Mark Brown
November 3, 2021
This summer I changed the timeline of my lifting program and I felt it had a significant effect on my lifting. That change was simply removing lifting from my weekends. It was a decision I had been thinking about for a few months. To some that might not sound like much of a change, but that one change in how I use my time had rippling effects in how I program and adjust on the fly. Recovery is not something to mess around with. My style is to go hard as I can but I have definitely paid the price for not giving recovery enough respect at times. That was the primary goal of the change and that has been achieved for sure. Golf was also part of the motivation to make the change.
Making a change is hardly ever done without conscious thought. A change in behavior is done usually having experienced or seen various cues to make one question if what they are doing could be done better another way. Shifts in strength training aren’t any different. There’s usually some physical evidence involved as to why a change needs to be made. One thing I learned about making changes doing something that improves as slowly as physical strength is that it can’t be done hastily. I have to make plans and stick to those plans until I have enough information to make decisions on what to change and what to continue with. This is exceedingly important because I program my own lifting so paying attention to all of the details matters.
Time is a key element in every program, whether it’s designed for a professional athlete or the average gym warrior. How much time a lifter has for lifting, as I have written before, influences everything about the workout they are going to do. Even for a lifter without a hard time limit like myself, other factors push them to keep sessions within a sane time range: Energy is first and recovery is the second. Going hard as one can is the only way a lifter improves and gives them a chance to progress. However, one only has so many reps in them for a given session before repetitions just aren’t worth doing anymore. Goals have to be understood and choices have to be made about how to get there. That takes lift choice, sets, rest, and reps all into account. What a lifter did before the session also matters a lot. I arrive at the garage or the gym pretty warm already from work because of the nature of it. I have also already burned through a good portion of my energy by that time. It is possible to borrow from tomorrow’s energy to get lifts done but that debt gets paid pretty quickly. It’s real easy to tell how much I borrowed by how tired I am the next day.
Recovery’s importance cannot be understated. It is very easy to take the session too far and too long because it just feels good. People who lift seriously know exactly what I mean by that. It can also easily become an excuse not to work as hard as one can causing progress to be stunted that way. The line between working too hard and too light is nearly invisible. One only knows it when they’ve crossed it, especially beginners. What I have learned is recovery is more or less everything else that a lifter deals with during the day. Sleep and nutrition are the two biggest components I have heard from bodybuilders, powerlifters, strongmen and other professional athletes. Those become even more important when performance enhancing drugs become involved because one is putting an extra strain on their body then. They are big challenges for me because the length of the workday is unpredictable. The last few years has been full of 12-14 hour days and that has produced a relatively high amount of physical stress. Lifting has helped me get through work without injury and deal mentally with the stress it has caused. The company has lost a lot of good employees because of the stress they were putting on people’s lives. Those long workdays also had a highly negative impact on nutrition. I found myself eating from gas stations just to get something to eat before going to lift. My being single kept a lot of what others were dealing with out of my way. The company was just eating into my recovery time and it angered me.
Time and recovery have been a big part of how I programmed, informally and formally. For the vast majority of my 8 years training, I have saved the heaviest days for the weekend with a few rest days during the week. With the exception of 8 weeks in the fall the last 2 years because of an indoor golf league I have participated in with a buddy from work, Jeff, I did a 5 day split. Usually that meant legs and back on Saturday then chest, shoulders and arms on Sunday for weekend work. During the time 2018-19 when I was only working upper body it was more a 4 day split, but always lifting both weekend days. The common thread in the thought process in all the years I have trained was that I viewed recovery days only through the lens of not having lifting on that day. As I have gotten deeper into strength training, especially the powerlifting parts, my mindset borders on obsessive. It actually gets there at times. It dominates my life.
In May 2021 I reached a bit of a plateau I needed to break through physically and mentally. I thought about my planning process and came to the conclusion that days that I didn’t lift but still worked definitely weren’t “off” or “recovery” days at because of the physical demands at work. Palettes and totes of stuff don’t weigh much but they make up for it with sheer volume. The numbers of those two things creeps up into the high triple digit-low 4 digit number range in tight spacing every day at work. That was the biggest factor in my Summer 2021 power building program: True recovery days. Another consideration I had to take into account is the other sporting activity I like doing. Golfing on the weekends was going to require me to work lifting in creatively. I know how much golf can take out physically and I didn’t want to train my heaviest lifts after golfing. I distinctly remember how sore my legs were the last time I trained them hard after golfing. It’s been years since I learned that lesson. I really wanted to play a lot of golf during the summer and I played every weekend from June to August, sometimes twice a weekend. Work was a factor for another reason. When I figured up how much time in my weekdays were actually taken up or planned for it was a startling little amount of time for anything else: 8-12 hours at work, 20 minutes to the garage gym, 2-3 hour lifting session, 20 minute drive back home with maybe a stop by grocery store. Sleep has to be in there somewhere, too. All of that made me come to believe the only logical conclusion was to use my workday as the warm up and lift hard during the week so I could relax completely as I wanted to on the weekend.
The results of the change were positive. Physically I got stronger. Not just because I was using the entirety of the day to get better but I also was actually allowing my body to recover. I was skipping weekend training days because I just didn’t feel like lifting even though there was nothing physically or mentally wrong in spring 2021. During the summer, I missed 3 planned training days. Two were from exhaustion and the other was a fluke one off that will never happen again. Since the end of the 12 week summer program and the beginning of the fall program, I have missed 2 training days. They both had to do with physical condition. Mentally, the change allowed me to not have to figure out what time I was going to do something. I could just let stuff be until I wanted to do it. Stress on the whole has gone down because my time has been planned effectively during the week and I choose not to do time sensitive things on the weekend. Last year the stresses of work were much greater than they are and have been. That was a curse then but is a blessing now because it cemented my nigh iron will.
Recovery comes in many different forms. The two types I have heard is “active” and “passive” recovery. The latter is sitting down, relaxing and keeping good nutritional practices going. Active recovery is keeping on ones feet, working throughout the day and maintaining an active heart rate. That doesn’t mean doing excessive amounts of cardio because that can potentially be not helpful for building muscle. I lean towards passive on the weekend with sprinkles of activity like mowing or other house work. I do recognize that I am missing out on opportunities for improvement by doing what I am currently doing. I am also quite aware that as the weather cools down to winter that desire to just relax after going so hard during the week will only grow. So I just have to reach reach a little deeper in the tank and get it done.
This small shift in was just one of the adjustments I have made over the last couple of years to my training. I will be detailing some of the changes both big and small over numerous entries over the next few months so keep an eye out.
Life Through Lifting 