A Frequency (Principles)

The main ideas from the transcription are: - In strength and conditioning, the frequency of training sessions is often limited by team settings and academic commitments. - Most athletes are only able to train two to three times a week. - High-intensity training and frequency management are important considerations. - The optimal frequency for training is dependent on the individual's ability to recover. - Different training approaches, such as total body training, upper/lower splits, and push-pull programs, have different impacts on frequency. - The desired outcome, whether it is muscle development, performance improvement, or body composition changes, should be considered when determining training frequency. - Monitoring workload and evaluating progress is crucial in determining the right frequency for training. So with frequency we have to come to the realization that we probably have very little control over how many times we can train our athletes. I think that's something that's really important to open up with because the elephant in the room is we are working under the umbrella of team settings that have a lot of control and jurisdiction with when and where they do stuff as well as most of the I would say the lion's share of athletes is going to have some sort of academic sport model right meaning that they are in school and they're playing sports as an adjunct to their school experience whether it's a high school or college. Reality is probably inverted in terms of the hierarchy in terms of overall performance and what people want to do but truth is is we're always working under the umbrella of that. We're working with athletes in their environment that are limited in many times they can train right so most of us are going to work within this two to three day a week setup just that's it right like I think we could talk about the benefits of four day or five day or or multi workout in one day we can talk about all that stuff but I think it's important I think it's something that we should at least have an appreciation for but truth is is most of us are going to be working in a situation where we see our athletes and clients two to three times a week. This just is what it is and and the more we can kind of figure out strategies and means to controlling that right and I sort of funny because you think about it from if I was going to inventory most strength and conditioning coaches workout I would say probably the lion's share would default to a four-day program. I'm just this is speculative but I would say if I was going to pull strength and conditioning coaches how many times a week do you train most of them would probably say in this in the fashion of four times a week right you're probably they're doing this like high low vertical integrated model or this upper lower split that allows you to do work capacity on the upper body days and and a lactic power on lower body days maybe you fall into this like push-pull the dynamic whatever have you but the truth is the majority of the athletes we work with they're probably going to be three probably more times than that more times than we'd like two times a week. That in itself is the big irony of strength and conditioning is our preference really doesn't align with what we can actually do right and I think that's a lot of things in what we do but in terms of frequency that simple fact of a lot of this is kind of taking care of us care for us right frequency is not necessarily determine what's going to get the best results it's going to be whatever is going to get the whatever our athlete can actually physically recover from right if our athletes can only handle one session a week and actually recover from it that is what we have to do right we go all the way back to Arthur Jones and Mike Mentor and Ellington Darden to look at high-intensity training and this true one set to failure framework and taking everything to the extreme length of what someone can actually recover from dictates the frequency or the cadence in which you stress that body part right so Mike Mentor talked about this extensively he would work out for four times a week for 15 to 30 minutes a pop and he wouldn't train a muscle group for minimum seven days in between right so if he was doing a rest pause protocol or pre or post fatigue protocol going to absolute muscle failure he would say he wouldn't allow himself to do anything until he knew he could actually make a progression off of that right that's the ultimate true north of all this it's this very intentional leveraging stress to garner an outcome and I'm using this really big indicator of progressive overload to determine if I went too early if I was right on spot or did I wait too long and for him you talk about seven to ten days that he would absolutely crush a muscle to the degree that I needed so much time to recover from from not only a nervous system but a muscular system from a connected tissue standpoint that the muscle can actually develop and grow and get stronger there would be a seven to ten day rotation right and that's something that's really crazy to think about right like majority of us are working with this total body program or this upper lower push-pull you know we're hitting these muscle fibers and these motor units multiple times a week right and then you know a lot of things that people often forget it as much as like the train flow be slow moniker was like something that's transition you really had to overcome internally you know we really had a big battle going on about one set to failure versus multiple sub maximal stats is superior and I think we take for granted how much this was a conversation this is a really big big discussion dr. Kramer now are you caught time Penn State which was by the way a high-intensity school doing really well I mean really well not to mention other schools that were doing really well doing high-intensity training like Michigan and Ohio State a lot of NFL teams I mean I can tell you where I was at USC when we had all these hammer strength machines because Anthony Munoz played Cincinnati Bengals because really one of the first original hit guys came would was that Cincinnati Bengals and did such a good job anybody who's ever worked with a real traditional high intensity strength you should coach I mean like one of the real ones the ones that do manual neck and manual a lot of razor literally half their team they have this like arthritic wrist from just crushing individual body parts till failure the real ones will tell you this is not an easy program but the intangibles of just physical toughness and