Peaking, Deloads, and Special Exercises ; Methods of Futility

Often when it comes to nutrition and training, we look for unicorns to fix all of our problems. We overlook all the principles that have been repeated for years and maybe even our own in hopes that maybe we’ve been missing something this whole time. If you don’t think you’ve fallen victim to this, remember that for a period of time people were putting sticks of butter into their coffee and calling it fasting. While we can’t stop these things from gaining relevance in society, we can hope to be better educated and learn to trust our gut and common sense when it comes to training and nutrition. Many times we we see ourselves as special cases that have super specific needs that can’t be solved with basics. This is user bias at it’s finest. Almost of all the clients we have worked with, fall into a Level 1 or Level 2 of needs from strength training. Level 1 means no previous training experience and needs a ton of repetition on basic exercises. Level 2 means some previous training. This can mean correcting movement patterns or beginning to intensify movements through increasing load, volume, or intensity. Level 3, reserved for high specificity in sport has only been used with a few of our former competitive lifters that were chasing All Time World Records. With all of this information, I think it’s important to look at some very commonly used tactics that are incredibly overhyped. Even more so if you don’t have a solid foundation to try them. There are likely more, but these will do for now.

Peaking

I’ll never forget my first bodybuilding show in 2008. There was another guy around my age preparing for it as well. Him and all the magazines talked about water cutting, dandelion root, and carbohydrate manipulation to be the best you could be on stage. I remember he started his water cut two weeks out and then I saw him at the gym and got a good laugh out of the results he had. After three days of minimal water and salt, he felt like shit and couldn’t lift a weight or flex a muscle. These are all bad things for a contest to display your muscles. The competition came and him and I still had a problem. We didn’t have enough muscle and had too much fat. I often think about this experience and laugh at how often it seems to pop up. We were 15 years younger than some of the better competitors. We needed more time and more years of nutrition dedicated to building muscle before worrying about displaying our lack of muscle or which water cut routine was the best. Different people and different hopes and goals, same  story keeps popping up today. 

Deloads

I’ll never forget the day it happened. Showtime was less than a year old and I had a high school softball player coming two times a week to train and we were on her second session of the deload week. They were the two worst workouts in the nine years I worked with this girl. She came in and we squatted 50% of her training max and did a bunch of other meaningless movement. Then the next week, she missed because her softball schedule got changed. She lost two weeks of training out of fifty two for the year. Life has a natural way of providing breaks in training. Vacations, sports schedules, family events, school or work obligations, and illness all provide natural deloads, do we really need to add more to it? We also noticed that during those deload sessions, lighter weights moved slower because the body had already mentally checked that the day was a down day. The better approach we began to use from that day on was to continue to always train, but modify the intensity, load, or volume. Like everything else, just because something is written out doesn’t mean it can’t be modified. We ask clients at the beginning of every session two simple questions that help us do this. 

1- How are you feeling?

2- How did you feel after your last session?

Have a plan and then adjust based on the answers to those two questions to make a perfect training session experience.

Special Exercises

This was something Louie Simmons coined from the Russians. A special exercise is simply any variation of an exercise designed to target a weak point. Example board presses instead bench press off the chest or elevated deadlifts. These exercises have tremendous value for the .01%, but for most people they probably have minimal returns. I remember I had benched 600lbs in a meet and then 12 months later I finally got 605lbs. It was ugly and terribly difficult. I remember talking with my wife about this. She bluntly said “Your arms are too small for the weights your trying to get to, you can’t do 10 push ups or 1 bodyweight pull up”. It gutted me because I knew she was dead on. I didn’t need a special tricep exercise, I needed a foundation that had been lost. I worked on push ups and pull ups daily and got to where I could do 20 push ups with a band around my back and 5 bodyweight pull ups. This lead to a 650lb Bench six months later. Before searching the Internet for new exercises to help you, can you do the basic things that used to be covered in middle school P.E class?

This article isn’t to say these tools don’t have some benefit for some people, but rather pointing out that they’re likely highly overrated for most of the people considering using them. Whenever you begin to feel yourself lost and unsure about what you’re doing with your nutrition or training, you have to use your North Star to guide yourself back to what’s important to you. For me, that will always come back to basic tasks that people should be able to do their entire life  like push ups, pull ups, sit ups, walk, and run. Create your North Star for your training and you’ll always have control. 

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