Hints and Cues

Finding the Stop Sign

Mark Brown

January 25, 2022

Stop signs exist to make us pay attention to the road we are driving on so bad things don’t happen at intersections. A lifting session isn’t that different from the act of driving a car through an intersection. Physical and mental cues are constantly being sent by the brain and and body to the person lifting telling them what the next thing to do is or how to do it. For some things it’s as specific as the sound a deadlift bar makes when the tension has been pulled from it telling the lifter to pull it upward. The cues the body sends to the lifter can be confusing to interpret because they mean various things at various times. One of the easiest things to do for a lifter is to lose sight of the long term goal and push a little too hard during a session. Reading the cues one’s body is sending them correctly will allow for more strength and muscular development in the long run because they have missed less sessions due to overexertion from the previous day. Progress in strength training can only be achieved by continuously pushing “what can’t be done” into “what can be done” territory but that doesn’t happen if one is missing sessions. Reading the physical and mental cues helps find the stop sign on a day-to-day basis.

This isn’t designed to be the big “Recovery” entry that will inevitably come in the future. It is, however, central to what I do want to talk about though. When I started lifting in the garage with Pete I became more aggressive in my approach to lifting. It happened because I had a training partner for the first time and I had a dependable spotter who also knew his stuff. My philosophy of starting in the 70-75% 1RM range after the warm up set(s) then making smaller jumps through the working sets all the way to the heaviest wasn’t something he was used to. It has bore out good results over the last couple years. I have learned much more concretely that training the central nervous system how to react to heavier loads is more important than anything else. What that means for the training day is that if one wants to increase their 1RM, then they need to be lifting heavier loads more consistently. That is how I increased my 1RM in bench press down to my chest to 295 pounds last year from 275 at the end of 2020 and 305 pounds with the shoulder saver, which is equivalent to a 2 board press. I increased my deadlift 1RM using the same strategy over the same time period.

How I lifted in 2020 is not how I lift now. In 2020, I liked to start with a banger and end with a banger. I think the concept still works but what I have learned since then is that the approach of doing a major lift like a heavy deadlift last or heavy variant of the bench press is more meet or sport specific training. This style of session works deeper into fatigue than the powerlifting sessions I have been learning about and currently employ that are structured to put all of the heaviest strain at the beginning of them. The lifting I did that year has benefited me in the year since because I understand better how to train through fatigue much more fully. It’s also seen benefits my day-to-day life because I’m less fatigued by what I have to do at work. I did sets based on feel, rather than have a rigid structure of pre-determined volume and workloads. Pete and I had that in common, and said that his son got annoyed by it when they lifted together. We both had a good laugh at that and the half joke that I don’t know where the stop sign was. What lifting an inherently less structured program does is that it makes reading physical cues and reacting to how the body feels correctly much more important. Misreading them leads to injury and soreness that requires more than the normally allotted time to recover before the next session. Missed sessions don’t magically come back. This problem is felt much more acutely by those who compete than those just wanting to be stronger or more fit.

I’ve written before about the times I came close to rather serious injuries but I think they bear repeating here because of the cues I missed that led to them. The time I almost injured by back trying to straight leg deadlifts in December 2016 was caused by me completely missing the fact that my legs were nowhere near straight enough while doing the lift. That made it much closer to a traditional deadlift and I was not in the proper position do it. I was down for a few weeks before I figured out what I needed to do. The deadlift in the garage in 2020 a few months after I restarted doing them was caused by just plain not being strong enough I think. I was at a stage where I was comfortable deadlifting 275 pounds without a belt but definitely needed one at 315. I remember on that day that 275 went well so I thought I would test 295 without a belt. I was pretty confident in my ability to lift without needing any external help and the lifts got up but they were quite strained. When it came time to do 315, I tweaked my lower back on the 4th rep even with my belt properly placed. I think I asked my back and legs to do far too much too soon. I finished the session but I didn’t deadlift for a few weeks. Later in 2020 I did the a very similar thing, just with a trap bar while standing on plates. It was a tweaked back due to my pushing the limits of what I could so. What I missed in the case of the last 2 tweaks was the reaction my body was having to the sets prior to the near injury.

