Weights and Plates Podcast - #73 - Why You Missed a Rep: Four Questions to Ask

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Dr. Santana and Coach Trent wrap up their mini series on post-novice programming with an important discussion on understanding why you missed reps. The novice linear progression cannot last forevever (or else we'd all be squatting 1,000lbs!), and as the saying goes, all good things come to an end. This means that at some point, you'll miss reps. What do you do then? Some people have the impression that missing reps means it's time to change the program, and that's not necessarily true. Often there are recovery issues at play that can be addressed, allowing the lifter to extend progress on the novice linear progression with a few simple tweaks. In today's episode, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent walk through the The First Three Questions outlined in the Starting Strength method, and a fourth question, related to the stress/recovery/adaptation model.   In the Starting Strength article The First Three Questions, Rip identifies three important questions to ask yourself when progress stalls: How long are you resting between sets? How big are your jumps in weight between workouts? How much are you eating and sleeping?   The demands of heavy barbell training are high, and many trainees miss the mark on one or more of these questions, especially a few months into a novice linear progression when every lift has become hard. Coach Trent adds a fourth question to the mix: what other stressors are going on in your life? Psychological stress affects physical perormance, especially when it becomes chronic stress. Especially for busy adults with lots of responsibilities outside the gym, you have to account for life stressors in your recovery and programming.   Weights & Plates is now on YouTube! https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf-   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream Email: [e-mail]  

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. What's going on, Bo? Not much, man. It's Friday. It's Friday. Yeah. And I understand you are headed out of town, right? I am. Going over the pond, over the great blue divide? Yes, I'm going over the pond for the first time in my life. I'm going to Berlin. Yeah. Well, that'd be cool, man. When I was in college, I got to study abroad a little bit. I spent six months in Europe, more or less, five months maybe. And that was one of the places I went was Berlin. It was pretty cool. I wish I'd gone to more places in Germany

at the time, but I will say that that's the cool thing about Europe. It's really easy to get pretty much anywhere. That's what everybody keeps telling me. So I think I'm going to have to go to more places because, so I have this thing, you thing. I think some of our listeners might be just getting neurotic hearing this from me. When I travel, I don't really plan anything, and I try to put it off to the last possible minute. And this international trip is no different. Like I have nothing packed. I don't know where I'm going when I'm there. I just have flight info, and I know when I'm leaving, and I know where I'm staying.

But I generally have an idea of what I want to do. There's a few places that I want to go and a few countries I want to check out because I've been told what you've been told, that you can bounce around easy. But yeah, I'm flying by the seat of my pants on my first international trip in the 39 1⁄2 years of my life. Well, you know, the time I was in Europe was 15 years ago now. So it was a while ago, but I have to say the, the memories that I, the strongest memories I have, the best memories I have from that time was when I did exactly what you're doing. And I

didn't really make any plans. We're just like, Hey, let's go to Florence and do what? I don't know. Hang out. It was awesome. It was great. You know, the tour, like when I signed up for like tours and stuff, I'm not a very tour-y person, but I do like history. So like, uh, when we visited Rome, I had to go and like, look at the forum and everything. And, uh, I was a big Latin nerd at the time, but you know, I don't know, looking back, I didn't really get nearly as much from the like guided tours and things than I did from just like hanging out and just, you know, taking in the vibe of the city. So cool, man. Well, I hope you enjoy that. I hope so, too, because. Well, in honor of that, we're going to do a shorty today.

We're going to do a shorty. Okay. Because we both have pretty, pretty packed schedules here. But I think this this topic really is kind of well suited to a short episode. And it also fits in with the last two episodes we did on programming. Today, we're going to talk about why did you miss? Or why did I miss? You might be asking yourself that question. So it would be cool if we all could run linear progression forever, and we'd all be squatting 1,000 pounds

for three sets of five. 2,000. 2,000 pounds, right? And beyond. Yeah. Actually, it'd be funny to run the numbers, be like, okay, normal training age, like how far could you progress

if you could just add five pounds forever? Yeah. I wonder how, yeah, I don't know. I'd have to do the math on that. But obviously we can't do that. So you're going to run it, every single. But obviously, we can't do that. So you're going to run it, every single program you run has an end date to it. The thing about it is we don't know what that end date is. It's governed by a whole bunch of variables, some of which are knowable,

many of which are not. And so every program has a natural conclusion. But we run into people all the time who miss start to miss reps in their program whatever they're doing whether they're doing linear progression or they're somewhere in the advanced novice phase or the intermediate phase like we spelled out in the last two episodes they're somewhere in that progression and they start to miss reps and um you know we need to talk about what do you do when you start to miss reps? Because I think some people have this assumption that, oh, I missed reps. It's time to change the program. And that's not the case. Sometimes it is, but... Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is, but usually it's not the case. Usually there's some other culprits you need to address first. So we're going to talk about that today.