going through really hard things is really really important but aside from that Kramer really set up a framework of multiple submaximal sets of superior than one fallout maximal to set to failure I mean he just destroyed that logic like he proved it unequivocally with overloaded amount of research and that argument kind of went by the wayside and looking back over that and saying okay like dr. Kramer and Arthur Jones like dr. Kramer one unequivocally how did that have a concentric circle or impact on frequency I think we lost a lot of it of that because one of the big proponents of high-intensity training was Mike Metzer and Guy Ellison-Darden and they would talk about frequency management is easily the most important variable to control and then we go multiple submaximal sets we're not really going to absolute failure so it's hard to determine progression to be honest it's hard to determine progressive overload and progression when you're not taking something to true ultimate failure because you don't have as much of an indicator it's not as clear it's not as objective it's not as cut and dry right like I'm going to do a progression a single progression including intensity or reps from one week to the next and if I don't go up in weight or reps it was either not enough time or too much time if I did it was enough that's a beautiful part about it it makes it very simple as to how much frequency you actually need but when you're going submaximal and say that you're using a relative intensity chart which I'm a big proponent of it's a harder and harder to determine what is absolutely like enough frequency or too much let me make it even more convoluted and confusing we go this more minimal effective dose or sometimes referred to as microdosing right it's like short snippet 30-minute sessions that are kind of like working submaximally but grooving and more moving and just just loading tissues and nervous system to a certain level stimulate not annihilate potentiating all sorts of stuff we really don't know if that's going to have a long-term visual fatiguing effect we look at all right I'm going to get eight micro sessions in the course of a week versus two really challenging ones I don't know I really don't know if we can say definitively if we know that's too much frequency or too little but I could tell you this with high-intensity training you know very very clearly whether you're doing too much or too little maybe we need to look at that objectively with frequency one of the other big things that I think a lot about is the person that accrues the most volume or tonnage and most like whatever it is that's directly related to the task at hand is probably gonna have the upper hand right so one of the examples we talked about when I was at West Point was we have a shorter summer than everyone else let's imagine we have a load of depth because we're working against the clock because we have our athletes doing military training where they lost tons of weight they have a ton of stress related issues like blisters and calluses and and bunions and stuff with their feet they might have they might have stress related things like shin splints and inflamed joints of their lower legs lower back tissues some rucking for miles on end and at the sleep-deprived state and just ergonomically really poor environment it is what it is but the reality of the situation is I still only had six weeks and most of my counterparts had eight weeks and didn't have to deal with military training in the back end so the way we'd always talk about is we need to close this gap by doing two a day training as long as we possibly can so while everyone was doing one time a day training for eight weeks so let's say they're training five times a week for eight weeks at 40 sessions I was going to go two times a day for five days a week you get ten sessions per week for six so we could get 60 sessions over the course of the next six weeks we not only can close the gap we can surpass them in terms of total training volume and total actual work you could argue that's probably too much frequency and I could probably argue probably right it's almost an event every year called muscle mentorship or basically taking everyone to failure for nine sessions in a week every single session was designed to break you down and what it's really referring to is this idea of a supercompensation effect meaning that we're going to intentionally overreach in five days to a degree that either depletes you to such a degree that can carry over residually to months in advance or just to shock the system that you are going to recover from this but you want to see if you can make it and over time you learn that the convergence of high intensity and high frequency don't really match well it's oil and water but the other end it goes into what if I could leverage that what if I have a a period during a competitive season that I have a four-week time span where I can really crush that and I can get this residual from training that I can't get otherwise there's an element for frequency that I think is so amazing that it's so clear about did you or did you not make progress yes or no and that gives you a great indication if there's not enough time or too much time and then the other end it's like if you can take this high frequency minimal effective or like micro dosing of effect what would you do right if I had the time what I what would I do with it right if you had nine sessions in a week what would you do would you in a sec recovery in there and say yeah screw it let's just really load them up over the course of these nine workouts I mean shoot when I ever seen it like the last eight years of my college aviation career every and this is an interesting time this is an interesting timeline to this but my I guess my fifth year of college fishing NCAA passed a rule saying you couldn't do two-a-day practices anymore and what it did is create this void where a bunch of football coaches had no idea to do with that to our period so decided to go offensive or defensive lifts and they meet or walk through and you're thinking like oh wow instead of practicing every day we're going to live now so I got six days or six days a week of lifting for four weeks again what do you do in that scenario like most of us are not really in that place it's a weird feeling like wow again 24 times over the course of the next four weeks like it's a lot that's like interesting right nice to think about this a lot with our movement prep right like so many times in preseason with my electric sport they never get access to the team so I try to like compensate for