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…

Fatigue Percents Revisited
By Mike Tuchscherer

In the RTS Manual, I introduced Fatigue Percents as a reliable, effective way to autoregulate volume based on stress. In the Seminar DVD, I discussed them in more detail and outlined several more dynamic examples on how to use them. Today, I want to outline some different ways that you can use fatigue percents to effectively control your training volumes for other various training effects.

Down to the essentials
At the most fundamental level, a fatigue percent is simply trying to measure how tired you’ve gotten. If you’re familiar with the principles of RTS, you’re aware that it is possible to reasonably estimate a 1RM on most sets given the load, number of reps, and RPE of the set. If we watch how this estimated 1RM behaves from set to set, we can easily see when fatigue begins to creep in.

Read more…