Neil Deighton explains how to force your body to adapt to a higher training frequency.
Hi guys welcome to part 2 of the powerlifting programming, today I'm just gonna go over the amount of work you do, increasing the amount of work you do so this is kinda gonna encompass volume and frequency and just got a quick question about breathing at the end during the lifting.
If I was to say to you imagine if you could fit all the work you've done, all the training you've done in the last 8 weeks into 5 weeks you're gonna progress so much faster. Now what's gonna limit that is gonna be recovery you aren't gonna be able to recover from your training sessions so it's pointless even saying it at the moment. But what we're looking at is can we adapt to being able to train more often to do more volume. So I'm gonna use the sink analogy, I can't remember who wrote it but it made sense to me so I'll go with that. Now if you imagine a sink and you've got your tap, as soon as you start running your tap that's your training stress, and your drainage hole that's your recovery. ability Now if you've got a very small drainage hole, say you're the kind of guy who does minimal work per week because you just can seem to recover properly or you don't think you can recover properly, you can't turn the tap on very fast or think sink is gonna overflow pretty quickly. And that will be akin to maybe overreaching, I won't say over training because overtraining would have to occur over a much longer time period. So unlike a sink the human body is adaptable so we can increase the size of our drainage hole as it were. Now how do we got about increasing the size of our drainage hole, and obviously if we do that we can turn the tap on faster which would be akin to doing more training.
So how do we get that drainage hole bigger, that's the main question. And I think what all of us do, or at least I did do and I’m trying to change that now for this and it seems to be working is you'll do maybe 4, 5 6 weeks training you'll be training hard and then you're gonna feel a bit tired, maybe aching a bit you'll maybe lose a bit of motivation so what do we do? It's time to back off we've got to listen to our body, we're gonna back off, we're gonna have a deload week, then we're gonna come back and we're gonna build it back up again which is great but the problem is you aren't forcing that adaptation, you're not gonna increase the size of the drainage hole by doing that, you aren't forcing your body to work harder for longer so it's kinda gonna stagnate where it is recovery wise. To increase that recovery what we're gonna do is were gonna push on for an extra couple of weeks when we feel like that. Now this where it becomes important to listen to your body each session. If you've got bad lower back pain and it's deadlift session, I'm not saying carry on and do a deadlift make sure you're working hard on something, go on the pullups, make sure you're doing a hard session so you're still forcing your body to adapt but ideally we do want to be pushing the compound lifts, that's the idea. Right, so don't back off too often and what can we do now we can start adding days into your routine or increasing your volume per day. Now this is also gonna have the same kind of effect. I've talked about frequency before and volume it's the same thing, it's a very slow process, it's not a case of going from doing squatting once a week for 3 or 4 sets to starting right I'm gonna squat 4 times a week now and do a high volume. I'm gonna deadlift 5 times a week, I'm gonna bench 8 times as I've seen some of the top guys doing it, the eastern Europeans will. You may be able to get to that level but it's gonna take years and years.
So what we're looking for, it's not kind of a eureka moment where you think right I'm gonna bang in a load of volume here and I'm gonna add a load of days there. It's such a slow process and I'll explain what I mean by a slow process and how I’d go about adding things into your routine. Now what have we got to consider before we start adding the extra work in? There's 2 main things for me, the main one is lower back loading. This is what I kind of base a lot of programs around, if you're putting too much stress on your lower back you're doing too many heavy squats, deadlifts, bent over rows that kind of thing anything that taxes your lower back that's when you're more likely to get burnt out. So we're gonna have to bear that in mind when we're programming in more work. And also if you're getting too amped up every session if you're getting too psyched up and you're headbutting bars and you've got your smelling salts out every session you're gonna struggle to increase your volume because you're just gonna burn out eventually. You're taxing your CNS much more than you need to. Remember it's training, you're not in a competition.
