Fatigue Management and the Adaptive Process

Posted By: Paul Carter on Strength Sensei August 7, 2014

One of the most common, if not THE most common question you will read on the net, or get from lifters in regards to training is, “how long should I stay on this routine?”

That, or as soon as the lifter hits a bit of plateau he or she immediately begins contemplating that it’s time to make a change because “dem gainz” aren’t coming anymore.

Depending on the lifter, and what they have been doing, there may be some validation to this.

Training is a stress on the body, and if the stress levels are high enough the body then adapts by improving it’s ability to perform these functions. Depending on how it is stressed, it generally adapts by growing more muscle mass, or by getting stronger. Sometimes a little bit of both. At a very basic level, that’s what lifting causes the body to do.

If stress is too low, then there is no adaptive response.

If stress is too high, especially for an extended period, then overtraining/under-recovering happens.

When stress is optimal or efficient, and recovery factors are met, then we grow larger, stronger, or a bit of both.

Specificity plays a role here as well because the body will adapt to what it is you’re asking it to perform better at. If you want to get good at something, then do that particular thing. So adaptation works hand in hand with specificity in order to allow you to perform better.

Eventually there comes a point where the body adapts enough to the stress placed on it that it can perform efficiently at what you keep asking it to do. To give a representation of this….

Week 1 – Start a new routine – You get sore from the change in movements and change in set and rep schemes
Week 2 – You perform better than in week 1, soreness is still on coming, but not as bad as week 1
Week 3 – You perform much better than in week 2, soreness is minimal
Week 4 – You perform much better than in week 3, soreness is mostly nonexistent
Week 5 – You perform slightly better than in week 4, no soreness
Week 6 – You perform no better than in week 5, no soreness
Week 7 – You perform no better than in week 6 or perhaps worse in some movements, no soreness

This is just an example, and obviously doesn’t apply to everyone in every situation. But it is fairly typical. Especially if the program has no deviations in it from week to week, like waving intensity, or any movement/exercise variation.

As you can see in this example, the adaption curve tends to trend upwards around week 4, then trend downwards thereafter. Theoretically speaking in this example, week 6 complete adaptation has occurred and the body isn’t being stressed in a way it cannot handle or tolerate. From there the athlete tends to hit a plateau, or can even regress at times. My own personal theory is that the body can sometimes reduce performance ability to find a “set point” that it can maintain with minimal effort. That is the body actually being “efficient”.

The other factor is that, based on the structure of the program being ran, the athlete could start to experience overtraining at week 6 or 7. Here is why I think that’s a possibility.

Once the body is no longer trying to adapt to performance and has reached a “set point” then all that is happening in training is fatigue accumulation. In other words, you go to the gym and train the same way you’ve been training, so you’re still accumulating fatigue from the stress, but because the body has no new stress to adapt to there are no “gains” coming.

Think about this….and get frustrated.

So you go to the gym, bust your ass, and all you’re really doing is digging a deeper recovery hole but doing very little to bring forth new results from said training.

Let me stress this once again. Once you’ve reached adaptation in a routine or a series of movements, improvements in said performance will be minimal, yet stress from training stays the same or even possibly increases.

So basically, you’re just training to get tired at that point. Training progress will be minimal more than likely.

Variations in training to avoid stagnation

So does this mean that as soon as a plateau arrives that training has to be overhauled completely?

Not at all.

Years ago I remember reading about a Russian coach who simply changed out the shoes his athletes wore for squatting in order to force them to adapt to a “new stress”. Whether this story is myth or not, I don’t know, but I get the idea behind it. He didn’t overhaul movements and training on a large scale. He made a small change that caused the body to have to adapt to something new again.

Once you realize that improvements in training aren’t forthcoming, you can start with small and subtle changes to get things moving forward again. Here are some ideas you can implement in order to avoid becoming a “chronic routine changer”.

Change rep and set schemes – Lots of guys get stuck in a specific rep or set scheme and don’t vary them from week to week. If you’re that guy that has been stuck for weeks on end hitting X weight for Y reps, then switch that out for something difference.

