Are You Actually Making Progress?
Progress is what we’re all after, and having accurate and reliable methods for tracking progress is vital to ensure everything is headed in the right direction. Anyone that’s been training for a while knows that tracking progress isn’t always as straightforward as it often seems, so today’s video discusses evidence-informed methods for doing so.
Chapters
00:00 Why Track Progress?
01:11 Pros & Cons of Estimated 1RM
03:26 A Better Way: Block to Block Comparisons
04:55 3 Benefits of Block to Block Comparisons
05:23 Fitness and Fatigue
06:26 Arousal
06:52 RPE Accuracy
08:00 Best Way: Attack Week Comparisons
08:50 Example
10:25 Tracking Muscle Growth
11:36 Summary
Transcript
Progress - it’s what we’re all after. As a beginner, it’s often quite easy to see that progress is occurring, but for intermediates and especially advanced lifters, the difference between a plateau and meaningful progress is a fine line. If you've been training for say 8 years, multiple weeks or even months could be required to hit PR’s.
So, in the meantime while PR’s are brewing, it’s helpful to have a system for determining if the ship is headed in the right direction. A good system for this is the difference between seeing some meaningful gains or “accidentally” plateauing for a year.
So, in this video, I’m going to go into my personal favorite system for tracking progress. And by tracking progress accurately, I can decide to troubleshoot the program, or just leaving things be to let the lifter ride out the progress.
To analyze training progress, we need to take a step back and ensure we’re tracking variables that are actually meaningful.
Luckily, for powerlifting or general strength training, the ultimate goal is improves performance, so we can track the actual outcome of interest by looking at performance in training sessions.
From a top set in the 1-6 rep range, you can calculate an estimated 1 rep max and monitor how this estimated 1RM changes over time. However, I don’t love looking at these estimated 1RM trends on a short term basis; they’re much more helpful when you zoom out. for example, here’s a plot of the estimated weekly total - the sum of estimated squat, bench, and deadlift from the week - from one of my clients over the course of 83 weeks.
Now, we don’t have 83 weeks to ensure things are moving in the right direction, so we need to have some shorter term tools.
I’ll start by saying that we can absolutely use lifter intuition. Especially as a lifter becomes more and more advanced, I really value their subjective input. So, I highly value conversations and getting their insight into how training is feeling. If a lifter feels that a change to the program or a technique change makes them feel like they subjectively feel more “pop” or more “stable” for their heaviest sets of the week, that’s a great sign to me.
Beyond that, my favorite way to monitor progress is through what’s called block to block comparisons. So, as a basic example, let’s say a lifter is doing heavy a heavy squat triple for their weekly top set in their program. I like to have some sort of RPE progression week to week with these triples, so if it’s a 4 week training block, it may be RPE 6 in week 1, RPE 7 in week 2, RPE 8 in week 3, and RPE 9-10 in week 4.
Now, we could look at an estimated 1RM week to week, but I think a lot of coaches would agree that there’s a lot of noise in those comparisons. Instead, block to block comparisons allow us to look at the same week of two blocks and look at performance. If a week 2 triple at RPE 7 was with 405 lbs in block A and then with 415 lbs in block B, that’s a great sign.
But why is that such a great sign? Well, there are 3 reasons I find these block to block comparisons as higher precision than other approaches.
Fitness & fatigue dynamics
Arousal
RPE accuracy
Let’s break them down one by one.
First is fitness and fatigue, and this will change throughout a block — you’ll gain both fitness, or underlying strength, AND you’ll accumulate fatigue. In a perfect world, each block will lead to more fitness than fatigue and thus you will get stronger throughout the block, but even then, it can be hard to tell WHAT is causing a strength increase. For example, your underlying fitness could be going up a lot, but if fatigue is also going up a lot, your gains could be “masked” until you taper and test. So in this case, good stuff is going on under the hood, but it’s hard to pick up on with very short term comparisons.
On the other hand, by comparing block to block, you’re able to compare performances with similar fitness and fatigue dynamics.
Second is arousal. Honestly, this is largely a product of how I like to write programs — I coach people to be more chill early in a block and then be aggressive near the end of a block. So, this alone can influence performance, but if you’re comparing block to block, you’re able to compare performances with similar arousal levels.
Lastly, by comparing block to block, RPE accuracy is better accounted for. We know from the research that one of the main variables that makes someone LESS accurate in their RPE ratings is being further from failure. You can see a visual of this from a meta-analysis of RPE accuracy from Halperin and colleagues. On the x-axis, you have proximity to failure that the prediction was made. On the y-axis, you have the accuracy of that prediction.
So, it’s going to be harder to rate an RPE 6 than an RPE 9, for example. Thus, if you’re comparing an RPE 6 set in block A to an RPE 6 set in block B, hopefully they’re at least similarly inaccurate. Either way, we can just put more stock into those higher RPE ratings near the end of the block.
In fact, the most common training performances I’m looking at as a coach are those in the last week of a block. I like to call these “Attack Weeks”. Not only are these the heaviest and highest RPE weeks, but as I mentioned, I encourage the lifter to bring extra arousal and get hyped up for these sets. We can do this with confidence because we know that the following week will be some sort of deload to allow for us to catch up recovery wise.
So, these attack week top sets check all the boxes and are really important for monitoring progress - they will have similar fitness and fatigue dynamics, high intent, and very reliable RPE accuracy.
To nail this point home, let’s consider a 12 week training cycle, which is made up of 3 four week blocks. So, there are three attack weeks in the cycle - one at the end of each block. Perhaps we’re doing top sets of 5 in the first block, top sets of 3 in the last block, and top singles in the last block. Within that cycle, we can look at these block to block top sets and confirm performance is trending up at solid rate.
But, where the magic happens, is when you have a lot of training data and can look back at previous cycles with the same top set rep number. So, if you run another cycle, again with top sets of 5, 3, and then 1. You can look back at the LAST cycle attack weeks and see if they’re they’re higher. You can look at the triple at RPE 9-10 in week 8 of cycle A and then the triple at RPE 9-10 in week 8 of cycle B. And, you can of course look at non-attack weeks from cycle to cycle as well.
Now, a savvy listener will know that a LOT goes into analyzing progress for a lifter - you also want to consider things like bodyweight changes and goals of the block. For example, if the goals of a block are biased towards hypertrophy, we’ll want to have insight into the actual hypertrophy progress. And just in general, assessing hypertrophy over the long term is important for strength athletes and anyone looking to get as jacked as possible.
This topic of analyzing hypertrophy progress deserves its own video, so comment below if you’d like to see that, but I’ll mention that we like to use training performance as a big piece of the puzzle here as well. We have a proprietary approach to this at Data Driven Strength, which you can see here from one of our lifters using our lower cost Infinity Programs system.
Alright, I hope this video was helpful and adds some tools to your tool belt for making sure your training is headed in the right direction. To recap, I recommend comparing block to block performances at similar rep ranges and RPE’s, especially in the hardest, highest RPE weeks of training.
If you liked this video, you may want to check out our Infinity Programs system, which is linked below, and integrates a lot of these ideas for you. The system utilizes this approach of “naming” weeks such as attack weeks, has various periodization options, and even provides data analysis tools to visualize your progress so you can inform the system of how your training is going, ultimately allowing the system to make improvements for future programs.
Please like and subscribe, and we’ll see you in the next one.