Adjusting to Lifestyle Ebb and Flow

My last post was about training progression, a critical component of any well-designed exercise program. If you aren't getting better, you're just spinning your wheels. In order to actually progress, however, you must train on a consistent basis. The frequency and duration with which you can train will be based around your current lifestyle. While some degree of sacrifice is necessary for reaching any fitness goal (whether this be TV time, internet time, alcohol consumption, etc.), the best exercise schedule will be one that you can adhere to, and one that minimally disrupts work, family, and general quality of life. A workout program should enhance one's life, not detract from it.

It's all too frequent to see someone decide to get in shape, and immediately attempt to commit to 6 days per week of working out at 6:00 A.M., when previously he or she didn't work out at all, and was never much of a morning person. Typically, this sort of approach lasts about two weeks before the person completely falls off the wagon.

You must be able to adjust your training program to fit your current lifestyle situation. If you work 50 hours a week and have a family, chances are you won't be able to work out for 2 hours a day. If you do, your spouse and kids probably won't be too happy. The longer, more frequent workouts would stress you out due to the responsibilities that you'd be shirking, and could even cut into your sleep time. This would mean worse recovery, and possibly worse body composition, than if you had implemented a lower-stress, more lifestyle-conducive program. If you're a high school kid on summer break, in contrast, you most likely do have 2 hours per day to devote to working out, and may benefit from these more frequent and voluminous workouts.

Similar principles apply to nutrition. When I'm in residency in a few years, and working 40-80 hours per week, I won't be able to prepare and eat 7 high-protein, nutritious meals per day (not that I do that now). Instead, I'll likely utilize some sort of intermittent fasting protocol during this period, not necessarily because it's far superior, but because it'll be far easier to manage than eating every 2 hours. The aforementioned high school kid, though, may be able to eat 7 times per day, and would benefit from the extra nutrition to go along with his or her extra training.

Prioritization and perspective are important in life. Stan Efferding, over the past couple of years, has completely overhauled his training to become more conducive to health and longevity now that he's retired from powerlifting and bodybuilding competitions. He's reduced his bodyweight (but is still effin' huge and ripped) and added more cardiovascular conditioning, while reducing his gym time to about 4 hours per week. Now that his competitive days are behind him, he wants to spend less time setting world records, and more time with his young kids and wife, building his businesses, and developing content to help people improve their health and fitness.

In the past, Stan went through periods of not training at all, eating nothing but PB&J and ramen, when he was singularly focused on building his real estate empire and telecom companies. He does say that in retrospect, he wishes he did do some training and ate better, because it would have improved his productivity. He also went through periods where he was able to focus entirely on training and eating, lifting twice per day and eating huge amounts of steak and rice 8+ times per day. He was only able to do this after he already had made millions from his previous years of specializing in developing his businesses.

For myself, during my first year of medical school, I had to make many adjustments based upon the constantly-evolving demands of my school life. With each class (we take one class at a time, 5 days per week, in block format), I had to adjust the amount and type of studying, and with that my training and eating had to change as well. I also had to account for clinical off-site visits, frequent work, events, and meetings for my student entrepreneurship group, and spending quality time with the people I care about. At certain points, I found it best to hit the gym for 4 hard workouts per week with a body part split. At other times, I was only able to fit in 2 hard full-body workouts, and 1-2 short cardiovascular conditioning or circuit-type workouts. Currently, since I'm on summer break, I'm training hard pretty much every day.

It's also important to adjust training around your goals, and to adjust your goals to your current life situation. When I was training for the Spartan Ultra Beast and a powerlifting meet simultaneously, I was training 6 days per week while finishing up my undergraduate classes. This was manageable, but if I had tried this during my first year of medical school, I would have had to either cut back training time and possibly been unprepared for the race, or cut into study, sleep, or family time to get all of the training in. Rather than allow any one aspect of my life to suffer significantly, I simply didn't do the Ultra Beast this year. Training for a powerlifting meet alone, however, was very manageable, so I did that instead. I was realistic about my situation, and set myself up for success. If I had overextended my commitments, I would be setting myself up for failure.

No matter where you are in life, you should be following some sort of exercise and nutrition protocol. It'll keep you healthy, mentally acute, and happy. Your protocol can be as intuitive or structured as you prefer, as long as you're doing something that is conducive to your goals, and doing it consistently. The ability to adapt to external demands is key for success in any endeavor. If you want to stay healthy and fit for life, this quality is an absolute requirement.

If you're interested in reading more about developing a training program around a busy schedule, I highly recommend this article by Jim Wendler (it's useful for both men and women).

There Is No Progress Without Progression

The most important lesson I've learned on my path to getting stronger is that to make progress, you have to force it. If your effort is mediocre, your results will also be. Consistent, hard, and intelligent effort is the key to achieving any goal, and strength is no different. Consistent effort doesn't have to mean 7 days a week in the gym, but it does mean formulating and adhering to a plan for each week, month, and year, and adapting the plan to external demands. Hard effort doesn't mean hitting a one-rep max every time you're in the gym, but it does mean focusing on your sets while at the gym, and not on your phone or the Instagram model filming herself doing hip thrusts in the corner. Intelligent effort doesn't require an exercise science degree, but it does mean utilizing some model of progression so that you can continue to improve. 

