Isn't all programming bullshit?

[atsm]

Hi,

I've been lifting for over a decade. I'm 30, 6'0, 210lbs and my best lifts are:

SQ 515x5
PR 220x3
BP 280x5
DL 580x5 (640x1)

All my technique is modeled after the SS stuff... and my programming is somewhat similar to TM. I've tried various programming and it all just seems like complete bullshit to me. I like SS-style (and by that I mean anything in PP) simply because after I've set a new 5RM I know I've gotten stronger. I never felt any stronger from doing a bunch of volume. When I say my programming is similar to TM, I mean without the volume. I tried doing the 5x5 squats and it just beat me up and didn't make me stronger. I've squatted 500+x5 on various occasions, and each time I got there I was just doing a single set of 5 once a week. I do some volume for upperbody stuff... pretty much just press. My shoulder can't tolerate bench volume.

My future goals are to pull 700, squat 600, and press 275. So I was doing a bit of reading and thought maybe I'd venture out of the SS dogma a bit and see what other people are doing. I looked a bit at BBM. But it just seems retarded. All that RPE and volume. I've tried RPE shit before and doing doodoo like dynamic squats (yes yes I know that's part of late-stage TM) and didn't feel I was gaining anything from the complexity.

My view is: no one understands the biological processes that are going on to produce adaptation to stress -- and no one understands which stress to apply to produce the greatest strength adaptations. We can just take guesses based on experience. And sure, that works really well for a novice program like the SSLP. But then for a more advanced lifter like myself, nothing starts to make sense anymore. The advanced stress-adaption-recovery timeline for advanced lifters can be a month. Who the fuck can control all their training variables so well that they can consistently make progress on a month-to-month basis? I just don't understand how this complexity helps anyone.

Even things like switching deadlifts to rack-pulls and haltings like Rip recommends seems dumb to me. I understand the idea -- but I tried it and it didn't seem to help at all. Instead, when my sets of 5 get past the 550lbs range or so, I just switch to doing the sets of 5 once every 3 weeks. So I have a reduction in volume, the opposite of what most people seem to advocate outside of SS, but it works!

I just can't imagine that our bodies care so much about exactly what produced the stress, and how much volume, etc etc etc. I know from experience that a true 5RM squat and deadlift is a whole bunch of stress and if you can recover from it, you get stronger.

Am I really so wrong to think that I can attain my strength goals continuing my simple as fuck 3-day a week programming without variations?

My program:

Day 1:
SQ 3x5 light (i've gone through periods where I do these and where I don't. doesn't seem to matter)
PR 5RM
Strict PR 3x5

Day 2:
PR 5 singles
BP 3x5
DB inc bench

Day 2:
SQ 5RM
PR 2x3
DL 5/3/1RM Cycle
Weighted chins

[dw]

If it works for you it works for you. Some people need very little volume.

[Hardartery]

Everything stops working after a while, then you adapt. The smarter approach is to do what works until it doesn't, then make small changes. Throwing out the whole program and jumping headfirst into something totally different tends to be a dumb idea too. At some point you will need to cycle in some higher volume for abit - not because your lifts get better while you are doing it but because it gives you a bit of a reset to get progress again at what was working before, if you get what I'm saying with that clear as mud sentence.
Like Speed Work, or Dynamic Effort, or whatever it's being called. You don't see anything out of it right off, but a block or two of it kinda resets things when low volume progress stops.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

The fact that you have to figure out what type of programming works for you through trial and error does not make programming "bullshit".

What is actual bullshit is people selling you non individualized templates and giving broad recommendations like "beginners should do sets of X reps", or "the best exercise to bring up your squat is Y", or "anyone who does program Z will gain 30 lbs on their squat" or whatever.

Some people need a lot of volume at medium intensities, some people need a small amount of volume at high intensities, some people need to squat 3 times a week, some people need to squat 1 times a week etc. As you alluded to, the body is an extremely complex, adaptive system, and so it's impossible to predict what type of program will yield good results without trying it a few times and logging your training to analyze the results. That's more or less the RTS approach to programming, and it seems to work pretty well.

Also, if the program that you highlighted has yielded good results in the past, why do you think that it's unreasonable that it will continue to give you good results in the future ?

PS: is "halting deadlift" rippetoe-speak for paused deadlifts ?

