B - Frequency

The transcript discusses the concept of frequency in training and how it relates to achieving desired outcomes. It mentions examples such as the Bulgarian system of high-frequency training and the importance of context and individual readiness. The transcript also explores the idea of high and low intensity days, as well as the balance between pushing clients to their limits and considering their recovery. It emphasizes the need for intuition and rapport in training, as well as the importance of goal-oriented programming and the use of objective measurements. Overall, the main ideas revolve around understanding and managing frequency in training to optimize results. A huge component of frequency is just simply having context of what is the upper and lower limit to produce results. So one of the examples we talk about within this module is going to be this like Bulgarian system of those who make it will be champions. So familiar with this? This is all the way back in science and practice, where Zatorski and Kramer talk about the Bulgarian system of simply just how much tonnage can you accrue by having high frequency training. So this is always the example we kind of talk about with like the extreme upper limit. But the famous infamous of four to six sessions a day, Monday through Saturday, maybe one recovery day, you're thinking that is 20 sessions, 25 sessions in a week like that's that's aggressive, even to the point where they worked up to eight training sessions in a day, right? And this idea of like this cybernetic format where you essentially utilize whatever training match you have within that training session auto regulate what load you use. So let's say that I could snatch 200 kilos in the morning, that kind of determines my day, right? That would be phenomenal loads. So as I break down training off of that, maybe I'm in a very ready state versus all of a sudden, one day on a Thursday, I can only hit 120 kilos. And that determines that my auto regulatory readiness is a lot lower. So maybe even we have to adjust some other variables, right? So if we adhere to this high frequency component, and we want to adjust other variables like intensity or volume or time under tension, or rest or density, we start to look at this other perspective. And it just goes back into this what we've been talking about all along, of training is set up around the central concept of what are we really trying to progress or adjust or make make changes with, right? So if I look at it from trying to improve the ability to produce force at a rapid rate, if I'm looking at it from the context of, I'm trying to increase cross sectional muscle area, if I'm trying to increase someone's capacity, what would be the best lever to pull? Is it intensity? Is it volume? Is it density? Or is it simply just adjusting frequency? And a lot of times what we think about from the context of what is the right lever to pull, more times than not, this is set up for you organically, right? So if I looked at this from the context of, oh, well, I work with college athletes, and I really want to pull the right lever here, you probably don't have the frequency lever to pull. So if you work in Olympic sports, you're probably banking on maybe I can get two to three sports or two to three sessions in a given week. If I'm working with maybe football, maybe I can get four to five. If I work with basketball in season, maybe I work with a program that doesn't like to train a whole lot. So maybe I get one to zero, you know, and that's the catch 22 of this all, you know, we're talking about frequency like this is very malleable structure. Truth is for most of us, even if you work in a private setting, sessions cost money and more money is usually a big tipping point for what people decide they want to do or not. That's tough. So I want to get into this like conversation with practical of there is an extreme upper limit. We can get to six to eight sessions in a given day. There's a great protocol by a guy named Perry Rader, who used to be the editor in chief of Ironman magazine, competitor to health and fitness and Bob Hoffman and York barbell and all that. So one of the concepts he came up with was this like idea of the blitz protocol, where if you have a lagging body part, especially if it's one of these like tonic or more postural muscles or this like predominantly slow twitch fatigue resistant, like you see this with calves or forearms or even neck, having a high frequency approach, but very small volume or overall like session length, right? So he came up with this concept of blitz protocol where you're doing eight micro sessions in a day and you find like body parts change, right? And it's Pavel, we'll talk about that and being able to do a push up, a one arm push up or pull up or some of the other feats that they have, like a pistol with a 32 kilo kettlebell or even doing a overhead press with, you know, like I think a 32 kilo plus kettlebell, et cetera. So this concept of like, if you can only do so much with this fixed weight, right, I can only do one pull up, I can only press the 32 kilo kettlebell one time, I can only do a get up with, you know, this, this 24 kilo I have like, you know, a lot of folks at home that I utilize this actually quite a bit