For example, if you’ve been doing a back off set in the bench press for maximum reps, you can do something as simple as breaking that set down into three rest/pause sets. So if you’ve been hitting 225×20 reps and can’t get past 20, break that set into three sets so more work is done. Do 3 sets of 8, with only 30-45 seconds of rest between sets. Now you’re doing 24 reps, but broken down over 3 sets, with minimal rest between sets. It’s not the SAME as 1 set of 225×20, and that’s exactly the point. It’s a simple change, but one that can possibly get things moving again.

You can also have a rotation of set and rep schemes that you cycle through in training so that stagnation is limited. For example, if you had been doing 5 sets of 8 reps in the bench press @ 75% and had several weeks where your performance did not improve, you could make just a few changes to create new stress in training without overhauling everything.

Bench Press 
Week 1 – 5 sets of 8 @ 75%, 1 set of as many as possible @ 65%
Week 2 – 3 sets of 3 @ 85%, then 4 sets of 6 @ 80%
Week 3 – repeat

Change hand and foot positions – Another way to create new stress to adapt to in training is to simply change foot or grip positions in a movement. For squats you can bring your stance in or out slightly. For pressing movements, the same change is applicable. Move your grip in or out for a few weeks.

You don’t even have to change that for the entire workout. You can do something as simple as use the last few sets in a volume sequence dedicated to that change.

For example if you had been doing 8 sets of 5 in the squat with a low bar, and medium stance, you could switch the last 3 sets to using high bar with a narrow stance. For bench press or any other press, you could use a close grip variation of the movement for several sets.

Deload – Also to add, every 4-6 weeks before you make these changes, take a deload. A deload in between can enhance the adaptive process and make sure fatigue is managed over the long term. This way the fatigue accumulation slate is wiped clean AND a new adaptive stress is introduced right after. Because the body is such a marvelous thing, a deload alone may not do the trick if you resume training in the exact same way you had been before. The adaptive process will be much shorter than the first time around, and fatigue debt will be reached far earlier than before. So deload between “changes” so that you’re getting the best of both worlds.

Conclusion 

There are a myriad of ways you can change your training in order to further your progress without making a bunch of wholesale changes. If you’re a competitive strength athlete that actually has to perform particular movements for competition then it behooves you to keep those competitive lifts in your routine at all times. However, using variations of the movements as part of the training plan can and should be viable options throughout the year in order to avoid stagnation.

As mentioned before, a plateau is essentially when a place is reached in training where the body no longer has to adapt to the stress being supplied by your training, and fatigue accumulation is happening or cannot be overcome with recovery. You can’t get around accumulating fatigue in training, but you can make sure that your hard work and efforts are giving you a return on your energy investment in training.

Exercise Variety Is Making You Weak. Why Muscle Confusion Is Overrated!

One week you're squatting like a sane person – in the squat rack with a barbell on your back – and the next week, in the name of variety, you're squatting on a BOSU ball while juggling chainsaws, blindfolded. You know, to keep the body guessing, which is otherwise known as muscle confusion. Some variety is important to training, but most people don't need as much as they think they do.

Muscle Confusion is Misunderstood

Muscle confusion is one of those arbitrary words people like to keep in their back pocket to sound smart, akin to "corrective exercise" or "anterior knee pain." Ask ten different people their definition and you're bound to receive ten different answers. Muscle confusion is nothing more than the practice of changing things up in your training program every so often, including using different modes of activity and exercises.

Bodybuilders will incorporate different set/rep schemes or exercises to target specific muscles and even specific angles to achieve the look they're after. Powerlifters will rotate their main movements – squat, bench press, deadlift – on a weekly or biweekly basis to address a technique flaw or to otherwise lift as much weight as humanly possible in those three movements. CrossFitters will perform scoliosis for AMRAP (also called high-rep Olympic lifting) for, well, I don't know why. But they do it.

It's all good, but for 90% of people, 90% of the time, the best way to make progress and to ensure consistent gains is to do more work per session. This is especially prudent if the goal is to get stronger. If you did "x" amount of weight this week on a given exercise for a given number of sets/reps, the goal should be to do a little more work the next week. Tracking total tonnage from a session-to-session and week-to-week basis is always smart.

