New Sites
A lot of you have asked for training logs of those that are involved in this website. My tech-savvy friend Adam (who helps out with the site — thanks again, Adam) helped set up some sub-sites. AC, Chris, and Mike now have their own sub-site to be used as a training log, but will also be used for whatever they want to post about. As far as their programming goes, they are all younger intermediate lifters who compete in raw powerlifting. I took all three of them to USAPL Raw Nationals last year.
I nagged Ben Claridad to make a site that would allow him to show his art work, and he turned into an amusing training log that also hosts his art work. Here is Ben’s site.
These sites are updated a few times a week, so be sure to check them out.
PR Friday
Post all of your PR’s and training updates to the comments. Regardless of your strength level you are a part of this brotherhood of lifters on the quest to 70’s Big, so don’t be shy.
I don’t really need an engaging intro today because I already know that talking about conditioning gets you wet and bothered. Strength is a little more abstract, something you have to follow for a while to get gains. Gaining and losing strength is a slower process. Gaining and losing conditioning happens within days. And you fucking love talking about it.
There isn’t any fartin’ around in this book. You get a quick intro on some fundamentals, and then it jumps right into the 50 workouts in no particular order. Each workout has a description and pictures that help explain what is going on or what movement is being done. The fan-favorite Bony makes a self-deprecating appearance throughout the workouts. There are plenty of interesting captions such as this one that references Bony doing a tuck jump: “Bony could teach Buffalo Bill a thing or two about ‘the tuck’.”
The workouts aren’t difficult, and that’s the point. In order to be Greyskull approved they need to be simple (after all, Bony is doing them) yet hard hitting. One example is the 400m run, 100 kettlebell swings, followed by another 400m run. Simple. Tough. Efficient. Testicle building.
Hopefully you are at the point in your training career when you have A) been strength training consistently, B) have recorded your progress in a log, and C) have taken notes on how you feel during that time. The more data you have on subjective feelings and objective progress, the more you can discern whether or not certain events (like binge drinking, not eating enough, staying up all night studying, or participating in the horizontal rambas) have effected your training. You will have learned the difference between regular pain and injury pain (the former can be trained through smartly, the latter should be rehabbed). Now start paying attention to the difference between “not feeling well” and being sick.
“Not feeling well” means you have the sniffles, like a cold. Being sick means you have some kind of bacterial or viral infection. Sometimes you will “not feel well” and it will be the beginning stages of infection — again, you need to learn the difference. It should be pretty clear; having a runny nose, congested sinuses, and a sore throat is different than general fatigue, alternating hot and cold spells, swollen lymph nodes, and general and reverberating body pain. There are many examples of “not feeling well” and infection, but you should know the difference because you’re a fucking adult. The point is that having the “tough guy mentality” in some cases makes you stupid.
Need proof? Here. In any case, tough guys are just stupid people trying to make up for their stupidity with perceived machismo. Eventually they’ll fail (e.g. Debo in the movie Friday).
If you have some kind of infection, whether it be viral or bacterial, your immune system is now hampered with a systemic stress. Bacterial infections can be helped along with antibiotics, yet there isn’t any help against viruses. You’ll just have to wait it out and treat the symptoms. We already know that training, especially the bigger lifts that use the most muscle mass (squat, deadlift, cleans, etc.), produces a systemic stress on the body. That systemic stress is needed in order to get stronger. However, when you have an infection you’re body is already straining to reduce a systemic stress. If you add more stress to it via training (whether it be from lifting or conditioning), you’re going to exacerbate the problem with the additional stress.
Look at it this way: if you only have 100 credits that can be spent on recovery (reducing inflammation, healing things, etc.) and a typical workout will require 75 credits to recover from, and you are experiencing an infection that has already depleted 110 credits, you don’t have any credits to use for training, and you increase your defecit. The system is in a weakened state, and then you weaken it significantly more by asking it to do more when it can barely do less. It’s like a nation being trillions of dollars in debt, and then continuing to spend billions of dollars to try and make money — it doesn’t make any fucking sense.
This is my reaction to government spending
What can you do if you feel that you’re getting sick? I don’t get sick often, but if I feel anything that would indicate a lack of supreme health, stuffy nose or otherwise, I pound water and vitamins. I feel that it has helped me stave off some minor stuff in the past. What if you’re having symptoms of an infection? Obviously don’t go to the gym. We already clarified that it’s stupid because it can fuck you up to the point of hindering progress longer than the original infection would have. While you’re sick, do your best to hydrate and get as much protein in. You’ll have fat and glycogen to use if needed, but you should still try and get protein in. If you have a hard time keeping food down, then do your best. Depending on what you’re infected with, you may feel better the next day. This is not the time to fucking train. I’ve done this in the past and AC just did it the other day (even mildly gloating about it in the PR Friday comments), and now he’s worse off. I suggest getting two days of good food intake before attempting a training session. If anything you’d get a surplus of calories and protein in the days when you can finally eat.
When you resume training, you probably shouldn’t “resume it as normal”. You’ve just been in a systemic deficit; why would you think you can train as if nothing happened? Instead, a very intelligent progression would be doing a light-to-medium workout, a medium/moderate workout, then a heavy workout with days of rest in between. It’s intelligent because it’s patient; it doesn’t do too much too soon. Post-infection training is not the time to start back up on a volume day; just get a light workout in. If you feel great and think you can do more, than swallow your pride (your annoying fucking pride) and hold yourself back. It’s always better to be safe than sorry with training and programming.
