Transcribed from video:
– Alright, let’s talk about the importance of cycling the intensity here. Because what you’ll find is you don’t just want an even, doing the same amount of work every single day. We want a little bit of variation there. Alright, who has a rest day during the week? Cool. Um, who trains six days a week? Alright. Would you say you work at a similar sort of intensity volume on all of those six days? Is there any pattern there of waves, oscillations? Who intentionally changes the loading over the space of a week? Alright. Who has someone do it for them?
– Is that why you’re smiling? Yeah. Okay. So what we can look at it is we can assign each session type a score on a scale of one to four. Now again, this is just the scale that I’ve come up with. You may have your own way of doing this. But this is what I’ve found has worked well for me. And I call this a neuromuscular fatigue rating scale. And I have a blog and podcast episode on that for anyone who wants to delve into it a little further. But we are going to go into it in some detail now. And what this does is, it looks at the effect an individual session has on your body. How much it leaves you feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck. And it’s quite simple. There are four numbers on this scale. One, two, three, four. Session one is a very low neuromuscular fatigue rating. So you finish it and you feel refreshed. It feels good. It hasn’t smashed you. They do exist. Alright? These sessions are very high neuromuscular fatigue rating. So someone tell me a session that they’ve done this week that’s left them feeling refreshed and energised, feeling good, yeah that was good, I’m really positive after that. Someone give me a session that’s like that. Go for it.
– [Student] Walking for 90 minutes.
– Perfect. So a 90-minute walk. It’s going to leave you feeling good, you’re out in nature. There’s still benefit to it. It’s not that there’s no benefit to that session. There’s a huge benefit there, but you’ll feel better at the end of that than you were at the start. Someone give me one of these. Who’s done a session that’s a four? That leaves you feeling like you’re in trouble.
– Why was there so much hate in your face as you said that to me?
– Alright. It’s ’cause I rode the event. For those of you that don’t know, that’s why. Okay, how did you feel at the end of that session?
– [Student] Like I wanted to like down and fall asleep.
– Okay. It completely breaks you down. Yeah. Now too much of that, you guys can see, is not a good thing. If you go out in the sun, although I’m not obviously recommending this, your body adapts by making your skin a couple shades darker to try and protect you from future bouts of sunburn. It’s how our body tries to protect us. Obviously it’s not a healthy thing to do. It’s our body’s response to the stimulus being the sunlight. But if you, on the first day of summer, go out into the sun, you get burned. And then the second day and third and fourth you do the same, our body’s not adapting to try and protect ourselves. Same thing would happen here. If you keep applying this excessive stimulus, our body’s not going to be able to adapt to protect ourselves from future damage. So this is a session that I would say is going to leave you feeling sore for a couple of days after. So you do a big, lots of barbells, lots of dead lifts, heavy squats. Yeah, there’s a heap of benefit, but it leaves you feeling broken and down for a couple of days after that. And it during those couple of days, you’re then trying to add more stimulus into it, we start to get some issues where you’re not over-training, you’re under-recovering. And we’ll talk about that tomorrow in our lecture on recovery work. So we can assign every session we do a rating on a scale of one to four. Sessions that really break us down, sessions that leave us feeling good, sessions that are somewhere in the middle. So let’s call this, examples, 90-minute walk. As long as you’ve got some basic proficiency, I would also put swimming in there. So even if swimming is hard and it’s a hard session, it leaves you feeling good, doesn’t it? You aren’t sore and smashed the next day. You don’t feel like you’ve been hit by that truck. This one, heavy breathing, heavy lifting, high reps. Really breaks you down. Maybe this session here would be what I would call a Complete Relative Stamina session. So high-rep, body weight movements. And maybe the multi-modals that we talked about, where you’re not limited by the localised muscular stamina or strength but your cardio and your endurance. Maybe that multi-modal type session would be in there. And you can see all those sessions we talked about on our four-circle Venn diagram. We can assign each of them a score on a scale of one to four. Does that make sense to everyone? Yeah? So then what do we actually do with that? Well, let’s look at our training week and let’s look at Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. There’s our week of training. Now what we can do is, every session that we do on the Monday, we can give a score to. So let’s say on the Monday, if we bring it back to this model, on the Monday we are doing a power-lifting session and a work capacity session. The power-lifting session, maybe that’s going to be a three. It’s going to have a decent impact on the body. So the power-lifting session is going to be a three. That’s going to be our rating. We do a work capacity session. Let’s say we do a multi-modal type session which we’ve already said is a two. So now we are up to five on a Monday. This is just a very simple way to rate how much stimulus, how much impact you’ve put on your body. So on Monday we’ve done five, whatever five happens to be. Then maybe on Tuesday we’ve got a big training day. On Tuesday we’re going to do a body weight session and we’re going to do two cardio endurance-based sessions. So we’ve got three sessions there. Maybe one is a three, one is a two, one is a one. And then on Wednesday, and you can start to assign a score to each session you’re doing to see what sort of impact it has on your body. The Wednesday then, we may go a four and a three. That’s a big training day. You’re working hard there. Because of that, you then need to back it off a little bit. So what I would traditionally do, somewhere in the middle of your training week, whether your training week is Monday to Friday, or Monday to Sunday, or Monday to next Wednesday, however it happens to work for you. Somewhere in the middle of that, you want to bring that down again. And you want to do sessions which are still going to be training you but are not going to be breaking you down. So maybe on that day, that’s when we just put an Olympic lifting session. Alright, so it’s a light Olympic lifting session. And we only trained once that day. Let’s call that a two. And there’s your training for Thursday. A lot of people that I programme for, Thursday’s where I would put the swim. You’re still getting so much benefit, you guys know that. You spend half an hour in the pool, you get out and you feel like you’ve got a lot of benefit from it. It’s not that there’s any less benefit from a one out of four than a four out of four. It’s just that it’s a different type of session. And then you would build this back up, Friday and Saturday here and then Sunday may be your rest day. So we can cycle our stimulus, cycle the amount of impact, effects, stimulus that we’re placing on the body, by looking at the neuromuscular fatigue rating of different session types and making sure we get this sort of pattern of double undulation like this. Because we go stimulus, recovery, response. Stimulus, recovery, response. Our stimulus is the exercise we’re doing. Our recovery is not doing exercise. Not re-burning the skin. Our response is improving or getting better as a result of that.