Yeah. Let's be careful with that one because sometimes it is time to change the program and you get these guys and you know who you are i know you're listening yeah who want to be on linear progression forever because it's not even about uh achieving a one rm like let's say it's not even about squatting 500 or 600 or 700 it becomes about adding five pounds every time right getting that three sets of five as high as possible three times a week and only three times a week because if I do a light day, I must be some sort of failure. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that's true. There's this mentality that becoming an intermediate is this terrible fucking thing, and you need to be a novice forever. And then it's like, dude, you've been doing this.

I'm not thinking to be specific here. I'm exaggerating now. But there's a guy that I'm working with right now, and I keep telling him these exact things. So I think he's listening. But, you know, you take a dude, just your metaphorical dude, and that's doing this. And you look back, and it's like, okay, you've added weight to the bar once every six months because you keep recycling LP and trying to change some minute variable to squeeze out another five pounds. And you squeeze out that other five pounds, maybe 10, and then you bonk, you have to reset, get hurt, something happens. And then the next time you add five pounds is guess what? Several months later. So you're progressing slower than an

intermediate now, objectively speaking. But if I change this one thing, if I change this one thing, maybe I can add another 70 pounds to my LP and stay on my three sets of five squats three times a week forever, you know? Because the party's over. The party's over, man. It's over, man. Just accept it. Of course, if you're underweight and you decide I'm going to, you know, become clinically obese, you know, that's not the same as practically obese, you know, let's get your BMI to 35 or 40, right? Right. Yeah, sure, you might eat out some a lot more

squat weight, you know, if you're willing to get fat enough, you know, that's, you know, that's, you know, there are situations where you've artificially ended your novice linear progression by not doing certain things, sure. But like, you know, if you put like a couple hundred pounds in your squat and deadlift you know and then you're bonking and it's like okay i slept seven hours instead of eight or you know six and a half instead of eight you know uh dude you've come this far you really think that extra hour of sleep is gonna put like a significant amount of weight on your fucking lift you know right yeah it's you might put another 10 on it but then you're gonna bonk again reset and then

guess what you're wait three months and put another stuck than it is to get stuck and then have to get unstuck. 100% getting unstuck. There's a lot of reasons why. And I went, I went through all those, but yeah. So those people would be violating my principle of momentum. Yeah. But I definitely work with them. So you guys, you know how you are. Hey, listen, the party's over. It's okay. You can do a light day. You can move on. But we're talking, we're talking to the normal, the more normal folks here who, hey, you missed some reps, you know, doesn't matter what lift is on. And you're kind of wondering like, ah, what do I do now? Is, you know, is it over? Do I need to switch programs? So one of the things we do when you miss reps is we ask three questions

in the Starting Strength website. I think, did this come from the book? I can't remember. It's an article, a report on an article called The First Three Questions. The First Three Questions. Okay. So that's where I remember it from. There's three questions you can ask yourself of why did you miss reps? The first question is, how long were you resting? And I have to catch myself. I just kind of assume this point, I'm, you know, at this point, I just kind of assume that people are resting long enough. But I tell you what, I have clients who they really should know better. And they still will be like, well, you know, I rested like three or four minutes when I quiz them on it. And like, ah, well, there you go, man, you're doing heavy squats for sets across.

I mean, like, bro, come on. Um, so that's the first thing is how long did you rest between your sets? When you are first starting linear progress, this can be confusing by the way, if you're, if you're brand new. So when you first start linear progression, the first few workouts you do are going to be fairly easy because you're still learning technique. We're trying to build that mastery of the basic movements before we really start stacking on the weight. So it's going to be relatively easy. You probably don't need to rest five to seven minutes between sets your first few workouts. Okay. It's going to be more like two minutes, maybe three minutes. That's plenty. But as you go on and the weight gets heavier, the rest time needs to increase, especially on the squat. The squat is greatly helped by resting. If you're only resting three minutes between your squats and you're dying, if you bump that up to five, six minutes, that will be a huge improvement on your squats. minutes, that will be a huge improvement on your squats. My cap it off at seven minutes. I've heard some, you know, I think even rip at one point or another has said like, you know, rest 10 minutes,

