Where There Is [No Struggle], There Is [No Strength] – Part 1

To Push or Pull?

In this series I will be telling you why without struggle, there is no strength. What that really means is if you never have to try particularly hard, you’re never going to get better at what you’re doing.

Our bodies love staying the same, so to induce change we must provide a stress big enough to cause a response. However, if you keep pushing, never pulling back, you’ll cause problems, because you won’t have time to respond and grow to overcome the issue.

Yet if you don’t push hard enough or for long enough, you’ll simply never see a positive change. It is knowing when to push and pull and why that is important, and that is what Part 1 is about.

The Push- ‘Progressive Overload’
The principle that is progressive overload simply means that there is a need to increase training load in order to progress. In gym talk, you gotta add more weight to the bar or get more reps out if you wanna make gainz.

So to get stronger you have to push right? As touched on before. That push comes in the form of more weight or reps. Yet like previously discussed, you cannot push all the time. Why? Because our bodies cannot take it, we increase the risk of injury, overtraining and are likely to stagnate and even go backwards. No gainz.

The Pull- ‘Deload’
How do we pull back? This is usually done by reducing volume, and or intensity. The purpose is to allow our body to grow and repair from all the pushing. Growth and repair means gainz.

Combing the Push & Pull – ‘Periodisation’
Periodisation is the means by which we organise our training into blocks of low, medium and high volume and intensity. We have a microcycle (weekly), mesocycle (monthly) and macrocycle (yearly) to organise this within.

If we are always on the high end of intensity and volume all the time, we are pushing too much. Yet if we are using a low volume and low intensity approach, we aren’t providing enough of a push. If we get that balance right, we are on the way to gainzville. This process is captured particularly well by Selye’s General Adaption Syndrome (GAS) model of adaption to stress.

As you can see as we push we start to adapt, but push too long and we can stagnate or even deteriorate. Yet, given the right amount of stress the body will not only adapt but overcompensate (‘supercompensation’) to a higher level in anticipation of similar stress to come.

Push and Pull the right amount, say hello to gainzville.

When to Pull?- ‘Deload’/Taper
Right so we know that we can push our bodies too far causing no further progress. Yet we also know that if we do not push enough we won’t be stressing our bodies sufficiently to adapt. We must find the sweet spot, enough push, and then pull back at the right time.

The time we want to do this is when supercompensation peaks, as said before, too late or too soon and we will stagnate. That is brilliantly depicted below.

How do we know when our supercompensation is going to peak? This is dependent on our training age/experience. And that is where I am going to come to a close on Part 1.

What have we learnt?

• We need to continually push our bodies (progressive overload), to provide a stress response.
• We must take periods where we pull back (deload), to allow for supercompensation.
• This is done via a manipulation of volume and intensity, which is provided via periodisation.
• How you approach periodisation is reliant on your training experience.

Stay tuned for the rest of the series if you want to get really strong!