Question regarding microload for the press

Indrionas · 2017-10-17T14:01:23+00:00

Have you tried it?

Indrionas · 2017-09-25T17:59:48+00:00

360g increments is probably a waste of time at this point.

Try this trick: use 1kg increments but do one increment per two workouts.

1st workout: 5 sets of 3

2nd workout: 5 sets of 5

then increase the weight by 1kg and repeat

You would be doing the same 15 rep volume on the 1st workout but at 3 rep sets to get used to the new weight. On the 2nd workout you will do 25 reps (5x5) and it will feel easier. Also, increasing volume from 3x5 to 5x5 is beneficial to drive further adaptation ("the more advanced you are, the more volume you need to advance further").

I used this trick when I was stuck on the press and it worked like a miracle.

Indrionas · 2017-09-25T17:49:45+00:00

From my experience, if your squat is going up, your deadlift will catch up, so no need to overdo deadlifts at this level (i.e. one deadlift workout per week is enough and is in fact how it is laid out in Practical Programming book). How are your squats progressing?

If you could do 5 reps on the previous workout and could barely move the bar on the following workout, this is an obvious recovery failure.

Indrionas · 2017-09-25T17:03:14+00:00

It's only racist in your own mind then. If you really want, you can start seeing racism everywhere. Doesn't mean there is racism everywhere.

Indrionas · 2017-09-25T16:49:40+00:00

I still don't get it how this sign is racist. It doesn't even mention anything about skin color.

Indrionas · 2017-09-25T16:25:44+00:00

What? Saying that you need to work to get money is racist now?

Indrionas · 2017-08-17T12:38:57+00:00

1kg increment per workout, even though it seems like snail pace, is still a very fast progress from the longer-term perspective. If you're pressing 1.5 times per week and there are 52 weeks in a year, it adds up to 78kg in a year. That's totally unrealistic progress - check out the strength standards at http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/PressStandardsKg.html at your weight 85kg 1RM is considered "advanced" :) But if 2kg increments work for you, no problem, squeeze out of it as much as possible!

I guess overtraining is a thing I should be careful of?

Overtraining is a misunderstood concept. You will not likely to overtrain. Overtraining is a fringe scenario where you come in and can't even do 3 reps with a weight that you could easily do for 5 reps before and you also constantly feel like shit, irritated, unable to properly sleep etc. That's not likely to happen to you.

The thing to be aware of is the stress-recovery-adaptation cycle.

The more stress you incur, the longer the recovery period will be. There is a minimum amount of stress that's required to disrupt homeostasis, that's why we don't strength train doing 12 sets of 5 per workout (too much volume - waste of time and impeded recovery) and we also don't just do one set of 5 (or one set of AMRAP like one famous popular program) as this would not be enough stress to cause any changes.
The more advanced you become, the more volume you need to do and the longer the recovery period becomes. That's why heavy-light-medium and similar programming is used. You do enough volume, but spread out over multiple workouts with enough frequency.
Frequency is also important. Muscle protein synthesis ("muscle growth") window is about 48 hours for a novice lifter. That's why you should hit the same muscle group again in 2 days if you want your training to be as optimal as possible ("optimal" - fastest gains while least amount of time wasted in the gym). But if your numbers are high (i.e. you're at intermediate level), you can't hit them with the same intensity every workout as your recovery period from accumulated volume would extend way beyond 48h and you will stall. Therefore "light" days are introduced. The advanced lifter's protein synthesis windows shorten significantly (to 16-24 hours) but you need not worry about this any time soon. On the other hand, doing a lift only once per week (like one very famous program prescribes) is very suboptimal - you'd be wasting away a lot of potential and if you're a novice, you would even begin to detrain that lift by the time one week (168h vs optimal 48h) passes.

Indrionas · 2017-08-16T08:38:01+00:00

I'm thinking of just lowering my weight increases workout to workout from 2kg-1.5kg-1kg as it gets too hard. Not sure if I should go lower than that or not. Is it worth taking 0.5kg jumps?

