Peaking with Emerging Strategies
IPF Classic Worlds 2018 is underway in Calgary. We have 16 lifters competing this year — a point of pride among RTS coaches and athletes. As such, this seems like an ideal time to write in a bit more detail about how we taper for competition.
Emerging Evidence For Recovery Techniques
I recently came across this review article: https://www.
I quickly noted that they ranked massage as one of the best recovery modalities around. And if course then I remembered that I wrote an article last year saying that (n=1) I got no real results from it. You can read that article here: https://articles.
Leadership, Relationship, Creativity
By Mike Tuchscherer 2 April 2018
There are no magic programs. Coaching is about a lot more than writing a good program. Of course writing a good program as part of being a good powerlifting coach especially in an online setting but to think that there is just writing the program is to misunderstand the process and to do a serious disservice to all the clients who put their trust in you. Read more…
The Effect of Fatigue in Training
By Mike Tuchscherer 14 February 2018
Bottom line up front: measuring fatigue helps you make useful training choices, but will not help you to decide whether to go for a PR or not. Read more…
Recovery and Training Throughput
by Mike Tuchscherer, 27 December 2017
Doing a lot of training volume doesn’t matter much if you can’t recover from it. It’s not about workload, but rather the workload that you can recover from. Now from there, we can spout generalities usually in one of two varieties. We can say, “Most people aren’t working hard enough, so most likely you shouldn’t worry about it and just work harder.” Or we can say, “Recovery is the critical factor. Better to under-train than over-train. So keep training on the conservative side.”
Deloading Effectively
by Mike Tuchscherer, 20 December 2017
Deloading is taking an easy week every third or fourth week, right? Well… That’s a caricature of what effective deloading looks like. In most standard cases, deload training is intended to reduce accumulated fatigue and facilitate adaptation to future training cycles.
Log Your Training!
by Mike Tuchscherer, 14 December 2017
Back in 2008, we had a training log app on the RTS website. For many reasons we had to shut it down and rebuild it. We relaunched it in 2016 and have been packing it with features ever since. What’s more, it’s free for anyone to use with any style of training you want.
How to Use RPE in Your Training *Correctly*
By Mike Tuchscherer, 5 December 2017
You may see people using the term “RPE” regarding their training, but not be sure what it’s all about. Or, more likely, you are one of the people who *thinks* you know what it’s about, but still make fundamental errors with it. No matter which one you are, or even if you do for sure get RPE training correct, hopefully you can learn something from this post.
High Stress Training Weeks
High Stress Training Weeks
By Mike Tuchscherer, 3 October 2017
From the inbox:
“Why vary weekly fatigue percents at all? Why not move from high reps to low reps at [medium stress] each week? The high reps provide the stimulus and the low reps allowing fatigue to dissipate? A week of 3’s at [high stress] vs week of 8’s at [medium stress]. The latter has a lower fatigue percent but higher volume- so what’s the difference in effect between the two?”
What’s the Recovery Value of a Massage?
What’s the Recovery Value of a Massage?
By Mike Tuchscherer, 5 September 2017
We’ve always said massage is good for recovery, but how do we know? I get massages periodically. I would like to do it weekly, but often I’ll go a month between them. We always *thought* it was good for recovery, but as time has gone on I’ve noticed less and less of a difference. With the time constraints that one accumulates with life, I began wondering if it was time well spent or not. So I pulled my TRAC data and compared my scores after a massage to my scores after a normal rest day. I was very surprised by the results. Quick aside: TRAC is our athlete monitoring system. It’s how we monitor the recovery for all of our athletes. It’s available for everyone for free via the RTS website – just click on apps in the main menu.
Read more…