Weekly Recap 8/25 - 8/31
The article of the week is Training Expectations: Understanding Stalls which looks at the process of strength training, and how it is not a linear one where every workout allows us to realize a new level of performance, although improvement early on is often quick and rewarding. The second article of the week is a new review on Autoregulation in Resistance Training: Addressing the Inconsistencies which looks at how a more systematic conceptualisation of autoregulation can be helpful moving forward in both research and practice
Our first social media post of the week is Paul Oneid’s post about his own struggles with body image and how it is not specific to gender. To conclude, we have a post from Precision Nutrition about how no single food will transform your diet.
Articles of the Week
Training Expectations: Understanding Stalls
The process of strength training is not a linear one where every workout allows us to realize a new level of performance, although improvement early on is often quick and rewarding. This article addresses what to do when that enjoyable forward momentum is blunted or seems to have stopped altogether. This is frequently referred to as a “stall”, although that concept is a nebulous one. We will discuss how to identify whether you have actually stalled and if that warrants a change in your training.
A stall refers to a situation where a particular metric (working set weights, rep-max weights, endurance performance, etc.) is not progressing as planned or as expected. An important caveat is that this observation must occur over a time period long enough to demonstrate a clear trend. In the context of strength training this typically requires at least three weeks, sometimes longer. Performance can vary from workout to workout for a variety of reasons. One or two workouts where performance declines does not automatically mean you have stalled, because there is a degree of normal variation in performance that is to be expected over short time periods. We want a longer period to examine before making that declaration. We will arbitrarily define a “regression” as a marked reduction in performance (e.g., greater than 15%) across a sufficiently long time period.
Autoregulation in Resistance Training: Addressing the Inconsistencies
Autoregulation is a process that is used to manipulate training based primarily on the measurement of an individual’s performance or their perceived capability to perform. Despite being established as a training framework since the 1940s, there has been limited systematic research investigating its broad utility. Instead, researchers have focused on disparate practices that can be considered specifc examples of the broader autoregulation training framework. A primary limitation of previous research includes inconsistent use of key terminology (e.g., adaptation, readiness, fatigue, and response) and associated ambiguity of how to implement diferent autoregulation strategies. Crucially, this ambiguity in terminology and failure to provide a holistic overview of autoregulation limits the synthesis of existing research fndings and their dissemination to practitioners working in both performance and health contexts. Therefore, the purpose of the current review was threefold: frst, we provide a broad overview of various autoregulation strategies and their development in both research and practice whilst highlighting the inconsistencies in defnitions and terminology that currently exist. Second, we present an overarching conceptual framework that can be used to generate operational defnitions and contextualise autoregulation within broader training theory. Finally, we show how previous defnitions of autoregulation ft within the proposed framework and provide specifc examples of how common practices may be viewed, highlighting their individual subtleties.