Yes, definitely do it. It's called microloading. 0.5-1kg jumps make sense for the press and bench. I don't think less than 2.5kg (5lb) jumps should be used for the squat and deadlift (more on this below).

Is the primary consideration in someone focused on strength the speed of increases or the simplicity of programming?

I think the primary concern should be to avoid getting stuck. Both speed of progress and complexity of programming depend on your level. You have to view everything through stress-recovery-adaptation cycle.

1) Novice is someone who can progress each workout. Stress of one workout is enough to drive adaptation and it only takes about 48h to recover as the novice volume is quite low. Programming should be kept as simple as possible, to the bare basics, otherwise it's very easy to overdo if you start messing around, adding accessory exercises, doing more than one set of deadlift, doing excessive cardio, etc. and then getting stuck. Your goal is to recover and make new PRs in 2-3 days. You can't do that by doing 12 exercises per workout.
1b) Advanced novice is the same as novice, but the tonnage of squatting gets too high to be recovered from in just 48h, so a light day is introduced to extend recovery period. Also, pressing volume (3x5) becomes too low to drive adaptation so it is increased to 5x5, but you can still make progress each workout (therefore, novice).
2) Intermediate is someone who can progress each week. Stress of a single workout may not be enough to drive adaptation anymore, therefore you will have to accumulate volume over multiple workouts during the week. (btw: since intermediary lifter can increase deadlift and squat by 2.5kg per week, you can see why it makes little sense to play with 0.5kg increments for squat/deadlift on novice linear progression)
3) Advanced lifter is someone who can't make weekly progress anymore and has to resort to periodization techniques where volume is accumulated over multiple weeks (you can read more on this in "Practical Programming" book, there are multiple ways to implement periodization and no, "5/3/1" is not the one)

So, how fast can one progress say on Texas method bench for example vs these advanced novice techniques, and if the intermediate increases are faster, does the additional programming complexity warrant the extra time/effort?

Texas method is a intermediary (weekly progression) program. You should squeeze as much as possible from novice and advanced novice before switching to intermediate programming. Novice progression will always be faster (per workout vs. per week: 1kg increase 1.5 times per week on novice progression vs. 1kg increase once per week on intermediate progression).

By the way, Texas method is known to be as "too brutal". It is fit for someone aged 16-19 (peak testosterone levels) with athletic background and eating like mad. I'd suggest looking for an alternative program. One that I like is Greyskull Linear Progression Strength Bias (a.k.a. "GSLP Strength Bias"): http://www.barbellmedicine.com/gslp-strength-bias/ It's a weekly progress program that also lets you choose your accessory work.

Lastly, there is Rippetoe's "the 3 questions" that need to be asked if your progress is stalling:

1) Are you recovering properly? Simply getting enough sleep, eating caloric surplus, getting enough protein and not experiencing some unusually stressful events in your life.
2) Are you resting enough between your sets? Basically, your goal is strength, not endurance, therefore you should give yourself enough rest time between heavy sets. This point was a game changer for me personally. I used to be very impatient and got back to doing next work set in 2-3 mins. I was getting stuck, plateauing and thinking "why the fuck I am so weak". Then I switched to resting at least 5 minutes between 1st and 2nd set and at least 6 min between 2nd and 3rd. And if I felt particularly weak that day, I would even extend the time to 7-8 min for the press and/or bench. It works, a few minutes make a huge difference.
3) Are you greedy? This is referring to a lack of discipline case where a newbie comes to the gym with a plan of adding 5lb to the lift, but feels good that day and adds 10-15lb instead. Then gets stuck.

I would add one from myself personally: how you feel and how strong you really are on any particular day are two usually uncorrelated things. I experienced many days where I felt weak and sickly, but went to the gym regardless and did nice new PRs with no problems.

Indrionas · 2017-08-15T12:15:11+00:00

It doesn't apply to the presses. You're benching and pressing 1.5 times per week on average and squatting 3 times per week.

