011 Deloads and tapers

As you can probably already hear, I'm definitely a little bit under the weather today.

“I'm struggling with an unpleasant bit of flu, but we will make it happen and we will talk about delodes today.”

So, and if we've got time, perhaps we'll mention tapers, but we can always cover that in a separate episode.

So, essentially, when we're talking about delodes, first of all, we have to recognize there are two different types of delodes or two different occasions in which we'll see delodes being programmed. Firstly, we'll see them actually being programmed in advance. So, essentially, a kind of training conditioning coach will decide that the athletes are going to train quite hard for say four or five weeks. And then they're going to do a planned delode at the end of that period of a kind of hindrance to your high volume training.

Second type of delode or second occasion when you're going to see delodes is ultimately when we are naturally going through a training program and either the coach or the athlete themselves,

“realizes that, you know, things are not going well and they've started to accumulate some fatigue.”

And so, they kind of, you know, in discussions, decide that they're going to take an easier week, you know, in the week, it's coming up. And that's kind of like an unplanned delode that's just being done in response to the state of the athlete finds themselves in. So, it's kind of two situations.

So, ultimately, what I want to do is just talk about the idea of a planned delode and why it's not a great idea.

Ultimately, just walk through the physiology. Now, essentially, in the, you know, kind of high-purchary bodybuilding space, it's already now relatively well recognized. And if you're allowing fatigue to accumulate and what's happening is that post-workup fatigue is made up of, you know, mainly three components, although we will actually talk about the addition of a fourth. So, the female components are essentially excitation, contraption, coupling failure, muscle damage, my favourite of the damage, and central nervous system fatigue caused by the inflammation response to that muscle damage.

“So, that's what we're used to talking about in the kind of high-purchary bodybuilding space.”

Now, in terms of the excitation, contraption, coupling failure, and the muscle damage, both of those reduce single fibre mechanic retention, which reduces the stimulus that the muscle fibres that's a so-affected can achieve.

So, you're reducing their capacity to experience per capita retention and our produce a high-purchary stimulus.

This CNS fatigue that's accompanying that reduces the level of motor unit, crimson stops as accessing as many muscle fibres, and again, that reduces the high-purchary stimulus, but also, you know, kind of, is going to create some atrophy opportunity, if it kind of continues on for too long. Because essentially, it means that there are fibres that aren't being trained at the top end of the motor unit, or in any scenario, as long as that post-workup fatigue that, as accumulated remains. So, you can have this unpleasant situation where if you go too long with accumulated fatigue present, you're actually going to start to see atrophy at the top end of the motor unit, poor, which is not great, because those are pretty useful fibres, especially in the context of athletic situations.

Now, we're used to talking about that in, as I say, the bodybuilding context. What I want to do now is just introduce the adapters that we have been describing in previous episodes that are useful for athletes, and why they are actually much more negatively affected. than high-purchary fee, because essentially, with high-purchary, yes, you're going to lose some mechanical tension at the top end of the motor unit, poor, you're going to lose some muscular activation at the top end of the motor unit,

but you still can't maintain or even create high-purchary in the fibres that you're still activating, and still loading. Now, there is going to be some adaption occurring. The problem with the athletic scenario is that many of those adaptions don't have that same kind of gray area. It's very, very, very binary. Rather, hitting the necessary levels of recruitment, or firing rates, or coordination pattern, in order to trigger an adaption, or we're not. And if we don't, we don't get the adaption. So let me just walk through those quickly.

So essentially, with athletic performance, we're interested in improvements in coordination, especially on, you know, kind of sporting movements, like maybe throwing or jumping or whatever. We're interested in multi-nut equipment levels, and increasing those levels over time, and we're interested in multi-nut firing rates, and increasing those over time, because that's a really critical speed adaption. Now, periphery, we've also got muscle fibers shorting velocity that's interesting as well on the mention that in the moment.

In terms of that, those post-workup team mechanisms. Ultimately, the CNS fatigue is going to stop us from reaching both high levels of recruitment and high levels of firing rates, and that's essentially going to stop us from triggering those adaptions at all. And that's really, really different from what we just described in terms of eye-purchasing, because ultimately, when we can't hit a maximum level of recruitment, we can't hit a maximum firing rate, the adaption simply isn't going to get stimulated.