Right, so say we're training 3 days a week at the moment we're doing a squat session, a bench session and a deadlift session. And you've got room to add another day in, well go over someone who doesn't have the time to add a day in, in a minute. But say you've got time to add another day in, how do we play it? Well if we think of the lower back loading issue and the musculature involved in each lift you'll notice that squat and deadlift is more taxing than bench press. So bench press is gonna be the first thing that you split into 2 days. So how do we split a bench press session into 2 days? We'll go through what might be a typical bench press session, you might do 4 sets of flat bench, you might move on to a chest exercise and do 3 sets, you might move on to a shoulder exercise and do 3 sets, you might finish with a tricep exercise for 3 sets. So how do we change that into a 2 day program? Well as we say we're taking small steps here we don't want to go and bang in too much volume at once, we don't want to stress ourselves too much, the body can only adapt to so much stress it isn't gonna adapt to everything. So what we can do is we're gonna add 1 set of bench per week so 1 day we're gonna do 3 sets of flat bench on the other day we're gonna do 2 sets of flat bench. And we're not gonna change the assistance exercises for now we're just gonna split it. So what we might do is, we might do 2 sets of chest on 1 day, 1 set of chest on the other day. We'll split the shoulders, we'll do 1 set on 1 day another set on the other day, and the triceps 2 sets on one day, one on the other day. I'd rather do it that way than split it as a whole, I'd rather do your chest and shoulders and triceps and bench twice a week rather than say right I'm gonna put shoulders on that day and triceps on that day because I think it's not as optimal in my opinion.
And now what we've got is we've got 2 days and we aren't doing loads on each day, the recovery is gonna be no different than it was but you've got an extra set in there now so you've got somewhere to build. And all you can do now is every couple of weeks you might add a set here, a set there. You might add a little different exercise in so over time, over months and months you're gonna increase your volume and it should make you stronger. Now how about squat and deadlift? We're gonna train 4 days we've got our extra bench day in, how do we kind of increase that? Well to start with I'm gonna leave deadlift as it is, to me it's the most taxing exercise. Gonna leave that until last to start playing around with, but we can probably squat twice a week. Now we're gonna add the squats in, we're gonna work up to 1 or 2 sets, sub maximal we're not going near failure and we're gonna do it before deadlifting. You're gonna squat before deadlifting in a comp anyway so it makes sense. All we're gonna do is we're gonna build it up slowly, you don't need to jump in doing a max set of 5 reps, just built it up. Maybe 70% for 5 reps and just working that technique and each week maybe upping the intensity a little bit you'll maybe get to 75-80% and instead of doing more intensity you're gonna add another set in so you might do 3 sets before deadlifting. And then if we want to take it a little bit further you might carry on with that kind of routine for a couple of months and then how about if we want to add another day in? What do we do? We'll probably gonna look at your back work we want to do a bit more deadlifting now if we can. So what we might do is we might add 1 or 2 deadlifting sets in. It might be off of the block, it might be off of the floor, it might be a deficit. We're just gonna add 1 or 2 sets in, maybe even 1 set to start with on deadlift day, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna take assistance exercises and if you're gonna do your deadlifting you do your pullups your machine work and we're gonna choose 2 exercises out of them and we're gonna do it on a different day. So that makes 5 days and one of the days is gonna be a back assistance day, but it's not gonna be too taxing, you're not gonna do 4 or 5 different exercises. What you're gonna do is you're gonna take the exercises that you were doing already and put them on that day and slowly increase it. What it's doing is by the extra days it's giving you more room to manoeuvre increase in volume wise, simple as that. Not the best idea to do it if you're in a calorie restriction, if you're dieting anything like that you're probably not gonna be able to recover as fast so it's maybe not the right time to add in extra work.
Now how about if you train 3 days a week and you don't have time to train any more than 3 days a week. Well that goes for a lot of people I think and I don't think it's a problem per-se. I don't think it's optimal but I think there's plenty of great lifters out there much better than me who have done well off 2 or even 3 days a week. So what we can do is we can do that same thing as we did on the deadlift day, we can add the squats in before the deadlifts. And we're gonna have to play around more with the volume per session than we are the frequency, obviously if you can't train more days. What we can do though we can add the lifts in more often at a lower intensity. If you need to you can do your bench press on a different day at a lower intensity depending on how many days recovery you've got in between. If you've got a few days in between you can add another bench press session before one of your other sessions. I don't really think the whole “only train for 40 minutes, an hour” as long as you've got your nutrition pretty good around your workout and with powerlifting you're using a fair bit of rest time so I wouldn't worry about training too long.