[janoycresva]

Hi,

I've been lifting for over a decade. I'm 30, 6'0, 210lbs and my best lifts are:

SQ 515x5
PR 220x3
BP 280x5
DL 580x5 (640x1)

All my technique is modeled after the SS stuff... and my programming is somewhat similar to TM. I've tried various programming and it all just seems like complete bullshit to me. I like SS-style (and by that I mean anything in PP) simply because after I've set a new 5RM I know I've gotten stronger. I never felt any stronger from doing a bunch of volume. When I say my programming is similar to TM, I mean without the volume. I tried doing the 5x5 squats and it just beat me up and didn't make me stronger. I've squatted 500+x5 on various occasions, and each time I got there I was just doing a single set of 5 once a week. I do some volume for upperbody stuff... pretty much just press. My shoulder can't tolerate bench volume.

My future goals are to pull 700, squat 600, and press 275. So I was doing a bit of reading and thought maybe I'd venture out of the SS dogma a bit and see what other people are doing. I looked a bit at BBM. But it just seems retarded. All that RPE and volume. I've tried RPE shit before and doing doodoo like dynamic squats (yes yes I know that's part of late-stage TM) and didn't feel I was gaining anything from the complexity.

My view is: no one understands the biological processes that are going on to produce adaptation to stress -- and no one understands which stress to apply to produce the greatest strength adaptations. We can just take guesses based on experience. And sure, that works really well for a novice program like the SSLP. But then for a more advanced lifter like myself, nothing starts to make sense anymore. The advanced stress-adaption-recovery timeline for advanced lifters can be a month. Who the fuck can control all their training variables so well that they can consistently make progress on a month-to-month basis? I just don't understand how this complexity helps anyone.

Even things like switching deadlifts to rack-pulls and haltings like Rip recommends seems dumb to me. I understand the idea -- but I tried it and it didn't seem to help at all. Instead, when my sets of 5 get past the 550lbs range or so, I just switch to doing the sets of 5 once every 3 weeks. So I have a reduction in volume, the opposite of what most people seem to advocate outside of SS, but it works!

I just can't imagine that our bodies care so much about exactly what produced the stress, and how much volume, etc etc etc. I know from experience that a true 5RM squat and deadlift is a whole bunch of stress and if you can recover from it, you get stronger.

Am I really so wrong to think that I can attain my strength goals continuing my simple as fuck 3-day a week programming without variations?

My program:

Day 1:
SQ 3x5 light (i've gone through periods where I do these and where I don't. doesn't seem to matter)
PR 5RM
Strict PR 3x5

Day 2:
PR 5 singles
BP 3x5
DB inc bench

Day 2:
SQ 5RM
PR 2x3
DL 5/3/1RM Cycle
Weighted chins

I don't think programming is bullshit, but anecdotally I've never tried a program or programming style (over about, uh, 12 years of training now?) that resulted in dramatically better gains than another program. At best, the differences between some meme program that everyone shits on like Texas Method and the most hyperoptimized gigabrain Nuckols or BBM programming were really marginal, and in some cases the more optimized Scientific™
programs produced worse results or had me get weaker.

I think consistency, effort, and above all genetics (and I really do mean above all, by fucking far, John Haack halfheartedly doing a brosplit would outlift anyone here easily) just shit all over programming adjustments in terms of results.

[mgil]

TM sucks

SRA is bullshit

Programming is difficult

[mgil]

Follow up on SRA because I hate it so much as defined in SS lore.

The body certainly adapts to inputs that are stressors. And yes, these can vary greatly. However, things like muscle protein synthesis actually accelerate with training insofar that the body gets better at building muscle; it has to in order to support both hypertrophy and replacement of existing tissue simultaneously.

What hampers most “advanced” (stupid fucking SS hierarchy) lifters is fatigue and inflammation management. Quite often the percentages being lifted are too high and the lifter is simply too beat up to recover. But the SS acolyte is ill-prepared to mentally work through larger blocks of 50-70% volumes and feel like they are doing work because of how they’ve been mentally trained to feel post workout.

In a lot of seasoned capable lifters, you’ll often see a lot of volume accumulation at these lower percentages while they still maintain skill display/maximum intensity via a weekly heavy set of small reps.

The issue with SS-bred splits is that the intensity, like in TM, ends up being an @9+ set weekly and the lighter days aren’t light enough. When looking at the other advance programming stuff in SS world, it’s still too high of an intensity dose, but then it’s spread out too far. This is what often causes the flatline or regression: lack of skill display work.

[janoycresva]

What hampers most “advanced” (stupid fucking SS hierarchy) lifters is fatigue and inflammation management. Quite often the percentages being lifted are too high and the lifter is simply too beat up to recover. But the SS acolyte is ill-prepared to mentally work through larger blocks of 50-70% volumes and feel like they are doing work because of how they’ve been mentally trained to feel post workout.