It doesn't get stimulated at 90% or 95%, and it really gets stimulated at 100%. So kind of got to push the levels up to the maximum level trigger the adaption. Now, the interesting thing about coordination is that coordination is disrupted anytime there is any peripheral fatigue. Essentially, the brain doesn't really understand that the muscle isn't producing the level of force that it should do for the same level of recruitment, the brain thinks in terms of recruitment.

Okay, yeah, but it doesn't, because you know, you've got this fatigue presence. So now, this is why when people kind of, I mean, there's classic most most sprint coaches will relate to this, they'll see a sprint, they'll see an athlete arrive, and they're running like their legs are jelly, and they're like, "What did you do yesterday?" You know, it is clear that they've done something silly, they've gone and played another sport or done something that they're not accustomed to doing, and the coordination patterns just completely, you know, out of window. And it's because ultimately the brain doesn't think in terms of force production, it thinks it's a directivation.

So essentially, we can't improve our coordination, any time we got peripheral fatigue presence, we don't talk about this in bodybuilding context, because it simply isn't that relevant, but it's very, very relevant in the context of athletic performance. So this is one of those things that I get into trouble when I talk to sports coaches, because they're like, "Oh, we need our athletes to be able to perform our other fatigue, I'm like good luck, because that's not a possibility." You can't improve coordination in a fatigue state, it just isn't because the brain doesn't store different rhythm patterns for fatigue to non-fatigue situations.

It only stores a single variation, which is its best variation for a non-fatigue state.

“And then, instead of it, it was just kind of wheeled that out, even in a non-fatigue state. So you just kind of get whatever adjustment occurs as a result of the fatigue being present. That's why even eye performers, their mechanics are fantastic.”

They're stuck into fatigue and the mechanics break down. That is absolutely always going to happen.

It's just the way that the brain treats things. We know this because of the way that the returning research has looked to fatigue and eye fatigue learning situations. So, with essentially got a whole bunch of other important adaptions that are not going to get triggered if we are training in a fatigue state. And that's essentially saying that if you need to plan a de-load, then all those weeks leading up to that de-load, none of those adaptions are getting stimulated. So, we're not really able to stimulate some of the key underpinning adaptions for maximum strength and also for maximum speed. Now, just on the muscle fibers shortening velocity, essentially pretty much any fatigue mechanism is going to slow the muscle fiber down.

Not every single fatigue mechanism reduces muscle fiber force, but pretty much all of them slow the fiber down.

And so, ultimately, if we've got any of this postwork up to present, that's going to slow the fibers down. We're not going to be able to reach very high levels of speed at the muscular level, and that's going to stop that adaption from happening as well. So, really, we've kind of got a full house when it comes to the kind of adaptions that we want for athletes being, you know, blunted or, you know, completely prevented from happening when we are training in a fatigue state. And, basically, you know, the period leading up to a de-load, when we're actually planning to push volumes up to high level, because everyone's running around, you know, screaming with the idea that, you know, volume is what's driving the adaptions, I know it's not a stimulus as driving the adaptions, volume is just a dose applied to the stimulus.

But of course, as we know from my perspective, very well and almost certainly applies to most other adaptions, you kind of get a dose response that's non-linear within the session itself. It's a couple of really good stimulating kind of reps for any given adaption, and fantastic, you stimulate the adaption to occur. Now, you come back there, so later and try and do it again. Trying to sort of cram enormous amounts stimulus into a single workout and then expecting to then do it again two or three days later.

And for that, fatigue that you've also created, not have a negative effect is delusional.

You know, ultimately the athletics scenario is very sensitive to a presence of post-rocastics. We don't really want to be planning to accumulate so much fatigue that we need a de-load.

“So, ultimately, that's what I wanted to go through in terms of physiology.”

Essentially what we're arguing or I'm arguing is that we shouldn't be planning to do a de-load, but of course, it does also mean that if we recognise that something has gone slightly wrong with our kind of programming. And the athlete that we're working with is starting to accumulate fatigue, then of course, would immediately implement a de-load or some description. And we can talk about exactly what kind of shape those de-loads might look like. But, you know, for now, that's what I wanted to say, Rob, over to you.

