BS Sunday, 5x5 Monday, and Weightlifting Wednesday

Haven't had a chance to dive back into the thick of things on this periodization model I'm fiddling with, but I at least wanted to keep my training log up to date for the 1 or 2 of you following along out there.

After 2 crossfit workouts on Friday, with Fran in the morning and double DT in the evening, my body was dog shit on Saturday. I literally felt like cement. A lot of crossfit workouts require using deep skeletal muscles in the same fashion as rock climbing due to swinging on bars or rings. Even the high reps of weightlifting movement variations hit them to a degree as well. This is an important consideration when taking on crossfit that a lot of people don't consider. The deep connective tissues don't recover as quickly as the more superficial muscles, and I believe this may be where a lot of injuries come from when people take on crossfit. Most of us stop using our muscles like this sometime in our childhood. We go from swinging around on bars and trees to taking on more controlled exercise with dumbbells, machines, and strict barbell movements. Muscles are not just muscles. There are layers and levels....anyways, I'm about to turn this into something way deeper than I mean to at this time, so let's get back on track.

I was dog shit on Saturday.

So when Sunday rolled around and I knew I was still going to be feeling rough, there was only 1 thing to plan. A bullshit bodybuilding workout.

As much as your brain and body fought me going into the gym, getting in there and pumping my sore muscles with blood helped a tremendous amount.

It would be pointless for me to write out exactly what I did because it was just a quick 30 minute pump routine where I hit individual muscles for sets of 10-15. I literally just walked around the gym and did random exercises.

And it felt great! I no longer felt like a bag of cement, and I woke up Monday ready to attack the gym.

-2nd week rotation. Monday-

*c1 was 4 sets of 8

Building on from week 1, we get into a 5x5 set up today. I took away the moving exercises as well, and replaced them with ones more on the pure strengthening side of the continuum.
Came back later that day and worked on my running ability as well. Still doing a jog / walk mix, but increasing the distance I run each time, as well as the overall time of the session. I also take the time during every running session to do tibia and calf work.

-Weightlifting Wednesday_

Nothing special as far as program structure here. I continue to work on honing in technique, flexibility, and speed. I keep light, and use the speed of the bar as my measuring stick for how heavy to go. When I feel that I try to use my strength instead of technique, I back off a little and work there. Snatches, then C&J, then power snatches and snatch pulls.

Crossfit Friday

Friday training is all crossfit.

A conversation on this sport can go down many paths, all of which I hope to cover in due time, but let's try to accomplish one mission at a time.

I'll identify one thing it is here and explore the how and why in context of programming.

Crossfit is....100%

No, not your 1RM. It's your 100% of all the effort you have at any given moment in time. I remember a thought I had at the end of a WOD one time. I thought how at the end of a traditional strength training session or event you could come out of it feeling like you prepared yourself really well. You came, you did your lift or whatever, success, cheering, and you feel great. Yet a lot of times, even if you finish in first place, you come out the other end of a crossfit workout questioning your programming, life, religion, your purpose, your intelligence, everything. Your soul will feel DOMs.

I love this about crossfit. I don't see WODs as a time to work at 70% of your 1RM to increase muscle mass on your quads. It's not technique work time, or where you fix muscle imbalances. I go into a WOD to test my resolve.

I believe this is one area where it gets a lot of friction from too. It can come across very unspecific. Anything that tries to claim to be something while appearing to not really be about any one thing will seem weak, and the weak get attacked. Look closer at it though and you will see that it is the sport of resolve, just as I said. The athletes show up to the games not knowing anything about how they will be tested. They spend the entire year focusing in on weaknesses, polishing their strengths, while redlining their work capacity here and there, and then they show up on game day with all they have ready to put it on the line.

It's in this same vein that I program my Fridays.

2 workouts, because 1 is too easy of a mental hurdle to overcome. The first one is to bring you down even lower from the beating the week has taken on you so far, then the second one is where you get tested. A great way to go into the weekend too (well, it is from a nutritional stand point because you get to eat a ton).