I have been much better at interpreting and reacting to how my body responds to the loads on the bar since the trap bar near injury. I push harder on big deadlifts less often these days but I do fair amount of volume to gain muscle in my back and legs. Understanding when to stop is not a reason not to give maximum effort when lifting. The first couple of weeks after taking some time off are always challenging mentally because they can be hard to read as they are being done. Lifts at what a person knows are sub max weights can feel like they are being done at max intensity. In some of those cases I have felt my quad muscles tightening up like they are about to cramp up. One could easily misread this and stop, but I have found that this tightening is the legs recruiting more muscle to perform the lift. It needs to be pushed through with more effort unless cramping is actually happening or there is actual pain being felt. I know I will be cramping up later and will need extra recovery than normal but that is the first stage to normalizing the loads the quads will be asked to lift as the weeks go by. Chest training can feel similar to this, especially with heavier loads, but hardly ever gets as sore or takes as many sets to get there. Conditioning the body to take increasing levels of strain is what this is all about. The strain is a signal to the lifter that more muscle is being recruited to perform the task. That feeling is what a lifter is after, especially if muscular development is the primary goal.

The strain can be a difficult thing to judge because working through it is how progress gets made. That progress is usually shown through either volume and/or intensity increases over time. The body is good at telling a person when muscle is straining but poor at telling them when it’s going too far. That’s what makes training the central nervous system so important. Reading those signals with increased accuracy comes from repeatedly testing it through the concept of progressive overload, the process of increasing loads over time. It’s important to note here that not all heavy loads are created equal. Heavy barbells and dumbbells feel very different than something with shape like an atlas stone, natural stone, loaded totes or any large shaped thing one can think of of equal weight. This is where sport specific training comes into play, especially for strongman. For lifters like me who predominantly uses barbells and dumbbells, weight that has 3 dimensional shape, for of a better term, feels heavier because of the weight distribution. I’ve felt that at work with totes that were loaded with at least 40-50 pounds some of bigger pieces like ceiling tiles and dry wall. A lot of those big items are getting lifted in front of me and I don’t really like them because of the strain they put on my bicep. It’s really not a fun feeling.

One important thing to consider is the effect of medication on the human body, specifically pain blockers like Advil, Aleve, Tylenol, etc. Pain is the body’s signal to a person to stop what one is doing. It does so by a person’s central nervous system shutting down the effected area’s ability to work at peak intensity. If a person doesn’t stop, then severe damage could be done to the areas effected. Humans have figured how to block the pain from reaching the CNS through the use of oral drugs so that we can continue to perform at peak intensity for longer periods of time. While blocking pain sounds great on paper, the danger comes in the form of working into strain levels that would normally be giving an athlete or lifter warning signals to stop. These drugs can throw off a person’s ability to estimate when they need to stop. I’m not saying severe injury will happen if they are used, but they will get in the way of one’s decision marking, especially if they are inexperienced in using them while being active. While in high school I watched pitchers take 6-8 pain blockers a few hours before games they were starting because they knew by the 4th and 5th innings their arms would be hurting. That is why I consider them PEDs.

Deciphering the body’s hints and cues to figure out when to push through strain or stop is the key to avoiding missed sessions and needless injuries. One of the easiest things to do for a lifter is to keep going, especially if they don’t feel sore in the moment. That is one of the traps I have fallen into many times over the last couple years. I laugh when I say “I don’t know where the stop sign is” because it’s largely true. Strength training is a long game that is played over years and decades. You don’t get better by missing sessions. Mental cues are just as important as the physical ones because they keep a lifter’s mind from wandering when can least afford it. Mental clarity is everything.