I'm not particularly advanced in a numbers sense, but definitely advanced in a rate-of-progression sense, and what hampers me by far the most is that my rate of progression is so agonizingly slow that a year of solid training can be (and has been, several times now) totally wiped out by a minor injury.

It results in this retarded cycle of putting 20lbs on X lift, getting an overuse injury or some other random tweak, regressing 40-50lbs, and working my way back up through the same weight range. I don't see a way around this at this point - if I want to make progress I need to train with fairly high volume and frequency, but my body just isn't resilient enough to survive that.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

What hampers most “advanced” (stupid fucking SS hierarchy) lifters is fatigue and inflammation management. Quite often the percentages being lifted are too high and the lifter is simply too beat up to recover. But the SS acolyte is ill-prepared to mentally work through larger blocks of 50-70% volumes and feel like they are doing work because of how they’ve been mentally trained to feel post workout.

I'm not particularly advanced in a numbers sense, but definitely advanced in a rate-of-progression sense, and what hampers me by far the most is that my rate of progression is so agonizingly slow that a year of solid training can be (and has been, several times now) totally wiped out by a minor injury.

It results in this retarded cycle of putting 20lbs on X lift, getting an overuse injury or some other random tweak, regressing 40-50lbs, and working my way back up through the same weight range. I don't see a way around this at this point - if I want to make progress I need to train with fairly high volume and frequency, but my body just isn't resilient enough to survive that.

In that case aren't you the type of people for whom programming should theoretically matter the most (need high volume to progress but prone to injury) ? If somebody can tolerate insane volumes and never get injured, just have them do a million sets, and they'll grow, regardless of programming.

Also I feel that fatigue management and injury management cannot be disentangled.

[janoycresva]

In that case aren't you the type of people for whom programming should theoretically matter the most (need high volume to progress but prone to injury) ? If somebody can tolerate insane volumes and never get injured, just have them do a million sets, and they'll grow, regardless of programming.
Also I feel that fatigue management and injury management cannot be disentangled.

My injury rate is about the same on any programming I've tried with the exception of BBM templates, which maimed me every single time. Probably once every 6 months I'll pick up something minor that interferes with training, probably once a year I'll pick up something that seriously fucks with my ability to do a major lift or requires me to substitute it temporarily. It's less that the injuries are so bad or frequent (they're not), and more that my rate of progression on any programming I can actually survive is fucking glacial, so each injury really sets me back.

Tbh at this point I understand (as much as I try to delude myself otherwise) that I'm just not going to lift very much more than I already have without either blasting steroids or becoming grotesquely obese, and it's getting really hard mentally to trudge back through the same weight range just to fuck myself up again and redo the whole thing. I just don't care as much about being strong as I did 10 years ago. At some point I'll likely snap my shit one final time, excise anything resembling a barbell compound from my training, and LARP as a bodybuilder.

[MarkKO]

My two cents after nine odd years doing this:

All programming really is, is managing fatigue. That's it. Pick whatever program or system you like, what it's designed to do is make sure you accumulate enough fatigue to drive adaptation but not accumulate so much you can't keep training.

The rest is really just personal preference and individual characteristics.

I've found if you listen to most higher level lifters who've been at that level for a long time, you hear again and again that the game changer for them was figuring out how to manage fatigue. Sleep, food, stressors, etc.

The only really 'complicated' part is that what it takes to manage fatigue changes as you change, and you have to keep up with that.

[janoycresva]

The only really 'complicated' part is that what it takes to manage fatigue changes as you change, and you have to keep up with that.

Not only that, but sometimes the margins between enough work to cause adaptation and too much work to recover from are pretty slim. Add to that lifestyle factors like a career with unpredictable stress peaks and you're trying to thread a fatigue needle and usually just bouncing around between too little and too much.

[MarkKO]

The only really 'complicated' part is that what it takes to manage fatigue changes as you change, and you have to keep up with that.

Not only that, but sometimes the margins between enough work to cause adaptation and too much work to recover from are pretty slim. Add to that lifestyle factors like a career with unpredictable stress peaks and you're trying to thread a fatigue needle and usually just bouncing around between too little and too much.

I'll be honest, I've never found this to be the case.

Absolutely there are times when external factors have a very significant impact, but if you have a good setup in terms of nutrition and sleep management that will usually see you through without too much of a disruption.