Can you give us a little bit of a steer in terms of how would you respond in terms of de-loading and athlete if you recognise that they had already kind of managed to accumulate some fatigue? Whether that was because of your programming, whether that was because of what else they were doing in their sport. But you've recognised that they're kind of starting to flag a little bit. What would you do at that particular point?

“Yeah, Chris. So, I think the best thing to do is, obviously, you just said, don't plan a de-load.”

I can't remember the last time that I planned one week from once in advance. It just not, not something I would ever do at this point. But if I'm monitoring, say, jump heights, you know, jumps at the beginning of a session, or, you know, kind of sprinting, doing sprint work, things like that.

As soon as I see those, start to drop off for more than a couple of sessions in a row.

You know, at that point, I'll figure out there, maybe I've done something, or more likely, they're just volume of work outside. The gym has gotten too high, and I got to back something off a little bit. So, usually at that point, I think the easiest route is just going down to one or two, usually two, preferably maintenance type workout to week. And the way I would do that is just, you know, same thing as usual, full body, generally not changing exercises or anything like that too much. And just back and down to a minimum of one to two sets, and then low reps and staying just a little farther, maybe even the normal from failure.

So, if I have a client who's saying, you know, doing two reps and reserve, I'm most of the strength works, stuff like that.

“Maybe one to two reps reserve on high-peratured things, and those, that's what I'm training.”

Maybe back then down to like three or four reps, shy failure on the strength work, two to three reps on the high-peratured work. You're still getting a little bit of everything, you know, certainly enough for maintenance. And you do those two workouts in a week, and then, you know, assess the following week, how well that has worked. If the jump light comes back to normal, spring speeds come back to normal, cool, you know, that's done as a job. And most of the time, honestly, that'll do it.

I want someone is pretty deep in, like a competitive season, or just doing, you know, way, way too much outside of the gym. And yeah, but really, you just got to monitor things pretty well, and do more than a few sessions. Yeah, let's talk about that monitoring, because you've kind of dropped a really important point there with this idea of monitoring using jump height. Or even sprint speed.

Ultimately, you know, in athletic context, strengthening initially coaches are already quite familiar with using vertical jump height as a measurement of readiness.

And, you know, whether it's accumulating, but let's just explain physiologically why that is so useful, you know, compared to say just watching progress overload happen, for example. Ultimately, what I think most people forget is that when you've got a fast movement, and I say, you know, comparing that with a sort of heavy strengthening movement, both cases, you've kind of got maximum levels of recruitment as far as that person's capable of achieving, I mean, realities, it's probably like 90% or 85% of that, but it doesn't really matter. 100% for them. So, they've kind of got like both high levels of recruitment. In the case of the slow movement, basically, all of the fibers in the muscle are contributing relatively similarly relative to them, the cross sectional area.

So, when we compare the force production of say a slow touch fiber or a fast reach fiber, they're pretty similar, relative to the, I mean, there's 10% here or there, but I mean, they're really not added.

“I think I, I think people generally think they're much more different than they're really not, you know,”

not much, not much longer than it's fibers, and that's what the fibers don't produce much force when they, they definitely do. So, if you can literally compare a fiber with another fiber, they would compare quite a different force, but simply because they're different sizes. Yeah, if you kind of relative to size, they're actually producing pretty much the same amount of force. That's kind of where I think you write, I think that's where people get confused, they forget that you've got to normalize the force production of the fire with the size to get an idea of what it's contributing.

So, we've got an absolute ton of these low threshold motionate muscle fibers and you sort of group them all together. They're actually contributing pretty meaningfully to the performance of that particular exercise. If you then go to the high velocity movement, what's really interesting here is that you've got a whole load of fibers that are shortening and not producing any force.

“I think this, sometimes these blows people will mark people's minds when they hear this, I'm like, no, the fiber has a maximum shortening velocity.”

When you go off the end of that, it doesn't do anything. So, essentially, if you look at slow-ditch fibers, they've got a maximum shortening velocity of maybe around about half a fiber length per second, which is really slow. If you've got to look at sort of the type to eight fibers, they may be a per se, three or four fiber lengths per second, and you've got to type to eight fibers of five or six fiber lengths per second. So, it's like a 12-fold difference between, like, this sort of slowest and the fastest is massive differences.