that by doing stuff in our movement prep so I might do some 3d lunch matrices I might do some push-up matrices I might do some some isometric poles or our mid-thigh poles there's stuff that's gonna stress them in a way that's gonna create hopefully this carry over this residual we can actually get back in the weight room and in season right where we start getting back in a cadence it wasn't just such a shock to the system but again that's a high-frequency approach and I'm not trying to change tissue or not trying to change our motor all I'm trying to do is just get some sort of training effects of these athletes can continuously develop in progress it's an amazing thought of where we're at in frequency because we have such a little control and we have such overwhelming amount of frequency and then the other end like objectively we've kind of gotten away from what frequency management was all about frequency really was what is the most I need or the least I need to get the desired effect that's a continuum right you're like if I could do more should I do it relatively speaking all they want to do is put on muscle and my mentor would tell you that you don't you shouldn't do that and there's a lot of other variables consider here like neurological different than muscular right so what we know is that and we could look at some of the research articles that I shared on the modules that the high-frequency training for building tissue is somewhat substantiated right but with that being said is lower individual volumes that we can handles in the workout right so I and what I say is high-frequency coming into I'm training multiple body parts or I'm creating one body part multiple times multiple times over the course of the week right and that's it's not necessarily most of our strength machine coaches perspective right this training chef on Monday back on Tuesday all the way through to arms on Friday another end going to the feather level of all right I'm gonna train push and pull movements or lower upper body on Monday and I'm going to alternate or fluctuate between each day until I get to week four so he's taking it like looking at inventory of looking at bodybuilding split versus like let's just say Monday Jeff back Tuesday Wednesday legs Thursday shoulder Friday arms versus a lower upper split Monday lower so I'm doing anterior posterior chain of the lower body and I'm doing interior poster channel body on Tuesday rest on Wednesday and then repeat on Thursday Friday so I hit my anterior pressing movements on Monday and Thursday so horizontal and vertical and I'm hitting my upper back on Tuesday so structurally imbalanced already but I digress I'm hitting my lower body on Wednesday versus I'm exposing double the amount on a push-pull program right we can say well maybe you can't reach as much of a training volume or a stress of threshold as you would if you did a lower body only day once a week sure and what we're also saying though is there's more than just developing cross-sectional muscle area before they total body training split right we might be doing some total body movements like Olympic list we might be doing some sprint works and plyos we might be doing some more athletic type of things and that might be a reason why we use this upper lower split and then we look at it from the level of like objectively like I envy the bodybuilding world of like all they need to do is increase muscle decrease fat versus the athletic world needs to increase performance and that's more of a nebulous open-ended topic but are they running faster jumping higher throwing something further it's pretty much the outlet that we really should be focusing on while improving muscle mass and decreasing fat mass you can look at those kind of things there's like key results relatively speaking to jumping higher running faster throwing something further and the frequency is probably needs to constitute I'm developing motor developing force velocity or work I'm developing skill I'm developing muscle and developing body comp all together there's big like massive targeting outcomes and then you go wow okay I'm trying to accomplish quite a bit maybe I need to adopt this more higher frequency model and I think as we start to evaluate like circumstance and looking at it now I think we should really get back to this conversation about how do we really know what is too much or too little frequency and you can go into the other end of the spectrum we've included things like wellness and RP and wearables like HIV and resting heart rate and heart rate recovery we included things like bars we included things like force plate analysis we include things like GPS and heart rate during workouts we include all these things off the pretense of we need to understand what workload is and what is a tolerable upper and lower limit of performance right we're going to acute chronic loading going to having a smooth gradual transition in total workloads through heart rate or GPS we're going to a gradual transition from one week to next for submaximal loading it's maximal loading we go into increasing systemically of frequency and volume we go on all these things but it's all coming back trying to replicate the very simple the very fundamental thing of did I approve yes or no from one week to the next and I can determine what the frequency impact on that was it too fast or too slow or was it just enough and as I look through good programming one week to the next one month to the next one year to the next it's very simple did you net improve yes or no and you can determine whether it was enough frequency or not bottom line facts did you get what you were supposed to get done done if you did you can go into this whole other conversation about we're doing what we need to be doing right and you know it's funny about in season so you go off this six workouts a week for four weeks during preseason and then you get to in season and your coach like I want to give you two 45 minute sessions a week damn it's quite quite a drop it's quite a drop maybe like you know what voluntarily if you want to throw in an extra upper body workout maybe on Thursday yeah I think that's fine okay great maybe you do this like potentiating workout on Friday or Saturday for the game you know okay cool that's interesting maybe you look at it Sunday this is a I've talked about this before in our case studies but it's a pretty nasty trick of user voluntary off day to schedule rehab and fitness related stuff right so they're responsible to do their in season conditioning right so they do they're 110 or half casters on Sunday and then they do