If we look at the progression in terms of volume and intensities through the week, we see a daily load undulating pattern.

monday - wk1, 60-70%. wk2, 5x5. wk3 3x3. wk4 1x1
wednesday - wk1 60-70%, wk2 70%, wk3 75-80%, wk4 80-85%
Thursday - intensity stays at 50% bar weight, plus 15-25% band tension, but volume goes from
24 total sets in squat and deads, to 20 to 17 and then to 12 sets in the 4th week.
Then crossfit wods on friday will never work with loads in lifts above 70% of a 1RM.
-http://suppversity.blogspot.de/2015/12/mix-things-up-up-your-gains-altering.html

In addition to being a mental resolve training day, I also view Friday as an integral day in training the cardiovascular system and increasing work capacity through HIIT like training, which has been shown to be incredibly effective at increasing mitochondrial volume. (even at just once a week!)
-http://suppversity.blogspot.de/2014/03/sprint-strength-training-dynamic-duo.html  
-http://suppversity.blogspot.de/2014/02/24-hiit-workouts-in-three-or-eight.html
-http://suppversity.blogspot.de/2013/12/4x4-minutes-of-hiit-per-week-thats-all.html

Those are a few of the perspectives I have on this day so far. I am still learning everyday about how people believe crossfit should be programmed for, extracting the core beliefs from those guidelines, and experimenting how to best train the qualities needed to do well in it.

Today was:

10am -
Technique work: ring handstand push ups
Fran:
-in a 21, 15, 9 rep scheme
thrusters with a 95lb bar
pull ups
+for time

6pm
Double DT
with a 155lb bar
10 rounds of
12 deadlifts
9 hang cleans
6 jerks
+for time

Why such light weight on the squats today?

"While both athletes could produce the same amount of maximal force in the bench press, Ben could absorb more force eccentrically at a higher velocity. ...Ben was able to load up his muscles with more energy to use concentrically, enabling him to accelerate the bar faster than Tommy did, producing more power." Cal Dietz, "Triphasic Training"

30x0
2222
5233

....I'm not a fan of tempo. Actually, I'm not a fan of the consensus on tempo and how it is used.
There is a large body of coaches who believe you have to have a tempo on everything in order for a program to be legitimate and I just don't buy it.

For those of you who may not be aware, the tempo prescription of four numbers each represent the muscle action in an exercise. Eccentric motion, time spent in the stretched phase, concentric motion, and the time spent in the contracted phase.

The muscle at each of these moments exhibit specific actions and qualities. A good coach knows what is going on during each phase, the best parameters to use to evoke the change desired, and how the body recovers from each action given a program context. Yet, when you prescribe them all the time, just for the sake of filling in 4 little numbers on a program, I believe you lose control of your program.

As far as I know, the idea of tempo was introduced to the mainstream through Charles Poliquin (who I know, so know that these words are not of a keyboard warrior hiding behind his screen). As my memory serves me, his thought process was that he simply wanted a way to normalize the time under tension his athletes were exposed to during exercises. If he wrote dumbbell curls for 3 athletes, one might do a set of 10 in 12 seconds, one in 16 seconds, and another in 30. Without standardizing the time under tension there was no way to account for the results at the end of the program. So in that light, tempo is brilliant. Time under tension is absolutely a variable that elicits a specific effect which should be accounted for.

Yet today I see that being more of an afterthought of coaches writing tempo rather than being the reason, and almost EVERYTHING has an eccentric tempo of 3 or more. If you think that is negligible, try lowering your deadlifts at that tempo from now on.

Now take the epiphany Cal Dietz had in his book. He had 2 athletes, both throwers, and both could bench 405 max. Yet one threw further. Why? Because one lowered the bar, stopped it, and then reversed it at a greater speed than the other. Read the book if you want to dive further into the physics of what is going on between the two benches (its a great book by the way), however you should be able to conclude just in your head that it would be easier to stop a car coasting towards you at 2mph than one rolling at 15mph. Its the same car, but the reversal strength needed to stop the faster one is much greater.

So what happens when you prescribe a controlled eccentric tempo to everything?

Ok, this is all conjecture from here on out, I'll be straight up with you. Yet recall that conjecture is where all science begins, so there is my rebuttal.

I benched with a slow and controlled eccentric for powerlifting for years. I got decent and could bench 415, which was way more than a lot of the guys I competed against in highland games where there is a lot of throwing. I never trained my muscles to absorb all of that descending weight at a fast speed and therefore could not exhibit explosiveness in my throws despite my heavy bench.

The same goes for almost ALL of my lifts. I always lowered slow and controlled.

Now at this point in my life I am trying to develop explosive qualities and am having to start at the kiddie shallow part of the pool. The weight I used today on my front squats (125#s bar weight with ~80lbs band tension) is far less than what is typically used in a traditional Westside speed day where bar weight usually represents around 50% of your 1RM. I went up in weight as much as I could and still feel fast on both the eccentric and concentric portions. More importantly, I wanted to be fast in the reversal.

The small weight used would deter many from continuing to travel down this road as it is very mentally hard, but I will push forward with it in hopes of developing that fast reversal speed quality, allowing me to better train for power.