What really messes things up are injuries or illness that take more than a week or two to fix. It doesn't matter how good your nutrition and sleep setup is, that will throw a decent spanner in the works.

I do think that generally speaking, three things will make your recovery ability much better and stop external stressors impacting too much:

- having a perspective of what is the least amount of work you can do to progress instead of the most, so that you only add work when you are absolutely certain it is needed;
- making a concerted effort to improve conditioning and work capacity, because it tends to make you more resilient overall and definitely improves your ability to recover from whatever work you're doing; and
- focusing more on diet and sleep than what you're doing in the gym, because that is the main determinant of recovery, not training.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

The only really 'complicated' part is that what it takes to manage fatigue changes as you change, and you have to keep up with that.

Not only that, but sometimes the margins between enough work to cause adaptation and too much work to recover from are pretty slim. Add to that lifestyle factors like a career with unpredictable stress peaks and you're trying to thread a fatigue needle and usually just bouncing around between too little and too much.

I'll be honest, I've never found this to be the case.

Absolutely there are times when external factors have a very significant impact, but if you have a good setup in terms of nutrition and sleep management that will usually see you through without too much of a disruption.

What really messes things up are injuries or illness that take more than a week or two to fix. It doesn't matter how good your nutrition and sleep setup is, that will throw a decent spanner in the works.

I do think that generally speaking, three things will make your recovery ability much better and stop external stressors impacting too much:

- having a perspective of what is the least amount of work you can do to progress instead of the most, so that you only add work when you are absolutely certain it is needed;
- making a concerted effort to improve conditioning and work capacity, because it tends to make you more resilient overall and definitely improves your ability to recover from whatever work you're doing; and
- focusing more on diet and sleep than what you're doing in the gym, because that is the main determinant of recovery, not training.

I agree with that. I always do quite a bit of high reps / conditionning stuff (closet bodybuilder) , and I never got any serious injury in 5+ years of lifting. Or maybe I've got good genetics for injury resistance (and I'm also weak ...).

[MarkKO]

The only really 'complicated' part is that what it takes to manage fatigue changes as you change, and you have to keep up with that.

Not only that, but sometimes the margins between enough work to cause adaptation and too much work to recover from are pretty slim. Add to that lifestyle factors like a career with unpredictable stress peaks and you're trying to thread a fatigue needle and usually just bouncing around between too little and too much.

I'll be honest, I've never found this to be the case.

Absolutely there are times when external factors have a very significant impact, but if you have a good setup in terms of nutrition and sleep management that will usually see you through without too much of a disruption.

What really messes things up are injuries or illness that take more than a week or two to fix. It doesn't matter how good your nutrition and sleep setup is, that will throw a decent spanner in the works.

I do think that generally speaking, three things will make your recovery ability much better and stop external stressors impacting too much:

- having a perspective of what is the least amount of work you can do to progress instead of the most, so that you only add work when you are absolutely certain it is needed;
- making a concerted effort to improve conditioning and work capacity, because it tends to make you more resilient overall and definitely improves your ability to recover from whatever work you're doing; and
- focusing more on diet and sleep than what you're doing in the gym, because that is the main determinant of recovery, not training.

I agree with that. I always do quite a bit of high reps / conditionning stuff (closet bodybuilder) , and I never got any serious injury in 5+ years of lifting. Or maybe I've got good genetics for injury resistance (and I'm also weak ...).

Bit of both?

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

The only really 'complicated' part is that what it takes to manage fatigue changes as you change, and you have to keep up with that.

Not only that, but sometimes the margins between enough work to cause adaptation and too much work to recover from are pretty slim. Add to that lifestyle factors like a career with unpredictable stress peaks and you're trying to thread a fatigue needle and usually just bouncing around between too little and too much.

I'll be honest, I've never found this to be the case.

Absolutely there are times when external factors have a very significant impact, but if you have a good setup in terms of nutrition and sleep management that will usually see you through without too much of a disruption.

What really messes things up are injuries or illness that take more than a week or two to fix. It doesn't matter how good your nutrition and sleep setup is, that will throw a decent spanner in the works.

I do think that generally speaking, three things will make your recovery ability much better and stop external stressors impacting too much:

- having a perspective of what is the least amount of work you can do to progress instead of the most, so that you only add work when you are absolutely certain it is needed;
- making a concerted effort to improve conditioning and work capacity, because it tends to make you more resilient overall and definitely improves your ability to recover from whatever work you're doing; and
- focusing more on diet and sleep than what you're doing in the gym, because that is the main determinant of recovery, not training.

