Training frequency, recovery, and Matt Perryman

I’m not even sure if I want to post this since I’m thinking a lot of you will be missing too much context.  If you haven’t read a lot of Matt’s stuff in the past, you’ll probably be left scratching your head.  And it’s late, so I’m not going to go into the whole back story.  However, there was a great conversation on his facebook page earlier tonight and I wanted to share some of what I consider to be the important posts.

If anyone has any questions, I’ll do my best to explain a bit deeper and I’m sure I could get Matt to chime in as well.

Keep in mind that I’m cherrypicking the important posts from a long conversation.

Enjoy!

Matt said:

People seriously just have no clue what goes on in their bodies.  They read some nonsense on woo-woo blogs and that becomes the truth.

Pubmed tells a different story but you’d have to branch out of your comfort zone and see what other fields are doing to understand that, no, glands don’t get fatigued and CNSs don’t “burn out”. (CNS = central nervous system)  There’s some freaky mess going on which I think is worth understanding but the majority of anything ever posted about “CNS anything” on the internet is just voodoo.

Someone than asked Matt for the cliff notes on the central nervous system, and in response to that, he said:

It’s kinda hard to give cliffs but to make it easy there are two different things happening:

1. feeling bad after a workout via soreness but also that “man I feel burned out” sensation — this is a specific response of the immune system acting on the brain and triggering “I feel bad” feelings.

2. loss of fine motor control (strength and power performance) within a workout session due to a specific pattern of activity in parts the brain controlling mental effort and motor control — this expresses itself as fatigue but neurologically speaking it’s more like a safety device

“CNS fatigue” as an internet concept wraps up both of them into one package, and they are related weakly, but one doesn’t lead to the other, and neither of them has anything to do with long-term recovery (and recovery itself is a misleading idea)

I then asked:

Are you saying that recovery itself is a misleading idea from the standpoint that we are not locked into some fixed stress/recovery/supercompensation curve that’s the same for everyone irrespective of individual circumstances? Or what?

Matt replied with:

Mostly I think supercompensation is a poor model of what actually happens.

We don’t have hitpoints.

Muscles recover and rebuild themselves but for most people “recovered” means “I’m not sore anymore” and that’s really got no impact on the real question of “can I train again?”

JC Deen says:

so you don’t necessarily look at it from a standpoint of having “x” amount of recovery units in a period of time and once we run out, we die? kinda like a video game. or something.

and

so do you feel there is an optimal recovery period? or that it’s highly individual when it comes to work load, stress, sexcapades, etc?

Matt replies with:

depends on workloads, life stress, individual biology-psychology and past training experience mainly

After a few more questions, Matt cuts to the meat of his point, which is what I thought was too good not to share:

see what I’ve been seeing as a consistent thing is that stress does most of its work *through* the psychological response

so the actual physical stress of a workout might be nothing, or at least minimal, but if you’re all wound up over it, that magnifies the negative symptoms

and not just that, but folks prone to getting mentally wound up do it for *everything else* in their lives too, so not only do workouts beat you up extra bad but you’ll take any other life-stress extra bad too

Sapolsky wrote about these folks and they’re actually measurably stressed out, and there’s prolly a heritable cause as it runs in families

hence my interest in mindfulness and relaxation techniques; if you learn to dial back your own emotional reactions to squats (or anything else) then you rob it of much of its power to cause “recovery problems”

in my thinking the physical stress of a workout can be laregely adapted to, hence why daily squatting works *if you wrap your head around it and stick with it* (and don’t get too wacky with the workloads until you adjust to each new level)

but the emotional response, when you get in there and dump all your energy into your work sets and spend 16 hours stressing over it before and after, that’s what will floor you

Just to make sure I was reading Matt correctly, I asked:

Yeah, that’s the best I’ve seen you explain it, Matt. Even factoring in all the talk of stress/recovery and HFT you’ve had on your site over the last while. Good stuff.

Says a lot about the batshit crazy dieters too, who flip the hell out about fractions of a calorie, endless workouts, and body image. How they’re perceiving the importance of what, for the most part, amounts to trivial things is causing greater “disturbances” than said “things” themselves… if that makes any sense.

Going back to an old analogy you used to explain the concept of stress/recovery… and this goes back well before you’re newer line of thinking… but I believe you used the sink full of water to represent our recovery capacities. The drain represented the application of stress – training, dieting, life, or whatever. Each variable sucking out a portion of the available recovery capacity. And the faucet represented our ability to replace said capacity.

This older line of thinking was limited in that, more or less, we were viewing the capacity and recovery as fixed variables locked into the patterns of the theoretical model of the day (single factor or dual factor curves of recovery/supcomp).

Therefore we were constantly balancing our “drains” in accordance to these fixed variables, which always netted to our basic full body training, upper/lower splits, or even body part training as long as there was adequate rest between training each muscle/movement/or whatever.

But now we’re saying not only is the size of the sink and the volume of the water pouring out the faucet more adaptable than originally assumed, but also that the drain is going to open up more in response to our perception of training rather than it is to the actual dosage of training.

Am I thinking about this correctly?

Matt’s final reply for completeness:

ya that’s a good way to look at it

this is why I’ve been so big on the belief aspect as well, I mean if you start from the premise that “squatting again tomorrow will overtrain me” then you’re going to react to that as such and, physical damage to tissues aside, you’ve started a cascade of events that is potentially more harmful to your physical condition than the workout itself

Just some food for thought… sorry if the disjointed copy and paste job doesn’t make a lot of sense to some of you.  Matt is one of those guys who’s always making me think, which is a very good thing.  I need more people in my fitness network who make me question my beliefs and ideas.  You can check out more of Matt’s stuff here.