So there we are. Think about why you use what you use in your programs. If you're using a parameter that was introduced by a coach, ask what their original intent of that parameter was. Does it fit with what you are training for?

The information game in this industry is like the telephone game we played in school. Don't always trust that information will retain its integrity by the time it reaches your ears.

Specialization, or lazy?

" You have to be in shape. if you're not in shape, you cant recover. If you cant recover, you cant do more work. If you cant do more work, you'll never get any stronger" – Louie Simmons

I had mentioned in my first post that many are held back from something called "functional fixedness". The test most commonly used to see if someone has this is that picture of a box of thumb tacks, a candle, and a box of matches. You're asked to stick the candle to the wall so as not to have it drip any wax while the candle burns.

As easy as it looks, a lot of people cannot see the box that the thumbtacks are in as anything other than what it is presented as.

Ah of course! The box could also be used to hold the candle.

Ok, I'm sorry as I assume that was painfully dull and you've heard it a million times before, but I'm trying to be somewhat proper in my setup here leading into my perception of programs.

I would say that how a coach can feel about specialization in a program would fall on a continuum rather than saying they are either black or white on the subject. You can't be SO specialized that you ONLY perform one or two movements, and the opposite holds true that you can't possibly feel that it is detrimental to try and improve an aspect of fitness by focusing on it for whatever period of time. Everyone falls somewhere on a continuum.

The friction comes from, in my opinion, too many people agreeing that you need to be on the far end of the line towards specialization. This leaves the people who wish to dabble elsewhere on that line a minority, and when it comes down to majority vs minority you can expect to see some very obvious and predictable human behaviors.

Let us remember though that any and every coach is, in every sense of the meaning, a scientist. You are guessing at things all the time, trying them out on your victims, and seeing if they work. As such, we should not be quick to try and protect our beloved programs as religious relics (again, see the connection I draw between religion and the exercise industry in my first post).

It irritates me that you see "scientifically proven" so much in this field. One of my research methods professors said a great line one day when she warned the class, "as soon as you say someone who claims to be a scientist that they have proven something, deny them any credibility." So many programs are written on the premise of a technique found in an article shown to produce results, and then given the supposed gold seal stamp of being a scientifically proven program guaranteeing results. Listen, I'm not going to get into the nuts and bolts of just how little of a percentage needs to be seen to claim something statistically significant, or even how easy (and common!) it is to manipulate the parameters to reach that point. I will say though that if anything could reach the point of being 70% generalize-able to the public it would be patented so quick it would make your head spin. Just 70%! So, lets say you just so happen to love using the one and only program that actually meets this criteria (and I'm not sure there is one, but let's keep pretending), you're going to have success with it only 70% of the time.

Now, let me get just a little math-y on you here. If you have 100 clients, and that magical program, you will have taken care of 70 athletes. You still have 30 left to tend to, but you find another magical program. Still, that only takes care of 21 athletes out of those 30. Lucky you, you yet again find another magical program, but find it only takes care of 6 out of the 9 athletes you have left. Well, after that you don't care if you lose 3 so you halt your crusade for programs.

Ok, hopefully you get what I'm saying here. Even if you had the magic touch and found program after program that worked for that astronomically amazing 70% of the population, you would still need at least 3 programs to have success in 97% of your clients.

And that's not even getting into the fact that you can't keep an athlete on the same program forever!!!

So it makes no sense to hold any "special" configuration of sets and reps so close to heart. Nothing is sacred in science. I pointed you towards the path of infinity in my first post by asking you to learn how to formulate better questions. In accepting the notion of infinite learning through infinite questioning, you must also accept that there is probably always a better way of doing what you're already doing.

Now lets get back to functional fixedness.

I see a lot of programs written around the idea that an athlete needs to improve a specific athletic quality. More to the point, a specific strength. Speed strength, absolute strength, relative strength, etc. You have programs for hammer throwers, runners, sprinters, powerlifters, strongman, and on and on. Whatever program you use, it has been created around the goal of increasing the strength type that is displayed in your sport.

Now lets think back to that picture of the box of thumbtacks, matches, and a candle. Lets say the box represents, oh I don't know, speed strength. The matches are absolute strength. The tacks themselves are endurance, and the candle is power. You're goal as a coach is to program so that candle is high up on that wall, wick lit, and not letting any of that wax drip. You already know the deal, you gotta be resourceful and use everything to get that candle up there, but we often see that coach just trying to hold that candle against the wall with their hand don't we? You want to develop power, so you train power. What else is there to do!?

Part 1 end...

