Research and Development, Part 1

Figuring Out the Mess Through Experimentation

Mark Brown

August 9, 2022

Strength training can be a mentally stimulating experience or one that bores the living hell out of someone. I tend to fall into the former more than the latter, but I know people whose relationship with it is vice versa to mine. Doing the same lifts week after week can definitely cause both the spirit and mind of the lifter to fall out of line with their goals. Lifting inside a program will provide the best results, but some organic experimentation is useful to both it and the lifter. Experimentation is the soul of research and development. It is what defines the initial stages of a lifter’s journey into strength training. One can read about how things should be and feel, but they have to do it in order to fully understand them. Every body is unique. What works is generally understood and has been written about in studies. However, it might take a lifter a long time to finally reach the point where that knowledge is useful. Experimentation helps the intermediate and expert lifters in some of the same ways as a beginner. The main difference would be that the beginner is going to see a different level of result than intermediate or expert because progress is just faster at first. Research and development is essential to every lifter of every experience level. Today’s essay will be about why that is, what ways it takes form, how to weave experimentation into an established program and perhaps some other related items.

Strength training is largely learned through experiencing and feeling the effect of movements on the human body. Yes, cell phones put the power of recording every lifting session in the palm of everyone’s hand, but no film will ever match the feeling of the lift. Maintaining a thirst for learning more will help a lifter better understand what they are feeling when they are doing lifts. That goes for the lift itself and the muscles that are being used to complete it. Research and development is the core of this learning and action cycle. The research part could easily come from personal experimentation or from outside sources. I have heard some of the most accomplished powerlifters talk about how much they read to learn more and advocate for doing that. The development part is more personal. It is up to the lifter to understand what was read or felt then turn that information into something actionable. Not every piece of information received is easily digested, especially studies. Reading scientific reports is extremely different than reading anything else. They are so, so demanding on the brain. It is legitimately a different skill from regular reading. When I went through Drake University in the middle 2000s, I barely got the hang of it and it wasn’t 100% of the time. One should never feel badly about themselves when they need someone to break it down for them. If someone is going to go to effort of looking up studies, they should still read them so they can get the reps of doing so before going to a secondary source to make it get into the mind quicker. Reading the reports as they are written will pay off in the long run if given enough of a chance.

Development requires goal setting, commitment, and good planning. None of those things are understood by any lifter in the initial phase. One can have an idea what they are and how others have interpreted what it means for them, but they are truly personally learned through experience and experimentation. When I started lifting at Genesis (then Aspen Athletic Clubs), I told one of the personal trainers I had a goal to bench press 250 pounds when asked about goals. I look back now and realize that I had no idea how to set goals. To be brutally honest, I’ve only understood that inside the last 12 months. I thought I was committed to strength training for the bulk of the last 10 years. The last 2 years have shown me that I was about 70% committed. Good planning? Ha! I was learning the entire time from 2013-20 but it feels I was a bit too narrow in focus. I wasn’t able to see the bigger picture. Now, the frame is bigger and wider. I am better able to understand what the outside sources of information are talking about and what my body is telling me when I lift. Research and development really is a messy process. The phrase that is often repeated when referring to it is “throwing shit at a wall and see what sticks.” It’s pretty damned accurate.

Beginning lifters will get the most benefit from experimenting and and gaining the information they need that way. It will help turn the development gears faster than reading any advice in essays or on podcasts. What makes research and development so daunting in the gym is that it takes years of information gathering through lifting to even get a low level understanding of the big picture. This stage can be hard for a lifter who is looking for hard and fast results in main lifts. Learning patience with results is one of the hardest lessons to let sink in. Instant gratification is a very powerful stimulant. Some elements of research and development are quite tedious. The most progress is made in the everyday work that is mentally and physically boring. There’s a very good reason why Youtube videos skip over those parts of the lifting sessions. They are exceedingly boring. Judging the pace of process can be a very tricky one for beginner lifters because the speed of it will never be faster. A problem that may arise is they might not be able to pick up on changes within the progression. A lifter can’t just move from 1 short program to a different one because it limits development potential. They have to feel the stimulus falling and adjust accordingly. That might be a small change in the program or a full move to a different one. The only way to to know for sure is to keep lifting. The mess never gets cleaner.

For intermediate and expert lifters, experimentation often cuts through the overly boring nature of day-to-day lifting sessions. A lifter in this stage has a better understanding of setting goals and what needs to be done to attain them. Normally this means they are on some long term session structure or program. Lifters in this stage of their strength training journey tend to have less growth potential, so they are always thinking of ways they can be doing something better. More sleep, better nutrition, more days in the gym, less days in the gym, different pieces of equipment, and so many other ideas pass through a lifter’s mind in regards to improvement. A lot of what I listed is related to either outside the gym or plan/program structure. The exception is the equipment. It’s a special form of experimentation for a lifter because it’s something that they can physically touch and do something with. It’s what a new pan or a new ingredient is for a chef. Lifters are notorious for doing idiotic lifts with machines made for unrelated isolated movements. Sensible lifters think about equipment experimentation in different ways, like different shaped lat pulldown bars and the various cable attachments for triceps work. Some of the experiments will stay in the rotation and others get rejected completely.