Program Hoppers and Bad CrossFit Boxes

While very important, there's more to consider than sets and reps. For instance, far too many people program hop. One week someone starts a 13-week Smolnov squat cycle (not coincidentally, maybe 5-10% of the people who start one actually finish), only to jump to a new program six days later that promises to add 17 inches to their biceps in two weeks.

There's never a shortage of bright, shiny objects to distract our attention. For beginner lifters especially, constant program and exercise hopping is a one-way ticket to Average Town. Marrying yourself to the idea of muscle confusion will rarely, if ever, allow you to truly master a movement.

Not to keep kicking CrossFit in the face, but outside of the high-level competitors it's uncommon to walk into a box and watch someone "own" an exercise. In other words, they don't bother to master a pull-up because kipping pull-ups are an option. Understandably, it's not the goal of CrossFit to master any one exercise, but they're herding people into thinking they need endless variety. The smartest CrossFit coaches have evolved beyond this.

Progressive Overload Is King

Muscle confusion and program hopping will never allow your central nervous system (CNS) to adapt to any one movement. Think about the massive learning curve that exists when introducing exercises like the squat and deadlift into someone's training repertoire. The curve exponentially increases when the Olympic lifts enter the equation. And the weeds grow even thicker once we start adding load, speed, and repetitions into the mix.

The truth is, progressive overload is king. Everyone should make an effort to increase load (increase sets or reps or both, or decrease rest intervals) – to do more work – each and every week. This is a fantastic approach and something many lifters often overlook in favor of the more sexy or unconventional answer.

It's not the lack of chains or bands or some lost Eastern Bloc Undulated Block Periodization scheme written in Elvish that's the reason you're not getting stronger or making progress, but a failure to do more work. Track total tonnage from a session-to-session and week-to-week basis. Do more work. Did you lift more total weight or not this week? All you need is a notebook, a pen, and simple math.

Own the Weight. Earn the Right to Add More.

These aren't always the factors we need to be most aware of, however. Let's use an example everyone can probably relate to. Have you ever crushed a certain weight on any exercise, only to feel like gravity increased tenfold when you added five or ten pounds? The weight doesn't want to budge. Or if it does, it's infinitely more challenging. What gives?

Simple. You haven't "earned" the right to increase the load yet. You haven't performed enough reps at "x" to increase to "y." Stick with the lower weight. Stay there. Own it. You're not hell spawn if you perform the same exercise with the same weight for multiple weeks in a row. Life will go on.

You'll make better progress in the long run. You'll grow more comfortable with the exercise. You'll learn it. You'll respect it. Moreover, by making your strength base wider with more sub-maximal volume (60-80% of 1RM), you'll attain a higher peak when you do eventually test your max numbers.

And this point doesn't just apply to beginners. Advanced lifters can reap some serious benefits as well. Working above those percentages – in the 85-95% of 1RM range – is important from a neural stimulation and adaptation standpoint for all levels of lifters.

However, the stronger one is, the more neurally taxing and draining things are going to be. What's more, the joints are going to take a beating when using loads that high for a long duration. So, for advanced trainees, sub-maximal training has a lot of validity.

Newbies and Advanced Lifters Need Less Variety

Neither beginners nor advanced athletes require a ton of variety in their training, especially when the goal is to get stronger. Beginners need to learn the basics: squat, hinge, lunge, push, pull, carry, etc. Advanced lifters need to own their competitive lifts and that's it. The stronger someone is, the less variety they require to maintain that strength. For advanced lifters, "variety" comes in the accessory work and is dictated by what their technique flaws are in their main lifts.

Examples of Accessory Work to Fix Problems

1 – Squat

• Technique Flaw: You fall forward in the hole.
• Accessory Movement: Give more attention to detail on the setup – upper back tightness and lat activation. Also, include more paused squats – more time in the range of motion that's troublesome.

2 - Bench Press

• Technique Flaw: Weak at lockout.
• Accessory Movement: Higher rep, close-grip bench press.

3 – Deadlift

• Technique Flaw: Weak off the floor.
• Accessory Movement: Stop bouncing the weight off the floor. Deadlift like a grown-ass man, and train your reps from a dead stop.

