’ll benefit more from contrasting methods that average out to moderate over the long run, rather than actually training in the middle ground. Your body responds to exaggerations and extremes ― to volatility ― more than it does to nice predictable rhythms.
Thinking on Apollo’s terms might actually hold you back, robbing you of much-needed stimulus by focusing too much on orderly programs. We need to think more like the drunken Dionysus, adding a little uncertainty back to the process. Uncertainty can be frightening, but it also works for us. In fact, our bodies thrive on it ― and don’t work right without it.
If you’ll recall, Hans Selye argued that stress comes in two flavors. One type, distress, is what we normally associate with being “stressed out”. Autonomic activity is up, catecholamines and corticoids are up, and we’re stewing away as our bodies try to cope with whatever we’ve perceived as a threat. Distress is what we’d normally associate with a workout.
Selye also identified a friendlier form of stress which does none of this. Eustress is mood-elevating, growth-enhancing, the “good” kind of stress. Our bodies thrive on this, and we can make a strong case that we actually need a degree of low-level disorder in our lives in order to function properly.
You push out of your comfort zone, but just slightly. You go for an hour-long walk, maybe covering a few hills. You get up and do some body-weight squats and a set or two of pushups. You swing the kettlebell for a couple of sets. Your body, now forced to deal with modest demands of moving around, has to compensate.
This is a tiny drip of effort, not nearly enough to really challenge you in mind or body ― but it has an effect even so. The work is just enough of a challenge to wake everything up, to get it moving, to switch on the lazy genes and metabolic systems and pull yourself out of that low-energy state on the bottom rungs.
Eustress is similar to the related concept of hormesis. Biologists have long wondered why certain toxins, when taken in low doses, can actually have positive benefits. While too much will hurt or kill, there is also such a thing as too little. Your body needs the kick provided by environmental stresses; it just needs them at the right levels.
Our bodies are not creatures of order. A completely orderly body is dead. A fluctuating, dynamic, living body is inherently disposed to a little chaos.
We can visualize this with the power-law distribution. The picture is simple: most of your outcomes result from a minority of causes. The Pareto 80/20 rule is a fine example of this. For us, the productive minority are the hard-hitting “intense” workouts. They cause a powerful effect in us, stimulating strength and muscle gains while also incurring a recovery penalty as we’ve discussed.
The Apollonian focuses on this and says that it’s all we need. Just do the hard-out, all-in workouts. They are what creates the greatest effect. Why do anything else?
