Getting jacked and strong can be a painstaking pursuit. One can hop aboard many a train that will lead us to the promised land of bigger biceps, but not all of those trains take the most direct route. Some take detours, make unplanned stops, and generally just involve a fairly uncomfortable ride to your final destination. Choosing the least meandering journey is a skill, one that takes practice and time. Making that choice also happens to be one of the most common problems that most novice trainees face.
What’s a peak?
In this context, a peak in terms of training is the highest point of the bell curve of allostatic loading. Allostatic loading is the “cumulative burden of chronic stress and life events”, or to put it more simply, the wear and tear on the body. By peak, we can understand it to mean the highest stress point in a given session or in a given training cycle (for example a week). To provide a more practical takeaway from this article, we’re going to limit our discussion to a session and a training week.
What’s a valley?
Fairly logically, a valley is the opposite of a peak. It’s the lowest point in terms of the stress we experience. The lower the stress levels we face, the lower the impact on our brain and health. The greater the allostatic load, the less likely an organism will be able to cope with and reduce uncertainty in the future.
Why does this matter?
Grasping the concept of peaks and valleys and how they influence training is important. Results and performance are the goals. Just as we can’t spend extended periods of time at peaks, neither can we hand around in the valleys. Though they exist at opposite ends of the spectrum, the outcomes, in effect, are the same: inconsistent progress over the long term. We need a healthy dose of both peaks and valleys in our session just as we need them over the course of a training week. Think of a Bugatti Veyron. The top speed is not limited by the engine, but rather by its tires exploding when it drives at max speed. You are the Bugatti Veyron in this scenario (you’re welcome) and if you’re always peaking, you’re going to blow out your tires pretty quickly.
How do peaks and valleys fit into a session?
Assume a typical session consists of a warm-up routine of some sort, an isolation exercise before one or two main movements of the day, followed by 2-3 accessories to finish. The warm-up and isolation exercises at the start would constitute a ‘valley’, the main movements the ‘peak’, and the remaining accessories another ‘valley’. The peaks and valleys correspond to the allostatic load we accumulate during training (and life, but more on that later). We want to peak for our main movements, as these are going to yield the greatest physical adaptation if enough intent is applied. As the session winds down with fatigue building up, the perceived intensity of accessory exercises is still high and they’ll be providing stimulus, however, they constitute a valley overall in the broader sense. All this constitutes fatigue management.
Allostatic load and training weeks
A session by itself is meaningless. Our results are a sum of the parts, and one session is a cog in the metaphorical machine that is a full training microcycle, i.e. a week. A lot can, and does happen in a week, beyond just training. Adults will work, take care of their children, stay up late to finish projects, have poor sleep due to family stress, and any number of things that disrupt our peace and add to our allostatic load. It would be negligent to assume that training performance is uniform across the week. This brings up tools such as exercise selection, placement, and intensity management to inform how our training fits in with the actual fatigue and stress we experience throughout the week.
For a lot of novice trainees, early in the week can be a good time to go for broke on one or two lifts. You know, doing the kind of sets that make you hope you’ve got the stones to get the job done. Then, as the week progresses and fatigue builds up, 3 RIR sets might now feel like 1 RIR for certain exercises. Recall what we said earlier about the perceived intensity of accessories later in a session. The same principle applies across a week, with some exercises becoming subjectively tougher.
In the same vein, if unsupported exercises with a relatively large skill set show up earlier in the week, then external stability finds its way to the top towards the end of the week (thank you to Killian Hamilton for this idea). To put this another way, barbell squats on a Monday might mean hack squats on a Friday. We start with unsupported, high-skill, high-intensity early in the week, and we finish with heavily stabilised, lower-skill, but still relatively high intensity (whether perceived or “true”) as the week ends.
A note on rules
What you’ve read does not constitute programming rules. Rules pale in the face of principles. Principles provide the guiding thought process that allows us to problem-solve effectively. To highlight this point, if a person’s stress levels decrease as the week goes on, a programme could look the opposite completely from the theoretical example you’ve read in the previous paragraphs. Confusion is not the goal. Rather, we want more information that lets us ask better questions when a programme is not going our way. Principles, not rules. If you have principles then you can adjust your training to any (okay, maybe most) circumstances that come your way.
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