Ironically, intermediate lifters can be a little more Willy Wonka-ish and immerse ourselves in the crazy, zany world of variety. Still, most lifters don't need as much variety as they think they do. Simplicity is the key to progress.

by Tony Gentilcore Source T-Nation

The Basic Compound Lifts

The core of any good exercise program should be built around the 6 basic compound lifts. These are the basis of weightlifting, the cornerstone of muscle building, the mecca of mass, the… well, you get the idea.

Must you do all of these? No. Nothing is a “must”. But instead of wasting countless hours doing 45 degree back hyper-extensions, concentration curls, and pec-dec flyes, you should try these first. If you do these as the core of your workout you can, and you will, get stronger and see results – faster.

Now, without further ado, let’s meet these key components.

1. Squat

Most people begin with the Back Squat, and therefore that’s what we’ll focus on here. Start with this one, and then later you can move on to Front Squats, Hack Squats, Box Squats, one-legged hungarian death squats, or whatever floats your boat.

Keep in mind also that the style of back squat can vary greatly. Olympic high-bar squatting with a narrow stance is much different than a powerlifting style low-bar back squat. Both have their places in training and are utilized primarily based on the way a person is genetically built.

Tips:

• Your lower back should maintain a natural curve inward throughout the – movement. Do not “bend over” and arch your back or you risk a back injury.
• Go as deep as your flexibility allows. Ideally, you will squat until your thighs are below parallel to the floor. But if you lack the proper degree of flexibility, going deeper causes your hips to tuck in under you and your back to round. If this is the case, then go as deep as you can while maintaining a proper curve to your spine. Work on hip flexibility to allow you to squat progressively deeper.
• Good form is key. Do not use a weight which you cannot handle with proper form. If your form is compromised, drop the weight until you can maintain good form.
• Your knees should point the same direction as your toes throughout the entire movement.
• Have someone watch you squat and critique your form until you are sure you are doing this exercise correctly. There are many threads on bb.com about squatting – so do your research.
• Stay tight. Draw in a breath before you descend and keep your core tight throughout. As your ascend release the air.

For more information: http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/Quadriceps/BBSquat.html

2. Deadlift

Like Squats, there are many forms of the deadlift. The basic form is presented here, but there are also Stiff-Legged Deadlifts, Romanian Deadlifts, Rack Deadlifts, etc.

Tips:

• Like the squat, make sure you maintain a natural curve in your back. Do not bend over and round your back or your risk an injury.
• The barbell should remain close to your legs through the entire movement. You don’t have to drag it along your shins like a cheese-grater (unless you want the street cred), but it should remain in light contact over very near your legs.
• For heavy weights it is very helpful to use an overhand-underhand grip on the barbell. (One hand grips overhand, one hand grips underhand). This will help keep the barbell from rolling out of your hands.

For More Information: http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/ErectorSpinae/BBDeadlift.html

3. Bench Press

The bench press is every newbies favorite exercise. Those who claim it’s not are lying. Do this one, if for no other reason than to be able to answer the perennial gym favorite: “How much do you bench?”. FYI, I think almost everyone does this exercise “incorrectly” to some degree.

Tips:

• Use a weight you can control. Do not “bounce” the bar off your chest.
• Do not allow your elbows to flare outward so that your upper arms are perpendicular to your body. They should be “tucked in” toward your body at an angle.
• Do some research on this one too, since it’s easy to do this exercise incorrectly. Generally, you’ll be fine, but some form issues can cause RC (rotator cuff) injuries, especially at higher weights.
• You can also substitute Dumbbell bench presses. These allow you to work your stabilizers, and allow you more freedom to move your arms in a natural path – use these especially if you have shoulder issues with barbell bench pressing.

For More Information: http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/PectoralSternal/BBBenchPress.html

4. Rows

To fully work your back, you need a muscle-building rowing exercise. Bent-Over Barbell Rows, T-Bar Rows, or Dumbell Rows are staples.

Dumbell Row: http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/BackGeneral/DBBentOverRow.html

Tips:

• For most rowing exercises, it helps to visualize your hands as hooks and think about pulling your arm backward from your elbow. You want to minimize the involvement of the bicep, and instead concentrate on contracting your back.
• Generally speaking, think of pulling the weight upward to your hip joint or lower abdomen. In the basic form of the exercises you aren’t pulling to your chest.