15 minutes. No, I think that's bullshit. If you can't get it in seven minutes, you just can't get it. Okay. You know, that's, that's ridiculous. And plus, come on, you have a life. You should have a life. If you don't have a life, go get one. There have been guys, I know two in particular, that I met when I was running my linear progression many years ago. They were resting like 20 minutes or 25 minutes between sets just so that they could keep adding five pounds to their squat. And then guess what happened, Trent? All the other lifts went to shit and they were just squatting,

three sets of five over a two-hour period. Okay. All right, so I've done meets before. Well, thankfully it was only one meet that I did that was like this. I don't think I would do another one like this where I think the time between attempts was like, it was like 10 to 15 minutes. It was long. I can't remember exactly at this point, but it was over 10 minutes. And, uh, and it was horrible because you're just sitting there and you're like, well, shit, like, what do I do? Do I like go hit another warmup? Do I just sit here and get cold? Like, I don't know. Um, yeah, come on 20 minutes. That's ridiculous. The point is

if you rest more time, uh, to a reasonable extent, um, that, that does improve your ability to hit the next set. When you are resting, you are replenishing spent ATP and you are also utilizing the glycogen stores in your muscles and in your liver so that you have more energy available for the next set. And, you know, especially when you're doing heavy squats, squats seem to be the big culprit here oh yeah you blast through energy and so you need time for for all those processes for those energy systems to ramp up and do their work of supplying more energy to your muscle cells so that these volume close grip bench presses i've had to rest a long time for them lately i'm kind of surprised yeah yeah that's true bench press also seems to be like that now this just could be for me,

like in the fact that I've, you know, presses don't seem to bother me as much. Like I seem to be able to go faster on those, but you know, it's, if somebody was having an issue, that's, that's one of the things I would address first is like, if you're only resting three minutes on your upper body work, let's go four to five minutes. Um, but yeah, there you go. Let's go four to five minutes. Um, but yeah, there you go. There's the first question. Are you resting long enough? Question number two is what kind of jumps are you taking? And this is again, something I've run into with, um, with, with trainees of all levels of advancement. If you add too much weight too fast, you're going to run into a wall. And you oftentimes, many times, if you just took the smaller jump, you would get there slower

to the same spot, but you would get there and you would keep going, right? This is the momentum concept again. So, but yeah, I've recently had a client who has been coming back from, But yeah, I've recently had a client who has been coming back from had to take some time off. So she's been coming back. And so she made a big chunky jump on her bench press and then missed. Right. And she's like, I don't know what happened. Like I got three sets of five in this last week. I'm like, oh, but you didn't, you did 90 last week, right? Like, yeah. And you attempted a hundred this time. Yeah. And they're like, well, first of all, that's a big jump. That's a 10% increase in weight. 90 to 100 is a lot more than 300 to 310 in percentage terms.

But then also, it's a 10-pound jump. If she would have made a 2.5-pound jump, she would have made it. And then another 2.5-pound jump. And a few weeks later, she'd be doing 100. And it would have been a few weeks later, but she would gotten it instead of missing reps and then you're like well what happened you know did i just take a too big of a jump was i not recovered what was the thing so this this is so taking smaller jumps just eliminates some of the guesswork of of of where you are in the stress recovery adaptation cycle right because if you take too big of a jump, you're like,

well, I don't know, was it because of other factors or was it because of the jump? Taking smaller jumps makes more sense in that regard. This also, I think, just kind of, with younger trainees that don't have as much experience, I think the desire to make big chunky jumps, it's a misunderstanding of what training is, right? Like when you, like the process of training, as we spelled out with the stress recovery adaptation cycle is this accumulation of progressively heavier weights. And it's the accumulation over time to move you from weak to strong. And you have to have some sort of control mechanism to ensure that the stress recovery adaptation cycle will happen the way it's supposed to, right?

So you need to have a measurable amount of stress that you're applying every workout in order to know that that part of the equation is balanced, right? Yeah. And so when you make these big chunky jumps, you're just like your stress equation is just jumping all over the place. You don't really know like how much you're putting the finger on the scale in terms of, you know, giving yourself stress to produce the adaptation of strength. Now, let's talk about that because the big chunky jumps have their place. And there's one area that comes to mind where people don't make jumps big enough, and that's when novices are deadlifting. Okay.