So, ultimately, in a vertical jump, you've only really got half the muscle, but it's capable of contributing to the actual movement itself.

So, if you now kind of think about that, okay, so what does that mean? That means that if I've got a, let's say, I've started to accumulate some fatigue and five percent of my muscle fibers out to the 100 percent that we're interested in. If you five percent of my muscle fibers have now kind of got a severe amount of damage or the recruitment levels drop, so that they're not able to be even activated. Well, that means I've now got five percent in eight, say, I'm testing a three-ret max or a five-ret max pack squad. I've got, like, five percent less over my 100 percent. So, I'm going to see a five percent drop. Okay, maybe I'm going to notice that, maybe I'm not going to notice that, maybe that's within the noise alone. If I now look at my vertical jump, I've got five percent over 50 percent now.

I mean, is it just because it's, you know, kind of, is it to track with high velocity being so much easier to simply do in practice? Well, yes, that's true, but the reality is it's different because you're going to see a massive effect of the fatigue and high velocity, because you only use it half the five percent of the muscle.

“Yeah, much more meaningful data. Much more meaningful. So, I think really, you know, we've talked before and you've explained before how you programming these sort of jumps and other high velocity movements at the beginning of every worker.”

And this is such a great opportunity to test naturally for readiness and the fantastic thing is when the athletes doing those movements every single session, it becomes a really good habit and they start doing it in the same way and it becomes much more controllable. One of the things that I think people get, you know, wrong is where they, like, they only do high velocity movements, like in particular sort of periods of the year, like, "Oh, we're doing straight but now we're doing speed blocks later."

And then they're like, "Oh, so how can I test readiness and, like, put a speed movement in?" Yeah, which is a jump, man. I don't know. It's just so, it's easier to just keep it in that all the time and I mean, there's other reasons why we do that. Anyway, we'll get on to it when I put a position, but yeah, so fantastic. So are you just programming mainly counter movement jumps as your kind of main readiness test? I mean, most of the time, especially lately, just 'cause, you know, everyone can do them super accessible.

A lot of the people I work with have like the over jump, not like four things for testing jump heights and stuff like that. So they don't even necessarily like a camera set up and like all these things. Just have like all these really simple ways to do, just an easy counter movement jump test. You know, when for you guys to have what we're doing, sprint work and stuff like that, like also monitor the sprint speed, but the jump is probably the easiest one that have the most people doing.

Just so accessible, especially when just like low equipment, availability.

“Totally absolutely makes, I think it makes the most sense to do that.”

So really, ultimately, where we've got to is that, you know, delodes are on something that we would ever program, simply because

you know, we don't want to be in a situation where we're expecting a delode to be necessary. But equally, we've, you know, already to, you know, kind of start on a delode if we notice that, something's gone wrong and the, at the starting to accumulate of tea. So if we now kind of just look at the idea of tapers, since we've, we've kind of got plenty of time. In a tapers situation, we're basically saying that we've got to get the athlete in a scenario where

they're totally not ready for the competition that's coming up. Now physiologically, there's just another couple of interesting things to note here, because ultimately, this relies on the detraining of adaptions. Now, it's quite popular to claim that, you know, where I'm going with this, do you? It's quite popular to claim that things like speed, which is not actually an adaption itself,

as we've explained in the earlier episodes. You can't really talk about speed or strength detraining because it's meaning this idea. It's the adaptions that underpin those that are detraining. The adaptions that underpin speed don't really detrain very quickly.

Ultimately, neural adaptions stick around pretty much indefinitely,

at least on the scale that we're talking about. I mean, there's data showing that recruitment, for example, doesn't really detrain over six months without training. So I mean, this really, really long periods of time if we'd have to worry about, you know, a neural adaption. And speed is mostly neural adaptions. So when you go and look at the detraining list, you actually find that speed as an outcome,

which I don't like talking about the idea of speed detraining. But if you measure speed during a detraining period, it doesn't reduce very much. In fact, often goes up because, in the context of the detraining, we're actually seeing a shift in fiber types towards faster phenotypes away from the slow ones. So we get a type 2A to type 2x shift, which is the opposite,

what we normally see during strength training.