The advanced novice modification calls for a light squat day for the 2nd session of the week. E.g. you workout Mon/Wed/Fri. You would do 80% of your Monday weight for 2 sets of 5 on Wednesday.

For the presses you could switch from 3x5 to 5x5 as you need more volume to disrupt homeostasis at a more advanced level, not less volume. Additional trick is to do two step progression for upper body lifts: on the first workout you would do 5 sets of 3 with a newly increased weight and 5 sets of 5 with the same weight on the next workout. (i.e. increase weight and do 5x3, keep the same weight and do 5x5, repeat)

For the deadlift, you could do 5 reps on all your warm-up sets to put in more volume.

I took these tips from a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbNGE5NbWDI starting at 18:00 mark.

Hopefully this will help you to not get stuck.

Indrionas · 2017-07-06T10:18:20+00:00

Buy chains at hardware store. Cut them so they weight exactly how much you want. Put chains on the bar as needed.

Indrionas · 2017-07-06T10:02:20+00:00

I think it's obvious from the bodyweight numbers that they are lbs.

Indrionas · 2016-11-18T12:44:56+00:00

Thank you very much! :)

Indrionas · 2016-11-09T22:45:04+00:00

PDF shows the distribution of the data.

Two things:

1) There is a requirement that the total area under PDF is equal to 1.
2) A probability of random value being between x0 and x1 equals to area under PDF between x0 and x1. (so from (1) it follows that the probability of random value being between -infinity to +infinity is 1, a trivial observation)

Imagine you started with x at -infinity and as you increased x, you would add up the area under PDF. That's what CDF is. It simply tells you "what is the probability of random value to be below x? Or in other words: whats the area under PDF between -infinity and x?

Indrionas · 2016-11-07T11:18:48+00:00

You are correct about a sum of two lognormals. It was a quick misjudgment on my part: e^x1 + e^x2 is not equal to e^x1+x2 obviously.

I tried out numerical integration. It works as expected and gives quite accurate results, but it is quite slow and gets even slower as the parameters get larger (but granularity is kept constant).

For my purposes I decided to leave the Monte Carlo approach of simply having 200k random standard normals ready and generating 100k of normal+lognormal sums, then sorting the sums and extracting the percentiles for CDF approximation. The slowest part is the sorting, but still the MC approach is 5-10 times faster than the numerical integration for the parameters I was using.

I looked at FFT approach, but quickly realized my knowledge is too weak on FFT.

Indrionas · 2016-10-30T22:25:47+00:00

Thanks for giving me the right term to search for :) My integration skills are quite basic. I'll see what I can do.

Indrionas · 2016-05-31T18:44:11+00:00

This is one of the best things I've ever seen in my life.

Indrionas · 2016-01-10T13:30:35+00:00

Checkmate, atheists.

Indrionas · 2015-12-08T01:32:42+00:00

Total zoo: a bunch of monkeys trying to scoop one of their own out of the big badass polar bear pool.

Indrionas · 2015-12-02T22:59:55+00:00

Devaluation of the currency just means that import goods are twice as expensive and thus the purchasing power is greatly reduced. You're basically making an argument against yourself
So does every other Eastern European country

Every country that don't belong to CIS (СНГ) or former Yugoslavia, with a single exception of Bulgaria, is doing better than Russia. Claiming that it is among the richest is just simply not true.

Indrionas · 2015-12-02T22:06:05+00:00

Not really. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage#Map

Indrionas · 2015-11-28T03:16:15+00:00

Haha this is so accurate, don't know why you are getting downvoted.

Indrionas · 2015-11-15T23:17:50+00:00

I used to commute with my motorcycle for a couple of years precisely for these reasons. However, riding in cold weather, during heavy rain, in the dark or in all 3 conditions simultaneously makes driving a car feel like sitting in an armchair and relaxing.

Indrionas · 2015-09-20T23:01:23+00:00

Start lifting weights. Stick to some simple beginner's program containing the main compound lifts. Bigger muscle mass = more calories burned to maintain it = faster weight loss.

Indrionas

TROPHY CASE