They will prematurely try to reduce the jumps to five pounds and reduce the frequency to every other workout or once a week to the point where the squat surpasses the deadlifter is close to it, right? Right. And that's because, you know, I've said this many times, the deadlift's hard, you know, it's stuck to the floor, you know, if you can't get it moving, you're just not strong. And it's also, you know, that first inch of the deadlift is a good proxy for recovery too, because if you're blowing your load on squat, as I like to call it, and you basically are under eating or under rested, but you have just enough energy to get your squats in, it's going to show up when you go to deadlift. The bar is not going to move because your quads are going to be fried, right? Yes. And people don't understand that, right? So the thing is, when you first get exposed to a difficult deadlift, notice I'm not using the word heavy, a difficult deadlift, you start to think, oh, my God, this is heavy.

This is all I got, you know? And then if you film it and watch it, it looks like a warmup, right? But you don't know that because you're not used to getting things off the floor that are difficult, you know, that are starting to get hard, right? And people will just assume that, okay, I can't add 10 pounds next week and they'll add five. And then when they could have added 10 and they could have added 10 the next workout, the next workout, the next workout. So remember the deadlift is a shorter range of motion. You're still using a lot of muscle mass and you can make pretty big jumps on that for a while, you know, eventually, yeah, it's like the squat, the five pound becomes a

standard, but early on when you're a novice trainee, the deadlift can go up by 10 for quite a while. Yeah. You know yeah i would say for if it's safe safe to say that for the first three to six weeks for sure you're gonna see those big chunky jumps on the deadlift uh maybe maybe beyond that for for younger uh trainees especially men it's just so funny because guys are a lot of a lot of these male trainees especially are quick to add five to ten pounds to a bench for as long as they possibly can. Of course. And then keep repeating and recycling it and refuse to go under five pounds, you know?

Right. But then on the deadlift, they'll go to five pounds like on week three, you know? Right. Oh, shit, that was heavy. It's like, come on, don't be a pussy, you know? Exactly. Yeah, so this definitely takes some context here. So, yeah, if you're, you know, that's absolutely true. And to some extent you need to, in order to produce a good deadlift, you need some weight on the bar. You know, your first workout, you might do it fairly light because you're still trying to, you know, just trying to learn the movement. But pretty quickly, once you learn the basics of setting your back, you need to get some weight on the bar because otherwise it doesn't feel right you know yeah so you don't need to take five to ten pound jumps in the bench press

beyond the second or third week yeah it's pretty standard and if you're a female you're going to be adding a pound at a time so you know get used to it that's right yeah and that's the other thing too is you know if you don't have a pair already or a set, I should say, get some micro plates, order them early and you can get micro plates very cheaply. Now it used to be a little harder to, they used to be a little harder to get, but, um, I believe it's fast. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, I believe it's rep fitness. I'm pretty sure it's rep fitness. They have a set of micro plates now that are like 26 bucks and it's the complete,'s the complete set it's like you know you get your uh one and a quarter pounds so that so that you know in total one on each side makes a two and a

half pound jump you get your three quarter pounds you get one and a half half pounds all that stuff it's got all the essentials there it's super cheap now i didn't know that um yeah yeah they're really nice i've been i've been pointing people to them I'll drop a link in the show notes, but yeah, get yourself a set of micro plates. They're not optional because once you need them, you're going to need them like immediately. And if you have to wait two weeks for them to ship, then, you know, you're just going to be twiddling your thumbs, like getting stuck for two weeks on your upper body lifts. And yeah, women, absolutely. One pound jumps on the press. and sometimes even the bench press works really well when you get to that point.

So don't be afraid. All my female trainees are doing one pound on both of them. Yes. Yeah. Many times I have helped women go from 60 pounds on the press to 70. That seems to be a big like kind of- That's a consistently hard, yeah.

Getting to 70 pounds is a hard one for a lot of women. And yeah, one pound at a time, 60, 61, 62, et cetera. So there you go, jumps. Question number three, how much did you eat? And good Lord, this is the one that I run into over and over and over and over again. If you didn't eat any food, your lifts are probably gonna suck.