with people who train remotely is like I have limited accessibility to equipment and my body weight isn't that malleable, so maybe we take on this high frequency approach. So like, hey, this remote based client wants to be able to do a pull up, they're, they're a little overweight, they have a pull up bar, okay, fine, you're just going to do max pull ups every on the, every hour on the hour in your hallway eight times today. And you go through that and, you know, they can make some pretty substantial changes in a very short period of time, which is pretty cool. So as I start to break down like that dynamic versus the reality which most of us work within, like one to three sessions in a given week, right, that's, that's probably the truth for most of us. This frequency lever that I'm kind of talking about is pretty hard to pull. It's just not something that's readily available to us as much as we would like. So the other process we can go through on the extreme other version would be something like a high intensity protocol from Arthur Jones or Mike Metzer is like this concept of a body part or a pattern can only be trained really adequately once every seven to ten days. Even like the west side folks talking about something like deadlift. I would argue there's an element with that of pattern redundancy with squatting is very hingey and the reason why they can't deadlift more frequently is because their deadlifts are or the squats are pretty much glorified good mornings. But the reality of the situation, it does go into this, how many times can we tap the well? And at the high intensity folks would say it doesn't really matter how many times you train something, it matters how many times, how much do you need to get what you want. And this goes into this concept of high low and vertical integration and what Charlie, Charlie Francis has talked about of what is the quality we're trying to train and if it's more CNS dependent, there's a smaller amount we can actually do something in a given training day or training week or training month. And that's the dynamic we really have to talk about and one of the things that I think would be really important to dive into would be understanding and we've talked about this from literally day one on variability is what is the bandwidth of the system? So if I look at something along the lines of maybe HRV or resting heart rate, maybe I look at something of heart rate recovery during a training session, maybe we look at wellness or workloads during a training session tracked through either RP or actual physical heart rate monitoring. And we get this overall chronic score, like what's my normal HRV, am I above 40, 50 every day? Like, and what's my normal resting heart rate, am I below 55, 50 every day? And then all of a sudden I'm not there, you know, just much like Abhijab used to do with Bulgarian system of like, what is your capacity on this given day by determining some sort of RM on that morning and determining loads off of that. And then what's the contingency, right? So if it's very CNS dependent and I don't have good readiness, do I do lower volume, do I do lower intensity, do I do less density, do I do something different entirely or do I commit to maybe dropping the session, right? And this is the stuff as we break down frequency, high, low, doesn't really matter. It really comes down to what is the end goal and what are we trying to accomplish? And this is why I really like the idea of acute chronic loads. I'm sure there's some sort of detractors of the utilizing subjective ratings of a workout is not really the most accurate, but what I would argue is it gets into this other element of trust and rapport with your clients or athletes that if they're honest about their goals are ultimately up to them and they're the intrinsic nature of training should be, you're the only really one who can facilitate you reaching a goal or not. And then on the other end, it goes into how hard was today. It was really easy. We should have went harder or it was really hard, probably going to have to make a backup plan for the next or alternate plan for the rest of the week. That's the stuff that as we look through practical, if we look through relative to principles of training frequency, what we can actually do in a given week, this high CNS, low CNS, more oxidative type of windows we can train within, I think the process of having a rapport and connectivity to the people you're working with and having some sort of diagnostic that looks at what they can handle. The aggregate of what we are is the culmination of getting a lot of really good training sessions. And it's a pretty hard thing to actually say what's good, this idea of good training. I have standards of movement, I have objective criteria, I have things that govern me on a micro day-to-day scale. And then we also have output measurements, KPIs, OKRs, things that govern me on a macro scale. And if I look at the dynamic of assessing frequency management, you know that feeling of when you know your team doesn't have it or your client's just not there and you have to make a decision. Do I break from the monotony of training and do something different or more engaging? Do I give them a day off, do I give them a deload week? On the other end, it