5. Pullups & Chinups

Pullups (palms facing away) and Chinups (palms facing toward you), are also good muscle-building exercises for your back. We all know how to do these from grade school along with the Flex-arm-hang, right?

There’s not a lot of mystery here. Grab a bar and pull yourself up. If you can’t do a pullup/chinup (or can’t do many), place a chair under the bar and put one foot on the chair. As you pull yourself up, use your leg to assist you. When you reach the top, stop assisting yourself and lower yourself using just your arms.

Think about bringing the bar to your chest (not just eye level), and lean back slightly at the top of the movement. Don’t swing your body, or “kip” yourself up with your hips. Use slow, controlled movements.

Once these become easy to do with just body weight, you can do them weighted with a dip belt, or with a dumbell between your feet. (Or small children hanging from you).

For More Information: http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/LatissimusDorsi/WtPullup.html

6. Military Press / Overhead Press

The Overhead barbell press or Military Press (the Military Press is a specific version of an Overhead press) are usually referred to interchangeably. The Overhead press can be done seated or standing – your preference.

Basic Form: http://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/DeltoidAnterior/BBMilitaryPress.html

Tips:

• Overhead presses can be done standing, seated, with a barbell, or with Dumbells. There are numerous variants including Arnold presses.
• Keep the weight directly over the shoulders. As you drive the weight upward for a standing overhead press, think about moving your upper body forward under the weight.
• Some people like to place one foot forward and one rearward instead of just having them side by side. They find this helps with balance. I stick to side-by-side.
• Like everything else, keep a natural curve in your back.

Conditioning is a Sham - Mark Rippetoe

For several reasons, most of the articles and books I write are intended for people just starting their training. First, there are more of you, because most people never get past the novice phase of training due to laziness, lack of time, or a change in interests.

Second, novices who read articles on the Internet are better consumers of information than more advanced lifters, because they’re actively trying to learn. And third, advanced guys already know everything there is to know anyway – certainly more than Rippetoe does.

This article is no different, so if you already know everything there is to know about training and, in this particular instance, conditioning, please don’t waste your time reading another paragraph.

Now that adequate bandwidth has been restored, here’s a shocking statement that applies to all novice lifters, as well as the vast majority of all trainees: training specifically for conditioning without a well-developed strength base is a waste of time.

There’s simply no better way to increase your work capacity than increasing your ability to produce force. If your primary interest is being more effective at moving yourself and/or submaximal or maximal loads more efficiently, training for strength contributes much more to your goal than training for endurance.

The reason for this should be obvious. Maximal loads are your 1RMs in the basic lifts. For a 200-pound male of average height, a 1.75x bodyweight squat, a 2x bodyweight deadlift, and a .75x bodyweight press constitute a well-developed strength base.

Although this isn’t considered “strong” by competitive lifters, it represents a level of strength that’s attainable by 95% of male trainees in a few short months of reasonably efficient training on the lifts. More importantly, it makes commonly encountered submaximal tasks much easier repetitively, and this is what we mean by “work capacity.”

All in a Day’s Work

Loading hay on a trailer all day is a pretty good example of “work.” Around here, 70-pound bales are the norm, and 200 of them are a typical afternoon’s work. If you can power clean 200 pounds, lifting 75 – 200-pound bales of hay isn’t the task it would be for a skinny runner that doesn’t lift weights and therefore has a 65-pound clean.

His 30-minute 5-mile time is irrelevant because loading 200 bales of hay is only an endurance task to a guy that’s strong enough to actually perform the work.

So how would you get better at loading 200 bales of hay? One way would be to load 50 bales, wait a couple of days and then load 65 bales, wait a couple more and load 80, and work on up to the full 200. This would produce a quick adaptation to the specific task of loading 200 bales of hay.

Running 5 miles would be an example of a great way to avoid addressing the issue altogether, because moving your bodyweight rapidly down the road isn’t the nature of the task.

The best way to adapt your body to the task of loading a couple of hundred 75-pound bales of hay would be to spend some time getting your squat, press, and deadlift up to the aforementioned numbers.

This takes longer, but it prepares you for the task of loading the hay, and it has the much more important benefit of preparing you for any other work-related task you might encounter, not just the hay. Granted, it takes longer than escalating hay loading, but it’s a more useful adaptation because it’s not as specific.

