You DON’T Have “Plenty of Time”

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You DON’T Have “Plenty of Time”
By Mike Tuchscherer

I’ll never forget my first 800-lbs deadlift in competition. Prior to it, I was still relatively unknown in the powerlifting world. I’d won a Jr. World championship, but I’d bombed out of four (4!) other national level meets. It was well before Facebook (at least for me) and unless you were paying attention, I was easy not to notice. It was 2007. I had recently left the collegiate ranks and I was looking for a meet and I found one in Hemet, California. Read more…

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.

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Emerging Evidence For Recovery Techniques


I recently came across this review article: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2018.00403/full

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.reactivetrainingsystems.com/2017/09/05/whats-the-recovery-value-of-a-massage/

This seemed like a great chance for me to update my thoughts a bit, so I looked into it further. It seems that, for most people, massage is effective at reducing fatigue and soreness beyond just resting. And it worked better than the other methods that were reviewed as well. That wasn’t my experience at all, so I wanted to reconcile these two observations.

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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.”

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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.

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Log Your Training!

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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.

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How to Use RPE in Your Training *Correctly*

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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.

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High Stress Training Weeks

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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?”

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