As we know by now, your mental and emotional condition is a crucial part of stress, and it’s also key to workout performance. When I talk about “light” training and “heavy” training, your emotional state is inseparable from that. “Heavy” training is that dig-in, drop some adrenaline, strain on nerve-power type of session where you get blasted out of your skull to train ― taking stimulants, listening to loud music, brooding for three hours before lifting.
Easy days are meant to be chill. You want to be relaxed mentally as well as physically. “Physically relaxed” is probably the wrong way to say this, as exercise is physically strenuous by definition, but the idea is more that you aren’t pushing to any limits. If you’re keeping the mental energy dialed back, this won’t be an issue. On these days, chilling out is as much a part of the workout as getting hyped up is for the hard days.
We can talk about intensity and volume and all that, and those things are important, but it’s the psychological and emotional that I am most concerned with. I want to emphasize again that it isn’t what you see ― the workouts ― that is so important to recovery, but what happens outside the gym, throughout the rest of your life. These factors are often invisible, sinking into the background noise of life as we take them for granted. But all that chronic stress adds up, and it is far more damaging both to your performance and your health than a one-hour workout every day.
Learning to relax in the rest of your life is as critical to this process as what you do during training.
This is emphasis on both the visible and the hidden aspects of recovery is the centerpiece of our strategy, no matter what your actual workout ends up looking like. My program design strategy will focus on when and where to drop adrenaline and go all-in, and when to pull back and stay easy.
Drawing on the Longtails Strategy, we’ll be putting this asymmetry between brief, stressful effort and cool relaxation to work. Our mindset needs to be thus: Light is light. Heavy is heavy. The middle ground is best avoided. Light doesn’t mean literally lifting 10 lb dumbbells, and likewise heavy doesn’t mean a 300kg squat. These terms are vague at best, so let me clarify that I’m talking about a somewhat less vague idea which I’ll call training
effectiveness.
Training effectiveness is all the effortful things about the workout. Heavy weights count. High reps taken to the limit, even as high as 20-30 or more, count. Even high volume, short rest types of training can qualify. Anything involving mental effort, grinding, and straining ― and lots of it ― would be a “heavy” workout by this standard.
A light workout would fall on the other side of the continuum: medium to light weights, lower volume, and most importantly, only lightly tapping into the mental- neurological stuff. You’d be tempted to call that “easy” training, but that’s not the route I want to go. “Easy” gives the impression that these workouts are useless or somehow not manly enough to be productive, but I don’t believe that to be the case. The effort dimension and the actual fitness-promoting effects on the body are two different things. You’re still moving in a light workout; nerves are firing and muscles are contracting.
Training effectiveness, as I mean it here, can be summarized as the net effect on your body, which is maximized by exhausting yourself with straining, grinding effort. A light workout would score very low, whereas a heavy workout would be high. In that sense, we’re trying to tie it back to our emotional state. You need to be able to train without emotional effort most of time, and then to intentionally drop adrenaline on days you’re good for it. Most of you will naturally want to do the latter, all the time, when in reality we need to learn to do what Dan John calls “punching the clock” for the bulk of our workouts.
You might be a neurological hard-ass who can get away with mentally-exhausting training (or maybe get away with it longer than most), but I don’t think this applies to Joe Average. Unless he has reason to believe otherwise, Joe Average needs to relax.
This does not mean that you should never ever get excited when you train. Getting fired up
from time to time is not just a good idea, it’s key to getting stronger. The whole idea here is to practice what needs practicing ― if demolishing a PR set is part of what moves you, then you need to practice it, adrenaline and all, and then cool back down.
We just need to let that happen with some kind of variety, instead of every single time you lift a weight. Spend most of your time cool and then let all the energy out when you’re ready. We’re after volatility. We want a sharp contrast between the highs ― the daily-max sets and the heavy days alike ― and the lows, which will make up most of our training.
We want that asymmetry at all scales. Only a small number of sets should be psyched- up attempts. Your mind before and after those sets should be calm and relaxed. Tomorrow’s workout should be a break from today, and next month should be different from this month. The power-law pattern will turn up wherever you look: maybe 10% to 20% of your training week, your training cycle, and your training year will be “hard”, on these terms, with the remainder left for “easy” training in the long tail.
The Russians knew this, as evidenced by what Yuri Verkhoshansky called concentrated
loading. In a block of concentrated loading, they’d take a group of athletes and hammer
them with insane workloads for a few weeks. Just when their bodies couldn’t stand it anymore, the athletes physically stressed and emotionally drained, the training effect would throttle back to nothing. Suddenly all that adaptive energy had nowhere to go; after a week or so to let the fatigue settle down, these athletes would see amazing jumps in strength and power.
This is the idea behind currently popular load-and-release methods like the Smolov squat cycle. You deliberately over-work yourself, switching on all the growth and adaptation processes, and then take the work away. Your body responds to the contrast of extremes better than it would by spreading out that same amount of work.
When you go hard, go hard. Push your weights, add more volume, and lift all the time. When you rest, don’t half-ass it by saying you’re “deloading” while hitting the gym for a couple of PR attempts. Rest. Stay away from the gym. In fact, don ft think about the gym. Eat bad foods and drink beer.62
You might spend 2-3 weeks going all-in, and then take that much time cruising with easier training. If you’ve had an easy spell and feel like you’re settling into a rut, then you can ratchet up and really push yourself the next few weeks, or shift into cruise-control if
you’ve been busting ass for the last 3-4 months. You might not plan out anything at all, training until you get tired of it and then taking a week or two for easy R&R. This, too, can be as organic or as structured as you need it to be.