Strength Rules Them All

This is the most important thing to understand: strength is the most general of all athletic adaptations. All other physical capacities, such as power (a guy with a 400-pound deadlift cleans more than a guy with a 150-pound deadlift), even balance and coordination depend on the production of force within the physical environment. If strength improves, all other capacities improve with it, to varying degrees.

For a person who’s not strong, time spent getting stronger returns more improvement in all measures of physical capacity than time spent specifically developing any of the other derivative capacities that so many exercise programs consist of.

This is especially significant when you consider that it just doesn’t take very long to substantially increase your strength. Every athlete we’ve trained for strength who competes in a non-barbell sport reports that strength training has the biggest positive impact on their other abilities (which get trained in sports practice anyway).

As far as the breathing thing is concerned, strength training actually improves VO2max values in previously untrained populations. Granted, just a little, because VO2max, like the standing vertical jump, is one of those physical abilities that doesn’t improve much with training. Go ahead, look it up.

For novice athletes, or for recruits with many other things to learn, strength training improves this aspect of fitness as efficiently as conditioning programs that take much more time and produce no useful strength improvement.

This may surprise some of you who think that all people must do conditioning to be fit. And I agree that past a certain point in the development of strength, some Prowler work on a regular basis is beneficial, but remember, we’re talking about novices, people with no strength base, and for whom a strength base improves all aspects of performance.

The Prowler is the finest conditioning device ever invented, I assure you. Nothing else approaches its effectiveness. But for these people, barbell training works better. Getting their squat up profoundly affects their Prowler capacity, but pushing the Prowler doesn’t have the potential to build strength the way barbell training obviously does. The Prowler interferes with a novice’s recovery from strength training, and again, strength is by far the more useful adaptation.

So the Prowler and all other conditioning activities can wait until after the strength base is developed. It only takes a few months to get much stronger, unless you fuck up and interfere with the process by losing sight of the priority.

Strength? Conditioning?

It’s also very important to realize the difference between a strength and a conditioning adaptation. Strength improves very quickly at first if a correct program is followed, but soon slows down and ultimately can be developed for many years – it’s a long-term adaptation because it requires the construction of new tissue and the restructuring of tissue already in place.

Strength is a very persistent adaptation that doesn’t disappear after a layoff. Once a man gets strong, he’s always stronger than he was before, even if he quits training, because the long-term adaptations have raised his baseline strength. Getting stronger is “expensive” to your body, and expensive things aren’t usually disposed of quickly.

Conditioning, on the other hand, develops very quickly and goes away just as fast, as most of you’ve already noticed. A young, healthy guy can get in pretty good shape to run in about 2 weeks. Lay off a couple of months and you have to start over from the previous baseline, but it comes back just as quickly.

A conditioning adaptation changes the metabolic environment in the cells without the need for the large-scale tissue remodeling necessary for a strength adaptation. Condition comes on quickly, is easy to maintain, and goes away just as quickly.

At the higher levels of endurance-based competition, cardiac changes occur which are more persistent, but that level of endurance adaptation is useless in any other application, whereas strength is used by active people every single day. A resting heart rate of 48 BPM is very cool, but it’s not nearly as useful as a 405-pound deadlift.

So, if conditioning comes on quickly, and is easy to maintain, why would you leave it out, especially if it goes away so fast? And the answer is, because if you’re weak, you don’t need it as much as you need to be stronger, and time Is money.

A bunch of “cardio” or “met-con” absolutely guts your strength progress, while getting stronger improves your work capacity all by itself. There’s time to do your conditioning work later – you’re not going to die immediately, and if you do, nobody will talk about your shitty 5-mile time. The very programs that should be preparing young guys to be more useful are instead making them very good at running away, and that’s about all.

Extreme Specialization

I, of course, realize that my recommendation goes against the conventional wisdom regarding physical preparation for the sports and jobs typically (and incorrectly) regarded as endurance-based.

Running 26.2 miles in under 3 hours is an endurance activity, without doubt. It requires specialized preparation, and strength training is detrimental to high-level marathon training.