So, ultimately, when people think about tapers, you ought to go, "What adaption am I most likely to lose?"

So, Rob, what adaption am I most likely to lose? I'm most likely to lose? Ah, hypertrophy. There we go. That's the one that worried about.

I actually saw some redundancies as well, but it's kind of wrapped into the same thing. So, yeah, basically muscle muscles, the one that I'm going to worry about. So, when I'm structuring a taper, I'm not worried about letting the athlete, you know, kind of slack a little bit on the speed stuff. Although, you know, I'll probably would keep most of it in any way, because it doesn't really create very much for tea. What I am going to worry about quite a lot is then, you know, potentially losing some muscle muscle.

“I think that's really, really different from the way most coaches program tapers, because they think,”

in terms of outcomes, they go, "How can I keep my athlete speed? How can I keep my strength?" I'm like, "No, don't think like that." Drop down a level and go, "How can I keep the adaption?"

Why don't we have loads of data showing you how to do it? Why don't we have loads of data showing you how to do it?

“So, yeah, drop, talk to us a little bit about how you would, kind of, I mean, would your tapers look more or less like your dealer or is there a difference?”

I mean, they do actually look very similar, and it's a good time naturally to tackle this a little bit, because I had a question in Surin the other day from the guy who's got Judo Nationals in three weeks. I'm not a guy that I personally coach, but we chatter occasionally. I've worked out of modifications. I would make, and just the last couple of weeks, leading into the top,

you know, make the most out of the competition. So, basically all I suggested was making sure that

he maintained muscle mass in what I would deem our important muscles for Judo, you know, so like the hip muscle endurance, I told him to keep in just two sets of the hip thrust, the back muscle endurance, so I told him to keep in couple sets of heavy chin-ups, he doesn't train in a gym of the time of equipment, at least it seems to me, so just heavy chin-ups pull-ups, just a bit of heavy pressing, and then some stuff for quads and hamstrings.

Just wanted to set each twice a week as what I told him, and you know, figure if you're training a lot of Judo, very intense, you're going to be getting, you know, plenty of core work, you know, plenty of arms involved, things like that, you know, a lot of the actual Judo training, so just really to take it off, keeping like the kind of bare minimum maximum strength / hypertrophy work in there, so he just doesn't lose any muscle size by the time the count comes.

“Totally, totally, and from a literature point of view, I honestly think, you know, they could do single sets”

and there'd be absolutely fine. Yeah, obviously people kind of like, "Oh well, I'm okay, I can do two, fine, now you can do two," but, you know, I think, you know, in that scenario, where, interestingly, when I have talked with, um, strengthening and his encourages working with, with athletes at the highest levels, um, in sports that require a lot of speed. They often do like, um, slightly longer tapers, couple of weeks, rather than just kind

of a couple of days or a week or whatever, um, and I think that there is actually a lot of sense in that. I think that, um, especially on the speed and, um, any kind of fatigue really does impair movement velocity, I mean, this is less relevant for judo, but for something like, you know, you know, sprinting, something like that. I'd be really keen to see a longer, um, kind of, uh, taper and bring it down to two strength training sessions a week

of single sets and probably a reprimas of, you know, even though it's heavier load, that's still want to reprimas of on those. Um, I think that could be really cool. Um, more times when I was five or ten shifts to go back, the way you want that kind of, kind of really make sure that the fire times are in the right direction, make sure that we've got, you know, no fatigue really lingering around because,

you know, especially in, um, and in sort of events where you want to be absolutely

getting to your maximum level of speed, um, and that's critical for the performance of the event.

Um, I think I'd be, uh, really sort of happy with that slightly longer dealer, because ultimately, uh, essentially the same thing. Um, you know, really, I don't think we're losing anything by having that. I wouldn't think so. Well, yeah, well, constructed taper with those slightly lower volumes, um, maybe an extra reprimas of here or there. It doesn't really, uh,

losing anything in that in that situation. Um, sure, we're not going quite as quickly in the direction of the adaptions that we're going to be seeking. But honestly, at that point, you know, hopefully we've already got all the adaptions that we should be seeking. I mean, there's a difference between, and just so people 100% clear what I'm saying there. There's a difference between, um,

because ultimately what I'm saying here is that the delode itself isn't

“the problem. So I think this is just an important thing for me to just emphasise.”