Training - Wednesday 7/27/17 - Weightlifting

The first Wednesday of each non specific 4 week cycle will be the full range of motion weightlifting movements: snatch, and the clean and jerk.
Work will be done around the 70-75%, or 7 rpe, zone.
I do not program these movements in the traditional sets and reps scheme. I believe that set up is good when your desired effect is achieved through time under tension using a specific resistance of your 1RM, as well as a few other instances, but I do not find it ideal here because the intent when performing these movements is the development and expression of power. To be powerful, train powerful. No one cares about that guy that claims he can snatch 300lbs for 2 sets of 5 reps, the guy that will produce the most force will be the one who can snatch 450 for 1. With this in mind, I train snatch first at the mentioned rpe or %RM until I feel speed start to diminish in that movement. If I had a tendo I would use this instead, until then I have to use my senses. Going into cleans as soon as this loss in speed occurs acts as a self regulator from going too heavy too soon in the cleans where you can move much more weight.
As I said before, the first 2 weeks will be the full movements and then the 3rd week will be the power variations from the floor, and the 4th week will be power variations from the hang. The full versions require greater rom, thereby requiring more work, which can be considered a variable of volume so they come first in every cycle. The 3rd week takes some of the rom out of the motion and also simplifies the technique a little, which psychologically will be welcomed as intensity in other parts of the program are starting to go up in week 3. On the 4th week, we shorten the rom even more while still allowing for the expression and development of power with the hanging power variations.
The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th week will all be loads ~80-85%RM, or 8-9 rpe. My time spent learning from Risto Sports taught me that this range is where maximal strength and speed gains were made in Soviet athletes (and I highly recommend going to learn from Ristos), so this is where 3 out of the 4 weeks in a non specific training cycle will be spent on these lifts. Maxing out can be programmed when it is obvious the progress is being made to set a new PR.
More can be said about how Wednesdays can be programmed, but lets save it and see what I actually did.

AM session
mobility warm up

A1. working up to ~75%RM in snatch, time spend snatching was 25-30 min

B1. worked up to ~75%RM in the clean, time spent in the clean was 20-25 min

C1. Snatch grip deadlifts - 3x6


PM Session




recovery cardio

20 min running and walking intervals covering roughly 2 miles.

All good plans....

What is Ronin Periodization?







"A thing called by the name of any other thing, is still just a thing" - something I saw written on a piece of paper in the background of the movie "Birdman"

Let's not get wrapped around the axle here. In fact, it's the functional fixedness a name can instill on a program that led to me thinking about programming like this in the first place.

Recall that in my first post I made a call to start asking more questions. More real questions. Go through some of the programs you use often and start asking things like "what do I like about this", "what do I not like", "could something be different". Then I want you start thinking about where the program came from. Did you find it online, in a book, or was it from a research article?

Who wrote it?
What is their background?
What was their intention when writing it?
What group of people seem to benefit most from it, and who doesn't?
What body of work did they pull from when writing this?
Do you feel that their pool of resources was comprehensive enough to make the program as effective as possible?
Find out when it was written, and research what has since come to light which might support or refute it.
Can you identify any limitations they may have placed on the program based on who they were writing it for that may not need to apply to you?
What is the author of the program critical of? Meaning, is he openly against a form of training or theories? Why?

You see now that there are many things you can consider when reviewing the information you obtain in this industry. This is no different than being what is called a good consumer in research. Within the realm of writing and publishing research articles you have producers and consumers. Obviously the producers are those that create what is being published, and the consumers are everyone else. A good consumer knows how to look through the article and spot any red flags which may have construed the reported findings, hurting the credibility of the claims and implications.

Now with most of the training programs out in existence though there is another element to consider that is not usually the focus of a scientific literature review class.

The psychology of the source.

These people who write these programs are passionate about their work, their athletes, their sport, and what they feel is the best way to become better at it. This permeates through all forms of scientific publishing too, not just in the exercise science field, but we should not be so naive to think we are above it.
Consider the person when considering the source. This will enable you to break the program down into even further components that the sets, reps, and tempo while increasing your mastery over program design.

I look forward to sharing with you how I have come to view several popular training methods and coaches after reviewing them in this light, what I have taken away from them, and how I use select pieces to fix together a form which suits my function.

Monday 7/25/2016
Week 1, Cycle 1

focus is work volume, not weight moved.
Warm up:
5 min air assault bike
2x20 leg extensions
2x20 leg curls

A1. Front squats
-heels elevated
-regular barbell
5x8
 2 min rest

B1. Trap bar deads
-high handles
3x15

no rest

B2. Farmers Walks
3x120 feet

2 min rest

C1. GHD Leg curls
-as many strict as possible each set, then swing up to get the rest
3x8
1 min rest

D1. 5 min air assault bike