goes into my job is to push them to do something they're not capable of doing without me. My job is to get them somewhere that they can't get themselves. And that comes with some reaching, that comes from doing things that are uncomfortable, that comes from doing stuff that you are not normally willing to do yourself. That's a trainer, that's a coach. There's always a balance between when do I pull the lever and if I rely solely on subjective, then yeah, that's a very, very hard scale to manage. That's why you need objective in there as well. Between HIV and resting heart rate and blood pressure and heart rate recovery and anything that assesses autonomic tone, looking at sympathetic, parasympathetic, but then you look at the motivation and the wellness and the readiness, the physiology gets beat by psychology line, the dynamic of we work with humans and this is something we have to be realistic with of the thing that can't be replaced is the intuition we have as humans. I'm sorry, there's a line I just simply can't get across of 10,000 years of evolution and understanding that we are trying to fast track physiology by applying hormesis and stress, but in the note of what really is important is we think about this concept of human interaction as ultimately what governs actions. All those objective measurements do is just substantiate that instinct that we have. Instincts are funny because our true nature, our true psychology is to be rested or to be sedentary and that's where we have this sixth sense about this. I think the more experience you get, the more you realize it's time to push the gas or push the brake, but we get into this dynamic of when we're deciding upper or lower continuums of frequency, volume, intensity, density, I think what we have to really establish is the real, really good ones can get a high level. This would be the optimal amount of frequency and these are all how we're going to manage these other variables and when I reach a point of diminishing returns, I have contingencies. Then we can talk about intra-training, the intercession and what determines maybe potentially frequency and we're going into this idea of preliminary chart or what is the upper limit in other areas like how many contacts of plyos can I get in a session? How many high intensity sprints can I get in a session? How many Olympic lifts can I get in a session or high rate of force development or high external load movement patterns for these higher threshold movements like squat and deadlift? How many? What is the upper limit? What is the actual amount we can do and then that has a huge impact off of how much frequency we can do. This idea of high-low really comes down to we're bracketing off time to get as much high intensity work as we possibly can and the low days facilitate greater capacity in the future as well as expedited recovery short term. Maybe that comes in the form of active recovery or doing nothing and we just load up on these two days. That goes into the high intensity principle. If we're looking at it from taking something to absolute true muscular failure, then we're going to need to facilitate that with recovery. True failure is something that most people really don't understand and if you take something to absolute muscular failure or technical failure of a movement pattern and that is your upper limit on that given day, well I'll be damned to say that you probably need to manage your frequency. But the real dynamic that plays out above all else with frequency management is what is the end? What is the actual outcome? I can look at it from I have a micro and a macro aka fractals and I can say I need to accomplish this and I need to accrue this much tonnage or this much time under tension or this much overall duration of something in this period of time or I can look at it from I don't know and I'm just going to start to use my best instincts on a daily basis to have as much good training as possible and hope that it manifests into something better long term. And when we're bullets are flying and you're out there doing stuff every single day, the more individual basis, the more you can either kind of get or I guess the smaller the group, the more you can kind of get in the weeds on these dynamics. The bigger the group, the less in the weeds you can get, right? You're mostly just governed by we got to facilitate 100 people in front of me. So even if they're, they're not all prepared from a emotional, physical or autonomic nervous system perspective, I'm going to keep proceeding anyway. Maybe any other note you go into like, all right, like I'm going to have some sort of auto regulatory effect for what people have and I'm going to have these governors placed into training. But the reality is most of us are probably working with fixed frequency and we're probably just adjusting on a case by case basis with the frequency that we have, especially if you work in the team setting, you're not, you're not giving up a session, even in a private session, like setting, right? Like I'll be honest, man, I'm when I'm paid by the session, my idea is to make that session as good as possible because what you really see is momentum from a routine is more powerful than anything you're doing. And if I can maintain that