Even if your end goal is not to deadlift 600 pounds, getting stronger is an important component of any workout routine that aims to increase muscle mass, decrease body fat, improve athletic performance, or fight the ill effects of the natural aging process. 

Significant improvement in strength requires more than just going through the motions. I often see workout programs written with specific exercises, sets, and reps prescribed, but it's much rarer to see guidelines for how to adapt the routine to ensure continual progress. If you do 4 sets of 10 reps each week with the same weight, you will gain muscle and strength for a time, and the weight may begin to feel easier, but after a few weeks you will have adapted to the weight, sets, and reps for that exercise, and won't see further improvements (or may even see a regression in strength) unless some factor is changed. This factor can be the weight, sets, reps, frequency, or the exercise itself. A new demand must be imposed to force a new adaptation to occur. 

The idea of imposing new demands doesn't mean you're trying to "confuse" your muscles, but you do have to give your body a reason to make them stronger. Human biology dictates that our bodies don't like to expend energy on things that don't matter. Significant muscle mass (an essential adaptation for increased strength) takes a lot of energy (calories) to maintain. If you don't regularly lift heavy enough weights, or eat enough food, to justify holding onto your current muscle mass, your muscle size will slowly begin to decrease, or atrophy. If you lift and eat just enough to maintain your current muscle mass you won't lose much muscle, but you won't gain much either. If you provide a greater stimulus than your muscles are currently adapted to, then provided your nutrition is adequate, your muscle size and strength will increase. This all occurs through the up-regulation or down-regulation of molecular signaling pathways that determine how your body uses its resources.

If you're not progressing, you're regressing

Someone may say that maintaining his or her current level of strength and muscle mass is all they want, and this isn't a bad goal for the average person who's already in good shape and wants to have a life outside of the gym. However, maintaining a certain physical condition doesn't mean you can just do the same workouts indefinitely. As people age, hormones that are critical components of the aforementioned signaling pathways naturally begin to decline, metabolism becomes altered, and muscle atrophies. Age-related muscle wasting, or sarcopenia, affects everyone to some degree eventually. Age-related muscle wasting can result in a 3-5% decrease in muscle mass each decade after 30 in inactive people (1). This means a decrease in strength (which down the road can lead to poor mobility and decreased capacity to perform every day tasks) and lower sensitivity to insulin (and an increased risk for diabetes). Strength training, luckily, is quite possibly the most effective way to minimize sarcopenia (2). It is even recommended for older patients who don't have a history of previous strength training, to minimize or reverse sarcopenia's effects (3).

Even with regular strength training, muscle will become harder to gain and hold onto with age. A progressive mindset (think Ed Coan, not Bernie Sanders) is vital. Increasing the weights used or the training volume should always be striven for, even if you probably won't be as strong at 70 as you were at 30. Striving to be the best version of your 70-year old self will lead to a better you at 80.

Methods of progression

As previously stated, there are multiple factors that can be manipulated to impose a new stimulus for increasing strength and muscle. Weight, sets, reps, frequency, or the exercise itself can be changed. I'll save discussion about changing exercises for a bit later, and will briefly talk about manipulating the other factors here. For a more in-depth discussion of this topic, check out Paul Carter's excellent chapter "Stimulus Factors for Growth" in the Maximum Muscle Bible. 

Increasing weight, sets, reps, frequency, or any combination of the 4 for a given movement is indicative of improvement. If you can squat more weight, for more sets, more reps, and/or more often (while still recovering), you've gotten better at squatting, and your legs are almost definitely stronger and more muscular. Consciously choosing to increase one or more of these factors for a given movement with each training session forces progress. Pre-planning (and adapting, when necessary) a progression model into a strength cycle allows you to organize your training successfully in the long term. Failing to plan, after all, is planning to fail.

Increasing one to two of these parameters at once is likely better than increasing three or more at once. It is important to think of progression as occurring over months and years, not just over the week to week basis. If you try to force progression too fast each week, you'll reach a progression "ceiling" more quickly. If you reach a point where you fail to progress (or even regress) in less than 6 workouts, you moved too fast.

Increasing only one factor but keeping all the other the same is called "single progression."

Example: Reps increased only

Week 1: Squat 200 pounds, 2 sets of 8

Week 2: Squat 200 pounds, 2 sets of 10

Increasing two factors at once but keeping the others the same is called "double progression." (4)

Example: Reps and weight increased

Week 1: Squat 200 pounds, 2 sets of 8

Week 2: Squat 205 pounds, 2 sets of 10

Utilizing a combination of single and double progressions, where you utilize double progressions on days that you feel confident and strong, and single progressions on days where you feel less so, is an excellent to regulate your progression session to session. The Renaissance Periodization Male and Female Physique Training Templates are a great example of some self-regulating training programs that modify the progression model based on performance in previous sessions.