So just to recap we're just gonna take things slowly. If you can train more days we're gonna train more days, if you can only train 3 days we're just gonna kind of increase the volume, you might do a set at 80% for each lift the first week, you might do a couple of weeks. Then another set in with around 80% so we're just gradually building the volume up. Mainly focusing on the compound lifts rather than the assistance cause that's where you're gonna get the most bang for your buck and that's where we want to improve our proficiency.
So I think that wraps it up on that for today, if anyone has got any further questions on it feel free to ask away and I'll do my best to answer them. Oh breathing, just had a question about breathing when you're doing the lifts and the kind of question was about doing multiple reps, do I hold my breath for the whole set. No personally I don't, if I'm doing a squat I'll take a breath in obviously. Breathe into your belly, push our against your belt as hard as you can, get that intra abdominal pressure and it's gonna support your lower back and help you lift the weight as well. Never breathe out during the concentric or eccentric you want to keep your breath held all the time. If you start to let your breath out you're gonna become a bit looser, not only are you not gonna make the lift you're gonna open yourself up for injury so never breathe out during the concentric. All that bullshit that people spout, do you breathe in on the way down and breathe out on the way up? Not if you're a powerlifter you don't, not if you want to get anywhere. So I think we all know that really. So that actual question was “do I hold my breath through all the sets, for the whole set?” No I don't if I'm doing bench press I'll take a breath, unrack the weight and off that one breath I will do one rep. To be honest it's something that I don't even think about and I've had to really think hard what I actually do. In between reps I'll take a breath but it's not a full breathe out, full breathe in it's kind of a little one, as little as possible. I can't concentrate properly if I do the whole set off one breath, I'm focusing more on trying to breathe and I think it really does hinder me, and I don't see any real benefit to it. If you can do one rep off one breath that's all you're gonna do in a comp I don't see a problem with it. So little breath in between sets isn't a problem. Right so that wraps it up for today, thanks very much for watching and I'll soon be back with a new one.
Hi guys welcome to part 2 of the powerlifting programming, today I'm just gonna go over the amount of work you do, increasing the amount of work you do so this is kinda gonna encompass volume and frequency and just got a quick question about breathing at the end during the lifting.
If I was to say to you imagine if you could fit all the work you've done, all the training you've done in the last 8 weeks into 5 weeks you're gonna progress so much faster. Now what's gonna limit that is gonna be recovery you aren't gonna be able to recover from your training sessions so it's pointless even saying it at the moment. But what we're looking at is can we adapt to being able to train more often to do more volume. So I'm gonna use the sink analogy, I can't remember who wrote it but it made sense to me so I'll go with that. Now if you imagine a sink and you've got your tap, as soon as you start running your tap that's your training stress, and your drainage hole that's your recovery. ability Now if you've got a very small drainage hole, say you're the kind of guy who does minimal work per week because you just can seem to recover properly or you don't think you can recover properly, you can't turn the tap on very fast or think sink is gonna overflow pretty quickly. And that will be akin to maybe overreaching, I won't say over training because overtraining would have to occur over a much longer time period. So unlike a sink the human body is adaptable so we can increase the size of our drainage hole as it were. Now how do we got about increasing the size of our drainage hole, and obviously if we do that we can turn the tap on faster which would be akin to doing more training.