And if you're underweight, your lifts are probably going to suck. And if you're underweight, your lifts are probably going to suck. So you have to fuel your training with food. And this is one where if you don't eat enough acutely, if you didn't eat enough the night before or the day of, just depending on when you're training, you're not going to get through training. It's not going to happen. And this becomes more and more true the further you go with your training. You know, if you've got heavy squats on the menu, you can't get away with lazy, inconsistent eating habits anymore. You have to eat like it's a second job. Yeah. And if, you know And if you're a hard gainer, you're going to eat, you're going to get full, you're going to eat some more. That's just how it is. And if you're a skinny fat guy, you're going to see the fat come on initially, and then

the muscle mass will spread it out over time because that's just how it goes. You're going to outpace the muscle mass initially, right? And then as you get stronger and the weight on the bar goes up, you're going to fill out and become more muscular less fat now if you're the big fat guy you don't have these problems you know but you still need to not you need to not go on keto because that's what the big fat guy tends to do he thinks that it needs to eat 1500 calories and 20 carbs a day right no stop doing that stupid shit you still need to eat a good amount of carbs and a good amount of protein. And consistently. It has to be consistently the same every day. That means Saturday and Sunday. I see this on both ends of the spectrum, right?

Yeah. So if you're very overweight, you still have to eat consistently because what I'll find is that they'll have days where they didn't eat anything and then their blood sugar's in the tank, their blood pressure's low, their mood is real shitty, they have no mental gas to get through a workout, yeah, it's going to suck, right? And then you just further tank your mood because your workout sucks. So you need to establish good, consistent eating patterns by eating the same every day. And that includes on rest days and on workout days. On the other side of the equation

for the skinny guys, I'll find that they just crush food one day and the next day they don't eat anything. And this is, it's this kind of binge pattern, you know, where they like to have these huge, huge meals and then nothing for the next two meals. And then it's kind of a moderate meal for the third one after that. And they eat another huge meal and they're like, oh, I eat so much and I never gain. No, you don't eat that much consistently. And the same goes with your training, right? Those people often have a lifestyle that has some sort of stressful job that keeps them away from easy access to food. I get it. It's hard. You know, sometimes you aren't going to be in the best position to get optimal nutrition, but you got to do the best you can. And that means getting food in, like thinking about it like a job. You can't just be casual about it. You can't just think

like, oh, you know, I'll just try to eat a little more. No, you have to actually make a plan for it and then stick to that plan. I know for me, I don't track my food anymore, or very rarely, you know, maybe once a year, I'll log a few days just to kind of get a ballpark of where I am. But I don't I don't log my food anymore. But I absolutely had to my first year of training. I didn't do it the entire year. But I had several phases where I had to log my food because I didn't know I had to teach myself how to eat enough to gain. Remember, I was a little 155 pound like scrawny guy when I first started training. And so to push past that, I couldn't just sit around and be like, well, I'll eat till I'm full

and I'll eat a little more on top of that. That's not good enough. It's not going to cut it because your habits up to this point have made you underweight. So you have to change those habits with different ones. And so I've found for me, tracking my food was huge because I did not have a consistent mental idea of what I was eating every day. I thought I was eating a lot more than I actually was in most cases. No, you have to eat. Regardless of which situation you're in, you still need to eat a decent amount of protein, a decent amount of carbs, right? Whether you're very overweight, skinny, fat, or skinny, you have to do it. And there's no way around it. So we hammer that here all the time. Half of the podcast is diet, although we haven't been doing that many episodes lately. We'll try to work on that, though. It's always there, right? It's always there. You know, like I always tell people,

these carb phobes, I'm like, okay, if you ramp up your carbs, you're going to feel it in like two to four days. It's almost like getting on a freaking drug or something. You know, the effects are pronounced if you go from low carb to high carb and you're lifting weights. You feel it immediately, especially in the squat,, you know, you have more fluid in your body and whatnot. And it helps, you know, like to a certain extent, you got to decouple from this mentality that you have to look a certain way, you know. And that's, you know, a psychological problem. We're not psychologists. But if you're focused so much on the aesthetic, especially early on, you're just going to limit yourself because you're going to under-eat, you're going to under-train, and you're not going to get anywhere. The physical changes come with time, so you just got to kind of forget about it. And you also got to really understand that

they are tied to the amount of weight you're lifting. Contrary to popular belief, that is true. That is the most objective metric that you could use to know that if you're building muscle, if the weight on the bar is going up,'re probably going to grow those muscles that's just what happens you know and this was very obvious and clear for a long time uh and then you know we started getting these these fucking idiots you know sitting here telling you that some you know you know the science fiction comic book masquerading as science, you know? Right. If you want to call it that, a lot of these peer-reviewed journals

don't have enough information in them to say what is going to work for everybody. You know, these are very narrow circumstances with a very narrow subset of the population sampled in such a way that you can't generalize any of it. You know, and this is something we're gonna dive into but you know uh peer-reviewed journals are becoming like fucking comic books you know they really are you know it's like the um yeah and then and that's really in the discussion section you know like when you kind of go into the background and the methods it's like okay you know stuff sounds good in theory but then when you get to their

interpretations and their conclusions it's like guys you're stretching the shit out of this to get published you know right right and uh you know i think a lot of our audience probably isn't familiar with how they do that that's why we have some episodes coming on this but it's just made people think about working out and shit a lot of other things in a very impractical way, you know? Yeah. It doesn't tend to, you know, doesn't tend to check out in practice. Yeah, it doesn't pass the smell test, that's for sure. No.