Progression-Reduction*

Some successful training programs utilize a "progression-reduction" system, where one or more factors is increased while one or more factors is decreased, to still yield a net increase in strength. A perfect example of this is a typical powerlifting peaking cycle, such as Ed Coan, the GOAT powerlifter, used. Ed would pick a weight that he felt he could reasonably hit at his next meet, and base his training progression around working up to that number. This awesome calculator takes out some of the guesswork for less experienced lifters by basing the training weight around a current max rather than a goal max. The below example is based on a 300 pound current bench press max.

Source

Over a period of 12 weeks, weights are increased gradually as reps decrease gradually. From week 1 to week 2, nothing changes, while from week 2 to 3 weight increases as reps decrease (a "progression-reduction"). From Week 3 to 4, the weight increases while the reps stay the same (single progression). Sets and frequency remain the same throughout the whole cycle. Ed did this for several movements simultaneously in the same session. Each Wednesday, Ed would bench, close-grip bench, and incline bench with the same progression scheme for each. After Week 12, when a new strength level has presumably been reached, and the cycle can be restarted, but with a new max and a higher baseline level of strength. Each week will be heavier than it was the previous cycle. When using a single or double progression fails, a "progression-reduction" where reps are decreased as weight increases can extend the life of a training cycle. (5, 6)

Movement rotation

To improve performance in a given movement, it should be stuck to for some time with so that adaptations have a chance occur. If you switch between an incline bench press, a decline bench press, a flat bench press, a dumbbell flat bench press, a dumbbell incline bench press, and a hammer strength press for your chest workouts each week, you aren't giving yourself a chance to adapt to each movement individually. Each movement is only done once every seven weeks, and this is insufficiently frequent "practice" to ingrain the motor patterns that allow you to lift progressively heavier weights in each session. Every seven weeks, you'll basically be relearning the lift. 

Ed Coan may have used three progressive movements in a single bench session, but he was practicing each movement each week, so that he never lost his "groove" on any of them. You can certainly use the same movements for long cycles year-round, or you can rotate through 2-3 movements in "blocks" where you only practice one movement at a time. For example, you do 6 weeks of flat bench press, progressing gradually, and then you switch to 6 weeks of incline bench, progressing at that. When you restart flat bench, you should be able to start off with, and end with, more weight, sets, reps, or frequency than you did during your first 6 weeks of flat bench. Movement rotation can prevent halted progression and overuse injuries.

Start light, and manage effort

When starting a strength cycle, it's important to allow yourself room to "grow into" the training cycle. This is something great strength coaches like Paul Carter and Jim Wendler have harped on constantly. If you're starting your first week with a balls-out maximum effort, you have nowhere to progress to from there. You'll only be putting yourself at a higher risk of compromised form, poor performance, and injury in subsequent sessions. Your first couple of weeks should be submaximal, even somewhat easy. From here, progression can continue until training volume/intensity reaches a peak, and then a new cycle can be started.

Get uncomfortable

Anyone is capable of getting stronger. Whether this means taking a 50 pound bench press up to 60, or a 300 pound bench press up to 400, progressive increases in strength can do wonders for a person's durability, body composition, self-confidence, and overall quality of life. Overcoming a weight that was previously intimidating is an empowering experience that quickly becomes addicting. 

Summary

• Progress in your training to ward off regression.
• Utilize "progression-reduction" schemes or movement rotation to force progress forward.
• Push your boundaries, and don't prematurely convince yourself that your physical peak is behind you.

*As far as I know, this is the first use of this phrase in this context (I didn't want to say "add weight, reduce reps" a million times), but if you think otherwise please let me know.

Works Cited:

1) "Sarcopenia With Aging." WebMD. WebMD, n.d. Web. 01 July 2017.

2) Iolascon, Giovanni, Gioconda Di Pietro, Francesca Gimigliano, Giulia Letizia Mauro, Antimo Moretti, Maria Teresa Giamattei, Sergio Ortolani, Umberto Tarantino, and Maria Luisa Brandi. "Physical exercise and sarcopenia in older people: position paper of the Italian Society of Orthopaedics and Medicine (OrtoMed)." Clinical Cases in Mineral and Bone Metabolism. CIC Edizioni Internazionali, 2014. Web. 01 July 2017.

3) Seguin, Rebecca A., B.S., CSCS, Jacqueline N. Epping, M.Ed, David M. Buchner, M.D., M.P.H., Rina Block, M.D., and Miriam E. Nelson, Ph.D. "Growing Stronger." CDC. Tufts University, 2002. Web. 1 July 2017.

4) Thibaudeau, Christian, and Paul Carter. Maximum Muscle Bible. N.p.: F. Lepine Publishing, 2016. Print.

5) Nation, T. Nation T. "Atlas Speaks." T NATION. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 July 2017.

6) "Powerlifting Heads-Up." Top Banner. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 July 2017.