This is an edited repost of my late comment to the previous week. I report it, to ask one more question and to get some more opinions.
Last month I analyzed my workout log from last year and made some interesting observations.
There are some exercises where I progress week by week, and there are some exercises where I did not progress for a long time and even regressed. I wondered why.
My strongest exercise is the leg-press. Here, I consistently increase the weight by 5kg every two weeks. In this exercise I have a TUL of 1:45 min to 2 minutes.
According to the book, I could increase the weight, until my TUL is 60 sec, and then progress until I reach the 90 sec limit. Unfortunately, the mechanics of the machine is such that I start in a deep squat position which presents a sticking point. Thus, the first weight that I can lift from this position will give me a TUL of at least 1:45 min. From there, it takes me two workouts to reach a TUL of over 2 min.
My weakest exercise is the narrow grip pulldown. Here I am stuck at the same load for 6 month now. I pull 60kg with a body weight of 80kg (and below 14% body fat). The load is not even enough to do one chin-up! Here my TUL is 1:15. Chest-press and shoulder press are similar in TUL and lack of progress.
Now, following some comments from this board, I decided to raise the weight by the smallest possible amount. This worked for one workout, but then my TUL actually decreased! The following week, I decreased the weights to the previous level and noted a strong decrease of the TUL. Note, all this happened while I am consistently improving on the leg press.
So what went wrong?
BBS tells us that there is a minimum of time you must be under load in order to activate all your fibers (TULmin). And then there is an upper limit (TULmax), beyond which you reactivate fibers that were already used. So we should choose a weight that lets us achieve the lower limit of TUL and then do the exercise until we reach TULmax.
Comparing the successful and the non successful exercises, we notice the much longer TUL for the leg press. So maybe, I generally need a longer TUL to induce adaptation. A time between 60 and 90 second just seems too short. Anyway, during 90 secs, I manage just 2-3 reps of the pulldown.
To test this, I lowered the weights in the next workout, so that the TUL is around 2 min. After the workout, I compared the TUL with my old values from several month ago and found that I did *not* even reach these values anymore. This agrees with something that is written latter in BBS: If we don’t increase the load regularly, we start to regress. Apparently, by staying on the same load for too long, I had regressed more than I feared.
What does that mean for the workout? It means that rather than continually increasing the TUL, until TULmax is reached, I now maintain a target TUL while continually increasing the weight. Well, I increase it every other workout. To achieve this, I had to reduce the weight increments for pulldowns and chest press to 1.25 kg. This is a bit tricky, because the smallest increment of the machines is 5kg. In the leg press, my increments are 5kg at a load of 200kg.
What I have learned is:
1. The target TUL maybe longer than 90 secs. For me it is around 2 min.
2. I increase the weight every other workout.
3. The weight increase should be so small that the target TUL is reached latest after 1 workout.
Does this match your experience?
Now Dr. McGouff commented basically what he wrote in this week’s post: That tweaking the stimulus may be good, but working on the recovery side may be better.
My first comment regards the optimal TUL. I still have the impression that a TUL of under 90 secs is just too short for me. I simply don’t progress, while I do make tremendous steps, I my TUL is between 90-120 secs.
So maybe my recovery is not good enough. Which would mean that I simply cannot recover from the heavy load that allows me only 60-90 secs TUL.
I have tried different recovery times in the past. Basically anything from 6 days to 21 days.
- Below 6 days, I fail to reach my TUL.
- Between 6 and 10 days, I can reach or exceed my TUL.
- Beyond 10 days, I regress in all movements except the leg press, where I still progress after 14 days.
So here are my questions:
1. regarding TUL: How fixed are the 60-90 sec limits given in BBS. Isn’t it conceivable that these times depend on the fiber profile and thus vary in both directions?
2. So how can I improve recovery without simply extending recovery time? I do sleep roughly 8 h per night and I don’t have a job that requires physical work.
This is the response I got from Doug McGuff:
@Marc- the 60-90 second guideline is just that…a guideline. Many factors from your own fiber type mix, to equipment issues can make the ideal TUL fall outside these boundries. One way of addressing the recovery issue is to rotate subfailure effort on your upper body movements (which seem more recovery-fragile). For instance, stop your push movements short of failure one week and your pull movements the next and perhaps legs on the next-then repeat. A good stopping point is 85% of your previous TUL to failure. This allows you to “recruit but not exhaust” the FT fibers. Theoretically this should prevent decompensation without overtaxing recovery.