Well, you know, the other thing too is that, you know, you mentioned carbs and, you know, right now in this phase of, you know, how the pendulum is swinging in the fitness world is carbs are bad. Carbs are evil right now. Now, I don't know if in five, 10 years, if they will be evil anymore, probably not probably changed to something else. But the other thing to remind yourself of is you are training now. So a low carb diet might work well for some guy who's just sitting on the couch and walks, you know, 5,000 steps a day and doesn't do any training, lifts no weights, does nothing hard physically, you know, maybe that guy should be on a low carb diet. I don't know, but that's not you. That's not you. You have chosen to pick up the

barbell and train three days a week. And that, that means you have, you, your needs are different now. Your nutrition needs are different now. And part of that means eating enough carbs to make the weight go. lot better, but it's something that you have to do consistently. And that means on your off days too. You know, when you're resting on those days, you're replenishing spent muscle glycogen. And you're also, you know, so you're filling up those glycogen stores. And along with that, you bring on extra water and fluid into the body. And that means that if you're going to work out the next morning, then you're going to be using those glycogen stores that you accumulated on the day before based on what you ate. So it's every day. It's not just the days that you work. I think some people have this idea that they need to earn what they eat. And so they eat more on workout days. Some of that has to do with their appetite.

Their appetite's bigger on days that they train, but you also need to eat that way on the off days for the same reason. So there's the three questions. Before you start thinking about programming changes, you got to ask those three questions. And I would add a fourth one. I would add a fourth question to this list. And I'm sure it's been discussed in the starting strength seminars and elsewhere. But my fourth question is, what else is going on? What else is going on in life? If you have a ton of stress, if you got fired from your job, if you're going through a divorce, if your kid is sick and you stayed up late because they're throwing up, well, it's going to have an impact on your training. And for some people, it has more of an impact than others. You know,

in general, the more life responsibilities you have, the more these stressful situations are going to impact your training because, you know, a lot of your life and your focus is elsewhere outside the gym and so you have to give yourself some leeway and understand that if life is going nuts then training is not probably not going to go perfect training can be a very good outlet for stress i know for me it certainly is always feel better. I always feel less stressed when I get under the, underneath the iron and I put in a good workout, but I also, I also, and I'm, I'm bad about this too, right? I expect to have maximum performance, even though I've only slept for five hours the last three nights. Right. But I also, when I stepped back, I realized that,

okay, you know what? This is not right now. This week is not the week that I'm going to have absolutely my best performance. I need to get in there and do something hard, do something heavy. But if I miss some reps this week, then I can't attribute that to a programming issue. I probably can attribute that to a stress issue and it's worth repeating what I've done when I've had a chance to rest more, when I'm less stressed so that I can, you know, eliminate that variable. And that's what I would call the fourth question. Yes. The way I like to explain this is you have like this, this, a stress bucket, right? And

there's all these things that go into it. You know, 18 year old kid at mom's house, the only, the most stressful thing in his life might be training and maybe finding a girlfriend, right? Right. Yeah. But you know, otherwise the guy's going to sleep eight to 10 hours a day. He's going to eat all mom's food. You know, he might work part-time and then he's just going to lift and train. Right. You know, similar to like, you know, when you're dealing with pro athletes athletes that's their full-time job and everything in their lifestyle revolves around that job but what we're talking about here is you know pretty much recreational lifting a recreational training i should say you're trying to improve so it is training but it's for recreational purposes your life doesn't depend on it right which means that that bucket of stress is going to have other things in there

besides the mechanical stress of training, right? You know, you might be married, you may have children, you may have animals, you may have a stressful and demanding job with a crazy schedule. You know, I get people in the medical field that work shifts, they're on crazy schedules. You know, I get people, lawyers that, you know, have to go to court, that messes things up, you know? And there's a variety of different examples, right? But the point is that everything that stresses you out, you have to recover from. And it's not just a set of five heavy squats, a set of five heavy benches and a heavy set of five deadlifts or whatever else you're doing, depending on your advancement, right? Now you have infants keeping you up at night. You got a little puppy dogs keeping you up at night, you know, and having a clean poop out of a dog crate in the middle of

