Emergence: Loading Progression and Rate of Adaptation

When writing a training program, we seek to apply sufficient stress to elicit desired adaptation without overwhelming the athlete’s ability to recover appropriately between stressors. This cycle can be referred to as Stimulus-Recovery-Adaptation (SRA).

For any given instance of training stress, the SRA cycle will be of different length. Differences will be influenced by a huge number of variables. Some of them we can account for ex ante: heavier loads, longer ranges of motion/incorporation of more joints in the movement, high intensities (relative or absolute), and high volumes are all likely to have longer SRA cycles than lighter loads, shorter ranges of motion/fewer joints, low intensities and volumes.

Each athlete will have a different SRA cycle for any given stressor. Good heuristics can help us determine a starting point for an athlete we know nothing about, but most of the important work will come on the other end (ex post) – following athlete response, as the Great and Mighty Mike Tuchscherer likes to say.

How can we set ourselves up to leverage emerging information in order to trace the contours of a particular athlete’s SRA cycle for a particular stressor? Big question, lots of reasonable answers. I’ll offer one strategy below.

RIR: “Reps in Reserve”.
This is not meant to be a week to week progression – an athlete might repeat any of the specific prescriptions for several workouts/weeks.

The table above shows a de facto loading progression through the application and removal of various constraints. I say de facto because at no point does this progression directly or explicitly call for an increase in load. Instead, we start the progression with a lot of constraints – high reps in reserve, both a concentric and eccentric tempo, no belt allowed – and put the athlete in a position to increase load by lifting and/or changing constraints over time.

There are at least two advantages to an approach like this one: autonomy and emergence.

Autonomy is important because it leaves the “in-game” decision-making to the athlete themselves. They are given constraints and asked to perform within them, rather than simply told precisely what to do. This allows the athlete to develop their training IQ, and it gives us the best chance of the athlete actually working at the appropriate level of stress for the day (assuming that they have been sufficiently educated to understand their own role in the process.)

Emergence is important because that it allows the athlete’s “natural” rate of adaptation to emerge. Instead of determining ahead of time that we will add load at such-and-such time in such-and-such increments, we start with a lot of constraints and change them as seems appropriate (having a sound decision-making protocol for lifting and/or changing constraints is also important, but a topic for another day). This ensures that we are able to leverage new information as it becomes available to us, rather than relying on ex ante assumptions about the way in which the athlete will adapt to their training.