But twenty six 5.5-minute miles represents an extremely specialized activity, the epitome of endurance, the performance of which has absolutely no bearing on the ability to do anything else, and the training for which actually decreases physical capacity for other activities – just like the specialization for powerlifting in the elite levels of the heavier weight classes in the weirder federations that don’t judge depth anymore.

Marathon competition itself is highly catabolic and has an exceptionally high mortality risk. Half-marathons are much less dangerous, as of course are 5 mile runs. But running at any distance produces no strength adaptation, while strength training improves the sedentary person’s ability to run and do everything else, too. So a rational person would regard strength training as the more beneficial activity.

But we don’t. We – meaning we recipients and promoters of the conventional wisdom – regard endurance activity as exercise and strength training as something to “sculpt lean muscle” and soothe vanity.

Exception, Not The Norm

Military PT still consists of running and high-rep bodyweight calisthenics like push-ups and sit-ups. Police and fire academy PT is also based on running, and it’s the exceptional program, rather than the norm, that builds a programmed strength increase into their graduation requirements.

Here’s an interesting take on training for police work, recently overheard at a state-level training academy:

1. Size and strength don’t matter; it’s all about technique. In the “real world” being too strong prevents good technique, and “will get you killed on the street.

2. Big motor skills are things like breathing; small motor skills are things like moving your arm. These techniques will start out being small motor skills but as you practice will become big motor skills.

Priceless, right? Never mind the motor skills gibberish – I just thought it was entertaining, so I left it in – but this assessment of strength is completely assbackwards, one that can’t meet any analysis of physical reality, the job, and its physical requirements.

Military/Police/Firefighter work involves a variety of physical abilities, all of which we understand pretty well and are easily able to prepare for. If the individual isn’t strong enough, all these tasks will be harder than they are for a stronger individual.

The development of mechanized transport has made the forced-march contingency rare enough that no modern battle has been lost because of a unit-wide endurance deficiency, while many an ass has been kicked because the possessor of that ass was not strong enough.

Policemen the world over rely on cars these days, and it’s helpful to be strong enough to deal with a bad guy at the end of the occasional foot-chase, unless you were just going to shoot him anyway.

Firefighters die on the job from heart attacks far more frequently than from any other cause, and there’s no better way to have a heart attack than to lack sufficient strength to complete a physical task that would have been easier and over with sooner if you were stronger.

I’ve worked with a rather large number of military units, policemen, firemen, and other people who have physically demanding jobs. Many hundreds of these people have taken our seminar for the express purpose of learning more about getting stronger. Several articles written by active-duty military guys with combat experience are posted on my website, each with a very active discussion thread.

The unanimous view of all these people is that their strength has a pivotal bearing on their ability to function in the toughest situations they encounter, and that endurance plays a much smaller, if not insignificant, role in any modern shitstorm.

A Better Way

In my opinion, and that of men who’ve been there and done that, boot camps and academies would better prepare their recruits by instituting a basic barbell strength course in place of all the pointless running and conditioning; by requiring that a reasonable strength standard be met for graduation; and by putting the fat kids on a diet and feeding the hell out of the skinny ones.

At the end of 5 to 6 months of basic strength development and the attainment of the required strength standard, the emphasis would shift to a maintenance strength program combined with some intelligently programmed conditioning.

Remember that the conditioning adaptation comes on quickly and is easy to maintain, so that by the time the class graduates they’re both strong and in shape. In every case, the graduate of such a program would be better prepared for his job at the end of 9 months than he is now.

The bottom line is that strength improvement for people who are not already strong is the rising tide that floats all the other ships in the physical performance harbor. In the current situation, time is being wasted on conditioning for novice trainees for whom it’s neither necessary nor appropriate, and not nearly enough attention has been paid to getting them stronger.

If you’re not strong, stronger is fitter. Stronger is conditioned. If you’re a novice, take my advice and don’t dilute your strength training with a bunch of sweaty work until it’s appropriate – when your initial strength gains slow down.

If you’re in charge of training novices, and their proper preparation is actually critical to their duties, their lives, and the lives of others, try my suggestion on a group of them, and then compare that group to your standard-approach recruits.

I dare you.

Author: Mark Rippetoe. Source: T-Nation