What is fatigue?

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

To add to what @Hardartery said, in RP-speak, there are two distinct things:
- stimulus
- fatigue
Stimulus is all the good things that your training does and fatigue is the cost that you have to pay in exchange for that. Feeling a pump, feeling tension in the muscle, being sore etc. is not something they use to evaluate fatigue, it is something that they use to evaluate stimulus. The goal of a good training session is not to accumulate fatigue, it is to accumulate stimulus.

On a tangent: has Beardsley trained anyone of note ? Is he strong himself ? I am genuinely curious because I tried to find his achievements using some google-fu but went nowhere. Call me a meathead but to me, if you're not strong and have never trained people to get strong, then your advice is worth nothing, as far as the practical act of training is concerned.

I have been wondering about this on a conceptual level now for a little bit. Stimulus abs fatigue are considered by many as two seperate things. Like fatigue is just a by product of the stimulus. Mechanical tension is the stimulus but it’s painted as if muscle cells just experience a nudge or deformation but not an actual challenge to homeostasis. To me it seems silly that our body would use resources to grow muscles unless they actually experienced a serious challenge to homeostasis. Therefore in my mind some sort of muscle damage/fatigue/ inflammation would have to be necessary instead of a useless byproduct. Like I know there have been studies showing that hypertrophy was greatest when muscle damage was the least. But maybe there’s still a baseline amount necessary and too much is detrimental

I mean fatigue is "necessary" in the sense that I cannot think of any exercise that has an infinite stimulus to fatigue ratio. Would be like an infinite gainz machine.

Now the fact that fatigue and stimulus are separate is pretty clear to me in the sense that you can design workouts that generate enormous fatigue but close to zero stimulus. Imagine for instance doing 1/8ths squats (moving the bar up and down 5 centimeters) with a 10 second pause in the bottom position with the heaviest weight you can manage. This is going to provide close to 0 stimulus for almost anything, but you're going to be fatigued for a week.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

To add to what @Hardartery said, in RP-speak, there are two distinct things:
- stimulus
- fatigue
Stimulus is all the good things that your training does and fatigue is the cost that you have to pay in exchange for that. Feeling a pump, feeling tension in the muscle, being sore etc. is not something they use to evaluate fatigue, it is something that they use to evaluate stimulus. The goal of a good training session is not to accumulate fatigue, it is to accumulate stimulus.

On a tangent: has Beardsley trained anyone of note ? Is he strong himself ? I am genuinely curious because I tried to find his achievements using some google-fu but went nowhere. Call me a meathead but to me, if you're not strong and have never trained people to get strong, then your advice is worth nothing, as far as the practical act of training is concerned.

Meathead

In all seriousness though, I absolutely agree. You wouldn't take cooking classes from someone who doesn't cook well, after all.

Exactly, this is something that kills me because in almost all human activities, people instinctively know that if the instructor has not done something then he can't teach you how to to something. No one would hire a math teacher who does not know how to count to 10, an illiterate literature teacher, or a painting teacher that can't draw a stick figure.

Yet somehow in the world of getting bigger stronger leaner whatever this happens all the time. You have the obese coach telling you it's easy to lose weight, the 160 lbs guy selling a bulking routine, the 225 bencher offering powerlifting coaching, and the guy who trained for 8 weeks after spending the last 20 years in front of his PS4 writing a graduate level textbook about what's achievable naturally. And people just eat it up, they love it, they give them views, likes and comments. Infuriating it is.

[5hout]

To add to what @Hardartery said, in RP-speak, there are two distinct things:
- stimulus
- fatigue
Stimulus is all the good things that your training does and fatigue is the cost that you have to pay in exchange for that. Feeling a pump, feeling tension in the muscle, being sore etc. is not something they use to evaluate fatigue, it is something that they use to evaluate stimulus. The goal of a good training session is not to accumulate fatigue, it is to accumulate stimulus.