I agree with that. I always do quite a bit of high reps / conditionning stuff (closet bodybuilder) , and I never got any serious injury in 5+ years of lifting. Or maybe I've got good genetics for injury resistance (and I'm also weak ...).

Bit of both?

Probably ! Until I figure it out I'll keep going for that pump

[Goat]

I don't know that I'd say it's bullshit, but I have started to suspect that the difference between a program that merely works and a program that is "optimal" is actually extremely small.

Just seems like about 95% of results just come down to "train every muscle group with high enough intensity a couple times a week" and the minutiae of programming covers the last 5%.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

I don't know that I'd say it's bullshit, but I have started to suspect that the difference between a program that merely works and a program that is "optimal" is actually extremely small.

Just seems like about 95% of results just come down to "train every muscle group with high enough intensity a couple times a week" and the minutiae of programming covers the last 5%.

I had periods of time in which I surely "trained every muscle group a couple times a week with high enough intensity" but made no progress.

Now I partially agree with you in the sense that people who don't train hard enough will get no results anyhow. But those who do train hard enough are not guaranteed to have results.

[Hardartery]

My two cents after nine odd years doing this:

All programming really is, is managing fatigue. That's it. Pick whatever program or system you like, what it's designed to do is make sure you accumulate enough fatigue to drive adaptation but not accumulate so much you can't keep training.

The rest is really just personal preference and individual characteristics.

I've found if you listen to most higher level lifters who've been at that level for a long time, you hear again and again that the game changer for them was figuring out how to manage fatigue. Sleep, food, stressors, etc.

The only really 'complicated' part is that what it takes to manage fatigue changes as you change, and you have to keep up with that.

Easy to say, hard to do. In this trend at the moment of hitting everything 6 times a week (that is an exaggeration for those not reading the sarcasm) the background noise pushes everyone to do more volume. More volume is bullshit once you hit a certain level. It has it's place, but that is a different place than when you have 6 months of lifting under your belt.
Case in point, my deadlift last Saturday. Shoukd I have deadlifted? It was a week since the last DL session, so most would consider that to be low frequency and that I should maybe consider adding another session a week at a minimum. That is in fact a great way to kill my DL. Once a week is honestly probably too often at this point, especially as I am starting to push the Squats and leg day in general. I probably should NOT have done DL on Saturday, it was too soon, and that plays a role in how crappy it went. I got a single at the top weight and that should have been easily a double with more in the tank. So, I have a choice now. Wait more than a week and repeat the session and see what happens, or change up the programming. I know that for a certainty the thing I will NOT be doing is adding more DL sessions per week, experience tells me that is the wrong direction. If I leave it a little longer between sessions I will probably continue to progress my DL with current programming, or I can go nuclear with an experimental thing that I have in mind. Either way, I am not fully recovering on that heavy CNS drain stuff right now.

[MarkKO]

My two cents after nine odd years doing this:

All programming really is, is managing fatigue. That's it. Pick whatever program or system you like, what it's designed to do is make sure you accumulate enough fatigue to drive adaptation but not accumulate so much you can't keep training.

The rest is really just personal preference and individual characteristics.

I've found if you listen to most higher level lifters who've been at that level for a long time, you hear again and again that the game changer for them was figuring out how to manage fatigue. Sleep, food, stressors, etc.

The only really 'complicated' part is that what it takes to manage fatigue changes as you change, and you have to keep up with that.

Easy to say, hard to do. In this trend at the moment of hitting everything 6 times a week (that is an exaggeration for those not reading the sarcasm) the background noise pushes everyone to do more volume. More volume is bullshit once you hit a certain level. It has it's place, but that is a different place than when you have 6 months of lifting under your belt.
Case in point, my deadlift last Saturday. Shoukd I have deadlifted? It was a week since the last DL session, so most would consider that to be low frequency and that I should maybe consider adding another session a week at a minimum. That is in fact a great way to kill my DL. Once a week is honestly probably too often at this point, especially as I am starting to push the Squats and leg day in general. I probably should NOT have done DL on Saturday, it was too soon, and that plays a role in how crappy it went. I got a single at the top weight and that should have been easily a double with more in the tank. So, I have a choice now. Wait more than a week and repeat the session and see what happens, or change up the programming. I know that for a certainty the thing I will NOT be doing is adding more DL sessions per week, experience tells me that is the wrong direction. If I leave it a little longer between sessions I will probably continue to progress my DL with current programming, or I can go nuclear with an experimental thing that I have in mind. Either way, I am not fully recovering on that heavy CNS drain stuff right now.

No lie there.