the night or fucking change diapers in your case, Trent, you know, you know, you may have farm animals too, you know, or you may have a job where people call you in the middle of the night, wake you up, you know, and stress you out that way. Or you're working 12 hours one day and five the next, you know, you know, the list goes on. All these stressors require you to recover from them. They compete with each other and training usually gets the shit under the stick when you're working 12 hours one day and five the next, you know, you know, the list goes on. All these stressors require you to recover from them. They compete with each other. And training usually gets the shit under the stick when you're, when you have all these other things going on. Right.

So you have to understand that, right? Like there's some weeks where I'm just, you know, work stress keeps me up. I, you know, sleep six hours cause I can't sleep the full eight. And then, you know, I start missing reps. Right. I didn't fail though, because I showed up. Remember, you only fail if you bail. The expectations are managed.

You start to see the patterns and how you feel. I'm feeling it's objective, of course. You're going to know this better than anyone else. The longer you train, the better you understand it. One benefit to having several good years of training is when you start having the bad training, you can identify these things better and you're pretty yeah spot on with your predictions you know but uh you get more stoic about it too you're like okay i know things are gonna be better you know yeah like it took me four tries to pin bench press 305 and a lot of that had to do with just

the sleep schedule and other things sure uh one week i was still sore from volume squats things like that right uh and then this week i went through i got set of five last week this week i went for 307 and a half got four which i was more than thrilled with because the third one was pretty hard right but i slept six hours saturday sunday monday tuesday you know so and wednesday so then thursday when i had to do that, I got four, and I'm like, all right, well, you know, I'm not very well rested. So maybe next week in Europe I'll get five, you know? Yeah, right, right. And then I can put three plates on because it'll be 308, right? Yeah, that's true, yeah.

Yeah, 140 kilos. But, you know, my point is when that stuff happens, I don't care, like 395 on the squat, you know, I missed that three weeks in a row. Then I figured out that protein was the problem. So I beefed up my protein, probably my calories too. And then I got 400, then I got 395, 400, 405. Today I'm doing 410. By the way, this was recorded a week before you guys hear it. So I'm still in the States, but I'll be in Europe when you actually listen to this episode, I'll already be gone. But yeah, so you kind of like start to figure out. You're like, okay, I'm stressed out over this, and I feel run down in my workouts.

Everything feels heavy. And you just kind of know. The longer you train, the better you get to know this. But it's not worth freaking out about. It's not worth writing 2,000-word novels to your coach about it. You don't need to do that. It's, you know, and we understand it's a misrep and we understand you're going out of your fucking mind, but, you know, managing that thing that makes you write 2000 word descriptions of a workout that

consists of three to four exercises, whatever that thing is, you got to figure that out. That's also adding stress. You writing that 2000 word thing, you know, several times a week, it's probably making it harder to train. So think about that for a second, right? Yeah. Basically, in short, psychological stress absolutely has an impact on your training. A hundred percent. I think a lot of people want to discount it and like, you know, it's not that big a deal.

No, it is a big deal. Absolutely. It has psychological stress stress has a physical effect what is your central nervous system comprised of your brain hey your brain and your spinal cord right your spinal cord right exactly so psychological stress starts with the brain that's right exactly and that shit is lighting up when you're doing heavy squats and deadlifts and etc etc so um yeah so there you go so that's the fourth question and don't don't you know And that shit is lighting up when you're doing heavy squats and deadlifts and et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah.

So there you go. So that's the fourth question. And don't underestimate that one. I would just say that stress is usually acute. There are phases of life. We do go through seasons of life sometimes where stress is just elevated for a while. And when that happens, your programming approach is going to have to change. It just, it will have to. But most of the time, it's these acute little hits of stress that are just above our normal sort of baseline. And when that happens, if you just look at it and you kind of step back for a minute, you're like, I missed today. What

happened? Well, my sleep's been shitty for the last three days and this thing at work's been going i've it's a crazy project i'm turning it in friday okay why don't you just repeat what you did next week because if that stress that stressor is going away chances are you get it you probably will surprise yourself chances are you get it so it's okay to just repeat things when you have those acute bouts of stress when it's something that's going to last for weeks and weeks and months and months, your, your programming approach is just going to have to change at that point. Um, but a lot of times it's just these acute things and you can, you can work around those, but just, you gotta be a little flexible with it. Um, so there you go. There's, there's the three questions plus one on, uh, why you missed. And if you have answered all of these and you're like, nope, I've addressed all, every one of these, um, reasonably well, then you start to look at your programming.