On a tangent: has Beardsley trained anyone of note ? Is he strong himself ? I am genuinely curious because I tried to find his achievements using some google-fu but went nowhere. Call me a meathead but to me, if you're not strong and have never trained people to get strong, then your advice is worth nothing, as far as the practical act of training is concerned.

Meathead

In all seriousness though, I absolutely agree. You wouldn't take cooking classes from someone who doesn't cook well, after all.

Exactly, this is something that kills me because in almost all human activities, people instinctively know that if the instructor has not done something then he can't teach you how to to something. No one would hire a math teacher who does not know how to count to 10, an illiterate literature teacher, or a painting teacher that can't draw a stick figure.

Yet somehow in the world of getting bigger stronger leaner whatever this happens all the time. You have the obese coach telling you it's easy to lose weight, the 160 lbs guy selling a bulking routine, the 225 bencher offering powerlifting coaching, and the guy who trained for 8 weeks after spending the last 20 years in front of his PS4 writing a graduate level textbook about what's achievable naturally. And people just eat it up, they love it, they give them views, likes and comments. Infuriating it is.

I have to sort of disagree here. You have to exercise your god given brain and evaluate the information, certainly curve it (or bounded distrust if you want to be more anal) (eg https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/01/09 ... -distrust/), but ultimately truth it truth. Good advice coming from someone doesn't become bad advice b/c of the source (although certainly having a famous person tell you something might have motivational effects).

1: Hurdles coach at my HS essentially ran an export business in athletes, to the extent that people from non-hurdling disciplines would come to him for programming b/c it was better. His track experience pre-coaching? None. The man had never gone over a hurdle in his life, did not run. IIRC he wanted to coach basketball, but job wasn't open so he took the track job to kill time and oops turned out to be really damn good at it.

2: The mark of a good fencing coach (one might say a "real" coach) is can you make fencers better than you are? Just about any monkey can reproduce their own results. But (broad strokes here) fencers are rated E to A, if you're a D can you make Cs? If you can't you're shit. If you can, you're a real coach and anyone else can fuck right off with their comments.

3: Bill Belichick was a crap football player who attended a lol-they-have-a-team school. Tom Izzo was a Div 2 All star on the back of playing a lot minutes at a crap school 1.5 hours past the ass end of nowhere. Laurie Schiller (NU former Head Coach for fencing) was an exceptional coach, who was a perfectly serviceable fencer, but nowhere close to national level (let alone international), one of the winningest fencing coaches in NCAA history.

4: People with the experience should be listened to, but curved for lack of experience as a coach. People without the experience should be hella curved, but you might still find truth there. Especially if they've actually done the work of developing expertise.

5: Advice coming from more academic settings is also suspect, but is also a great source for new ideas. But again, you've gotta (pardon the phrase) apply your discernment to it.

6: Naturally talented athletes often make shit coaches, they don't have to think about their sport. They simply go, do and compete. Then when they retire and go to coach discover they lack the ability to explain/teach and see things from the point of view of those who do not understand from the start. If you discard the advice everyone who hasn't lifted nationally you're limiting yourself, especially as the best coaches are very often people that failed b/c of shit genetics and in the trying learned how to learn about the subject.

7: There is no easy road to truth, merely hardwork, thinking and testing.

Bonus ETA example: For years in the game counterstrike global offensive one of the guns (UMP) was overpowered on a cost/benefit basis. Non-former pro analysts would go on desks at events and ask "It's odd they keep buying other SMGs, the UMP is better here" and pros/the community would go "REEEEEEEEEEEEEE UMP sucks stfu you never played pro/don't know what you're talking about/if you're so smart why weren't you a pro player". This situation lasted about 2 years, then a few pros picked the gun up (perhaps in-between bouts of adderall and being good at clicking on heads they decided to read the stats) and within about a month it was THE gun to buy whenever remotely reasonable. So much so that it warped the entire gun meta around it and the dev had to nerf it substantially. TWO+ YEARS of non-pros pointing this out, and being told to sit down and shut up b/c they weren't pros or former pros. Then "oops it turns out it actually was OP the entire time".

