Anyone who has trained knows that training is not a completely linear venture. Even for those fast and consistent responders, who can improve regularly from week to week given a new stimulus in the workload, there still comes days where things don’t come easily, weights feel heavier, and the body struggles to escape the pull of gravity in general.
Charlie Francis and many others have talked about the idea of “If you know you aren’t going to improve on the last training session (in the sense of your speed, lift numbers, throw distance, etc. etc.) going up, then you shouldn’t train that day“.
This idea is the epitome, or at least, beginnings of what we could call auto-regulation, or steering the rest days of each athlete specifically to how long it takes them to recover from a bout of work before hitting them with another intense stimulus.
Great coaches have been using this type of thinking for some time. In my time running my podcast, you’ve probably heard examples such as Chris Korfist talking about having an athlete sprint only one time a week where two times would be too much.
You may have heard Joe DeFranco talk about scaling back his training program for non-responders in only having one squat day a week, and Rana Reider talked about how long it would take Olympic triple jumper Christian Taylor to recover from a maximal velocity sprint training session.
Christian was a rare jumper who had serious skills at the 400m dash to go with his triple jumping.
I think it’s awesome when coaches can have the foresight to arrange training based on how long it takes to recover from specific avenues. Today, I’d like to share with you some thoughts I have on what to do when you still want to train any given day, even if you have low readiness scores (i.e. your pre-workout tests would indicate that a training PR or a surpassing of your last session is definitely not in the books. The simplest example would be a 5 or 10 second “tap test” on a computer spacebar or iPad screen).
In other words, say you have a big 40 yard dash day, a substantial plyometric or lifting day you are preparing for, and just are not feeling that “pop” that goes with the need for speed and power in that session. The easy solution is just to rest and come back another day, but if you are in the middle of it all, having to “rest” a day is almost a punishment, especially for those of us who may be a little impatient (perhaps to a fault) with wanting to move our bodies, exercise and get a solid workout.
Keeping things in perspective of the harmonious balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic systems is key here. Rest is a key part of everything, not only in training, but life, and taking days totally off with the intention to maximally enjoy the rest of life, living in the present, is critical to long term progress. This being said, training can and should be fun! It should be something we look forward to, not for the sake of stress-relief, but for the sake of training itself.
This present-moment stance for each training session is the angle I’ve come at for the alternate (and probably more popular) view of auto-regulation, which isn’t taking a total rest day, but rather doing an alternate workout on the day, based on your readiness.
When it comes to our readiness going into each workout, we often think of it as “red”, “yellow”, or “green”. Red may mean a depression of the nervous system by 5-10+% (i.e. tap tests are down this much, or a standing vertical jump test is down 1.5-4″ based on typical baseline). Yellow is a depression of about 2-5% and Green would be 2% or less off of what your season best thus far is in basic neural readiness markers.
In some way, I think we could also change the “Red”, “Yellow”, “Green” Verbiage to avoid the negative connotations or self-fulfilling prophecies of these markers. The best replacement hasn’t come into my head yet, one potential one is a “Surviving to Thriving” spectrum. If you are “red” your body is surviving and wants to put the priority on your health and safety by down-regulating (and this is something to be thankful for, lest we get injured more often), and if you are “green” you are “thriving”, ready to attack a new neural challenge (hopefully in the form of a PR).
My video blog today is all about how to take on those challenges on the daily level without necessarily tacking on any extra total rest days in the weekly workload.
Tier 1 (Red, “Surviving”)
Basic protocols here would be doing no maximal effort CNS work, so avoiding maximal jumps, sprints and velocity recorded lifts, as well as any lifting over 75% 1RM, and optimally not over 60%. Replace the specific work with more general work, and try to increase the heart rate.
Increasing the heart rate will help improve the body temperature to get a better training session, as well as help to keep athletes in the moment of the work. It also can help aid recovery from the previous work session and build some general work capacity. Use music and group themes to help athletes have a fun experience. Give non-specific or lower intensity work a new theme or perspective.
Tier 2 (Yellow, “Alive”)
Not far off a typical training session, the emphasis here, in my eyes is multi-faceted. There may be a chance of a personal best at recent training exercises, but at the same time, the effort needed to achieve these may not be worth the cost of how long it might take to recover from the workout, given the state of readiness. This is a perfect day to work hard, but under psychological constraints that allow the athlete to powerfully engage themselves with a high level of body awareness. One of my favorite training modalities for this day is Sam Portland’s “Speed Gate Golf”, or any variation of it for the majority of one’s efforts, and then “tuning” the intensity level of the golf based on the flow of training and athlete response. I still like doing longer or more exploratory warmup sessions these days, but it’s not totally necessary. (I also like using versions of Speed Gate Golf even on “Green” days for a lot of the workout)
For example, if you come in to train with a CNS reading that is down 3-4% and feel pretty good, but not incredible, a good strategy may be a medium length, engaging warmup, and more specific than a “surviving” day. You could do something like 100m of crawls, then 3-4x80m of sprinting alternating various strategies (such as low-knees, high-knees, low-knees, etc.). From there you’d go into speed gate golf (main workout) where you were running a 40 yard dash. If your best time was 4.75 seconds, you could set the “pin” at 5.00 seconds for the first 3 sprints, then drop the “pin” to 4.85 on the last run. Accuracy in closeness to pin is praised more than raw time today. Throw in a 300m squatty run finisher and “boom!”, you have a great workout that the nervous system will recover very well for, and with a touch of work capacity.
Tier 3 (Green, “Thriving”)
These are the days that coaches and athletes live for. These are the “all systems go” days where we put the hammer down and go for PR’s in whatever training exercise has marked the current cycle. If the nervous system is ready to roll and the athlete is in good tensional balance, then let it rip. The main key with high-threshold neural work is to leave athletes wanting more!
As Tony Holler repeatedly talks about, we want to work in the minimal dose, knowing that small doses stimulate and large doses annihilate. When it comes to the nervous system, this is especially true. If you want more work for the tissues, then select some other lower intensity exercises after you’ve completed your main neural set of work.
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