And then you go back to the last two episodes we did and start to make some programming changes. But before you do that, don't be, don't be too quick to, to flip, you know, to flip the programming lever. Make sure you have these other things nailed down first. You know, I want to hit on something as we close out. You know, Trent mentioned this earlier. Momentum is more important than making progress on X, Y, or Z program, right? I never thought about this until you just said that, right? But when I'm programming somebody, my priority is to keep that momentum going, because I find that when somebody gets stuck, the psychological stress of it can really drive them to hate lifting. I've seen people quit over it. I've seen people skip workouts over it. I mean,

it gets bad, right? And on top of it, then you just have to sit there and try to reset and troubleshoot through that. Ideally, you don't want to miss. I mean, if you miss, you know, okay, you know, you miss, you try again, right? But, you know, things are pretty consistent in your life. Ideally, you want to keep that momentum going versus trying to get as much as you can out of whatever templated program you're following, you know, because you're going to go further that way. You're going to build more confidence that way, you know, and eventually you are going to miss, you know, there's, you know, what, two guarantees in life? I'd say there's a third. So there's death taxes and missing reps, you know? Right. Yeah. So, you know, just embrace that. But at the same time,

when something starts to slow down, it is okay to change the program to keep that momentum going. You know, if you're barely getting a set of five deadlifts on Friday after doing a set of five deadlifts on Monday, then maybe you just need to do it every Friday starting the following week. And that's okay. That's okay as long as you keep moving up. If you rack-pulled several, let's say you rack-pulled 405 one week, then you PR'd your deadlift at 375 next week,

don't go to 380 next week on the deadlift. It's not going to move off the floor. Then you're going to get pissed, and then I'm going to have already told you that was going to happen, and then you're going to get pissed at me for being right. Or you're going to laugh at me for being right, depending on your sense of humor. Most recent guy who did something like that laughed at me for being right, you know, because I'm like, well, it's going to be stapled to the floor, buddy. Then he literally just tried to lift it and it was stapled to the floor. So, you know, those four questions are very important, but also counterbalance that out with what do you have to do to maintain momentum,

not what do you have to do to stay on this program forever. The goal is not to stay on a given program forever. The goal is to make progress for as long as you possibly can, right? Yeah. At the end of the day, who cares what program you're on? Like, we're here to get stronger. I'm not here to run a program. I'm here to get stronger.

Nobody gives a fuck if you ran starting strength and squatted 500 for three sets of five, you know? Nobody cares about that, you know? Yeah. So, you know, keep moving. We just care that you got stronger. Yeah. Keep progressing.

That's the goal here. You keep progressing, you know, keep moving. We just care that you got stronger. Yeah. Keep progressing. That's the goal here. You keep progressing. Keep progressing. Dial in your recovery by going down that list of those four questions. So do all of that. But then if all that is done, keep fucking progressing. I don't care if it's every week, every two weeks, every four weeks. You will feel better if you make a new PR versus if you try

to make one weekly and you're missing it weekly. You know, for me, I'm in the four questions territory. I'm not sleeping well. That's why I'm missing weekly, you know. For the loads that I'm at, given all the data I've collected over the years, I can make weekly jumps. But I know that I'm getting close to a point where it's going to have to be bi-weekly. And I know that from the data. But why am I repeating the same number every week? Because I know what the fuck I'm fucking up. And it's the sleep variable before it was a protein variable. So, you know, address the four questions. But then after you address the four questions, the goal is to not stay in a program forever. The goal is to make progress steadily for as long as you can. Here you go. All right.

Well, let's close it out, man. I also have online coaching on my website. If you are interested in that and aren't near a starting strength coach or just want to work with me, I'm also on Instagram where I post most of my content these days. I'm trying to expand out to YouTube. The podcast is now on YouTube, so tune in. The link in show notes. Link in show notes. There you go. Yeah. See, I'm getting better at this.

Or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. And you can find the gyms page at weights double underscore and plates. All right, well, you know where to find me. I'm at marmalade underscore cream on Instagram. And I'm also at Jones barbell club at gmail.com. If you want to send me an email, we'll talk to you again in a couple weeks.