So how do we get that drainage hole bigger, that's the main question. And I think what all of us do, or at least I did do and I’m trying to change that now for this and it seems to be working is you'll do maybe 4, 5 6 weeks training you'll be training hard and then you're gonna feel a bit tired, maybe aching a bit you'll maybe lose a bit of motivation so what do we do? It's time to back off we've got to listen to our body, we're gonna back off, we're gonna have a deload week, then we're gonna come back and we're gonna build it back up again which is great but the problem is you aren't forcing that adaptation, you're not gonna increase the size of the drainage hole by doing that, you aren't forcing your body to work harder for longer so it's kinda gonna stagnate where it is recovery wise. To increase that recovery what we're gonna do is were gonna push on for an extra couple of weeks when we feel like that. Now this where it becomes important to listen to your body each session. If you've got bad lower back pain and it's deadlift session, I'm not saying carry on and do a deadlift make sure you're working hard on something, go on the pullups, make sure you're doing a hard session so you're still forcing your body to adapt but ideally we do want to be pushing the compound lifts, that's the idea. Right, so don't back off too often and what can we do now we can start adding days into your routine or increasing your volume per day. Now this is also gonna have the same kind of effect. I've talked about frequency before and volume it's the same thing, it's a very slow process, it's not a case of going from doing squatting once a week for 3 or 4 sets to starting right I'm gonna squat 4 times a week now and do a high volume. I'm gonna deadlift 5 times a week, I'm gonna bench 8 times as I've seen some of the top guys doing it, the eastern Europeans will. You may be able to get to that level but it's gonna take years and years.
So what we're looking for, it's not kind of a eureka moment where you think right I'm gonna bang in a load of volume here and I'm gonna add a load of days there. It's such a slow process and I'll explain what I mean by a slow process and how I’d go about adding things into your routine. Now what have we got to consider before we start adding the extra work in? There's 2 main things for me, the main one is lower back loading. This is what I kind of base a lot of programs around, if you're putting too much stress on your lower back you're doing too many heavy squats, deadlifts, bent over rows that kind of thing anything that taxes your lower back that's when you're more likely to get burnt out. So we're gonna have to bear that in mind when we're programming in more work. And also if you're getting too amped up every session if you're getting too psyched up and you're headbutting bars and you've got your smelling salts out every session you're gonna struggle to increase your volume because you're just gonna burn out eventually. You're taxing your CNS much more than you need to. Remember it's training, you're not in a competition.
Right, so say we're training 3 days a week at the moment we're doing a squat session, a bench session and a deadlift session. And you've got room to add another day in, well go over someone who doesn't have the time to add a day in, in a minute. But say you've got time to add another day in, how do we play it? Well if we think of the lower back loading issue and the musculature involved in each lift you'll notice that squat and deadlift is more taxing than bench press. So bench press is gonna be the first thing that you split into 2 days. So how do we split a bench press session into 2 days? We'll go through what might be a typical bench press session, you might do 4 sets of flat bench, you might move on to a chest exercise and do 3 sets, you might move on to a shoulder exercise and do 3 sets, you might finish with a tricep exercise for 3 sets. So how do we change that into a 2 day program? Well as we say we're taking small steps here we don't want to go and bang in too much volume at once, we don't want to stress ourselves too much, the body can only adapt to so much stress it isn't gonna adapt to everything. So what we can do is we're gonna add 1 set of bench per week so 1 day we're gonna do 3 sets of flat bench on the other day we're gonna do 2 sets of flat bench. And we're not gonna change the assistance exercises for now we're just gonna split it. So what we might do is, we might do 2 sets of chest on 1 day, 1 set of chest on the other day. We'll split the shoulders, we'll do 1 set on 1 day another set on the other day, and the triceps 2 sets on one day, one on the other day. I'd rather do it that way than split it as a whole, I'd rather do your chest and shoulders and triceps and bench twice a week rather than say right I'm gonna put shoulders on that day and triceps on that day because I think it's not as optimal in my opinion.