I’m not suggesting that you sit out every time you aren’t feeling super. But you do need to be in tune with your body. If you’re thinking the cough is more than a cough, ratchet the workout back or wait till the next day. You now understand that not feeling well and infection are two different things. You know that shit will get worse if you try and train while infected (and you shouldn’t be going to a place where you can infect other people anyway, you dickhead). You know that you can try and manage the sickness by hydrating, getting protein in, and some over-the-counter symptom helpers. You know a pretty good guideline that requires two days of feeling and eating well before training, and you also know that you should slowly progress your training (or your systemic stress) back up to pre-infection levels to optimally resume training. All I can do is tell you this shit. It’s up to you to recognize and react like a smart person instead of a stupid person.
This post is part of a series on the Texas Method. Here is Part 1.
Now that there is a general understanding of what the Texas Method (TM) is, what it’s used for, and why it’s useful, we will talk about how to transition different exercises into it.
I have several themes that resonate over and over and over and over and over and over … on this site. The concepts of adaptive stress and individuality mean that in order to drive progress, an adaptive stress must be imparted on the body. However, the magnitude and method of that stress is dependent on a person’s current state of adaptation. Our society likes to group things to make them easier to comprehend; skinny, weak, skinny-fat, big, fat, and strong are ways to describe a trainee. However these distinctions aren’t descriptive enough. For instance, there may be a trainee who has just gotten into squatting and deadlifting, yet has been doing bench and other upper body exercises for years. His bench may be higher than the squat and deadlift; such a body isn’t balanced for performance.
In the case of discrepancies in weight lifted or muscular distribution, it may be prudent to advance certain exercises to intermediate programming instead of a linear approach. For instance, if the squat progression (on a structured linear program designed to make daily gains) has stalled several times, yet the press and bench are still making progress, then the squat could be shifted into an intermediate-style program while the presses continue a linear advancement. The opposite could also hold true. In other words, beating your dick into the ground because “that’s what the program outline tells you to do” doesn’t help you get any stronger.
Similarly, forcing yourself to find the maximum potential of your linear progression won’t be helpful in the long run. For example, I ran my (Starting Strength style) linear progression up to 465x5x3, yet every workout after 450 was purely survival. I vividly remember feeling emotionally wrecked when I finished squatting; I had to summon so much adrenaline just to get through the three sets (with at least 10 minutes of rest between sets) that I was running on empty. Forcing myself into that experience may have been spiritual, yet it wasn’t optimal for my strength development. I spent several weeks putting an unnecessary amount of stress on my structures to the point that they required recuperation as I transitioned into intermediate programming. I subjectively wouldn’t recommend this, but I also wouldn’t objectively recommend it because it blunts progress in the long-term.
The pressing exercises won’t have the same problem because they don’t involve as much muscle mass. A trainee can exhaust their progression many times yet the recuperation time won’t be as lengthy as if the overreaching occurred with squat or deadlift. Remember: the more muscle mass that is trained by the exercise, the more disruption that occurs. If you abuse the amount of stress you impart on your body – relative to your current adaptation – then you will cause local, and potentially systemic, problems.
Advancing various exercises to a TM approach isn’t difficult; the first workout is volume-based, the second is recovery-based, and the third is intensity-based. The bench and press will alternate their emphasis every week so that you bench volume and intensity in the same week (and visa versa). On bench week’s recovery day you would press; on press week’s recovery day you would do some light bench. It isn’t difficult and there are plenty of examples in the book Practical Programming (as well as on the internet).
The deadlift is a little bit trickier. I like to have novices deadlift once a week on the same day. I usually like to put it at the end of the week so that it doesn’t disrupt any other squat days and because the weekend allows an extra rest day (the Greyskull Linear Progression drops a squat day and puts the deadlift on Wednesday – this is acceptable). Novices will make progress by doing a single work set of five. Often I see people doing sets across on the deadlift. This will put more volume on the trainee making it hard to recover while using a smaller amount of weight compared to a single set of five. Don’t do sets across; for a linear progression it’s too high of a dose to get the response we want, and it will hamper other training days.
Franco Columbo deadlifts
Once the single set of five starts to slow, then the trainee can shift into doing triples. This allows the trainee to continue adding weight on the bar every week while getting a moderate amount of volume. It’s important to note that moving to triples will benefit a trainee who has a decent musculature structure. The fewer reps will move away from the hypertrophy spectrum (5ish to 15 reps) and thus wouldn’t be optimal for someone with a thin back and torso. A smaller person would benefit in the long run from ratcheting the weight back and getting more cumulative deadlift training done with sets of five (there’ll be more on this topic in another post).
If a trainee has shifted into doing triples, the timing will usually work out where they have transitioned the rest of their training into TM-style training. In such a case, I would just keep driving the triples up. The triple reduces a little bit of the volume imparted on the body on the intensity day, yet handles a significant load. If the triples start to poop out, then the trainee could shift into more complicated stuff; ascending singles, singles across, ascending doubles, or doubles across (as well as rack pulls and speed deadlifts — subject matter for other posts and interviews). Of course this all depends on the current state of adaptation and what the trainee’s goals are. As a general rule I like to keep the total reps on intensity deadlift workouts below five (NOT including warm-ups). After all, it’s supposed to be a high intensity and low volume workout. To get appropriate super-compensation from the volume/intensity effect, you’ll need to maintain the weekly fluctuation of those variables, so don’t get excessive volume in on the intensity day.
As you progress you’ll learn what your limitations were in the past and how you currently adapt to stress. Your training records will help provide data that will help you predict how you will adapt to stress in the future. You will become your own scientist as you continue to advance your strength throughout your life. I will continue giving you ideas and tools to use in your experiments. In the next TM post, we’ll talk more about how to manipulate the reps and sets of the volume and intensity days to continue your strength progress.