momentum, whether it's a private training client or working with a football team in the off season, chances are I can overcome whatever, whatever dynamics are at play with training. And if there's, it's really hot and humid and we're doing outdoor conditioning and I can just give them a little bit less density on that given day and I can give them more frequent water breaks or I can adjust the, the acidity that we work, right? So let's say that we have, we have programmed 300 yard shuttles. If you're not familiar with that, 25 and back six times, it's about as much of a glycolytic energy system as you could possibly get, right? This is, this is just a salt, a 60 second assault bike sprints. Like you, there's a climber, a thousand or 500 feet. Like anything that you can just to build up as much as acidity as humanly possible. That is what you're thinking about when you get to a, oh man, it's really hot and humid. It's really sticky. I, they're just sore as hell from yesterday because we did this like 12, 10, 8, 6 protocol, whatever. So you know, these, all these variables are popping up and you have something in front of you. Like it's either we rise to the occasion or I need to find another thing. And then the other part, it's when you get really, really experienced, you understand the implication that's associated with pushing people past what they're able to recover from and that you, we always call it like mid-summer, like end of June, midway through July. When are we going to throw them a bone? You know, when are we going to give them something that is like a reprieve from this constant intensity? Cause you can see it, they're dragging. We're not running to camp, we're crawling to camp. Like that dynamic plays out and you're looking around and you're like, I'm just tired of every single day trying to rally the team to get to do these basic level things. I'm exhausted and I can't get them motivated to do this anymore. And then you have to make a decision, you know, do you do something fun like play kickball? Do you, do you, do you do something like, like give them the day off? Do you just do a deload? These are all, there's always, there's always this back and forth in your mind, but when you're looking in front of you and you see a team that's going to do something more than they can actually physically recover from and you have a workout plan tomorrow, at what expense is that? And then you get back to the point I was making before of like, it's all outcome driven. So if I can accrue more good sessions than bad, if I can meet some sort of standards and objectives in my workouts on a consistent basis, chances are I'll meet that target or meet that outcome consistently, which is great. If I'm accruing a bunch of crappy sessions and I can't get to ultimately where I want to be because I just don't really have a good job, I don't do a good job of looking at my frequency and how that's getting negatively impacted by mismanagement of other training variables like intensity, density, and volume, then okay, you're not going to really, really get to what you want. You might be an expert motivator. You might be an incredible communicator. You might be someone who can convey the rationale why we need to train really hard on a consistent level. But it's funny about that, when I think about this, and I'm going to go on a tangent on this one, I think there's a huge issue with football coaches hiring carbon copies of strength coaches that they think are the archetype. And it might come in the form of, I'm hiring you based off, I really like this guy because I worked him at the school and I want you to just replicate what he did. It might come in the form of, I want you to copy their program, I want you to copy their general demeanor and approach, even to the point of just be a carbon copy of them, which is difficult because the thing that most people don't realize about really successful experienced strength coaches is their intuition about the things they do is second to none. Like they have such a sixth sense about it. And I've seen enough of the best in the industry, hopefully one day I could be considered with them as well. But I've seen it, and I'm pretty observant, and I like to think I'm pretty good at learning from my environment. But I've worked with these folks, I've seen them firsthand. I'll tell you what no one ever seems to realize is they're doing hard things, they do really challenging things, but they have an incredible sense of what is the actual limit. And it might come in the form of going on a tirade for an extra three minutes to give the guys more of a break. I'm not going to say names here, but there's a test circulating around a lot of schools around July to get them ready for football camp of doing 26 one-tenths, from back of the end zone to the obstacle line. This has been copied over quite a bit, it's a lot of running, it's a lot. It's 26 times one-tenths, it's a lot of yardage, and it's all timed, right? So a typical time for a one-tenth is probably, if you really want to push it, 13 to 15 seconds for a skill, 15 to 17 seconds for a combo, and then probably 19 to 21 seconds for big, depending on where you're at. Those numbers might be pretty aggressive for non-power five or FCS. The reality of the situation is, if