When people say to me, oh, yeah, but you, you said that delos and tapers are okay, you can just do them, and there's no problem with doing them. There isn't. It's the what happened before it that made you need the delode that was the problem. So if you're programming a delode, that means that you are deliberately going into a very fatigued state. The such that you need the delode,

that's the problem. The delode itself is actually pretty good trading. Yeah, the bad problem. It's the bad problem first. It's the bad problem first. There was the reason that we needed the delode or the program delode. This is the reason why I'm kind of, um, you know, saying to people, you shouldn't be deloding. Um, actually tapering before

a competition, uh, honestly, with, you know, two sessions a week with, you know, sensible kind of programming. We could actually make some small improvements still. Um, so you can have a really long taper if it's constructed properly, I think. Yeah, and then like you just said, you'll be constantly improving, even if it's just very minimally versus you run yourself into the ground,

and then I don't only do maybe not perform well, but you might even move backwards, you know, slightly in that time. Totally because ultimately, if, um, if we're in that period of, uh, especially in the first part of the table or the first part of the delode, where the fatigue is accumulating,

still in a state where that fatigue is causing us problems.

“I mean, that's what a lot of people didn't realize the problem with fatigue”

accumulation. Um, ultimately, the way fatigue accumulation works is

broadly numerical. So, um, up to a point. So, basically, the what I tell people is, um, you can kind of get an idea of roughly what kind of numbers of sets are, you know, possible to recover from. I mean, obviously this doesn't work. If you've got a ton of extra kind of aerobic stuff and sports practice, and that's why athletes can't really do this.

But in bodybuilding context, if somebody comes to me and goes, oh, I've been doing this particular training program when I was doing, you know, five sets, three times a week for this muscle group. Well, okay, how long have you been doing that for? Yeah, exactly. Because what I can do is I can go through it and I go, that's an excess because really recoverable is about three sets three times a week.

So, I can go through it and I can go, okay, if three sets three times a week is recoverable, and you've been doing five sets, that means I've got two extra sets per week, which is kind of maybe, you know, one and a half days of, of a recovery requirement per workout. And you've been doing that for say, you know, I don't know, ten workouts. I've got ten times that one and a half days of recovery.

Um, that's like, you know, sort of 15 days worth of recovery. I've now got to plan on you having. That's a two week de-load period or two week taper. For which most of that taper, you're not going to be getting great results, because you're going to be letting that particular accumulation kind of, you know, dissipate. So, um, the thing about de-loads themselves is that the actual training in them can be good

if you've got minimal, you know, accumulative tea. Um, but if they're off the back of a really long period of time,

when you were, you know, deep in a recovery kind of whole, and ultimately they're not so good,

because you can't stimulate a muscle or class stimulator adaptions, if they, um, you know, the stimulus can't be reached. So, it just wanted to clarify that why I'm kind of sounding like I don't think a taper or a de-load is problematic, because in itself it's not. Um, it's a bit happens before.

“It's the point. Yeah. And I think, you know, probably on the line of tapers worth”

mentioning where people go so, so wrong with them, because I mean, I see a lot of bad ones. Uh, I mean, even in like the context of, you know, just powder lifting as a support, where coaches are programming tapers, and you would obviously coaching powder if there's a if you're a powder after, you would know that muscle size was important, and still, you know, the way a lot of people do a taper for powder lifting is

they'll keep in the mainlifts and they'll remove any of the more like targeted accessory work, or instead of, yeah, instead of little reps, they'll go from, you know, little reps up to, you know, sets of like 12 to 15, because it feels lighter and easier, and then instead of, you know, tapering and clearing the fatigue and anything like that, you just, you know, kind of funk yourself, and then wonder why your meat day is not so good.

Um, and I've talked to track athletes who's got just have done similar things, which was crazy to me, a collegiate, um, track sprinter who I am. I work with now, she and said that her coach would have them do, you know, sets of 12 and things like that with lighter weights, closer to a competition, and then things like that, and I just, I kind of ran my head around it.

The, the tape is that I've seen that I thought were the worst, where when, um, a strength training program was being done, I think it was in the context, perhaps a powerlifting or perhaps maybe it was a strongman or something like that, but it was in the context of a strength sport, and the athletes were training, you know, with heavy loads relative to close to failure, you know, before the tape was started.