their quote-unquote effort flows and mental breakdowns you know up downs aka and then they do their film and rehab maybe the rehab has a lot of like general physical preparation stuff and a lot of stuff related to them being able to participate in their workout right and then you do your two sessions a week and call it right so technically they're probably getting three workouts a week with you but they're really only kind of nice tip but point being is where I know whether I'm making about doing enough in season right and this is always a great debate and it's a fun debate in my opinion but I was always able to make improvements in strength for a couple movements in season with two training sessions a week with football guys and it showed me that I was enough right so one of the areas that I always focus on this is like so the Tim Caron hack here you you gain your entire offseason around then feeling confident when it matters right so I really bench press in the offseason or traditionally bench press right we always do dumbbell variation or some sort of like variation that just is really confusing hard to say like what is it good or bad way right so fat grip clusters with a 5010 tempo like who knows what your actual like what's good or bad on that right like I know the most important so say well they're putting up 80 to 90 percent of what they normally can do that's really successful but it's hard to determine what successes or now I try to detach from like this like notion of like I call it like closing your book training right like whatever you did in high school with the triple spot with six with your hands plus six others it doesn't really count and I'm just gonna load this up with variables that make whatever it is you think is good or bad completely obsolete and unrelated but then we get in season and I think okay let's get back to what they are familiar with in traditional bench and let's use a progression that maybe gives them confidence to go so what I usually do is do a fixed intensity and progressive reps so we phase one or September for football we're going to put 80% of the bar to alarm so tempo that normally we can hit for about let's just say six day wraps right let's just say that's your let's just say six RM to work with really fast which one is athlete so what I would do is week one up before we train block I would do 80% for three week to 80% for four week three 80% for five and then week four we do 80% for open you say you hit it for five just hit it for one more wrap if you feel like it's unnecessary and you know everyone's in a while they would hit it for six they were headed for six somebody's we hit it for seven some guys are here for a joke the guy either was too light or you're really slow twitch and you can hit 80% for more than more than eight reps and then we use that as a kind of a jump-off point to load them up for the next blocks and then we jump up to 82 and we shave a rep so now we work up to five reps and then we jump up to 85 and we jump up to 87 and we jump up to 90 and we're supposed to hit that for three reps in the last block right some degree to a three progression there and I I tell you this and I tell you this every single time we always set PRS in season on bench guys that are like I never hit this for one and I just hit it for three it was so commonplace for guys to hit PRS in season on bench press then start getting like just stupid to talk about you might think that's a brag you might think that's a something that like it's like I don't like I feel like he's embellishing a little bit I'm just telling you two times a week was enough to set bench press PRS across the board and the message was one you already are familiar with that load because you just hit it last week for three so all I might actually do is hit it for one more rep to all I need is one good set there's a high intensity interval high intensity training principle just one good set all I need is one good set today today we're going to do I'm going to do some sort of like rotational power so maybe a rotational row or push-pull in the Kaiser we're going to work up to a heavy double in a front squat just one good set you know for warm-up sets and a glorified work set and then we'll do a couple structural balance things like an upper body pull with that does a warm-up set so for warm-up sets pairing it up with four sets of five each side single arm dumbbell row and then after that we'll have some poster chain maybe I like to hit the knee dominant work on that day it'll usually be a little bit more muscle soria so we're getting some leg curls and blue ham on that day we'll pair that up with an upper body press like a vertical press or something that or like more vertical like a high-end higher stuff like that I'm going to make a pill or core exercise and then come back three days later and then we hit some sort of total body stuff I like to maintain and cleanse or something in season because truth be told one of the big secrets I find transitioning really misses out on is if you want to be good at something you need to figure out how to maintain it in season that's all I don't need to have you only the crazies need them to execute right we just do a good barbell warm-up and then we do a couple lights that's a hand clean so we'll get to January it wasn't just like we're starting from scratch all over again call it just a glorified continuation of our dynamic warm-up and then we hit our bench you tell them I just want one good set that's what one good set let me see what you got and then after that you go into this next level of all right let me start to load up these other movements and we'll go from there two times a week PRS and bench I can tell you definitively and I got videos to prove it guys crushing PRS on front squat in season just from one good set training two times a week that's enough frequency right that's enough frequency do you think with a football and a lack of power base for body mass cross-sectional muscle area force generating output is really important two times a week is enough to set PRS in November and December I think that kind of gets to my point of when we look at what our purpose is for training and we look at what we're trying to do from a training standpoint is enough is enough and we know that by what we know that by are we actually performing at a higher level yes or no if we are that's enough frequency you are training as much as you need to be training I'm gonna stop there we're going on practical here next week a lot of great things to dive into on this one appreciate you guys listening and I will see you guys next time