you're going on time, and you're seeing that combo guy that you know needs to move down the D-line, if you're seeing that offensive lineman just dragging, and you know that we're not going to make the time, maybe we missed the time two reps in a row, and it's hot, and it's humid, and all of a sudden, that super-experience I've been down this a million and one times, starts to lose their mind, and just goes off on everything, right? Everything and anything under the sun. And you're timing the rest, normally it's supposed to be 45 seconds, right? It's big, it's big, down, blow the whistle, wait about 10 seconds, get them through maybe opposite 30, combo, down, blow the whistle, get them through another 10 seconds, get them through, scale, down, and then they get across the line, and you're starting the rest period when the big crosses the line first, right? So you're thinking, all right, I've got another 20 seconds before I'm going again, right? So you're sending them back, and then you're going back and forth, and you see this guy like, three, two, and you get elongated one, the ones that know now, apologize if you've never done this or experienced this, but I've seen this so many times, and it's actually making me think about the, wow, our guys are going to be toast tomorrow, or man, they got to come back and do some snatch and cleans, hit a triple on front squat, whatever we're doing tomorrow, like we're going to be absolute trash. And then you see that coach just loses mind, right? Maybe they go off on, this is the stuff I'm talking about, we're going to get our asses kicked, I'm so tired of all this and that, like blah, blah, blah, or maybe they go off on like, these are the guys that are holding us back, maybe they go off on something else, maybe they just cut the session entirely. And I've seen the good ones, I mean the really, really good ones, just strategically and conveniently know when to take this huge break. Might go from a 45 second to a three to five minute break. Might be like, alright, let's regroup here, we're going to go halftime, and we're going to take a five to ten minute break here, and we're going to come back and finish this. It might come in the form of, those times get a little bit slower and slower, right? So I start counting three, two, one for skill at 14 seconds, for combo at 17 seconds, for big at 23 seconds, I just lower the intensity, mind you. It might come in the form of maybe coaching and going through technique and going through cyclical arm action and relaxed hands and relaxed face and get a good get off, so get me ten hard steps and just coast. Work on the front side lift, like all this stuff, like you want to be fluid. Have a pacer car, right, so the fastest guy, slow down a little bit so people can kind of time their run. The guy who's just doing great. My big thing when I was a college coach doing anything like this was never bend over, but never lean on your buddy. I just was adamant on, you're just literally holding everyone down. You're bringing everyone down and you're making a hard situation harder for some, because you weren't capable. All that being considered, and I genuinely mean this, when we're trying to break down frequency, I think the issue of having a carbon copy of a copy is they don't realize how to manage volume intensity and density and then the subsequent frequency off of that suffers. I was able to do two-a-days my last two years when I was at Army West Point. I hold an event every year, or I used to, where I did two-a-day training. I can tell you this, when I'm thinking about frequency and having really high amounts of frequency in a period of time, right, so the rationale in Army, we only had a six-week summer, most programs have eight to ten weeks, so we needed to close the gap in terms of total sessions in a given week by having two times a day training. Comparatively speaking to something like muscle mentorship where I used to run and now I host my mentorships, it's, all right, you have a small window of time with me. I want to get as much bang for your buck as possible. But with that comes some sort of limited aspect the next day or the following year or the following week. And I have to adjust my frequency pre and post that training block or pre and post that training phase. That's the game. So I do two-a-day training. They're coming off no training for three to four weeks. I do something along the lines of preseason where, ironically at Army, we train every single day. So that dynamic, as I play it out, and as I start to build up overall training rationale, I think about this bigger, higher level, okay, well, what is frequency? It's what I can recover from. It's what I can ultimately get me to point B. That is frequency. I think there's a lot to be said about that. So look through all these methods from Bulgarian to HIIT to high-low and think about it. It's just all frequency management, relatively speaking, to volume intensity and density. And those dynamics, as it plays out, makes it a lot easier to decide how much frequency you should actually do. But the truth is, it's probably more so actually out of your hands than you want. All right. Let's break here. Make sure you check out the case study, and then we'll see you guys for the next module.