Training Hard All The Time is Killing Your Gains

Hard, fatiguing training is required. However, doing so all the time is a recipe to run yourself into the ground, mask your performance, and spin your wheels. In this video, Josh Pelland breaks down how to think through the goal of each training day and how this should change over time.

Chapters

00:00 Intro
00:37 Primary Days
02:17 Individualizing Primary Days
03:30 Primary Day Hypertrophy Work
04:43 Secondary Days
06:00 Individualizing Secondary Days
06:25 Periodizing Secondary Days
08:26 Takeaway

Transcript

If you’re having a hard time building momentum in your powerlifting or general strength training, this is the video for you.

Today, we’re going to provide a framework to ensure you’re simultaneously pushing your limits to promote adaptations while also managing fatigue.

What’s going on, my name is Josh Pelland. I’m a strength coach and exercise scientist. I’m also a co-owner at Data Driven Strength, and if you’re new here, we help lifters maximize strength and hypertrophy by integrating research into practice.

With that, let’s jump right into our framework for balancing hard training with fatigue management, starting by differentiating between primary and secondary days.

As the name suggests, a primary day is the highest priority day for a given lift. I generally like to separate primary days for my clients throughout the week - so primary squat, bench press, and deadlift are on different days. However, this is subject to individualization and lifter preference.

The biggest thing to note is that the training week is designed to have the strongest performance of the week for the lift on the primary day. This requires some trial and error, but as a basic example, our Infinity Programs system - which is a lower cost programming option we offer - uses an individualization quiz that directly asks if the lifter seems to perform better with their primary days earlier versus later in the week.

Once you have your primary day for a given lift identified, the key characteristic of it from a programming perspective is that it is the day with the highest loads. This is generally going to be through one or multiple top sets of 1-5 reps at a relatively high RPE.

Deciding how heavy to make the top set on a primary day could be a whole video itself, but I generally like to vary this by starting around 4 or 5 reps far away from a competition or test day and then progressing to singles. However, there are massive individual differences here. For example, some of my clients do 4 singles per week on bench press almost year-round whereas others may only do singles on bench press within a few weeks of a competition or test day.

Now, physiologically, it makes sense to bias heavier loads given the strong relationship we see in the research between heavier loads and strength gains.

However, most studies are relatively short-term - around 10 weeks on average - and thus do not account for the sustainability that is required for maximizing long term progression. So, in practice, when making these calls on the individual level, the main consideration is tolerance. If low rep, high load training is difficult to recover from for the individual - such as by causing an ache or a pain to flare up - it’s often smart to pull back as needed to ensure quality training can be accumulated over time.

Then, after the heaviest work on the primary day, there are a lot of possibilities. However, after one or multiple top sets and then one or multiple backoff sets on the main lift, I often find myself also programming the most difficult hypertrophy work of the week to grow the prime movers of the lift, such as 2-5 sets of Romanian Deadlift close to failure for deadlift.

This is because a well executed hypertrophy movement that takes the target muscles to a long length and close to failure - as the evidence suggests is necessary to maximize hypertrophy - is going to be quite fatiguing. So, doing this right after the heaviest work of the week gives you the most time to recover before circling back to your primary day in the following week.

So, to summarize, the main goal of primary days is high quality practice with heavy loads on the main lift. And again, these days are often also “polarized” because we like to also have hard hypertrophy training on these days.

Now, there can only be one primary day, and we’ll often have more than one day per week training each lift or a close variation of it, so that’s where secondary days come in. And just to be clear, I’ll use the term “secondary” for any day that isn’t a primary day; so, you can have multiple secondary days for a given lift.

Now, how you go about programming secondary days are where things get interesting and can really make or break your strength momentum.

On one hand, secondary days are vital for strength progress as the research indicates that more than one session per week can be beneficial as it allows for more quality training within the week, and anecdotally, a methodical increase in frequency can often break plateaus.

On the other hand, given we want to ensure high performance on the primary day, we also want to avoid causing very high fatigue that we can’t recovery from by the time we get to our next primary day.

As you can probably guess, the cost-benefit analysis here is going to largely be determined on an individual level. Some lifters can have one or multiple very challenging secondary days and still recover for the primary day. Other lifters may need to be much more conservative.

Another factor that determines the cost-benefit analysis when programming secondary days is proximity to a competition or test day. This is where periodization comes in, which is simply the strategic manipulation of training variables over time.

When far out from competition or a test day, it may be worth it to compromise some recovery going into the primary day to ensure a good hypertrophy stimulus is provided on the secondary day. For example, the secondary day may be a couple easier sets of high bar squats followed by a hypertrophy slot, such as a quad-biased split squat to grow the prime mover in the squat.

When approaching a competition or a test day, the performance on the primary day becomes more and more important, so we may want to drop the secondary day hypertrophy slot to spare fatigue.

Another reason we can get away with dropping the secondary day hypertrophy slot is because when close to competition or a test day, hypertrophy work is going to have less of a direct effect on your strength progress.

Additionally, there’s some evidence to suggest that performing a lower fatigue day of the main lift before the primary day can lead to greater strength gains.

Ultimately, this is likely because it increases the peak loads you’re able to lift on the primary day, which again, seems to be one of the strongest predictors of short- to moderate-term strength gains.

So, if you’re struggling to build momentum with your powerlifting or general strength training, take a good look at how your secondary days are currently being programmed. A lot of the time, you’ll want them to also provide a solid hypertrophy stimulus, but if they’re taking away from your ability to train with high peak loads when close to competition or a testing day, it may be worth making those days easier to allow performance on the primary day to emerge.