This is a great example, b/c buckets of money are on the line AND it's not something you have to test for 3 months like a training method (plus risks of injury/lost time/blahblahblah). Checking this out is a the work of a long weekend, at most, plus it gave a huge advantage to the first movers plus the risk was nil and it still took 2+ years.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

@5hout you make some good points, and I certainly agree that there might be some cases in which you have a good coach who's was never very good. And yes as you mention, the key is to build up a filter by using your brain. Also, yes finding truth is a hard problem, especially if you're dealing with a complex system like the human body.

Now I disagree with you that the messenger is unimportant. I feel that the person with practical experience and success giving out information is always better than an inexperienced and unsuccessful person giving the same information. Anyone can regurgitate something they read somewhere, which is what I was lamenting about in my previous post. The person who has used the information to reach a high level of success brings something to the table that the inexperienced cannot provide. The inexperienced, unsuccessful are just increasing the signal to noise ratio and cramping up the space.

Also, while I agree with you that ignoring the advice of some simply based on their lack of success could be a problem, but I feel that it is compensated by the fact that there is so many strong successful lifters giving out good advice for free: Nuckols, Israetel, Tuchscherer etc. If anything there's almost an over-saturation of good lifters giving good advice, so being "too selective" is less of a problem.

[5hout]

Also, while I agree with you that ignoring the advice of some simply based on their lack of success could be a problem, but I feel that it is compensated by the fact that there is so many strong successful lifters giving out good advice for free: Nuckols, Israetel, Tuchscherer etc. If anything there's almost an over-saturation of good lifters giving good advice, so being "too selective" is less of a problem.

That is a good point. It's not like fencing or some other sports where the amount of legit advice online is ~0 and you have to seek in-person coaching from the best available person within 45m.

[KyleSchuant]

This as it was told to me, I don't swear to its truth in all details. Denis Knowles was this guy who coached kids at the local park in whatever sport they were interested in. At some point he got it all associated with the local high school. He himself had done soccer as a kid, but grew up to a statuesque 5'3", I think it was, so didn't go far. As his son was growing up, he took an interest in discus. Knowles said, "um..." and went and got a bunch of videos about discus, coached his 10yo son. Well, the lad grew to 5'6", bigger than dad, but not ideal for discus.

Anyway, a few years on this adolesccent girl comes along, Dani Samuels, and she wants to do shotput. "Denis determined," I was told, "that she'd be better at discus." Maybe - or maybe it was just because by now Knowles knew how to coach discus. She did shot as well but discus was always her main thing. So young Dani comes along to the park five days a week for five years and then becomes the youngest ever world champion discus thrower, at 20yo.

Now, what a lot of people don't know is that while she was the youngest ever world champion, she didn't hold the women's youth Australian record. That was this other girl, who got taken to the record by Knowles and then she and her parents said, "Thanks, now we need a real discus coach." Off they went hopping from one coach to another and her performance stagnated and declined. That girl was a few years ahead of Dani, who saw this and took it as a warning - she stuck with him right from 12yo to her recent retirement after failing to qualify for Tokyo 2021.

The morals of this long and boring story are three,

1. sometimes a world-class coach is just an ordinary coach who had a world-class athlete walk through his door one day
2. the real 5x5 programme is 5 days a week for 5 years. This is probably the trickiest part.
3. sometimes the greatest coach is not necessarily a great coach of some particular sport, but of some particular athlete - after 5 days a week for 5 years, you know them pretty well.

And the real point: you have to judge the ability of the coach or trainer by what their people do.

Oh and if you are a trainer or coach and those 3 happen... now you can spend your life doing seminars.

https://www.aths.coach/resources/coachi ... is-knowles