Periodization and Recovery in Prep

in like cases, if we, I'm a big fan of continuums, like everything I teach is on a continuum. There's no black or white, right? It's just like 50 shades of gray. So on one side, we do have the beast mode on one side, we have the least mode. So depending on where your physiological status is, we're going to choose where on that continuum you are. So if you have high blood pressure, high heart rate, low HRV, bad sleep scores, you have all these physiological things that are happening. It doesn't make sense to be on the beast mode side of the continuum. Like physiologically, you're already beasting your internal systems. So we don't need to add an external system that's going to make things worse. So we slide them down to least mode, which basically means you're still training hard. Like least mode isn't training like a pussy, but it's reevaluating all the variables. Like maybe you go in and you just do the lowest effective volume and lowest effective intensity. Maybe if you want to do more volume, just do a bunch of ramping warmup sets and practice the motion. Maybe hit two like good gnarly sets and really control that. Right. So it kind of lines up nice nowadays with all the research coming out. Like what's, how much do you need? like say six sets a week or three sets done twice is enough to stimulate something. It's like, all right. So in those least most stages, the goal isn't really to like try. It's not really to aim for hypertrophy. It's just to either manage your hypertrophy, keep it the same or maybe make small jumps. But it's to let everything kind of calm down. And that's where we'd go. Well, if you have stage two hypertension, maybe it's a better idea to do a little bit less resistance training, not no resistance training, because that's still massively important, but maybe we do a little bit more cardiovascular conditioning, a little bit more steps, a little bit more zone one, zone two cardio, and bring everything back to a normal level and then start sliding back up towards that beast mode. So it's, it's a good way to think about, if you think about periodization of your training, which I'm, I'm still in a lot of people, poo poo periodization, but to me, we should be periodizing everything because all that means is making a plan, like making a long plan All bodybuilders periodize whether they like it or not You have an off you have a pre and then you have your competition season and your post You're already periodizing stuff that you're just not thinking about it on a level where you would deal with a soccer player or a footy player. But you can think about that in relation to having your beast mode months. Instead of football, because every American I've spoken to so far have all called American football, football. here and you say footy is the best thing ever yeah 100 i know when i'm here i call it gridiron so they understand yeah so but you know in in sports you would always have these periodization models or we could go a long debate on whether we consider bodybuilding a sport or not you know i i think when i think sport i think team sports are things that require lots of different athletic abilities yeah so but i mean i'm ambiguous with that if you like to call it judging in competitive post yeah yeah but um like you can look at it from a position of okay i have certain months where i'm doing beast mode stuff but once i see my metrics start to go now we need to insert a small lease mode phase or two to get everything back down yeah because if you keep pushing it we it's kind of a cliche thing that everybody says you don't really make your gains when you're training and make them when you're resting. Okay, that's true, right? You stimulate and then you have to adapt. So if you're constantly stimulating and you're not able to adapt, you're maladapting. So it doesn't make sense to keep pushing your body when your body's that stressed out because you're going to hit a wall at some point. You might as well take one step back to take two steps forward. Yeah, I really like that approach. Just looking at that as a stress management system, looking at people's preps, just like you described there right if you aren't allowing that recoverability to occur which you know training is a stressor drug use is a stressor dieting is a stressor it's a fucking chronic stressor for most people shutting down those are stressors people look at preps and go i'm just gonna do all the stuff to make me hardcore as fuck and i'm gonna be the toughest guy on stage and i know that i worked harder than him but then one of the things that i try to push is like cool you trained harder than him but did you rest harder than him did you recover harder than him yeah that's where your responses are going to occur right like if you're not if you're not able to do that well they don't care how hard you train because muscle breakdown and wastage in a training session if you're in such a depletion state of food and energy we're not going to come back from that going to start chewing up muscle protein tissue and we're going to start ending up having to catabolize tissue so you look on stage we spent two years in an off season building 10 pounds of mass we just lost six of it what the point of that because you didn't want to slow down i the one thing like as much as bodybuilding isn't a sport i try to help people develop and understand is the most professional athletes know when to push and not to pull they know hard and they know when to pull back and if your ball is deep in the prep and i'm saying i just need you to go to three rar or this week i need you to go to like 50 load for a d load and you're like yeah ben said this but him what he doesn't know i'm going to add 50 extra sets of lateral raises and all of a sudden you're tearing shoulders and you're like your infra is just completely torn off and you can't do any internal rotation your bench press now sucks that's going to impact the rest of our season whether or not you can retain tissue because you still need to maintain stimulus towards the back end as much as possible tissue that we've built i try to run off the idea that the tissue that the stimulus required to build it is at least going to be the stimulus we should aim to keep to maintain it so if we're looking at you know you've got a lot of muscle tissue and you just go hard to the point where your body breaks in the back end of prep you can't do and you're now just completely stressing the body out because you just think hardcore beast mode means non-stop training non-stop cardio posing and drugs but then at a certain point that least mode has to come in to allow the adaptation to occur and allow that recoverability and then from the bodybuilding standpoint to manage the accumulative fatigue you need to be able to back off and go well you know i'm training five days of the week at least one of these days i need to have sex with my girlfriend go to the beach go to the spa get some remedial work like as much as everyone's like uh remedial uh what do you call like manual therapy doesn't do anything if I perceive it as I'm feeling relaxed and somewhat hallucinate my body, that touch point is going to allow me to reduce fatigue. So I don't give a fuck. I'm going to use that placebo and that bias to go, yep, that helps me out in my prep. I feel a little bit better after every session. Cool. So we're going to do that. But you have to have those moments in your preps. Otherwise it's just continual beast mode. And everyone knows if anyone, I don't know, fuck all that cars. I don't know if you red line a car for six straight months, guess what it's going to do? Blow up. Yeah. A hundred percent. If you, if you have a manual car, which I know a lot of people don't even know how to drive a stick shift anymore. But if you put it in first gear and you punch the gas pedal all the way down and then you don't shift the second, the engine is going to blow. Something's going to snap. So we can't always be redlining. We have to shift gears and we have to have times where it's it's time to dig and torque and it's time to switch the horsepower. You got to go back and forth.