And now what we've got is we've got 2 days and we aren't doing loads on each day, the recovery is gonna be no different than it was but you've got an extra set in there now so you've got somewhere to build. And all you can do now is every couple of weeks you might add a set here, a set there. You might add a little different exercise in so over time, over months and months you're gonna increase your volume and it should make you stronger. Now how about squat and deadlift? We're gonna train 4 days we've got our extra bench day in, how do we kind of increase that? Well to start with I'm gonna leave deadlift as it is, to me it's the most taxing exercise. Gonna leave that until last to start playing around with, but we can probably squat twice a week. Now we're gonna add the squats in, we're gonna work up to 1 or 2 sets, sub maximal we're not going near failure and we're gonna do it before deadlifting. You're gonna squat before deadlifting in a comp anyway so it makes sense. All we're gonna do is we're gonna build it up slowly, you don't need to jump in doing a max set of 5 reps, just built it up. Maybe 70% for 5 reps and just working that technique and each week maybe upping the intensity a little bit you'll maybe get to 75-80% and instead of doing more intensity you're gonna add another set in so you might do 3 sets before deadlifting. And then if we want to take it a little bit further you might carry on with that kind of routine for a couple of months and then how about if we want to add another day in? What do we do? We'll probably gonna look at your back work we want to do a bit more deadlifting now if we can. So what we might do is we might add 1 or 2 deadlifting sets in. It might be off of the block, it might be off of the floor, it might be a deficit. We're just gonna add 1 or 2 sets in, maybe even 1 set to start with on deadlift day, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna take assistance exercises and if you're gonna do your deadlifting you do your pullups your machine work and we're gonna choose 2 exercises out of them and we're gonna do it on a different day. So that makes 5 days and one of the days is gonna be a back assistance day, but it's not gonna be too taxing, you're not gonna do 4 or 5 different exercises. What you're gonna do is you're gonna take the exercises that you were doing already and put them on that day and slowly increase it. What it's doing is by the extra days it's giving you more room to manoeuvre increase in volume wise, simple as that. Not the best idea to do it if you're in a calorie restriction, if you're dieting anything like that you're probably not gonna be able to recover as fast so it's maybe not the right time to add in extra work.
Now how about if you train 3 days a week and you don't have time to train any more than 3 days a week. Well that goes for a lot of people I think and I don't think it's a problem per-se. I don't think it's optimal but I think there's plenty of great lifters out there much better than me who have done well off 2 or even 3 days a week. So what we can do is we can do that same thing as we did on the deadlift day, we can add the squats in before the deadlifts. And we're gonna have to play around more with the volume per session than we are the frequency, obviously if you can't train more days. What we can do though we can add the lifts in more often at a lower intensity. If you need to you can do your bench press on a different day at a lower intensity depending on how many days recovery you've got in between. If you've got a few days in between you can add another bench press session before one of your other sessions. I don't really think the whole “only train for 40 minutes, an hour” as long as you've got your nutrition pretty good around your workout and with powerlifting you're using a fair bit of rest time so I wouldn't worry about training too long.
So just to recap we're just gonna take things slowly. If you can train more days we're gonna train more days, if you can only train 3 days we're just gonna kind of increase the volume, you might do a set at 80% for each lift the first week, you might do a couple of weeks. Then another set in with around 80% so we're just gradually building the volume up. Mainly focusing on the compound lifts rather than the assistance cause that's where you're gonna get the most bang for your buck and that's where we want to improve our proficiency.
So I think that wraps it up on that for today, if anyone has got any further questions on it feel free to ask away and I'll do my best to answer them. Oh breathing, just had a question about breathing when you're doing the lifts and the kind of question was about doing multiple reps, do I hold my breath for the whole set. No personally I don't, if I'm doing a squat I'll take a breath in obviously. Breathe into your belly, push our against your belt as hard as you can, get that intra abdominal pressure and it's gonna support your lower back and help you lift the weight as well. Never breathe out during the concentric or eccentric you want to keep your breath held all the time. If you start to let your breath out you're gonna become a bit looser, not only are you not gonna make the lift you're gonna open yourself up for injury so never breathe out during the concentric. All that bullshit that people spout, do you breathe in on the way down and breathe out on the way up? Not if you're a powerlifter you don't, not if you want to get anywhere. So I think we all know that really. So that actual question was “do I hold my breath through all the sets, for the whole set?” No I don't if I'm doing bench press I'll take a breath, unrack the weight and off that one breath I will do one rep. To be honest it's something that I don't even think about and I've had to really think hard what I actually do. In between reps I'll take a breath but it's not a full breathe out, full breathe in it's kind of a little one, as little as possible. I can't concentrate properly if I do the whole set off one breath, I'm focusing more on trying to breathe and I think it really does hinder me, and I don't see any real benefit to it. If you can do one rep off one breath that's all you're gonna do in a comp I don't see a problem with it. So little breath in between sets isn't a problem. Right so that wraps it up for today, thanks very much for watching and I'll soon be back with a new one.