Gym experimentation will produce different results in both the development and the process depending on experience level. A lot of this is because an intermediate or expert has learned a lot more information than the beginner. This idea applies to just about everything; however, it shows much more clearly in the gym because the quickest anyone will see any useful results from any experiment will be a few months. Some of them will be closer to a year. The base of information learned prior to an experiment is helpful to the lifter because they have a better understanding of the control part of it, so they can better understand exactly what the new lift is doing or making them feel. In essence, an intermediate or expert lifter will get more out of the experiment than a beginner will if they are following the scientific process the way they should be. There are some pieces of information that are easily gathered in the short term that would cause the experiment to be cut short. A new lift that causes injury is at the top of the list. It is important to note that there are differences in health terms. “Sore,” “tight,” and “stiff ” are all words that describe how muscles can potentially feel after a lifting session but “pain” causes an instant reaction that shuts down activity both locally at the source and/or the entire body. A lift that causes pain should be stopped immediately so as to decrease the possibility of an injury or limiting the damage that has been done. The term “injured” to me means that an action cannot be physically done because the body won’t allow it. When performing a different lift it is important to note the differences in how the body feels in the moment and afterwards. The biggest thing that beginning lifters need to be aware of is that progress in the gym means lifting through soreness, tightness and stiffness. Those things can be the sign of possible points of injury, but that’s part of the price of getting stronger.

A major part of any gym experiment is a combination of the goal setting and good planning I mentioned above. In this context, the goal will act as a thesis. The nature of strength training is that the process is active and is a never-ending loop so the goal setting is a way to narrowly determine what is desired from the change. The planning phase follows by understanding what parts of the lifting plan structure or program stay the same and which ones become altered. Experienced lifters will do this every few weeks to force the body adapt to new stimuli repeatedly through out the year. It generally has the effect of pulling weaker lifts up so a lifter ends up having no objectively “weak” lifts. The active nature of strength training means the plan is constantly under evaluation. Some elements of lifting can make some gym experiments difficult to determine how effective a different lift is compared to others. Powerlifting competitors will always be focusing on the bench press, squat and deadlift because those are the lifts they are judged on, so every change made to a program has to aid them. These lifts are much more technical in nature than strength based, so gym experiments that focus on strength development may or may not show up in them the way they will in less technical lifts. That has to be accounted for in the evaluation phase of the experiment. Changes to programs might take even longer for bodybuilders, especially if they aren’t on performance enhancing drugs, because muscles don’t grow at the same speed as lifts. The focus on the muscular development means that gym experimentation might be less risky, as long as it doesn’t involve starting taking PEDs, because the weights and loads are generally lighter. This doesn’t mean a lifter won’t pop a bicep doing a set of curls that is well under max weight, but the probability of it is decreased.

Beginner lifters don’t have as much learned information to go off when setting the goal or thesis of the gym experiment. The significance of that will be that the results could be misread more easily. Something can be learned from every change made to a program. Understanding that information is more difficult for beginners and intermediate lifters than expert lifters because their catalog of knowledge is just less full. Where beginners have an advantage over more experienced lifters is that their results will come in a little bit faster, especially muscular development. Going from little or no lifting to fairly serious lifting will produce visible results quicker than going from fairly serious lifting to very serious lifting. A beginner lifter should use their first couple years in the gym to mess around safely and experiment with everything the gym has to offer to find out what will produce the best results for them. I call this time the “organic build phase.” Building a Rolodex of lifts is important for when the gym is packed and a lifter can’t get to the machine, bench or cable attachment they want. There are heavy odds that they will end up doing a lot of of what everyone else is using but the ratios or something else might be different. The organic build phase only lasts for so long. If a lifter is serious about getting stronger or more muscular, this is the time to really find what is most successful for them to get that. Once the visible results start to get harder to see, gauging on feel and load increases will become the dominant way to view results. I have found that the latter 2 are far harder to grasp than the former. Technical experiments can be worked on throughout a lifter’s entire life. They will need to be done because technique and leverages are all stem from the body that does the lifts. Additions or drops in body weight over time are a major factor when it comes to both technique and leverage. This also goes for golf.

Gaining knowledge through experience is especially important when life outside the gym begins to effect what happens inside the gym much more fundamentally. When related or unrelated events conspire to derail the current plan or objectives, something has to be done to keep it at least somewhat on track. In March of 2020, public spaces were closes to help prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus. For those who had home gyms and only lifted in them, nothing much changed in regards to training. However, those of us who lifted in public gyms got a rude awakening. Six weeks without lifting is a long time away from strength training. It had a massively negative impact on my strength and muscular development. When I started lifting with Pete in his garage, experimentation was a part of almost every session. Since then, the experiments have been more focused to figuring out how to use equipment I have bought and lifting sessions done during the few months of winter that make the garage too cold to lift in. Those two different circumstances produce different experiments that involve the same elements. The issue is about resolving potential programming, equipment use and a gain or loss of the use of said equipment for an extended amount of time problems quickly.

Come back Thursday for Part 2!