And then all they did was they kept exactly the same lifts, and they just, do the exactly the same number of reps, but they dropped the weight in half, and I'm like, you could have sound so far. I've seen that really, could have sound on the sofa and not done anything,

because that's basically the benefit you're getting.

Training is so far away from failure, it's literally point less even being in the gym at that point. I'm like, honestly, that is nuts. I can't get my head around how little you would have to understand about physiology to program like that. It's really quite astounding to me. It's kind of similar to what we said about, like, people program in power training

for the last few weeks, leading into something where you do like, you know, 40% for low reps, miles from failure, and you get really good at whatever it is you're testing there. You don't do anything. Honestly, it's mad. So yeah, I think the, yeah, just coming back to that power lifting example that you go,

because I think a lot of people are going to be interested in that. So you mentioned that they're keeping the main lifts in. And again, let me just kind of note on that, that's because people think that things like coordination and neural, other neural adaptions are going to dissipate, so they have to keep the main lift in, because that's the, you know, that's the,

“going to go away. You can, you can kind of just take a, you know, if you need to take a rest”

on that, you can take a rest on that. And then they're taking out all of those assistance exercises that have been building the muscle mass that supports those lifts.

Well, the idea that's not going to go away in a week or two weeks.

In the idea that I perched, if you doesn't dissipate within two weeks, I'm like, "Ooh, okay." And then you wonder why your squat was, you know, 15, 20 pounds down midday and you say, "Oh, you know, this is a quadru-quad, bad peak, because so no, that.

Well, really just because you asked muscle, you just think of the use of losing enough to be meaning for all that time period." Absolutely. Really is a high-perch, if you saw some agencies problem.

“So, I think really, it's the same thing we would do for any other athlete”

is drop the work back down to two sessions a week, you know, sort of single sets, maybe a rep and reserve. And then, you know, as regards the main lifts, I think, really, I would be focusing on practice, I'd be like, you know, hit your openness.

That's it. Yeah, yeah, openers about it. If I'm programming someone that we can do a meet, that's about us having as I'll go, you know, quite a bit from failure. And then just making sure I keep the actual work. Like you said, the built that muscle in the program.

Yeah, I mean, really for me,

“it'd be like, "I want you to be bored if you're openers by the time you get to."”

I mean, it's just, yeah, be bored of everything you've done by the time you get to the club. So, yeah, so that would, just hopefully, that's useful for people you know, thinking about how to apply the physiology to our tapers in several different situations. Also, you know, as I say, a d-load in the taper, we're going to look very, very, very similar.

As I say, very, very minimal differences just around things like we've been describing with, you know, power lifting and needing to build confidence with the, with the openers. But, you know, other than that, I'm really going to be very similar. So, I mean, you just gave us some examples of things that

you've seen, uh, silly to finish off. Have you seen anything else that is silly, um, in tapers and de-loading?

Oh, man. I mean, there's, there's always so much foot around.

Uh, I guess I've seen another one. I guess, you know, the context of power lifting would be, and this one I haven't seen as much of quite a while, but people that are more conjugate proponents, doing things like instead of the regular competition done lift, prior to comp doing something like, you know, block pull or a rack pull,

things like that doing something that is not in the main lift. Um, and also at the same time, you know, dropping off accessories and things like that. I've seen that in more instances than I would like, and it just makes absolutely no sense. We're instead of a low bar squat. They do, like, you know, like a safety bar pause squat in the last session.

They're for some random reason I cannot ever fathom. It doesn't matter. It's very strange. Very strange. There are certainly some very strange things going around with tapers.

“Um, I think, you know, it's one of those kind of very superstitious sort of”

things where people want to kind of do things that they've done in the past and then they accumulate beliefs around it.

But ultimately, that is, uh, tapers, de-loads.

I think we've covered that pretty well. Um, we will continue this, uh, in the same line next week by talking about periodization. So, as we were talking about that before, I think that's probably going to be at one of our most controversial episodes that we do. So, um, looking forward to doing that one. So, yes, we will be here next week. Thank you all for

joining us. Um, and happy new year. Happy new year.